![]() ![]() But the difference between this tone and Wilde’s carefully nurtured flippancy was astonishing. ![]() The tone was fluent and sweeping, full of carefully controlled cadence and measured elegance. He went over Douglas’s bad behaviour in matters large and petty, often citing dates and places and details. Wilde accused Douglas of distracting him from his art, of spending his money, of degrading him ethically, of constant scene-making, of deliberately and then thoughtlessly mistreating him. “The only beautiful things,” his character Vivian had told us in “The Decay of Lying”, which Wilde wrote in 1890, “are the things that do not concern us.” Seven years later, in his cry from the depths, he wrote of what most deeply concerned him: “If there be one single passage that brings tears to the eyes, weep as we weep in prison when the day no less than the night is set apart for tears.” And then, in what is perhaps the most shocking sentence in the whole letter, he wrote: “The supreme vice is shallowness.” Once upon a time it would have been, for him, the supreme virtue. He wrote not as art now, but as desperately serious matter. Wilde’s old skill at paradox and phrase making was not there now merely to amuse his audience or mock his betters, but rather to kill his own pain and grief and attempt to communicate passionately and fiercely with his lover. (Wilde, for example, compares himself to Christ.) But there is also a beautiful, calm eloquence, and a sense of urgency, of things being said because there might not be time or opportunity to say them in the future. “De Profundis”, it should be said, is neither fair minded nor consistent it is, at times, bloated in its comparisons and its rhetoric. The complete version, however, was not published until 1949.īy the time he wrote “De Profundis”, Wilde’s love for Douglas had turned into a sort of bitterness, and the tone of his long letter manages to capture that bitterness as well as the extraordinary attachment he felt for Douglas. In 1905 Ross published extracts from the text, and a fuller version in 1908. On his release, he handed the manuscript to Ross, who had two typed copies made, one of which he sent to Douglas. Wilde addressed his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. Nelson was more liberal than his predecessor and was ready to relax the rules. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.” Wilde was later to praise Nelson, who had arrived at Reading in July 1896, as “the most Christlike man I ever met”. Towards the end of his sentence, the governor of the jail, Major Nelson, remarked to Wilde’s friend Robert Ross: “He looks well. For the first month, Wilde was tied to a treadmill six hours a day, making an ascent, as it were, of 6,000 feet each day, with five minutes’ rest after every 20 minutes. He could not sleep, he was permanently hungry and he suffered from dysentery. Allowed one hour’s exercise a day, he walked in single file in the yard with other prisoners but he was not allowed to communicate with them. In total isolation, first in Pentonville and Wandsworth, and then in Reading gaol, to which he was moved in November 1895, Wilde slept on a plank bed with no mattress. Wilde’s misfortune was to serve his sentence just before prison conditions were officially changed by the 1898 Prison Act. (Rob Marland)įor further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording.įor more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit in 1895, while facing charges of indecency and wondering if he should abscond to France, Oscar Wilde had no idea what a two-year prison sentence would mean for him. He also critiques Wilde's writing and character and concludes that the Irish playwright will soon be forgotten. In "Oscar Wilde and Myself" Douglas refutes Wilde's version of the events that led to his (Wilde's) imprisonment and takes swipes at Ransome, Wilde's friend Robert Ross, other biographers of Wilde, and Wilde's overzealous imitators. Having failed to convince a jury that he had been libelled, Douglas appealed instead to posterity by writing his memoir. Ransome, in his "Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study," had quoted from the expurgated portions of Wilde's prison letter to Douglas, "De Profundis", which was highly critical of his former friend and lover. The first memoir by the poet Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas was written 14 years after the death of Oscar Wilde and in the aftermath of Douglas's failed prosecution of Arthur Ransome for libel. ![]() LibriVox recording of Oscar Wilde and Myself by Lord Alfred Douglas. ![]()
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