27 September 1900

 

I do not wish to enter the infandum dolorem of my trial and punishment: when I think of that time, I still experience the strange nausea which affected me then, the sickness which nerves breed.  I shall never escape from it: before I eat, I still arrange my cutlery in a precise fashion and become quite unhappy if they are disturbed.  That is the legacy of prison.  I have visited the Comédie Française only once since my confinement: the three knocks which herald the performance made me utterly distraught and I left the theatre, for it was those three knocks which proclaim the entry of the judge at the Old Bailey.  It is foolish of me to behave so, but I have learned that one's own life can become a prison more durable than stones or iron bars.  I must close the window: it is growing chilly.

      Before the trial of Queensberry on the charge of libelling me, the trial which to my shame and ultimate ruin I myself had caused, I already knew that the gutters of London had been swept by the Marquess and his associates - that they had found some of the boys who had been my companions.  My friends earnestly advised me to drop the case and flee the country - and, indeed, my first instinct was to do so.  But although I was frightened, mortally frightened, it was fear that gave me strength: the strength to seek an end to it.  If I had left the country, that fear would follow me always and I knew what a terrible botch my life would have then become.  At least now events have followed their appropriate pattern.  To have crossed the Channel to France would have been the act of a coward: I would rather be a byword of infamy for the rest of my days than an object of gross ridicule.

      And so, despite my great fear, I stayed.  I asked Alfred Taylor to plead with the boys, and to offer them money.  But he was being followed continually by two detectives, and could not do so: I did not know then, and the knowledge would have filled me with horror, that a month later we would stand together in the dock.  And so I asked Peter Burford to speak tot he boys on my behalf, and he tried to do so.  He offered them money, and of course they took it.  Even empty promises cannot be bought cheaply.  He would report to me at Tite Street in his own special language.

      'Are you fly to what's going on, Oscar?'

      Of course I was, but he expressed it more beautifully than I could.

      'They collect the dibs and then they welsh on yer.  You've got to be on the q.t. with these pullets.'

      I asked him about one particular boy, whose evidence I most feared because of his youth.

      'He's off in America gayin' it and flashin' his meat.  No worries there.'

      I took comfort in small matters of this kind because, in my moments of light-headedness and vanity, I had no doubt about the outcome of my trial.  Mrs Robinson had looked at my hand and prophesied success - perhaps success has always been written on my palm, since the gods are noted for their sense of humour.  I was confident, also, because I knew precisely what I had to say when I stepped into the witness box.  I had rehearsed my answers and my opponent, Edward Carson, had been a particularly dull boy at Trinity.  Events conspired to intoxicate me - if more intoxication was needed - and when I entered the courtroom of the Old Bailey it was as if I were going upon a stage.  I had been in Washington during the trial of Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield: he used to sign autographs in the courtroom, and I remember thinking how absurd it was that such a privilege had been denied to my own audience.  That it was an audience I was in no doubt: they had come to watch me perform and, I suspect, to forget my lines.

      At first I was triumphant.  Carson made the mistake of cross-examining me about my own writing - he ought to have known that an artist is his own bitterest accuser, his own most relentless examiner.  But Carson tried to take my place: he raised his eyes to Olympus and, bedazzled, tripped and fell.  Philistines are uninteresting on the theme of literature simply because they cannot express themselves properly: I have always thought that their views would have a certain charm if they were elegantly phrased.  I fully anticipated Carson's line of questioning: I knew that I was to be hounded just as much for my art as for my companions.  When Carson read out in his quite exaggerated Irish voice certain passages from a letter I had written to Bosie, the beauty of which survived even his delivery, it was clear that they offended him terribly.  And that pleased me: it lent me a certain superiority.

      But, when he came to question me about the boys, I faltered.  I created a drama in which I figured prominently as a benevolent relation, but, alas, I misjudged the powers of my imagination.  I faltered as any artist must when he is forced to walk into the world, especially with a QC as a companion, and to justify himself in the language of the world.  Anyone's activities, when read out in open court, would deserve a criminal prosecution on the grounds of banality alone.

      Carson mentioned certain names and places.  He questioned me about certain gifts I had presented, and was impertinent about my evenings at the lodgings of Alfred Taylor.  He hinted at certain 'shocking facts' and, when he informed the jury that the boy I had fondly imagined to be in America was waiting to give evidence, I knew I was lost.  I, who had constructed a philosophy out of the denial of conventional reality, found myself impaled upon it.  I had always asserted that an interpretation is more interesting than a fact: I was proved unfortunately to be right.  I was destroyed by the sordid interpretations which others gave to my affairs: it is amusing, is it not?

      I could have fled the country when Sir Edward Clarke gave up my prosecution against Queensberry, and a warrant was issued for my arrest; but I did not do so.  I felt myself to be overtaken by events and, in my utter dejection of spirit, I simply did not believe that any action of mine could save me.  I had appealed to the world to save my reputation, and it crushed me.

      I sat in the Cadogan Hotel on that fatal afternoon, drinking hock-and-seltzer with Bosie.  For some reason I took a curious pleasure in reading the early editions of the evening newspapers.  The Echo, I remember, said that I was 'damned and done for' and I laughed out loud at the phrase; when I read in the News that a warrant had been issued against me for 'gross indecency', it was as if that paragraph had been written about someone quite other than myself.  I remarked to Bosie at the time that I knew how people loved, but I did not know until then how they could hate.  And so I waited for the world to make its next move.  It had destroyed my will, my confidence both as a man and as an artist, and it became a matter of relative indifference to me what it did with my body.

      At about six o'clock, two detectives entered my room without knocking.

      'Mr Wilde, I believe?' one of them said to me.

      'If you do not know now, you never will.'  I believe I was a little hysterical.

      'I must ask you, Mr Wilde, to accompany us to the police station.'

      'May I finish my drink?'

      'No, sir, you may not.'  It is then I realised that my freedom was at an end.

      A crowd had gathered outside the hotel.  I stumbled on the portal and, as I did so, I heard shouts of, 'Here he is!'  They jeered at me ass I was led into an ugly vehicle.  I was then taken to Bow Street police station, and locked into a cell.  I remember nothing of that day, except for the turning of keys and the slamming of doors: it was as if I had entered the Block of Pandemonium.  A veil of darkness has settled over those terrible hours and I do not care to pierce it, and see my own face, hear my own words, distorted by fear as they must then have been.  I had been waiting for that day all my life - its secrets had been whispered to me in my childish hours and I had seen its image in my dreams.

      While I lay in a prison cell, my house was ransacked by creditors, my family forced into hiding, my books and paintings sold.  But, in the first days of my imprisonment, I accepted such events without any feelings of a marked kind: there is a limit to the suffering one can impose upon oneself, and I could not have accepted any more without being utterly destroyed.  I was beset, instead, by small, pitifully small, anxieties.  Instead of concentrating upon the fate of my wife and children, I thought continually of the fact that I had no cigarettes.  Instead of concerning myself with the manuscripts, which had passed into the hands of casual buyers, I fretted that I had no books to read in my cell.

      But I was more fortunate than I knew.  Without books or cigarettes there was nowhere I could find refuge, and so I was forced to look at reality in a different way.  The shock of my fall was so great that I became extremely curious about the world which had suddenly been revealed to me, for it seemed to be formed upon principles quite different from those I had imagined.  The engine of life was an infernal one, and I was eager to talk to those who, all along, knew this to be so and who acted in accordance with its laws.  In the centre of London I was sealed off just as certainly as if I were in a sarcophagus, and I wished to understand the dead who lay there with me.  It was, you might say, the beginning of a new life.