28 September 1900

 

After many days and many nights - I do not remember how many, since time has no meaning for those who are forced to look into their own hearts - I was taken from my cell to the Old Bailey in a closed van.  I travelled with other prisoners but, for some reason, I alone was the object of pity.  The baths in prison, I was told, were 'fine but 'ot' - if I was fortunate, I would be consigned to Brixton because there were 'a lot of gentlemen' there.  One deranged young woman, who had been accused of pick-pocketing in the Strand, showed me a piece of paper on which she had scrawled a speech in her own defence.  I advised her not to read it in open court - it was the most damning indictment I have ever read.

      We were taken from the van and led down a stone corridor which had arched cells on either side of it - it reminded me rather of the Adelphi.  When my name was called, I mounted a flight of wooden stairs and, to my astonishment, found myself in the dock itself.  I dislike surprises intensely: I was seized with a fit of violent trembling and could hardly bring myself to look at the faces of those who knew me, and of those who had come to witness my disgrace.  And, when the clerk of the court repeated the charges 'against the peace of our Lady the Queen, her Crown and dignity', I felt the chill which only fear can bring.  Power has dazzled me always, but never had it seemed more terrible than when I became its catspaw.  My friends had told me that I would be able to resume my old life if I left the Old Bailey a vindicated man but I knew that, whatever the verdict, this would be impossible.  A whole history of infamy - real or imagined, it was no matter - was to be attached to my name, and I would never be able to free myself from it.  I had lived by legend, and I would die by it.

      I had not lied to my counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, when I told him on my honour as a gentleman that I was not a sodomite.  I had never committed that sin.  But truth is the last thing to be discovered in the well of a court: for three days certain boys were paraded in the witness box, much to the delight of the spectators, having been coached in their lies and trained in their accusations against me.  I have always worshipped at the altar of the imagination, but I never believed that I would become a sacrifice upon it.  I did not lie with Edward Shelley, as time and again he suggested in cross-examination: on the night we spent together, he was so embarrassed by his state of intoxication that I allowed him to stay with me at my hotel rather than return to his parents.  It seems that one pays for one's acts of kindness as dearly s one pays for one's sins.  When I took Charlie Parker back to the Savoy, it was for Bosie's pleasures and not my own.

      I was at first quite composed, since I was convinced that under Sir Edward's interrogation these young men would show themselves to be the perjurers they were - and, indeed, much of their evidence was dismissed.  But it soon became clear to me, and to Sir Edward, that the lust for vengeance against me was too strong to be averted.  For it is the vengeance wreaked upon those who reach too far - the world holds on to them, and will not let them escape, and I was painted already as a creature of sin, fit only to dwell in the valley of Malebolge with Simon Magus and Bertran de Born.

      At first I could not think clearly how to respond.  Confinement had coached me in the ways of suffering, and the dock had instilled in me the lessons of fear.  And yet, as the recital of imaginary and misattributed crimes continued, an angry will rose up in me just at the moment when my personality seemed quite buried beneath the weight of infamy.  In my pride, I saw myself as standing apart - I was being condemned by my inferiors, and I could not allow them to claim their victory without asserting myself as an artist, an artist who was being punished merely because he had the misfortune to be born in the wrong age.

      I went into the witness box and refuted all that had been said against me in a clear, calm voice and, as I spoke, I felt triumphant.  I made a speech on the nature of Socratic love - I had prepared it in advance - and in a few quiet, simple words I summed up the philosophy of a lifetime.  These are the words you wish to deny me, I thought, but I will leave them ringing in your ears.

      It was that speech, I think, that moved certain jurors and prevented them from condemning me.  But I knew that there was to be no victory: I had lied in some parts of my testimony, I admit it, and attempted to conceal much that I was afraid of.  I had mixed truth with imagination, and used silver words to conceal the fear and the humiliation which were my constant companions.  And they were waiting for me still: as soon as I understood that there was to be a second trial, at the insistence of Queensberry who held the letter from Rosebery like a sword suspended, the confidence which I had momentarily regained deserted me.  I was lost.

      When I was released on bail, the pursuit began in earnest: I had goaded the monster and it rushed towards me with redoubled steps.  I was driven away from the Old Bailey by two friends, but we were followed by Queensberry like a fury.  The mob outside the court, cheated of their prey, would have torn me limb from limb, and, where once the streets of London had seemed to me a glorious pageant, now they took on the lineaments of a nightmare.  I was hunted by the scarlet Marquess and his gang, and could find no place where they did not follow me and point me out.  The hotels which once welcomed me now shut their doors.  As I drove through the streets on that evening, searching for a house where I might rest my head, I caught sight of my name on placards and newspaper boys cried it out in the gutters.  It was as if I were driving through the landscape of my imagination, full of strange sights and haunted by the voice which calls out 'I! I!' without understanding the meaning of its cry.

      And so I fled to my mother's house in Oakley Street.  My personality had been stripped from me, piece by piece, and I returned to the terrible nakedness of childhood, alone and afraid.  The shock of my fall had destroyed my mother - I saw that at once even through the mist of my misery.  She had given me her dreams, and I had shattered them; she had seen in me the best part of herself, and I had betrayed her.

      I remained with her for two days, and they were unendurable to me.  In her grief, she fell back helplessly upon the life she had known in Ireland.  She would talk to me about her childhood in Wexford, laughing all the while, and then her mood would change abruptly and she would complain about her husband's cowardice in not appearing at his own scandalous trial.  While I was locked in the interviews with my solicitors, she would enter and announce that there was no disgrace for an Irishman to stand in an English dock.  She simply did not understand.  It was in that dark house that she told me the awful secret of my illegitimacy: the whole pattern of my life became clear then, and I joined hands with my destiny as in a dance of death.

      I could not stay with her; each hour heaped a new grief upon my head, and so I travelled secretly to the house of the Leversons.

      The Sphinx, in her gentleness of spirit, placed me in her daughter's nursery and there, among the wooden animals and abandoned toys, I understood what a career mine had been.  It is possible, in moments of extreme unhappiness, to see one's life from a great height - and I saw mine then.  I had been in a nursery always and, like a wilful child, I had smashed and destroyed those things which were dearest and closest to me.

      Constance visited me in that house but she hardly dared look at me: I had become monstrous to her.  She understood now that she had known nothing about me: I wanted to take her in my arms, but instinctively she shrank back.

      'What have you done, Oscar?  What have you done?'

      'There is no need to sound like a Victorian heroine, my dear.'

      She left the room.  I do not know why I said it.  I simply said it.

      Others came to see me - Dowson, Sherard, Harris, all of them begging me once again to flee.  But I could not: all flight is the flight away from one's self, and I could never be free of that.  Only an artist can understand another artist and, when Lautrec came to paint me, he offered me neither pity nor sympathy; I was grateful for that.  He had the clear, dry understanding of one who is an outcast also, since I, like him, now walked as a stranger through the world.  I could not admit that to anyone: I could not admit it because I dared not display myself, to those who had known me at the height of my powers, as the miserable and shrunken creature I felt myself to be.  And so I hid in the house, preparing a defence which I knew to be worthless.

      My final trial took place on Ascension Day - although I, like Don Giovanni, was to travel to a different place.  I do not remember the course of that trial now.  There are patches of darkness where I see nothing clearly and as for the rest, well, it was terribly familiar.  Although the voices rang out in denunciation, I did not understand what was being said: it was as if they were speaking of someone other than myself, someone I would soon have to meet and whose hand was outstretched to greet me and then to pull me down.

      As soon as one's personality becomes a matter of public knowledge, and one's history is recited in the form of an indictment, it is remarkable how little hold one retains upon it.  I became visibly what others thought, and said, of me: I grew tired, and old.  In my last role, in the glare of the public gaze, I gave myself up to the hands of others.

      When the verdict of 'guilty' came, it was as if the whole of my life had come to an end.  It was a death worse than physical death because I knew that I would survive it and be raised as Lazarus was raised - Lazarus who wept continually after his resurrection because his death was the only real experience he had ever had.  The judge uttered those words of condemnation which I had always feared and, in my delirium, I wished to fall in front of the court and confess the sins of my entire life, to utter all the terrible secrets which I harboured and the strange ambitions which I had nourished.  I wished to become like a child, and speak simply for the first time.  But the judge waved me away, and I was taken in handcuffs to the waiting van.