4 October 1900

 

After my conviction I was driven in a prison van to Pentonville.  My hair was cut so short that I resembled a philanthropist, my clothes and my possessions were roughly taken from me, and I put on the coarse brown and black prison dress with its arrows - I would rather that each arrow had pierced me than wear the ill-fitting garb which gave sorrow a clownish face, and redoubled pain with the crude symbols of guilt.  Then boots were thrown in the middle of the vast reception room - and those of us who had lately come were forced to scramble for them.

      I was addressed in a quite anonymous fashion: I had been 'sent out' and now I was 'received': really, I might have been a parcel.   A letter was chalked upon the back of my prison dress, and I was led through the metal corridors of Pentonville.  I was then placed in a cell, where a clergyman of vicious aspect came to catechise me.  He left two pamphlets which I was to read, over and over again, in the months that followed: 'The Converted Charwoman of Goswell Road' - her case was of particular interest - and 'How are Your Poor Fingers, you Blackguard?'  This was a gloating account of the picking of oakum, which rivalled even the modern novel in its inability to understand suffering.

      A schoolmaster visited my cell immediately after the clergyman.  He asked me if I could read - I told him that I could not remember - and how I spelled 'oxen'.  I submitted to this meekly, for in truth I felt nothing.  I was in the trance that follows delirium: if I had been under the surgeon's knife, I would not have cried out.  During that first night, life and sensation returned slowly back to me - the horror of it remains with me still, for life returned in the form of fear.  I understood what had happened to me, but it was only then that I began to experience it; the awful stench of prison, the flickering half-light from the gas jet outside my cell, and the silence which of all things marks the dead and the dying, all these rose up and stifled me.  I was afraid to cry out, terrified even to move from the wooden plank which bore my weight.  If someone had then asked me who I was, I would have known how to answer: I was the stench, I was the half-light and I was the silence.  For three days and three nights, nausea overwhelmed me and, when I placed my head in the bucket, it was as if I was expelling all of my old life.  That is why I no longer care to recover my old personality now and why, to the astonishment of my friends, I am content to find companions where I may and to talk to those who will listen: what personality I had before was weaker and more ignominious still, for it was stripped from me between one day and the next.

      I see my cell clearly still, more clearly than I see this room.  There was of course a Bible and a prayer book, and a whole range of common articles for daily use: a tin mug, a tin plate and a tin knife, a box of salt and a small piece of soap.  On the plain wooded shelf beside my cell door were two blankets and, in the opposite corner beneath the barred window, were a basin, a slop-pail and a can of water.  Outside my cell door was a card on which had been written my name and the particulars of my sentence: everyone knew who I was and what I was there for.  Here are the ingredients of a life of penance and meditation, are there not?

      My new life was one of barren tasks, tasks which I performed without thought but not without feeling.  I stitched canvas sacks for the Post Office, and my fingers bled so that I could scarcely touch anything - the lot of the prisoner will be improved immensely if the telephone becomes fashionable.  It seemed to me in those first weeks and months that the world I had known outside my prison cell was a fantastic world of dreams, that it had been an illusion as cunningly wrought as the shadows with whom Faust dances before he is led to perdition.  And when I left the prison in order to be examined in the Bankruptcy Court, where I confessed the profligacy of my previous life, I felt an unaccustomed shame - not because I was forced to expose my life to common men, but rather because I had deceived myself in my extravagance.  My examiners knew far more of the world than I did - after all, it had been fashioned in their image - and I was like a child being called to account.

      But since I had been stripped of my personality, as a result I became pathetically grateful to any who looked on me with kindly eye or spoke words of comfort to me.  Once when we trudged around the yard, with three paces between each man, a prisoner muttered brief words to cheer me.  I was not skilled in the ways of concealment and, when I returned his kindness, with tears in my eyes, I was overheard.  For that brief moment of companionship, I was brought up before the governor of the prison and sentenced to three days' solitary confinement in the 'punishment cell'.

      It was a fiendish place, fitted with double doors so that no sound came from without, furnished only with a plank and a stool.  Here I was forced to live on stale bread and the brackish water made salt by my tears.  In that cell, the effects of gloom, silence and darkness are quite indescribable.  I thought I would go mad.  I became a victim of the most terrible hallucinations.  A spider wove a perilous web in the corner of the cell and, when I peered at it, I saw my own face staring back at me.  The patchwork of lines upon the walls formed fetid shapes of lust, and I began to dwell at length on the sins of my past and to dream of fresh sins so vivid that I hid myself from them, and wept.  And then in the silence, a silence broken only by the wind, I would talk to myself.  I held conversations in which I laughed at my own wit.  I paced up and down the narrow confines of that dark place and, in grotesque parody of my former life, would strike attitudes and converse with the spider who watched me with unblinking eyes.

      The image of those three days and three nights has never left me; sometimes now, in the middle of a conversation, I remember my dialogue with the spider and am struck dumb.  That is why I cannot bear to be alone: solitude frightens me because it seems to me to be the simplest thing to slip back into a dementia from which I would never be able to free myself.  It is the fear of solitude which makes me write now: if I closed this book and put down my pen, I would become a prey again to all those horrors which, since they spring from myself, cannot be turned aside.

      I bear, also, the physical marks of that solitary confinement.  One night, I awoke suddenly from sleep and my mother stood beside me.  I rose from my bed, but I could not speak - she lifted her arm, as if to strike me, and with a cry of terror I fell back upon the floor and knocked my ear against the plank bed.  No, that is not right.  I fell upon the ground in the exercise yard.  Have I not described this already?

      I am told now that I have so severely damaged my ear that deafness is inevitable.  That is why I have these pains in my head and why each morning I find my pillow stained with the yellow mucus.  I see again my mother with her hand raised against me, and the same terror fills me.  I feel myself falling upon the stony ground of the yard, and I am in pain.  Which is the truth - will it be pain or fear that destroys me?

      The doctors in Pentonville, who would have been more usefully employed in an abattoir, came to examine me.  There had been reports in the press that I had become insane: gleeful reports, since men enjoy tasting the fruits sown in blood.  But I would surely have died if I had remained in that place, and the authorities wished to avoid an early martyrdom.  And so the doctors recommended that I be sent to a prison 'in the country'.

      In obedience to their commands, I was taken in a chain gang to Reading.  At each station we were hooted at and, on one platform were we were forced to alight, I was surrounded by a mob who recognised me; a man spat in my face.  I had not known what human beings were like until I stood among them manacled: I longed for confinement then.  Jesus only found rest from his tormentors in the tomb: I did not find it until I entered the gates of prison.

      When we arrived at Reading station, I could see the elaborate arches and ornate carvings which I had once known so well: it seemed unimaginative of the railway authorities that they should be there still when I had changed in so grotesque a fashion.  For I had passed that station many times on my way to Oxford, although in those days it had not been a station of the cross.  While we were marched into a waiting van, I reflected on the quite painful change in my condition and yet it was the philosophy which I learned at Oxford which had brought me to this point.  I had affirmed the values of the individual personality: my age had flung those values back into my face.  And my days in the darkened cell had shown me what I really was.

      Other men find strength in prison or, if they do not find strength, at least they find faith.  But I had found nothing within myself: I saw now quite clearly that I had no real values of my own except those which others had bequeathed to me.  I was like a man standing on the edge of a cliff: from afar he looks glorious but, if you were to approach him, you would see that his eyes are closed so that he might not see the emptiness beneath him.  And of course he falls.

      I had not known the world as it really is.  I ignored suffering.  I chose not to see it.  My good nature was a form of complacency and of cowardice: I did not want to be moved by any single emotion in case I was overwhelmed by them all.  I was afraid of passion - real passion - since I did not know what it might reveal to me, both to myself and to others.  And yet passion, the passion of sorrow wrenched out of my mouth at the sight of doom, had lain in wait for me; it was the thread of my life which I had now to gather up.  And, when the chain gang alighted at the gates of Reading prison, I knew I must find it there.

      Intentions are of no importance, however, if the capacity to fulfil them does not exist.  And my first few months in Reading were very hard.  The governor there was a foolish man, a mere emblem of officialdom.  His régime spread throughout the entire prison, so that one's life was brutalised by tyrannous regulations where it was not trivialised by petty restrictions.  Because of the nature of my crimes he placed me under 'special observation' in my first months.  Every half-hour a warder would look in upon me - I could hear his footsteps and then, when I glanced up, I would see his solitary eye peering through the glass spyhole in the door of my cell: I knew then how Odysseus felt in the cave of the Cyclops.

      It pleased this governor to allot as one of my tasks the cleaning of the scaffold - and, indeed, I was curious to see it, with the curiosity of those who have abandoned all higher feeling.  It had been constructed in a little wooden shed in a corner of the prison yard which, in my innocence, I had thought to be a greenhouse.  It was my task to scrub the wooden flooring of this place, and on my first visit it was pointed out to me by the cheerful warder who watched my labours that the solid floor itself gave way to a bricked pit below.  In his enthusiasm, he cranked the wheel and a long bolt forced the floor apart: to launch the victim into mid-air.  And there was the pit.  I felt dizzy, as if there had been no bottom to it.  And, indeed, where death has been there is only an airless void in which the body, pinioned and silent, falls.  The warder laughed at my distress, and made as if to push me into it.  It was then that I was sick, violently sick, and the warder redoubled his laughter.   That is what men do to each other when all pity has fled.

      During those first months in Reading I was helpless, quite helpless.  All I could do was weep, wrack my body with the rage I could not otherwise express and which I turned against myself in the guise of pain.  My eyesight began to fail, from the strain of picking oakum in my cell, and because of the injury to my ear my hearing began to fail also.  In my state of nervous hysteria, I thought I would go mad.  Indeed I grew half in love with madness - I saw nothing else for me which would release me from my sufferings.

      Two friends were allowed to visit me once in every three months and, although those who made the pilgrimage thought that they were assisting me, I found in such encounters only further humiliation.  I would be placed in a cage with wire netting in front of it, and they would sit in a hutch of similar construction; there was a narrow corridor between us along which the warder trod.  Of course conversation of any kind was impossible - there were four such cages on either side, and the babble of voices was indescribable.

      I was ashamed, also, of my physical appearance - I was not allowed to shave, and my face was thick with stubble.  One cannot say anything without the proper clothes, and in the dress of a convict I spoke very little.  Sometimes, in my distress, I would place a handkerchief over my face in order to hide myself from the eyes of even those whom I knew best.  And they had, for their part, very little to say to me - they came, after all, from a world which had condemned me and left me to die in solitude.

      'How are you, Oscar?' More asked on the occasion of his visit.

      'I am very well.  Can you not see?'  There was a silence.

      'Well, take heart.'

      'May I ask why?'

      'We are organising a petition on your behalf.  Frank is to see the Home Secretary next week.'

      'I am the most famous prisoner in England, am I not?  How are my sons?'

      'They are well, and Constance is well also.'

      'Do they ask after me?'

      'Of course.'

      'And do they know where I am?'

      'They believe you to be in hospital.'

      'It will be a very long illness, I'm afraid.  More, I want you to be a dear kind fellow and do something for me.  I wish you to visit Constance in Italy - do not write, she is frightened of letters now - and ask her simply and plainly if she means to support me after I leave this place.  I merely wish to know.'

      'Could you not leave all this for a few months, Oscar.  You know that Constance had made herself quite ill with anxiety -'

      'No.  I must know now.  The idea of poverty torments me, More.  You talk of Constance, but can you imagine what I suffer -'

      The warder then came between us, and I was taken back to my cell.

      It was my wife who saved me from the torment which I thought would last for ever.  She travelled from Genoa, where she had hurried with our children into exile, in order to tell me of the death of my mother.  She did not wish me to hear that news from the lips of those who did not care for me.  For the first time I wept in front of her: my mother's death was a blow insupportable to me.  Constance wept also, with a grief as great as mine, and in that exchange of woe I sensed dimly the one thing that might save me.  For when I shared my suffering with Constance, I saw it as something quite outside myself.  What touched my heart had touched Constance's also, and I began to understand that I might endure my own pain, as she endured hers, in sympathy with the pain of others.  If I was as greedy with my sufferings as I had been with my pleasures, then surely I would be lost.

      Across the landing from my cell, a young boy had been incarcerated for a petty theft.  When I returned from the interview with Constance, I could hear him weeping, and now I could weep with him - the first tears I had not shed for myself alone, tears which carried me forward until I saw life plainly.  The shock of my mother's death opened my eyes to the suffering of others.  There was a madman, King, who was continually being flogged for his gibberings and his insane laughter.  We could all hear his screams, but, where before I had understood them only as an echo of my own anguish, I saw now that the terror of his own life was greater than my own.  Why had I not known it before, when others knew it?  I sat on my plank and laughed out loud at my own blindness.

      I realised that I had seen life through my intelligence, and through the pride which springs from intelligence, not through the emotions which now shook me and which I endured willingly for the first time.  In my grief, I had once looked to find death, and now I was learning to see life, what Carlyle calls somewhere 'the temple of immensity'.  Sorrow taught me how to sit and look.  Pity taught me to understand.  Love taught me to forgive.

      And then the miracle occurred, the miracle which love needs in order to blossom.   A new governor took the place of him whose régime might have destroyed me - Major Nelson, a kind, patient man, arrived and at once the atmosphere of Reading changed for all its prisoners.  It was my psychological moment: my fall had broken me apart, and I was ready to receive those new and sweeter impressions with which I might begin to rebuild my life.

      Nelson allowed me books, and I began haltingly to read.  I felt nothing for literature at the beginning: all words seemed dead to me, and injurious also, for they lead men where they should not go.  I was given 'improving' literature, however - with the possible exception of Emerson's essays - and I sat down humbly with it, as if I were a child.  I began with the simple Latin of St Augustine.  Then I read Dante and walked with him in the Purgatory which I had known before, but which now I saw in the light of understanding.  I was given a volume of Aeschylus, and I fell again under the spell of ancient things: the prison shades fell away and I was standing in the clear, bright air.  The texture of language itself, like the veil of Tannith in Flaubert's delicate novel, clung about me and protected me.  I called upon Dionysus, the loosener of lips and of the heart, and his splendour interposed between me and the darkness so that I was at once revivified and joyful.

      Yes, it is curious - one can experience joy in a prison cell, for I had found that within me which had survived my bitterness and my humiliation.  It was then that I determined upon artistic work again.  The governor allowed me certain writing materials, and at night I would work beneath a single gas lamp in my cell.  At first I could make notes on my reading only: I did not trust myself with the words I had once used too freely.  But I knew that other artists had found in suffering the one perfect subject and I began actively to plan, once my term of imprisonment had drawn to its close, the lineaments of a new art that I would create from my pain as a bronze figure is fashioned from the fire.  There were two trees just beyond the prison wall - I could glimpse them from my cell, and through the winter I had watched their long, black branches through which the wind began to blossom.  I knew exactly what they were experiencing: they were finding expression.

      A new warder, Thomas Martin, took charge of my landing: his cheerfulness and kindness strengthened my resolve to free myself from the pit into which I had been flung.  He would smuggle biscuits and newspapers to me, although I believe the biscuits were of a more sensational character.  Such small acts of kindness are greater than the blessings of the gods, for the gods do not understand men and offer that which we do not need.

      Tommy was a young man of impressive appearance but also of impeccable morals.  After we had been in each other's company for several weeks, he asked me about my relations with the boys who had appeared at my trials.  He asked me, with all the curiosity of a thoroughly disinterested person, what I did with them.

      'I kissed them all over their bodies.'

      'Why?'

      'What else is there to do with a charming young man except kiss him?'

      'I hope you washed them first.'

      'When the Athenians were sent children form the Gods, Tommy, they honoured them.  They did not enquire in a Fabian manner into their domestic circumstances.'

      He left me contrite, but fortunately he remembered to remove my pail.

      I asked Tommy if he had heard of me even before my trials, and invited him to speculate on the extent of my fame among the working classes - the answers were most satisfactory.  And, since he knew of my connection with literature, Tommy asked me to solve newspaper competitions for him and other warders.  I contrived slogans to win sets of china.  'They would suit as to a tea,' I wrote in a poetical moment.  'A tea service is the grounds of a good marriage.'  They were my Fleet Street ecologues, and indeed such competitions comprise the only value I have ever seen in the daily press.

      By the spring of 1897, I had spent almost two years in prison.  I was forty-two years old.  As the moment of my release came nearer, I grew nervous of what might greet me when I left Reading.  My financial affairs had been grotesquely mismanaged by my friends: promises had been broken, and I knew that I would leave prison as a pauper.  I quite seriously considered beginning my new life as a vagrant, until I remembered that such a life had already become a cliché of modern literature.  No, it was not for me to bow my head before the world.  I could not allow my accusers to say that they had destroyed me: I would have to rise above them, unaided.  I alone had to decide the nature of my new life; I would have to remake myself as an artist for, if I failed, I would mar myself still further as a man.  It was a terrible course, but only because I did not know if I had the strength to pursue it.

      On the day I left Reading, I was handed the clothes which I had worn when I first entered prison.  They were of course too large for me now, and they smelled somewhat of disinfectant as if they had been used to wrap a corpse.  A half-guinea was given to me in payment for two years' labour - the last money I have ever earned.

      I shook hands with the governor, and turned to Tommy Martin who stood by my side.  He was smiling, and I broke into laughter.  'Think of my sometimes,' I said to him: I believe he does, just as I often remember him and his kindness which restored life to me.  I walked out from the gates of Reading prison, and looked up at the sky.  I was taken on a train to Pentonville, and then I was released to my friends in London.