literary transcript

 

Peter Ackroyd's

THE LAST TESTAMENT OF

OSCAR WILDE

 

Digital electronic transcription by John O’Loughlin

 

Transcription Copyright © 2023 Centretruths Digital Media

 

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9 August 1900

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Hôtel d'Alsace, Paris

This morning I visited once again the little church of St Julien-le-Pauvre.  The curé there is a charming man who believes me to labour under a great sorrow; once, he approached me on silent feet and whispered as I knelt before the altar, 'Your prayers may be answered by God's grace, monsieur.'  I told him - I could not whisper - that my prayers have always been answered: that is why I come to this church each day in mourning.  After that, he left me in peace.

      It is not generally known that St Julien tired of his mission somewhat early in life.  He healed the maimed and the sick, but they reviled him because they could not longer beg; when he cast out devils, they simply entered the bodies of those who watched the miracle; when he prophesied, he was accused of spreading disillusion among the rich.  So many times was he turned away from the gates of great cities, so often did he ask for a sign from God which god would not send, that he gave up his ministry in despair.  'I have been a healer and a prophet,' he said.  'Now I will be a beggar.'  But a strange thing occurred: those who had scorned his miracles then worshipped his poverty.  They pitied him and, in their pity, they made him a saint.  His miracles have been forgotten absolutely.  This is the saint for me.

      As I left the little church this morning, three young Englishmen passed me.  I have grown accustomed to such encounters, and adopted my usual posture.  I walk very slowly and take care not to look in their direction: since I am for them the painted image of sin, I always allow them the luxury of protracted observation.  When they had retreated to a safe distance, one of them turned around and called back at me, 'Look! There goes Mrs Wilde!  Isn't she swell?'  I walked on with flaming cheeks and, as soon as they had turned the corner of the rue Danton, I hastened back to my room here, my nerves quite ruined..  I still tremble as I write this.  I am like Cassander of the pantomime, who receives blows from the harlequin's wand and kicks from the clown.

      During the terrible days of my trials, a letter was delivered to me: it contained only an illustration of some prehistoric beast.  That was how the English thought of me.  Well, they tried to tame the monster.  They locked it up.  I am surprised that, on my release, the London County Council did not hire me, to be fired from a cannon or perform acrobatic tricks at the Tivoli.  The monstrous is terrible - Velasquez knew this when he painted his dwarves - but ugliness and wretchedness are trivial merely.

      The simplest lessons are those which we are taught last.  Like Semele who longed to see God and was wrapped in fire which consumed her, so I longed for fame and was destroyed by it.  I thought, in my days of purple and gold, that I could reveal myself to the world and instead the world has revealed itself to me.  But although my persecutors have tormented me, and sent me into the wilderness like a pariah dog, they have not broken my spirit - they could not do that.  Since I was driven in a closed cab from the gates of Reading prison, I have been freed in ways that I could not then have understood.  I have no past.  My former triumphs are of no importance.  My work has been quite forgotten: there is no point in instructing Romeike's on my behalf, for there will be no cuttings.  Like the enchanter who lay helpless at the feet of Vivien, I am 'lost to life and use, and name and fame'.  It fills me with a strange joy.  And if, as my friends say, I am Hindoo-like in my passivity it is only because I have discovered the wonderful impersonality of life.  I am an 'effect' merely: the meaning of my life exists in the minds of others and no longer in my own.

      So it is that the English treat me as a criminal, while my friends continue to regard me as martyr.  I do not mind: in that combination I have become the perfect representative of the artist.  I have all the proper references.  I am Solomon and Job, both the most fortunate and the last fortunate of men.  I have known the emptiness of pleasure and the reality of sorrow.  I have come to the complete life - brilliant success and horrible failure, and I have attained the liberty of those who have ceased to develop.  I look like Mrs Warren but without, alas, the profession.

      I have in the past been called worse things: imprecations have been taken from the pit of Malebolge and hurled at me.  It not longer matters what name I carry - Sebastian Melmoth or C.3.3. have been convenient for dramatic purposes, and both of them seem quite appropriate when my own is a dead thing.  When I was a boy I took enormous delight in writing it down - Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.  The whole of Irish legend lies in that name, and it seemed to bestow power and reality upon me.  It was the first proof I ever received of the persuasive powers of literature.  But I am tired of it now and, sometimes, I recoil from it in horror.

      I picked up the Mercure the other day, and it was there in the middle of a paragraph of unbearable French.  I put down the newspaper as though it were in flame.  I could not look at it.  It was as if in that name, Oscar Wilde, there was a void in which I might fall and lose myself.  A madman sometimes stands on the corner of the rue Jacob - opposite the café where I sit.  He cries out at the cabs as they pass by and spatter him with mud.  No-one could know so well as I the agony and bitterness that force him to speak in bewildered words.  But I have learned the simple lesson: I am one of the damned who make no noise.

      The whole course of my former life was a kind of madness also, I see that now.  I tried to turn my life into a work of art.  It was as if I had constructed a basilica upon a martyr's tomb - but, unfortunately, there were to be no miracles.  I did not realise that then, for the secret of my success was that I believed absolutely in my own pre-eminence.  When I gilded each day with precious words and perfumed the hours with wine, the past and future seemed to be of no account.  I must connect them with simple words: I owe that to myself.  Now that I have seen my life turn completely in its fiery circle, I must look upon my past with different eyes.  I have played so many parts.  I have lied to so many people - but I have committed the unforgivable sin, I have lied to myself.  Now I must try to break the habit of a lifetime.

      When Maurice arrives with today's news of the boulevards, I shall inform him of my new resolution.  I shall have to impart the news to him gently; if the dear boy comes in to find me at my desk, he will die of shock.  I have allowed him to believe that my own interests are the ones which he shares.  If he discovers that I have begun a journal, he will write at once to Robbie Ross accusing me of seriousness and other unnatural vices.  Of course he does not understand literature.  He asked me once who 'Mr Wells' might be.  I told him he was a laboratory assistant, and he went away much relieved.

      Maurice is a wonderful friend.  I met him by absurd chance.  I happened to be in the bookshop behind the opera-house when I saw him scrutinising the shelf devoted to modern English literature.  I knew from long experience that a volume of my Intentions lay there, and I waited impatiently to see if he would take it down.  Alas, he opened something of an explicit nature by George Moore.

      I could restrain myself no longer, and I approached him.  'Why,' I asked, 'are you interested in that particular author?'

      Maurice was quite unabashed.  'I live by the café where he says he learned French, the Nouvelle Athénes.'

      'Well, it is a disgrace that such a place is allowed to remain open.  I shall speak to the authorities about it tomorrow.'

      He laughed and I knew at once that we were going to be great friends.  He told me that his mother was French and his father English, but that his father was dead.  It is true, I said, that English people tend to die with unerring regularity.  He was astonished by my candour.  Of course he did not know who I was: his father had not mentioned my name to him, not even on his death-bed.  But I can forgive anything of those who laugh, and I decided to educate Maurice myself.  I introduced him to my friends and, occasionally, I allow him to buy me dinner.

      On these summer afternoons we lie on my narrow bed and smoke cigarettes.  He has heard from the wind and the flowers that I was once a great writer, an artist of international reputation, but I do not think he believes them.  Sometimes in an unguarded moment I will describe a fiery-coloured scene from Salomé or repeat a more than usually apposite epigram.  Then he gives a curious side-long glance as if I were speaking of someone whom he does not know.

      'Why do you not write now?' he asks me.

      'I have nothing whatever to say, Maurice, and in any event I have said it.'

      In the spring More Adey was with us.  He had brought over a volume of my poems to present to me.  It had only just survived the sea-crossing.  I really did not want it, and I raised my hands in horror.

      'But, Oscar, some of these are quite remarkable poems.'  More always talks like a solicitor - except when he is soliciting.

      'Yes, More, but what do they mean?  What do they mean?'  He looked at me, and could not think of an answer.

      I can of course begin this apologia with some confidence.  De Quincey has done it, Newman has done it - some people say that even St Augustine has done it.  Bernard Shaw does it continually, I believe - it is his only contact with the drama.  But I must discover a new form.  I do not want to write in the style of Verlaine's confessions - his genius was to leave out anything that might be of the slightest possible interest.  But then he was an innocent - in the proper sense of that word, he could do no harm.  He was a simple man forced to lead a complicated life.  I am a complicated man enmired in the simplicity of a dull one.  There are some artists who ask questions, and others who provide answers.  I will give the answer and, in the next world, what impatiently for the question to be asked.  Who was Oscar Wilde?  All I need now is the overture to Tannhaüser.  Here comes Maurice: the heavy tread suggests important news.