Writing Wilde: In Extremis

      Neil Bartlett

      My text, commissioned by Corin Redgrave as a companion-piece to his solo rendition of Wilde’s De Profundis, is spun from a single historical fact. According to a telegram sent the next morning to his dear friend Ada Leverson, on the night of March 24, 1895, just one week before the beginning of the trial that was to cost him his reputation, his liberty, his home, his family and quite soon his life, Oscar Wilde went to visit a society palm-reader called Mrs Robinson. She read his palm, and told him that the trial would be a great triumph.

      The next day a gathering of his friends made a last-ditch attempt to persuade him to flee London for the safety of France; he refused. The rest is a history we’re still living through.

      We can never know what actually happened that night. But the story is too good to let lie; it might possibly hold a vital clue to the fascinating, appalling story of Wilde’s downfall. We want to know why this famous man, with his brilliant mind and no less astonishing address book, turned, on that night of all nights, to a palm-reader. And why, as his letter to Ada Leverson and his behaviour the next day indicate, did he believe her? It seems profoundly irrational. We must not, however, let hindsight blind us to the fact that Wilde was faced with an impossible situation. Was he to leave Lord Alfred Douglas, the man with whom he was so deeply, disastrously in love? Leave his two young sons, whom he adored? Wilde was right in De Profundis to speak of the madness, the near-insanity of what happened to him. What place was there for reason in the city which had so suddenly turned against him? In less than three months an unholy alliance of media hostility, class prejudice and homophobic hatred had transformed Wilde from a darling celebrity into the worst kind of criminal pervert. A palmist might claim to decipher the madness as well as anyone.

      But surely he knew, as he set out in a cab to meet her, that Mrs Robinson was a charlatan? She had after all read his palm once before, at a society party. She’d played the oldest trick in the book; predicting foreign travel (hardly an unlikely event given Douglas’s penchant for making Wilde pay for frequent trips abroad). Perhaps that was her appeal; Wilde loved charlatans, if a charlatan is someone who makes lying not only a profession, but an art. His heroes and heroines are in this sense all liars; they make truth a performance. It is no accident that De Profundis, which of all his writings is the only one concerned to tell and prove the truth, is also his greatest tour de force performance, it’s great outpouring of hate and love rehearsed for months in the solitude of Reading Gaol.

      By way of explanation for his apparent passivity in the face of imminent disaster, Wilde is often said to have been deeply superstitious, to have believed that his destruction was somehow inevitable. Perhaps that’s why he went to Mrs. Robinson that night. Certainly, his work is always haunted by the idea of Fate, of Doom. All of his heroes are marked by destiny; Earnest was destined to marry Gwendolen from the moment Miss Prism left her handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station; Dorian was doomed from the moment he voiced the wish that his picture might age while he might not. Bizarrely, Wilde’s own fiction even seems sometimes to predict with fatalistic accuracy his own destiny; Lord Arthur Savile, in a short story written eight years before Wilde met Mrs Robinson, becomes a criminal precisely because of his superstitious belief in the predictions of a palmist who he meets at a party.

      *

      I have invented very little. I have adopted Wilde’s own technique of redeploying phrases, cadences and even whole speeches from one work in another. I have stolen from fiction – the fee of one hundred guineas, the names of the duchesses, the tear-stained walk through London at dawn are all from Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, for instance – and given new meanings to details lifted from letters and interviews. Like all good charlatans, I can claim to have stuck to the facts; Mrs Robinson did indeed provide advice to several M.P.s, and she did publish a photographically illustrated manual of palm-reading (The Graven Palm, Edward Arnold, London, 1911); and she did live just round the corner from two friends of Wilde called Alfred and Charlie, a couple who he referred to as “married”. He did wear lemon yellow gloves and a scarab ring, and a coat with a beaver collar; he did pay a well-publicised visit to a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest accompanied by both his wife and his lover. I have not invented Wilde’s terror, or his love, or the details of his love-life. He already knew on March 24th that Queensberry’s lawyers had obtained copies of his love-letters to Lord Alfred Douglas; but he didn’t yet know that they had traced ten of the young men who he had paid to have sex with either Douglas or himself in the previous three years. And, yes, London was, that terrible spring, freezing; on the night that The Importance of Being Earnest opened, the Serpentine carried six inches of ice.

      But as for this version of the story being “true”...well; no truth can be separated from the circumstances of its telling. A hundred years after his death, we find other truths in Wilde’s life and work than those found when he swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and