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De Profundis Oscar Wilde (1897)

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De Profundis Oscar Wilde (1897) DE PROFUNDIS OSCAR WILDE (1897) INTRODUCTION1 De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol (Berkshire, England), to "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensberry). During its first half Wilde recounts their previous relationship and extravagant lifestyle which eventually led to Wilde's conviction and imprisonment for “gross indecency.” He indicts both Lord Alfred's vanity and his own weakness in acceding to those wishes. In the second half, Wilde charts his spiritual development in prison and identification with Jesus Christ, whom he characterizes as a romantic, individualist artist. Wilde wrote the letter between January and March 1897, close to the end of his imprisonment. Contact had lapsed between Douglas and Wilde and the latter had suffered from his close supervision, physical labor and emotional isolation. Nelson, the new prison governor, thought that writing might be more cathartic than prison labor. He was not allowed to send the long letter which he was allowed to write "for medicinal purposes"; each page was taken away when completed, and only at the end could he read it over and make revisions. Nelson gave the long letter to him on his release on 18 May 1897. Wilde entrusted the manuscript to the journalist Robert Ross (an ex-lover, and rival to "Bosie"). Ross published the letter in 1905, five years after Wilde's death, giving it the title De Profundis from Psalm 130. THE TRIAL In 1891 Wilde began an intimate friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde was 41; Douglas, 21), a young, vain aristocrat. As the two grew closer, family and friends on both sides urged Wilde and Douglas to lessen their contact. Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, often feuded with his son over the topic. Especially after the suicide death of his eldest son, the Viscount Drumlanrig, Queensberry privately accused them of improper acts and threatened to cut off Lord Alfred's allowance. When they refused, he began publicly harassing Wilde. In early 1895 Wilde had reached the height of his fame and success with his plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest on stage in London. When 1 Wikipedia contributors. "De Profundis (letter)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 Apr. 2016. Web. 23 Aug. 2016. Wilde returned from holidays after the premieres, he found Queensberry's card at his club with the inscription: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]". Unable to bear further insults and encouraged by Lord Alfred (who wanted to attack his father in every possible way), Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel. Wilde withdrew his claim as the defence began but the Judge deemed that Queensberry's accusation was justified. The Crown promptly issued a warrant for his arrest and he was charged with gross indecency with other men under the Labouchere Amendment in April 1895. The trial was the centre of public discussion as details of Wilde's consorts from the working class became known. Wilde refused to admit wrongdoing and the jury were unable to reach a verdict. At the retrial Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, to be held to hard labour.[3] IMPRISONMENT He was imprisoned in Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading Prisons, where the poor food, manual labour, and harsh conditions greatly weakened his health. He quickly began suffering from hunger, insomnia, and disease. He was visited in Pentonville by R.B.S Haldane, a liberal, reforming MP whom he had known before. Haldane championed his case and arranged for access to religious, educational, and historical books. Whilst in Wandsworth Wilde collapsed in the Chapel and burst his right ear drum, an injury that would later contribute to his death. He spent two months recovering in the infirmary. Friends arranged for him to be transferred to Reading Prison, where he was prescribed lighter duties and allowed to spend some time reading but not writing. Depressed, he was unable to complete even these duties, and under Colonel Isaacson, the strict Warden of Reading Prison, Wilde became trapped in a series of harsh punishments for trivial offences. The failure to complete them led to renewed sanction. Wilde, who still loved Lord Alfred, became upset as contact from him became rare, then annoyed when he learned that the latter planned to publish Wilde's letters without permission and dedicate poems to him unasked. He wrote to friends immediately, forbidding the former and refusing the latter. Wilde still maintained his belief that the Queensberrys owed him a debt of honour arising from his bankruptcy trial. Wilde's friends continued pressing for better conditions and, in 1897, Major Nelson, a man of a more progressive mind, replaced Col. Isaacson as Warden. He quickly visited Wilde and offered him a book from his personal library, the sympathy bringing Wilde to tears. Soon Wilde requested lists of books, returning to Ancient Greek poets and Christian theology, and studying modern Italian and German, though it was Dante's Inferno that held his attention. Wilde was granted official permission to have writing materials in early 1897, but even then under strict control: he could write to his friends and his solicitor, but only one page at a time. Wilde decided to write a letter to Douglas, and in it discuss the last five years they had spent together, creating an autobiography of sorts. Wilde spent January, February, and March 1897 writing his letter. Textual analysis of the manuscript shows that Nelson probably relaxed the stringent rules, allowing Wilde to see the papers together: three of the sheets are of relatively fair copy, suggesting they were entirely re-written, and most do not end with a full-stop. Wilde requested that he might send the letter to Lord Alfred Douglas or Robert Ross, which the Home Office denied, but he was permitted to take it with him on release .Wilde never revised the work after he left prison. Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing. For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. ***2 Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,—and natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,—waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the 2 *** indicates the omission of text.
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