Frank Harris - Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

F >> Frank Harris >> Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

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"Yet the curious thing is he has read a lot and has a sort of vision:
that Shakespeare stuff of his is extraordinary; but he takes sincerity
for style, and poetry as poetry has no appeal for him. You heard him
admit that himself last night....

"He's comic, really: curiously provincial like all Americans. Fancy a
Jeremiad preached by a man in a fur coat! Frank's comic. But he's really
kind and fights for his friends. He helped me in prison greatly:
sympathy is a sort of religion to him: that's why we can meet without
murder and separate without suicide....

"Talking literature with him is very like playing Rugby football.... I
never did play football, you know; but talking literature with Frank
must be very like playing Rugby where you end by being kicked violently
through your own goal," and he laughed delightedly.

I had listened without thinking as I often listened to his talk for the
mere music of the utterance; now, at a break in the monologue, I went
into the next room, feeling that to listen consciously would be
unworthy. On the whole his view of me was not unkindly: he disliked to
hear any opinion that differed from his own and it never came into his
head that Oxford was no nearer the meridian of truth than Lawrence,
Kansas, and certainly at least as far from Heaven.

Some weeks later I left La Napoule and went on a visit to some friends.
He wrote complaining that without me the place was dull. I wired him and
went over to Nice to meet him and we lunched together at the Cafe de la
Regence. He was terribly downcast, and yet rebellious. He had come over
to stay at Nice, and stopped at the Hotel Terminus, a tenth-rate hotel
near the station; the proprietor called on him two or three days
afterwards and informed him he must leave the hotel, as his room had
been let.

"Evidently someone has told him, Frank, who I am. What am I to do?"

I soon found him a better hotel where he was well treated, but the
incident coming on top of the Alexander affair seemed to have frightened
him.

"There are too many English on this coast," he said to me one day, "and
they are all brutal to me. I think I should like to go to Italy if you
would not mind."

"The world is all before you," I replied. "I shall only be too glad for
you to get a comfortable place," and I gave him the money he wanted. He
lingered on at Nice for nearly a week. I saw him several times. He
lunched with me at the Reserve once at Beaulieu, and was full of delight
at the beauty of the bay and the quiet of it. In the middle of the meal
some English people came in and showed their dislike of him rudely. He
at once shrank into himself, and as soon as possible made some pretext
to leave. Of course I went with him. I was more than sorry for him, but
I felt as unable to help him as I should have been unable to hold him
back if he had determined to throw himself down a precipice.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Cfr. Appendix: "Criticisms by Robert Ross."

[29] The incident is worth recording for the honour of human nature. At
the moment of Oscar's trial Charles Wyndham had let his theatre, the
Criterion, to Lewis Waller and H.H. Morell to produce in it "An Ideal
Husband" which had been running for over 100 nights at the Haymarket.
When Alexander took Oscar's name off the bill, Wyndham wrote to the
young Managers, saying that, if under the altered circumstances they
wished to cancel their agreement, he would allow them to do so. But if
they "put on" a play of Mr. Wilde's, the author's name must be on all
the bills and placards as usual. He could not allow his theatre to be
used to insult a man who was on his trial.

[30] Cfr. end of Appendix:--A Last Word.

[31] Cfr. end of Appendix:--A Last Word.

[32] This was written years before a Home Secretary, Mr. Reginald
MacKenna, tortured women and girls in prison in England by forcible
feeding, because they tried to present petitions in favour of Woman's
Suffrage. He afterwards defended himself in Parliament by declaring that
"'forcible feeding' was not unpleasant." The torturers of the
Inquisition also befouled cruelty with hypocritical falsehood: they
would burn their victims; but would not shed blood.

CHAPTER XXV

"The Gods are just and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us."

It was full summer before I met Oscar again; he had come back to Paris
and taken up his old quarters in the mean little hotel in the Rue des
Beaux Arts. He lunched and dined with me as usual. His talk was as
humorous and charming as ever, and he was just as engaging a companion.
For the first time, however, he complained of his health:

"I ate some mussels and oysters in Italy, and they must have poisoned
me; for I have come out in great red blotches all over my arms and chest
and back, and I don't feel well."

"Have you consulted a doctor?"

"Oh, yes, but doctors are no good: they all advise you differently; the
best of it is they all listen to you with an air of intense interest
when you are talking about yourself--which is an excellent tonic."

"They sometimes tell one what's the matter; give a name and significance
to the unknown," I interjected.

"They bore me by forbidding me to smoke and drink. They are worse than
M----, who grudged me his wine."

"What do you mean?" I asked in wonder.

"A tragi-comic history, Frank. You were so right about M---- and I was
mistaken in him. You know he wanted me to stay with him at Gland in
Switzerland, begged me to come, said he would do everything for me. When
the weather got warm at Genoa I went to him. At first he seemed very
glad to see me and made me welcome. The food was not very good, the
drink anything but good, still I could not complain, and I put up with
the discomforts. But in a week or two the wine disappeared, and beer
took its place, and I suggested I must be going. He begged me so
cordially not to go that I stayed on; but in a little while I noticed
that the beer got less and less in quantity, and one day when I ventured
to ask for a second bottle at lunch he told me that it cost a great deal
and that he could not afford it. Of course I made some decent pretext
and left his house as soon as possible. If one has to suffer poverty,
one had best suffer alone. But to get discomforts grudgingly and as a
charity is the extremity of shame. I prefer to look on it from the other
side; M---- grudging me his small beer belongs to farce."

He spoke with bitterness and contempt, as he used never to speak of
anyone.

I could not help sympathising with him, though visibly the cloth was
wearing threadbare. He asked me now at once for money, and a little
later again and again. Formerly he had invented pretexts; he had not
received his allowance when he expected it, or he was bothered by a bill
and so forth; but now he simply begged and begged, railing the while at
fortune. It was distressing. He wanted money constantly, and spent it as
always like water, without a thought.

I asked him one day whether he had seen much of his soldier boy since he
had returned to Paris.

"I have seen him, Frank, but not often," and he laughed gaily. "It's a
farce-comedy; sentiment always begins romantically and ends in
laughter--_tabulae solvuntur risu_. I taught him so much, Frank, that he
was made a corporal and forthwith a nursemaid fell in love with his
stripes. He's devoted to her: I suppose he likes to play teacher in his
turn."

"And so the great romantic passion comes to this tame conclusion?"

"What would you, Frank? Whatever begins must also end."

"Is there anyone else?" I asked, "or have you learned reason at last?"

"Of course there's always someone else, Frank: change is the essence of
passion: the _reason_ you talk of is merely another name for impotence."

"Montaigne declares," I said, "that love belongs to early youth, 'the
next period after infancy,' is his phrase, but that is at the best a
Frenchman's view of it. Sophocles was nearer the truth when he called
himself happy in that age had freed him from the whip of passion. When
are you going to reach that serenity?"

"Never, Frank, never, I hope: life without desire would not be worth
living to me. As one gets older one is more difficult to please: but the
sting of pleasure is even keener than in youth and far more egotistic.

"One comes to understand the Marquis de Sade and that strange, scarlet
story of de Retz--the pleasure they got from inflicting pain, the
curious, intense underworld of cruelty--"

"That's unlike you, Oscar," I broke in. "I thought you shrank from
giving pain always: to me it's the unforgivable sin."

"To me, also," he rejoined instantly, "intellectually one may understand
it; but in reality it's horrible. I want my pleasure unembittered by any
drop of pain. That reminds me: I read a terrible, little book the other
day, Octave Mirbeau's 'Le Jardin des Supplices'; it is quite awful, a
_sadique_ joy in pain pulses through it; but for all that it's
wonderful. His soul seems to have wandered in fearsome places. You with
your contempt of fear, will face the book with courage--I--"

"I simply couldn't read it," I replied; "it was revolting to me,
impossible--"

"A sort of grey adder," he summed up and I nodded in complete agreement.

I passed the next winter on the Riviera. A speculation which I had gone
in for there had caused me heavy loss and much anxiety. In the spring I
returned to Paris, and of course, asked him to meet me. He was much
brighter than he had been for a long time. Lord Alfred Douglas, it
appeared, had come in for a large legacy from his father's estate and
had given him some money, and he was much more cheerful. We had a great
lunch at Durand's and he was at his very best. I asked him about his
health.

"I'm all right, Frank, but the rash continually comes back, a ghostly
visitant, Frank: I'm afraid the doctors are in league with the devil. It
generally returns after a good dinner, a sort of aftermath of champagne.
The doctors say I must not drink champagne, and must stop smoking, the
silly people, who regard pleasure as their natural enemies; whereas it
is our pleasures which provide them with a living!"

He looked fairly well, I thought; he was a little fatter, his skin a
little dingier than of old, and he had grown very deaf, but in every
other way he seemed at his best, though he was certainly drinking too
freely--spirits between times as well as wine at meals.

I had heard on the Riviera during the winter that Smithers had tried to
buy a play from him, so one day I brought up the subject.

"By the way, Smithers says that you have been working on your play; you
know the one I mean, the one with the great screen scene in it."

"Oh, yes, Frank," he remarked indifferently.

"Won't you tell me what you've done?" I asked. "Have you written any of
it?"

"No, Frank," he replied casually, "it's the scenario Smithers talked
about."

A little while afterwards he asked me for money. I told him I could not
afford any at the moment, and pressed him to write his play.

"I shall never write again, Frank," he said. "I can't, I simply can't
face my thoughts. Don't ask me!" Then suddenly: "Why don't you buy the
scenario and write the play yourself?"

"I don't care for the stage," I replied; "it's a sort of rude encaustic
work I don't like; its effects are theatrical!"

"A play pays far better than a book, you know--"

But I was not interested. That evening thinking over what he had said, I
realised all at once that a story I had in mind to write would suit
"the screen scene" of Oscar's scenario; why shouldn't I write a play
instead of a story? When we met next day I broached the idea to Oscar:

"I have a story in my head," I said, "which would fit into that scenario
of yours, so far as you have sketched it to me. I could write it as a
play and do the second, third and fourth acts very quickly, as all the
personages are alive to me. Could you do the first act?"

"Of course I could, Frank."

"But," I said, "will you?"

"What would be the good, you could not sell it, Frank."

"In any case," I went on, "I could try; but I would infinitely prefer
you to write the whole play if you would; then it would sell fast
enough."

"Oh, Frank, don't ask me."

The idea of the collaboration was a mistake; but it seemed to me at the
moment the best way to get him to do something. Suddenly he asked me to
give him L50 for the scenario at once, then I could do what I liked with
it.

After a good deal of talk I consented to give him the L50 if he would
promise to write the first act; he promised and I gave him the
money.[33]

A little later I noticed a certain tension in his relations with Lord
Alfred Douglas. One day he told me frankly that Lord Alfred Douglas had
come into a fortune of L15,000 or L20,000, "and," he added, "of course
he's always able to get money. He'll marry an American millionairess or
some rich widow" (Oscar's ideas of life were nearly all conventional,
derived from novels and plays); "and I wanted him to give me enough to
make my life comfortable, to settle enough on me to make a decent life
possible to me. It would only have cost him two or three thousand
pounds, perhaps less. I get L150 a year and I wanted him to make it up
to L300.[34] I lost that through going to him at Naples. I think he
ought to give me that at the very least, don't you? Won't you speak to
him, Frank?"

"I could not possibly interfere," I replied.

"I gave him everything," he went on, in a depressed way. "When I had
money, he never had to ask for it; all that was mine was his. And now
that he is rich, I have to beg from him, and he gives me small sums and
puts me off. It is terrible of him; it is really very, very wrong of
him."

I changed the subject as soon as I could; there was a note of bitterness
which I did not like, which indeed I had already remarked in him.

I was destined very soon to hear the other side. A day or two later Lord
Alfred Douglas told me that he had bought some racehorses and was
training them at Chantilly; would I come down and see them?

"I am not much of a judge of racehorses," I replied, "and I don't know
much about racing; but I should not mind coming down one evening. I
could spend the night at an hotel, and see the horses and your stable in
the morning. The life of the English stable lads in France must be
rather peculiar."

"It is droll," he said, "a complete English colony in France. There are
practically no French jockeys or trainers worth their salt; it is all
English, English slang, English ways, even English food and of course
English drinks. No French boy seems to have nerve enough to make a good
rider."

I made an arrangement with him and went down. I missed my train and was
very late; I found that Lord Alfred Douglas had dined and gone out. I
had my dinner, and about midnight went up to my room. Half an hour later
there came a knocking at the door. I opened it and found Lord Alfred
Douglas.

"May I come in?" he asked. "I'm glad you've not gone to bed yet."

"Of course," I said, "what is it?" He was pale and seemed
extraordinarily excited.

"I have had such a row with Oscar," he jerked out, nervously moving
about (I noticed the strained white face I had seen before at the Cafe
Royal), "such a row, and I wanted to speak to you about it. Of course
you know in the old days when his plays were being given in London he
was rich and gave me some money, and now he says I ought to settle a
large sum on him; I think it ridiculous, don't you?"

"I would rather not say anything about it," I replied; "I don't know
enough about the circumstances."

He was too filled with a sense of his own injuries; too excited to catch
my tone or understand any reproof in my attitude.

"Oscar is really too dreadful," he went on; "he is quite shameless now;
he begs and begs and begs, and of course I have given him money, have
given him hundreds, quite as much as he ever gave me: but he is
insatiable and recklessly extravagant besides. Of course I want to be
quite fair to him: I've already given him back all he gave me. Don't you
think that is all anyone can ask of me?"

I looked at him in astonishment.

"That is for you and Oscar," I said, "to decide together. No one else
can judge between you."

"Why not?" he snapped out in his irritable way, "you know us both and
our relations."

"No," I replied, "I don't know all the obligations and the interwoven
services. Besides, I could not judge fairly between you."

He turned on me angrily, though I had spoken with as much kindness as I
could.

"He seemed to want to make you judge between us," he cried. "I don't
care who's the judge. I think if you give a man back what he has given
you, that is all he can ask. It's a d----d lot more than most people get
in this world."

After a pause he started off on a new line of thought:

"The first time I ever noticed any fault in Oscar was over that 'Salome'
translation. He's appallingly conceited. You know I did the play into
English. I found that his choice of words was poor, anything but good;
his prose is wooden....

"Of course he's not a poet," he broke off contemptuously, "even you must
admit that."

"I know what you mean," I replied; "though I should have to make a vast
reservation in favour of the man who wrote 'The Ballad of Reading
Gaol.'"

"One ballad doesn't make a man a poet," he barked; "I mean by poet one
to whom verse lends power: in that sense he's not a poet and I am." His
tone was that of defiant challenge.

"You are certainly," I replied.

"Well, I did the translation of 'Salome' very carefully, as no one else
could have done it," and he flushed angrily, "and all the while Oscar
kept on altering it for the worse. At last I had to tell him the truth,
and we had a row. He imagines he's the greatest person in the world, and
the only person to be considered. His conceit is stupid.... I helped[35]
him again and again with that 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' you're always
praising: I suppose he'd deny that now.

"He's got his money back; what more can he want? He disgusts me when he
begs."

I could not contain myself altogether.

"He seems to blame you," I said quietly, "for egging him on to that
insane action against your father which brought him to ruin."

"I've no doubt he'd find some reason to blame me," he whipped out. "How
did I know how the case would go?... Why did he take my advice, if he
didn't want to? He was surely old enough to know his own interest....
He's simply disgusting now; he's getting fat and bloated, and always
demanding money, money, money, like a daughter of the horse-leech--just
as if he had a claim to it."

I could not stand it any longer; I had to try to move him to kindness.

"Sometimes one gives willingly to a man one has never had anything from.
Misery and want in one we like and admire have a very strong claim."

"I do not see that there is any claim at all," he cried bitterly, as if
the very word maddened him, "and I am not going to pamper him any more.
He could earn all the money he wants if he would only write; but he
won't do anything. He is lazy, and getting lazier and lazier every day;
and he drinks far too much. He is intolerable. I thought when he kept
asking me for that money to-night, he was like an old prostitute."

"Good God!" I cried. "Good God! Has it come to that between you?"

"Yes," he repeated, not heeding what I said, "he was just like an old
fat prostitute," and he gloated over the word, "and I told him so."

I looked at the man but could not speak; indeed there was nothing to be
said. Surely at last, I thought, Oscar Wilde has reached the lowest
depth. I could think of nothing but Oscar; this hard, small, bitter
nature made Oscar's suffering plain to me.

"As I can do no good," I said, "do you mind letting me sleep? I'm simply
tired to death."

"I'm sorry," he said, looking for his hat; "will you come out in the
morning and see the 'gees'?"

"I don't think so," I replied, "I'm incapable of a resolution now, I'm
so tired I would rather sleep. I think I'll go up to Paris in the
morning. I have something rather urgent to do."

He said "Good night" and went away.

I lay awake, my eyes prickling with sorrow and sympathy for poor Oscar,
insulted in his misery and destitution, outraged and trodden on by the
man he had loved, by the man who had thrust him into the Pit....[36]

I made up my mind to go to Oscar at once and try to comfort him a
little. After all, I thought, another fifty pounds or so wouldn't make a
great deal of difference to me, and I dwelt on the many delightful hours
I had passed with him, hours of gay talk and superb intellectual
enjoyment.

I went up by the morning train to Paris, and drove across the river to
Oscar's hotel.

He had two rooms, a small sitting-room and a still smaller bedroom
adjoining. He was lying half-dressed on the bed as I entered. The rooms
affected me unpleasantly. They were ordinary, mean little French rooms,
furnished without taste; the usual mahogany chairs, gilt clock on the
mantelpiece and a preposterous bilious paper on the walls. What struck
me was the disorder everywhere; books all over the round table; books on
the chairs; books on the floor and higgledy-piggledy, here a pair of
socks, there a hat and cane, and on the floor his overcoat. The sense of
order and neatness which he used to have in his rooms at Tite Street was
utterly lacking. He was not living here, intent on making the best of
things; he was merely existing without plan or purpose.

I told him I wanted him to come to lunch. While he was finishing
dressing it came to me that his clothes had undergone much the same
change as his dwelling. In his golden days in London he had been a good
deal of a dandy; he usually wore white waistcoats at night; was
particular about the flowers in his buttonhole, his gloves and cane. Now
he was decently dressed and that was all; as far below the average as he
had been above it. Clearly, he had let go of himself and no longer took
pleasure in the vanities: it seemed to me a bad sign.

I had always thought of him as very healthy, likely to live till sixty
or seventy; but he had no longer any hold on himself and that depressed
me; some spring of life seemed broken in him. Bosie Douglas' second
betrayal had been the _coup de grace_.

In the carriage he was preoccupied, out of sorts, and immediately began
to apologise.

"I shall be poor company, Frank," he warned me with quivering lips.

The fragrant summer air in the Champs Elysees seemed to revive him a
little, but he was evidently lost in bitter reflections and scarcely
noticed where he was going. From time to time he sighed heavily as if
oppressed. I talked as well as I could of this and that, tried to lure
him away from the hateful subject that I knew must be in his mind; but
all in vain. Towards the end of the lunch he said gravely:

"I want you to tell me something, Frank; I want you to tell me honestly
if you think I am in the wrong. I wish I could think I was.... You know
I spoke to you the other day about Bosie; he is rich now and he is
throwing his money away with both hands in racing.

"I asked him to settle L1,500 or L2,000 on me to buy me an annuity, or
to do something that would give me L150 a year. You said you did not
care to ask him, so I did. I told him it was really his duty to do it at
once, and he turned round and lashed me savagely with his tongue. He
called me dreadful names. Said dreadful things to me, Frank. I did not
think it was possible to suffer more than I suffered in prison, but he
has left me bleeding ..." and the fine eyes filled with tears. Seeing
that I remained silent, he cried out:

"Frank, you must tell me for our friendship's sake. Is it my fault? Was
he wrong or was I wrong?"

His weakness was pathetic, or was it that his affection was still so
great that he wanted to blame himself rather than his friend?

"Of course he seems to me to be wrong," I said, "utterly wrong." I could
not help saying it and I went on:

"But you know his temper is insane; if he even praises himself, as he
did to me lately, he gets into a rage in order to do it, and perhaps
unwittingly you annoyed him by the way you asked. If you put it to his
generosity and vainglory you would get it easier than from his sense of
justice and right. He has not much moral sense."

"Oh, Frank," he broke in earnestly, "I put it to him as well as I could,
quite quietly and gently. I talked of our old affection, of the good and
evil days we had passed together: you know I could never be harsh to
him, never.

"There never was," he burst out, in a sort of exaltation, "there never
was in the world such a betrayal. Do you remember once telling me that
the only flaw you could find in the perfect symbolism of the gospel
story was that Jesus was betrayed by Judas, the foreigner from Kerioth,
when he should have been betrayed by John, the beloved disciple; for it
is only those we love who can betray us? Frank, how true, how tragically
true that is! It is those we love who betray us with a kiss."

He was silent for some time and then went on wearily, "I wish you would
speak to him, Frank, and show him how unjust and unkind he is to me."

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