Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years

by Nicholas Frankel

Nicholas Frankel presents a new and revisionary account of Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile on the European continent following his release from an English prison for the crime of “gross indecency” between men. Oscar The Unrepentant Years challenges the prevailing, traditional view of Wilde as a broken, tragic figure, a martyr to Victorian sexual morality, and shows instead that he pursued his post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.

After two bitter years of solitary confinement, Frankel shows, Wilde emerged from prison in 1897 determined to rebuild his life along lines that were continuous with the path he had followed before his conviction, unapologetic and even defiant about the crime for which he had been convicted. England had already done its worst. In Europe’s more tolerant atmosphere, he could begin to live openly and without hypocrisy.

Frankel overturns previous misunderstandings of Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the great love of his life, with whom he hoped to live permanently in Naples, following their secret and ill-fated elopement there. He describes how and why the two men were forced apart, as well as Wilde’s subsequent relations with a series of young men. Oscar Wilde pays close attention to Wilde’s final two important works, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol , while detailing his nearly three-year residence in Paris. There, despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde attempted to rebuild himself as a man―and a man of letters.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, LGBT, Literary Criticism, Queer, History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 2017

About the author

Nicholas Frankel is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Among his many books about Oscar Wilde are Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years, The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated Uncensored Edition.

Reviews

[leynes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just came back from Amsterdam (of course I wanna move there now, lmao). I visited a gazillion bookshops but showed great constraint and only came home with two books: one wonderful little picture book and this gorgeous hardcover of a biography/analysis of Oscar's last years.

This book has been on my radar for years but I've always been too stingy to get it (it's 28€ new)... amazingly, I found it in a lovely second hand bookshop for an okay price (18€) BUT it's in pristine condition and I was on holiday, so I'm happ that I treated myself to it. :D

Instead of giving you an in-depth review of my thoughts, I'll leave you with all of my notes, so that you can come to your own conclusions. Frankel makes an excellent argument for reconsidering Wilde's final years, not seeing him as the victim of Victorian moral and exploitative younger lover, but rather as the agent of his own destiny.

***

Prologue

– “Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars … and is the light of all my hours,” Wilde had written to Douglas from Holloway Prison shortly after his arrest.
– Until his arrest, his plays alone had earned him sone £10,000, equivalent of roughly £1 million today.
– The Ballad of Reading Goal proved to be the bestselling of all Wilde’s works in his lifetime
– Defending himself for returning to Douglas after his release: “To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble”
– Within weeks of his release, he was writing to Douglas daily, addressing him as “my darling boy” and “my dear honey-sweet boy,” and eagerly making plans for Douglas to visit him in his secluded retreat at Berneval, on the Normandy coast.
– In the summer of 1897 Douglas told a friend: “I was parted from the person I love best in the world and … ever since I have waited and hoped and longed to see him again.” “I wanted to go back to him, I longed for it and for him,” Douglas told his own mother.

Part One: The Prison Years 1895-1897

I. Fettered and Chained

– In 1885, the British Parliament passed The Criminal Law Amendment Act “for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes.” Among other things, the Act raised the age of sexual consent from twelve to sixteen
– The Act also outlawed “gross indecency” between men. It has been said that the Act brought the modern male homosexual into being, for it created panic, paranoia, and a new sense of sexual identity among both men with same-sex desires and those most desirous of policing them.
– The condition in British prisons were horrendous: solitary confinement was common, upon arrival Wilde had to shave his head to a short stubble, get into a filthy bath in which other prisoners had already bathed, and then spent six hours daily on the treadmill
– At the time, calls for prison reform were strong. Press accounts of Wilde’s deterioration threatened to increase the pressure on already defensive prison administrators, politicians, and government officials.
– Wilde told Frank Harris: “I could not sleep, I grew weak and had wild delusions … Wandsworth is the worst. No dungeon in hell could be worse.”

II. From the Depths

– Under Nelsons’s governorship, Wilde’s conditions in prison got much better: sudden decline of petty punishments, cessation of onerous forms of manual labor, elevation to the role of “schoolmaster’s orderly”, meaning that he was in charge of the prison library
– Nelson also encouraged Wilde to correspond with his friends outside prison regularly, something that was technically forbidden/more regulated
– Although Wilde had begun his sentence vowing undying love for Douglas, over the ensuing months he became increasingly angry, alienated, and depressed at the thought of his lover. This change owes more to Wilde’s isolation and depression in the first year of his sentence, when he harboured hopes for reconciliation with his wife and children, than it does to any slights or neglect on Douglas’s part
– Still, Wilde had hopes for reconciling with Douglas as well: “In old days there was always a wide chasm between us, the chasm of achieved Art and acquired culture: there is a still wider chasm between us now, the chasm of Sorrow: but to Humility there is nothing that is impossible, and to Love all things are easy”

Part Two: Oscar Wilde on Exile 1897

III. Release

– De Profundis was finished by April 1, 1897, just over six weeks before his release
– On the letter, Wilde told Ross: “It is the first time anyone has ever told him the truth about himself … the letter is one he thoroughly deserves, and … if it is unjust, eh thoroughly deserves injustice. Who indeed deserves it more?”
– After his release, Wilde stayed interested in the topic of prison reform, wrote to letters to The Daily Chronicle, propagating for better conditions, especially for imprisoned children
– Within a day or two of arriving in Dieppe, Wilde had written to Constance, begging for reconciliation of some kind; he especially longed to see his children.
– “Had Constance allowed him to see his boys, he wrote later, my life would, I think, have been quite different. But this she would not do. I don’t in any way venture to blame her for her action, but every action has its consequence.”
– By June 6, Wilde was writing to Douglas every day: “Our lives are divided, but we love each other deeply and our souls touch in myriad ways through the estranging air”
– Douglas offered him love, something that Constance couldn’t do (RIGHTLY SO, may I add). Douglas wrote to him: “I am told you now hate me and do not wish to see me or have anything to do with me, but all the same I write to tell you that I have not changed to you, in spite of all the efforts that have been made to put me against you, that I have remembered and kept my solemn promise to stick to you through thick and thin, and that I long to see you again.”

IV. The Pursuit of Love

– “My going back to Bosie was psychologically inevitable”
– The idea that Douglas was callously indifferent to Wilde, that he agreed to stay with Wilde in order to exploit him, or that their patron nearly three months later was emotionally predictable, while oft-repeated, are heavily coloured by the acrimony of De Profundis, and they do not bear up under close inspection.
– “Our love was always beautiful and noble, and if I have been the butt of a terrible tragedy, it is because the nature of that love has not been understood…” “My should clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the worlds of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration fo joy”
– Wrote parts of The Ballad of Reading Goal when he was with Bosie
– “I am happier with Bosie than I could be if all my laurels were given back to me. Somehow, he is my life”
– The English colony at Naples was ostracising the couple, during their visit to Capri in late October, Wilde and Douglas were ejected from the Quisiana Hotel after the hotel’s English clientele rose from their seats in the dining-room in disgust at the couple’s entrance
– Constance was fuming when she found out that Oscar had gone back to Bosie: “I forbid you to see Lord Alfred Douglas. I forbid you to return to your filthy, insane life. I forbid you to live at Naples. I will not allow you to come to Genoa.” - “How can she really imagine that she can influence or control my life?” Oscar angrily wrote to Ross: “I wish to goodness she would leave me alone. I don’t meddle with her life. I accept the separation from the children: I acquiesce.” -> Oscar doesn’t seem to release that through his public scandal, he did in fact meddle with her life in the most extreme way
– Constance cut his allowance and Douglas’s mother threatened to do the same. Lady Queensberry agreed to pay Wilde as long as he would write a pledge not to live with Bosie henceforth. In a heartbreaking letter to his mother, Bosie wrote: “Don’t think I have changed about him or that I think him bad … I still love and admire him … I look on him as a martyr to progress. I associate myself with him in everything. … I give up nothing and admit no point against him or myself separately or jointly.”


V. The Ballad of Reading Goal

– “My life is patched up. Neither to myself, nor others, am I any longer a joy.”
– Wilde’s first trip to Sicily can be seen as an expression of an emerging understanding of himself as a homosexual man. He consciously thought the company of Sicily’s most unapologetic homosexuals
– On The Ballad of Reading Goal, Wilde said: “It aims at eternity.” He called it his literally swan song or “chant de cygne” With his death still two and a half years away, he feared that something vital had died in him: the poem was indeed to prove the last of his works, but it was his bestselling work in his lifetime.
– The poem is “a sort of denial of my own philosophy of art in many ways,” it’s not art for art’s sake, rather it is moralising, it aims at real life politics, it can be read as propaganda -> yet Oscar’s lyricism is still beautiful, it clashes with the harsh things he’s describing -> he brings beauty to the poem, very much in vain with his previous philosophy

VI. The Seduction of Paris

– One of Paris’s attractions was that it offered a greater sense of personal and sexual freedom
– Over 30% of men active in Paris’s late-Victorian homosexual subculture were aged between fourteen and twenty; upon his arrival in Paris, Oscar began a series of open, public liaisons with young men offering him personal and sexual companionship
– Douglas arrived in Paris sometime in early 1989 and immediately set about being Wilde; they quickly resumed their friendship, they met and dined together frequently
– Douglas, attracted to younger men than himself, had never been comfortable with the older Wilde’s sexual fascination with him. In a revealing confidential letter to Frank harris, written in 1925, Douglas said that, with the exception of Wilde, he had never had sexual relations with a man older than himself.
– Wilde becoming a gay icon/ gay rights activist: “I have no doubt we shall win but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good”

VII. A Confraternity of the Damned

– Constance’s death: their son Vyvyan Holland questioned the sincerity and depth of Oscar’s mourning: “Oscar of course did not feel it at all … He is in very good spirits and does not consume too many”
– In 1899, Wilde would make a special journey to Genoa to place flowers on his wife’s grave
Oscar’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair didn’t really interest me tbh

VIII. The Solace of Spectatorship

– When Chesson observed that Wilde’s life was “a harmony of two extremes,” Wilde replied “Yes, artistically is is perfect, socially most inconvenient.”
– Wilde found it increasingly hard to write. “Something is killed in me,” he explained to Ross. “I feel no desire to write.” “When I take up my pen, all the past comes back… regret and remorse … I am face to face with my own soul: the Oscar of five years ago, with his beautiful secure life and his glorious easy triumph, comes up before me, and … my eyes burn with tears.”
– However, in 1898 he at least managed to revise The Importance of Being Earnest
– Unfortunately, he tried to scam his friends and partners by promising and selling them plays he had no intention of ever writing
– Oscar, ever the prophetic. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, Mrs. Erlynne says: “You don’t know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at ­- to be an outcast! to find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one’s face, and all the while to hear the laughter, the horrible laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed. You don’t know what it is. One pays for one’s sin, and then one pays again, and all one’s life one pays.”
– He tried learning to ride a bicycle (LMAO)
– Wilde continued seeing Douglas regularly in early June (1899), all the while having affairs with young Parisian men

IX. Decline and Death

– By 1900, Wilde continued to make money by unscrupulously selling the scenario to his unwritten play without telling the buyers that he had already contracted with others; let alone having no intention of actually writing it
– He embarked for Italy at the end of March 1900. While in Rome, he took up photography. And he was also a sex tourist, seeking out underage Italian boys.
– Upon returning to Paris, he had a terrible falling out with Bosie when Wilde suggested that Douglas should settle a large sum of money on him. Douglas felt he was behaving like “an old fat prostitute”. – However, to understand Douglas one should know that he had given Wilde over £325 in checks in 1900 alone by the time of Wilde’s death. In August they dined together for the final time.
– Cyril and Vyvyan had been led to believe by their guardians that their father had died years before–and they were informed of neither his death nor his funeral. Bosie was chief mourner at the funeral.
– In 1950, the ashes of Robert Ross were placed in Wilde’s tomb in accordance with Ross’s will (I don’t know how I feel about that; not sure if that’s what Oscar wanted tbh)

Epilogue

– Wilde was not a martyr to Victorian morality: he was its enemy, and he was hardly the passive victim of his contemporaries prejudices. According to Douglas, Wilde retained in his last years “an extraordinarily buoyant and happy temperament, a splendid sense of humour, and an unrivalled faculty for enjoyment of the moment.”
– Wilde was also not Douglas’s victim. To view Wilde this way is to rob him of all agency. He knew perfectly well what he was doing and risking in returning to Douglas.
– Imprisonment and exile, paradoxically, had liberated him to pursue and uninhibited life, and the pleasure he received in consequence could be enjoyed more fully, as a total experience of heart, mind, soul, and boy, with conversation as its medium and laughter as its index. Wilde’s greatest achievement in exile was himself.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frankel has given us a highly entertaining work of biography: vividly evocative of O.W., beautifully organized, written and paced. More importantly, he corrects rather hastily, incompletely prepared accounts of the last three years of OW's life.
It appears that Frankel's objective was exactly that. He doesn't address or comment on any questions or conclusion regarding OW's life course or the dynamic that propelled his development along its trajectory - insights that a "whole life" biography owes its readers, an obligation that biographers rarely discharge in full.
So one might think reasonably that this book was relatively "easy" - for lack of a better word at 6AM - to prepare. I suggest this possibility for several reasons.
Frankel had mountainous heaps of evidence, e.g. letters, memoirs, post-mortems, etc. to draw upon, and all these accounts cohere, verge even upon unanimity of perspective. So I suspect that the most difficult problem that NF faced in writing his account related to cutting, pruning and tightening his narrative. And I can't imagine that preparing this biography presented the extreme hardships that discovery can inflict - especially in the absence of abundant primary evidence and secondary literature.
But that comment may not be entirely fair. Certainly I can detect in OW self-inflicted declension and suicidal degeneration, and perhaps that may pass as a sort of development, the dynamic of which Frankel presents completely and clearly. All handed to him in full regalia.
I can understand suicide - even admire the act. What I can't understand, is OW's recovery of his former delusional grandiosity and grotesquely exaggerated sense of entitlement and authority after he left prison. And I don't get, even at my advanced years, OW's self-inflicted degradation, humiliation and self-destruction, all of which OW observed in himself and experienced with undisguised masochistic pleasure even in his final days/hours of lucidity. I've been acquainted with individuals whose lives ended in the same manner so I know it's all possible. And I certainly can't consider all this the stuff of heroes - as Frankel argues explicitly in his epilogue.
But NF's account raised precisely a biographical issue of central imporance, an issue that HF, caught up in recounting lurid episodes, either ignores or fails to recognize. How was this self-destruction possible? How did that capacity come to be? How did it come to propel OW through the years of self-inflicted humiliation that remained to him? Why was it the case that nothing in his life could have turned out differently - as OW asserted? Why was change and adaptation altogether impossible for him? But these are questions that require a biographer to interpret episodes in the context of the "whole life," which NF most pointedly does not attempt. And instead of attaining some degree of understanding of OW we read of his heroism - which, to my mind, is utterly beside the biographical point - and not particularly interesting.
But that's neither here nor there. NF has presented a wonderfully engaging work of biography, of the same sort and class as Brenda Wineapple's account of Emily Dickinson's relationship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson in "White Heat" - even if the subject remains a bit of a mystery.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been so many books about Oscar Wilde that it’s hard to see what yet another one can find that’s new to say. However, Nicholas Frankel manages it by concentrating on his final years in much more detail and with more sympathy than simply seeing them as a slow, debauched and tragic slump into further disgrace, illness and the grave.
There are some longueurs, particularly around his attempts to get hold of money and his wrangling over publishing deals for ‘Reading Jail’ and his revised plays. The most powerful parts are the early chapter on his brutal treatment in prison and his subsequent work to get prison reforms and an account of the writing and reception of The Ballad of Reading Jail. One thing that was new to me was his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair in which, typical of Wilde, he both played a part in aiding Zola’s campaign to free Dreyfus but also managed to befriend and perversely admire the dastardly Esterhazy.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent look at the twilight years of Oscar's life and chiefly notable for its far more sympathetic treatment of Bosie, who tends to get a lot of bad press, not all of which is deserved. Overall an excellent reminder of why Oscar Wilde is still, after all these years, my problematic dad.

[Micebyliz]

Holy smoke. What a book. A brilliant man with a tragic end...

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well researched and well written book, but Frankel looks for silver linings where, alas, there are few to be found. Even those that do occasionally shine through are scant compensation for the disdain and penury and disgrace that rained down on Wilde after his release from prison. The story is moving and heartbreaking. But with few consolations. A familiar story, with a happy ending contrived at the finish.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are good, interesting and enlightening things in Frankel's book and I think looking again at Wilde's life, or aspects of it, in the light of new information, perspectives or understanding is good and should be applauded. The problem with this book is that it doesn't set out simply to look at Wilde's life post prison, it sets out with predetermined agenda to see this period in a new way, a more positive way. Any book that is written with predetermined point of view is always suspect as far as I am concerned and, as far as I can see, anyone who has actually reviewed the book rather then use it as an excuse for writing perorations on Wilde is forced to acknowledge that Frankel provides new insights but in his determination to silver linings and positive outlooks in everything he not only over eggs his argument but renders it silly.

That the traditional tale of Wilde's last year's, like his whole life, has needed to be re-examined and many of the old ways of looking at challenged goes without saying but it is important not to rewrite or distort history. His life after prison, his attempts to create a new, etc. is more more varied and complex then the traditional account of despair, decline and destructive behaviour. Wilde had a almost impossible task to face in trying resurrect a life and career after both had been destroyed by prison and scandal. I think Wilde knew from the beginning that a new life and career was impossible but there were times he allowed himself to believe otherwise.

There were no second acts for Victorians forced abroad by scandal the only thing that saved some from an existence like Wilde's was money. If your rich enough you can live comfortably and do what you like as long as you are willing to accept being shunned by respectable society. But social ostracism was far more devastating then we can imagine (look up Bertie Stopford on Wikipedia or read William Clarke's 'Lost Treasures of the Tsars' which tells in part the tragic tale of Stopford, an Edwardian man about town, who was caught up in homosexual scandal in 1919 and was forced to live abroad).

There is plenty of new insights in the book and it is written with sparkle and style but it is flawed by it's rigid insistence on how to view Wilde's post prison life.

[Jean Mehochko · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was well-written and gave a fairly unbiased look at Oscar Wilde's life after his two-year prison term. I learned a lot (almost always my requirement to give a five star rating) and feel it was well-researched.
I also found the end of Wilde's life, as described, very sad. He basically frittered his life away, using the good friends who stood by him as unlimited sources of income, wandering through Italy and Paris lusting after young men and bragging about it. There was no creativity or writing or income, just lying and using and ill health.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating corrective to the idea that Wilde spent his final three years in abject misery and humiliation. There were, indeed, moments of misery and humiliation; but he also experienced joy and triumph, and he also produced The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In essence, although prison certainly had an impact on Wilde and temporarily humbled him, it did not change his fundamental nature. For good or ill, he remained the witty, spendthrift bon vivant he had always been.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently written and easy to read

After reading Ellmans classic biography on the old Sphinx I wanted to know more about his years in exile after prison. So glad I picked this one up. Easy concise language and a good method of portraying the era and a scene. I particularly enjoyed the epilogue which paints a beautiful picture of the Paris exposition of 1900.

[Richard Krieger · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful and refreshing look at Oscar’s last years. Beautifully written as well researched. A must for anyone interested in Wilde. Also not to be missed is the special attention to printing and binding. Something Oscar would have loved.

[Gustavo Vidal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome!

[Gareth Reeves · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last three or four years have produced not one but three critically acclaimed biographical works on Oscar Wilde, meaning that fans and scholars no longer have to rely on Richard Ellmann's great but dated biography from 1987 (and Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde published 15 years later). Since Ellmann's book, there have been several important contributions to Wilde studies, chief among them the Complete Letters (2000) and the full/uncensored transcript of Wilde's first trial, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, actually a humiliatingly unsuccessful attempt by Wilde to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for libel.

I have not read Michèle Mendelssohn's biography of the young Wilde in England and America, nor have I read Matthew Sturgis's full biography, though I look forward to reading both soon. This one, by Nicholas Frankel, focuses on Wilde's last years. As such, it makes for painful reading, beginning with the horrors of imprisonment and then making way for the different but equal horror of losing friends and never being able to see his two children again. Few people have been punished so comprehensively, both physically and psychologically, and so profoundly, and yet, though he contemplated it frequently, he did not commit suicide.

I think Frankel tells the story very well, threading quotations together from the letters to form a cohesive narrative and interpolating as necessary. I found the chapter-long interpretation of 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' a bit trite in places (bio-crit is all well and good but can be dull) and ultimately weak in its argument that the flaws of the 'artistic' (or non-realistic) parts of the poem (noted by Henley, Yeats, et al.) are somehow a strength. However, the account of his life is always fascinating, sometimes frustrating (due to Wilde's actions), and occasionally unbearably moving. I look forward to Mendelssohn's biography, which will serve as a much-needed pick-me-up after this.

[Alan Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding

[Francesca Penchant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thought-provoking book that adds much to the knowledge of Wilde’s life.

It lets go of the myth of Bosie as the villain who ruined Wilde, and presents a nuanced view of their relationship and the complexity of their feelings for each other—reflecting the complexity of human relationships.

[Anthony Saunois · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book an extremely enjoyable and informative read.

[Mills College Library]

Biog W672f 2017