“You know already what Hate is. Is it beginning to dawn on you what Love is, and what is the nature of Love? It is not too late for you to learn, though to teach it to you I may have had to go to a convict’s cell”.

jesus fucking christ. ( )

Oscar Wilde found himself in prison in 1895 on what amounted to a charge of homosexuality. From there he wrote this eighty page letter to the primary cause, a young Lord Alfred Douglas. As Wilde characterizes it, he had always empathized with Douglas but could not shake him loose as a hanger-on and leech, who introduced on his time as an artist and spent his money in a profligate manner. Reading between the lines - and more explicitly at the end - love played a factor in the relationship.

Reading gave me the discomforting feeling at times of being the third wheel in a room filled with the cacophony of a fight between two lovers. We can't hear Lord Alfred Douglas' whining defence, but it isn't difficult to imagine. Some relationships are like a sea lamprey and a fish. Oscar Wilde was the fish in this case, but one of the most articulate fish imaginable, and when he set pen to paper in the jail cell he occupied he did not hold back. He must have had an amazing memory, or been hurt indeed, to recall so many exact dates and details in his litany. He retained a strong streak of pride while he accepted some measure of the blame for the outcome. It was his foremost concern, however, to ascertain whether Douglas accepted his.

In the later half, Wilde ruminates upon the importance of accepting his fate if he is to carry on, and addresses the story of Christ as a model. Speaking as a man of little faith myself, I got more than I bargained for here. Wilde's argument is compelling. He says that even if you were to take Jesus as merely a man, consider how his story of sacrifice for all the world's sins - past, present, future, in all that enormity - outshines any plot Shakespeare could invent. Wilde writes that Jesus was an individualist, not merely an altruist. His was not the message of self-sacrifice for others that appears on the surface. It was a message about saving one's own soul, however you define it. Jesus pitied the rich as much as the poor. He urged them to give of themselves not to help others, but to save themselves from what their wealth was doing to them. I find that take fascinating, less guilt-laden and more respectable than the norm. ( )

Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (known affectionately as the l’enfant terrible Bosie), penned during his incarceration and hard labour at Reading Gaol for ‘gross indecency’ (or homosexuality), is more than a contemplation of a relationship fated for demise, or the irreparable ruins of his life. With sharp turns of wit specifically Wildean, its beginnings are laced with the elegance of bitterness, where candour relates Douglas’ cruel ambivalence and hedonistic whims. Exposed amidst is the one-sidedness of devotion abound the insatiable material excesses of this doomed affair. The extravagant wining-and-dining and the monetary support Wilde provided, whereas Bosie remain vain and self-indulgent, are recollected in detail. As such, Wilde doesn’t mince words. Even a person with the highest pain tolerance will wreathe and flinch after reading such paragraphs:

"Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much." (p4)

"Between myself and the memory of joy lies a gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. Had our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of pleasure, profligacy and laughter, I would not be able to recall a single passage in it. It is because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else." (p22)

"I need not ask you what influence I had over you. You know I had none. It was one of your frequent boasts that I had none, and the only one indeed that was well-founded. What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you that I could influence? Your brain? It was underdeveloped. Your imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was not yet born." (p122)

Every page of De Profundis is fraught with impassioned hurt, set ablaze by a feverish, forbidden, rotten romance which destroyed Wilde’s marriage, dissolved his parental rights, and damaged his reputation. It also effaced his identity in ways that only such a relationship effaces: in only thinking of and for itself. Towards the end, Wilde seeks consolation in things his mind and heart can continue to hold—spirituality, nature, art and literature, even imprisonment itself. Partly generous this is on examining the workings Art too:

"Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy. For every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy. For every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man." (p94)

"In art good intentions are not the smallest of value. All bad art is the result of good intentions." (p115)

But, perhaps, its most universally resonant and poignant surmise—besides the solace Art bestow and the soul-aching after of any relationship—is the immense capacity of such a love to give. And in this giving, there is often the lost self, there is often sorrow. So Wilde mulls, "Now it seems to me that Love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world." (p82) If so, sorrow, perhaps, can be alchemised to strength, just as love can spring from it.

Society wronged some of its brilliant individuals throughout history. This case is no different. For Wilde to be only posthumously pardoned around 5 years ago only affirms his remark, that the road to the abolishment of homosexuality as a crime is a "road long and red with monstrous martyrdoms." (excerpt from his letter to early homosexual law reform campaigner, George Cecil Ives) ( )

Clearly, prison time was wasted on the author, sorry, Author. Pages upon pages of resentment, spite, anger and bitterness, especially bitterness. I read the history behind it after reading the book and it makes Wilde look rather bad and the claimed humility looks even more fake in its light. ( )

Pitched somewhere between a personal essay and a prose poem, this book, or at least this edition of this book, is one of limited virtue, e.g., the occasional deployment of Wilde's masterful prose, mostly at the book's beginning and at its end, when he narrates his public humiliation and imprisonment near the end of his life. The middle portion of the book is taken up almost entirely by his paean to the Christ; his reflections thereon are somewhere between fanciful and ridiculous. Since the topic which was the reason that two people recommended this book to me is nowhere addressed, I have to assume that this is an abridgement, perhaps issued for purposes of Christian proselytizing, as the book's content here is almost entirely taken up with flimsy apologetics. This homebrew Makerspace edition is replete with typos, capitalization where italics are called for, and omission of the several passages from non-Roman alphabets. ( )

Una carta de doscientas páginas. Parece imposible tener tanta paciencia como tiene Wilde al escribir esto. La carta va dirigida a su amante, llamado Bosie, al que recrimina sus malas acciones durante el tiempo que pasaron juntos. La carta está escrita desde la cárcel, donde el pobre Wilde dio con sus huesos por su condición de homosexual. El tal Bosie era un mal bicho, por cierto. Malo, malo, malo. Un cabrón, un enfant terrible, un mimado y un gilipollas. Wilde, que era la estrella del ingenio y el brillo social, tuvo que aguantar y pasar por miserias y penurias, tanto económicas como psicológicas, por culpa de su amante. La carta en sí es bellísima; el estilo de Wilde en prosa es maravilloso. Gran libro. ( )

Wilde wrote this book-length letter while he was imprisoned at Reading Gaol for sodomy and gross indecency, in short for homosexual behavior. The letter, whose title means “from the depths,” is addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas. Under advisement from Lord Alfred, Wilde brought libel charges against Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who had called Wilde a Sodomite. The whole situation got turned on its head when Queensberry provided proof that his allegations were true, and Wilde ended up in prison. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Wilde himself discloses the whole history in the letter.
Wilde recounts his whole relationship and history with Lord Alfred in the first half of the letter. It’s gut-wrenching to read, honestly. The relationship is so toxic from the very start, that it’s not so much full of red flags as full of giant red banners pulled by airplanes. Lord Alfred used Wilde for money and fame, and clearly didn’t care about Wilde at all. The best example of this is during a vacation abroad when Lord Alfred came down with the flu and Wilde nursed him back to health: when Wilde himself caught the flu, Alfred straight up left, saying that Wilde was boring when he was sick. Lord Alfred seems a textbook case of narcissist behavior. It broke my heart reading this book and knowing that Wilde was stuck in such an unhealthy relationship.
The latter part of the letter is more uplifting. Here, Wilde discusses his own spiritual growth while in prison. He talks about his suicidal period, yes, but also how he has moved beyond that. He also likens Christ to a poet, perhaps the greatest poet who ever lived. This is the part where Wilde really hits is stride and the beauty of his writing truly shines. Oscar Wilde was posthumously pardoned in 2017.

De la etapa adicta a la biblioteca del 96. Después de haber leído unas cuantas obras de Oscar Wilde, me picó la curiosidad este libro que es algo más personal sobre la vida del autor. ( )

The end of Oscar Wilde’s life was so sad it makes me shiver to think about. The world was his oyster, and he was a highly successful playwright and wit at the height of his powers when he was convicted of “gross indecency”, and then sentenced to two years in prison. Humiliated, jeered at by crowds, not allowed to read or write for portions of his imprisonment, scrubbing floors and performing other menial tasks so ridiculously beneath such a brilliant, eloquent mind, losing his children as well as a lot of weight, suffering injuries that would later contribute to his early death, and becoming a pauper – all for essentially being gay.

How appropriate to have bought this book in Dublin after seeing the Pride parade march through the streets there. Never again, and always remember.

De Profundis, or, ‘From the Depths’, is a long letter Wilde was allowed to write but not send to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, towards the end of his imprisonment. When he was released in 1897 he gave the letter to Robert Ross, instructing him to give it to Douglas, which may or may not have ever happened. Over the objections of the families on both sides, Wilde did meet Douglas again for short intervals in France and Italy, but died a few years afterwards in 1900, disgraced and impoverished. The letter was then published posthumously five years later.

There is a pervasive feeling of overwhelming sadness in De Profundis, as well as Wilde’s attempts to come to terms with the absurdity and cruelty of it all. Prison was so damaging to his sensitive, artistic soul, and yet he tried to make sense of it, find meaning, and become a better person for having been there. His words flow so beautifully, and while the content at times was not all that interesting, such as the Christian themes and likening Christ to an artist, one cannot help but feel sadness for the condition he was in, and the tragedy of his life and career being cut short so senselessly.

Unfortunately, while finding the first edition from 1905 was very cool, it came with a significant drawback, for when the book was first published, large portions of the letter were suppressed – in particular, Wilde’s recounting of his personal time with Douglas, and everything that led up to his arrest – and it’s worse for it, losing the ‘feel’ of a letter and the stories from his life. Gone are the passion and myriad feelings towards Douglas, who had influenced Wilde into a playboy lifestyle and then encouraged him to sue his father for libel, which of course ended in the disastrous U-turn of events and Wilde’s own arrest. It’s for this reason I knock down the review score a bit, though it may be a bit unfair, not having the full text which appeared in later editions.

Quotes:
On beauty:
“…merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.”

On prison, and the charity of the poor:
“The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes, prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in trouble’ simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain…”

On regret:
“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others.”

On the other hand: (love the poetry in this one)
“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.”

Lastly, on solitude, this at the book’s end:
“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.” ( )

Beautiful, fascinating, poetic, and heartbreaking, Wilde becomes the “spectator of his own tragedy” in De Profundis and attempts a sort of mystical Confiteor to make sense of the suffering of his soul.

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would be always haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant as much for me as for anyone else -- the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver -- would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power and their power of communicating joy. To reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul."

There are so many great reviews of this here on GR that I'll just add an aspect that I think hasn't been touched upon. Wilde’s meditations on his pre-prison life were colored by the reading he undertook while in prison: the Bible, Dante, Saint Augustine, and Cardinal Newman among others. However, it was still his situational antinomianism upon which he filtered his philosophy even as he found in himself parallels with the prodigal son:

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realize what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their gnomic aphorisms "Even the Gods cannot alter the past." Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it. That it was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said — I feel quite certain about it — that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept he really made his having wasted his substance with harlots, and then kept swine and hungered for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy incidents in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worthwhile going to prison.

Wilde puts the past transgressions (despite what you/I/we see today as transgressions) of the prodigal son into the category of “beautiful and holy things” rather than the effect that later resulted from them, thus making the evil things good rather than accepting that God may bring good from evil. He’s justified his own actions as necessary for the remaking of the man he thought he was become.

It is tempting to see him as a new man born from his catastrophe but the short, mostly depressed and alcohol-soaked life of poverty he lived afterward was not exemplary of someone on the road to wisdom or salvation. Instead, it seems he'd become even more mired in "the depths" from which he thought he was rising. However, that detracts nothing from him being one of the masters of the English language.
( )

Very moving account of his emotional state in Prison. ( )

A moving, angry love letter. I recommend this second only to The Picture of Dorian Gray to people who aren't familiar with Wilde's work. Even then, it's a very close second. Beautiful. My copy is a hardcover from approx. 1910. The "unabridged" version wasn't available until approx. 1960. ( )

Simon Russell Beale reads remarkable correspondence from Oscar Wilde to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas ( )

Simon Russell Beale reads remarkable correspondence from Oscar Wilde to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas ( )

Simon Russell Beale reads remarkable correspondence from Oscar Wilde to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas ( )

Simon Russell Beale reads remarkable correspondence from Oscar Wilde to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas ( )