The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Dear Oscar Wilde…
A new edition of ‘De Profundis’ sends Patti Smith back to her schooldays – and inspires her to imagine a letter to its author
Sitting before the pages of De Profundis, I travel back to my earliest awareness of your work. I was in middle school, required to read The Selfish Giant, presented as a fairytale, yet it seemed much more to me then, redemptive and poetically Christlike. The tale was so unique and moving that it spurred me to write my own, instrumental in my personal evolution as a writer, which I submit with much gratitude.
When a bit older I read and reread library copies of The Happy Prince and The Picture of Dorian Gray. In between the pages of the latter I found a picture of you, wrapped in a greatcoat with a luxurious beaver collar.
I was enthralled by the image of your towering figure and often envisioned you boarding ships in the same marvellous coat, embarking in welcoming cities with trunks of finery that you would don for lavish dinner parties, beguiling all with your superb Irish wit.
I fancied you in velvet waistcoat and silk breeches, exhaling blue whorls from gold-tipped cigarettes, perpetually poised to initiate your aesthetic doctrines, as if a tantalising new religion.
When imagining you at work, it was inevitably at a fine writing table, with two drop leaves, a rising slope and drawn-out desk. Reams of the finest vellum, Chinese inks, quills and nibs aplenty, arranged on its mahogany surface, all at your disposal in order to pen precisely the desired words. I pictured you pausing mid-sentence, to sip from a cup of hammered silver, calling upon your brilliant elastic mind. I saw your proud head bowed and waving hair spilling down a face pensive, yet confident, as all manners of correspondence and a plethora of celebrated plays were produced, stroke by stroke, from spotlessly manicured hands.
But these imaginings had nothing in common with the atmosphere in which De Profundis was written, undoubtedly the most shattering of all your output, for your fortune had taken a turn in meteoric reverse. In creating the character of Dorian Gray, you had unwittingly set the table for your own ruin, for soon you were to encounter Lord Alfred Douglas, an arrogant young beauty who fashioned himself in Dorian’s image. This golden spider, not an intellectual match but irresistibly reckless, drew you into his dangerously seductive web, smack in the eyes of Victorian society.
Homosexuality was then a criminal offence in England, and a series of manipulative circumstances landed you in a public entanglement with his rigid, highly appointed father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Sorely underestimating your vindictive adversary resulted in a heinous trial where you were accused of gross indecency.
Society judged and sent you to prison. You were stripped, shorn, and chained at the ankles. All was prepared to maximise your deprivation. You were dressed in coarse cloth and condemned to a dank cell, with a plank bed, with neither latrine, nor wash basin, nor window. You were given little to eat and denied writing tools, paper, or the nourishment of books, not a shred of sky, no slanting hills and none of the solace of leisure. Surely men have suffered as much and more; you have noted that yourself, but what profits society in
I fancied you in silk breeches, exhaling blue whorls from gold-tipped cigarettes
burrowing a jewel in a sewer? In time, you were issued the Holy Bible, that for lack of a companion, was the sole conduit for fervent internal discourse. Eventually you were granted a daily sheet of prison stationery and it was upon these sheets that you wrote your De Profundis, a letter of love and admission to Lord Alfred Douglas. The chambers of your heart were draped in the memories of disgrace, and you drew them out in degrading detail, a long train of missteps within a destructive relationship that plummeted you from victor to vassal. One stripped of everything and the other learning nothing and therefore gaining nothing. Such admission requires full attention and you petitioned the intended recipient to hold himself accountable and peer into all wounds. You wrote with great hope that he would dispatch vanity; prison was the assassin of your own.
Two years were spent physically deteriorating in a rectangle of humiliation. There you were the scribe of your own misfortune, confession and revelation, laid out on 80 close-written pages, on 20 folio sheets of thin blue prison paper. You thrust a mirror in the hand of your former lover, then turned it upon yourself. Every word, however lamentable or indulgent, was necessary in achieving self-realisation, every bend in the river spews its complaints entering another, begetting a stream of tears. Over a century later the British government issued a pardon in your name. Yet you had already evolved beyond pardon, experiencing the power of forgiveness, and took this time of abject humiliation to impart to all the terrible mystery of love.
In this quest, unfettered by religious dogma, you meditated on this supreme Christian doctrine. You keenly scraped the pastel shades of holy cards and gave us Jesus Christ the poet. In breaking down the intent of Christ’s words, the revolution of love, you must have felt deeply comforted by the great teacher, the sovereign poet who did not shun the leper or the whore. Through him, though sick and broken, a dying flower was revived, and bloomed anew.
And so dear writer, in lieu of such a flower, a white one with an infinite number of petals, I offer these words. I have read your De Profundis, and visited the cell where it was written. I noted the number,
C.3.3, the age of Christ at his crucifixion and transfiguration. This missive to you was written on the rue des Beaux Arts in Paris, where, wedded to poverty, you breathed your last, in the year 1900. It was the new century, and you, who longed to live and chronicle this new world, had little else to offer than the humble drama of your own passing. Perhaps you no longer possessed a glorious countenance, but an adoring schoolgirl would have easily recognised you, the redeemed giant, who divined the beauty of suffering.
This text is taken from Patti Smith’s introduction to The Folio Society’s new edition of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, available now from folio society.com/ de-profundis
This time of reflection is a chance for those who shape our taste in music – the impresarios whose concert halls and opera houses are now sadly empty, and the producers at Radio 3 – to rethink their values, and their prejudices. For decades perfectly good composers have been dismissed, not because they were deficient in talent, but because they were determined to stand apart from the herd. My mind turns inevitably to George Lloyd, blacklisted by the Third Programme in the Fifties and Sixties, and Robert Simpson, whose essay The Proms and Natural Justice, published almost 40 years ago, condemned abuses of patronage using public money and the freezing out of composers not considered part of the prevailing zeitgeist.
I hope this won’t happen to Oliver Rudland who, at 37, is one of our most gifted young composers and until now someone of whom I presume you haven’t heard. I, too, was ignorant of Rudland until a few years ago, when he was commended to me by the late Roger Scruton, who admired Rudland’s uncanny ability to write music that invited an intelligent audience in, rather than sought to exclude them in favour of appealing to a small club of insiders. Look up Rudland’s one-act “cinematic opera” Pincher Martin, based on the 1956 William Golding novel of the same title, about a man shipwrecked in the Atlantic who descends into madness. You can find it on YouTube, in a 2014 production directed by Rudland himself and with a superb performance in the title role by the baritone Miles Horner.
During this crisis, opera houses around the world have been streaming past productions to keep us amused: but you honestly will not find modern opera much better or more exciting than this. Pincher Martin is a beautifully crafted, powerful and mature piece, and the balance the composer achieves between orchestra and singers is nothing short of perfect.
Once its explosive opening has passed, Rudland’s melodic gifts are immediately apparent. As I listened to it for the first time, composers of the stature of Richard Strauss, Janáček, Britten and Wagner were evoked. Rudland clearly had the last composer in mind: he has described Pincher Martin as “a sort of 21st-century Gesamtkunstwerk”.
Rudland’s compositions are not simply appealing and original. What makes his music so powerful is the way he uses it, whether in his operas or his orchestral writing, to tell a story. (He is working on an operatic treatment of Barry Hines’s classic modern novel A Kestrel for a Knave, a story perhaps more familiar from the Ken Loach film Kes.) The whole music business is paralysed by the coronavirus; at the end of the crisis, opera houses must look afresh at the musical talent our country produces, and ask themselves whether they are really encouraging that talent, or just playing safe with old favourites and “approved” modern composers, much of whose music would serve well as an alternative to custody.
One day Pincher Martin will be performed at our great opera houses and festivals: all it will take is for the people who run them to appreciate the astonishing gifts of Oliver Rudland. He deserves his day, or rather a few decades, in the sun.