Oscar, I will start again

Happy New Year to all our kindly readers! We wish you all plenty of health, wealth and happiness and thank you for visiting our blog.   

As we note that it was Constance Wilde's birthday yesterday, it seems an excellent opportunity to take a peep into some private correspondence addressed to her estranged husband, Oscar Wilde. It is, of course, as imagined by Rohase Piercy in her excellent and well-researched novel, The Coward Does It With A Kiss. 

Villa Elvira,

Bogliasco,

Nervi.

2nd of January 1898

My Dear Oscar,

You may be surprised to receive another letter from me so soon after my last, and indeed I had not intended to write again for I have nothing in particular to say that has not been covered by our recent correspondence.  I'm sure I need hardly add that I have not changed my mind about anything, especially after your last letter to me, which is the letter of a madman.  I suppose that A.D. is still with you?  I hear rumours that Lady Q. has written to him, and that you are both short of money.  I can only say that I hope she has withdrawn his allowance as I have withdrawn yours, and when I think of your going back to him after all that has happened, and then blaming me because I have been biding my time before inviting you here to join me, a thing which everyone agreed to be the most sensible and delicate course of action, I hope you may both starve.

Oscar, I will start again.

I do not want to write you another letter full of bitterness and recrimination.  I want to write you at least one honest piece of correspondence, not to lecture you about your situation, but to tell you something about mine.  Or are you so far steeped in the madness of self-pity that you have not even the imagination to see that your wife has a soul to be tormented also, a soul as precious as yours perhaps?

It is no use. I am so full, so saturated with bitterness and spite, that it appears I can neither speak nor write without barbs.  I sometimes wonder whether my ill health is not caused by sheer anger - spite and resentment running like electricity through my nerves - which would account, perhaps, for the shooting pains and the tingling.  Of course I have plenty of encouragement from my family and from well-meaning friends (and your well-meaning friends have done little to help the situation) – but encouragement is no excuse.  The truth is that I am an unpleasant person masquerading as a likeable one, a vindictive women pretending to be a martyr; one who chose with eyes wide open to go where I would seem to have been led innocent and blind.  I say this in cold blood and without self-abasement; and I know that it will be as great a surprise to you as anyone, to know that I have long had a window through which to look into the secret recesses of your heart.  

It has often been said to me (how often!) that I could not be blamed for having misunderstood you, that your actions were, and still are, beyond the comprehension of decent people.  But I did and still do understand you, Oscar; I understand you perfectly well.  It is myself, myself I do not understand.

Cyril went back to Neuenheim yesterday, and I do miss him; especially as today is my birthday, as you know, and I enter my forty-first year.  But it is a beautiful morning here at Nervi, and I feel quite well for the first time in days.  Maria woke me with a breakfast tray on which lay a bouquet of sun-coloured roses – a gift from the Ranee, who always remembers me.  She must have sent for them specially, at this time of year.  Feeling rested, I rose early and have been sitting for some time now by my window, from which I can see the jasmine in bloom, and the white road leading down to the village.  I have been leafing through an old diary which I found in the bottom of my trunk – I am still in the process of unpacking, you see! - and which I am very thankful to have kept by me, for I blush to think what the bailiffs who ransacked Tite Street would have made of it.  I am not sure just what has prompted such a restrospective indulgence, at a time when retrospection can bring me nothing but pain – intimations of mortality, perhaps, having reached the age of forty (still young, the Ranee says, but it feels so old!); my ill health, et cetera; and thoughts of other birthdays, with you.

 You think this a rambling and self-indulgent preamble, no doubt.  Well, you should know all about that.

  

No.  If I cannot do better than this, this letter had best not be sent at all.  I am getting too tired, Oscar, to nag you for much longer, you will be relieved to hear.  Would you be interested, I wonder, in what I have been reading?  

 Well, prepare yourself.  The young woman who expressed herself thus was twenty-six years of age, and newly married; a young woman of artistic pretensions, ardent disciple of the Aesthetic Movement, and forty-eight hours wife of one who was, at the time, regarded as its High Priest.

Hotel Wagram, Rue de Rivoli

31st of May, 1884

The first day of my new life!  And my first chance to write about it.  It still seems like a wonderful dream, from which I pray I may never wake.  I have a few hours to myself this morning – by choice, of course, for O. pressed me to join them in a morning stroll but I declined, thinking how delicious it would be to spend some time writing by the window in our room.  We have a wonderful view of the Tuileries, and everything is in bloom, and I can see couples out strolling arm in arm just as O. and I did yesterday (as man and wife!  How strange, and yet how completely natural it seems already to think of ourselves in those terms).  Mr Sherard addressed me this morning as “Mrs Oscar”...

  Oh, I forgot to mention that Robert Sherard arrived at breakfast this morning, and was introduced to me, and was altogether most charming and contratulatory.  I had heard much about him from O. and so was very interested to meet him; he does not seem on first acquaintance to display any of the “puritanism” that O. likes to complain of – on the contrary, he seems a rather romantic figure, and puts me in mind of Chatterton.  And he is the great-grandson of Wordsworth!  Anyway, he and Oscar are taking a stroll together, and I do not at all begrudge them one another's company, for now I have a little solitude in which to revel in my happiness.  To tell the truth, I am also feeling tired – and aching in every limb!  I am very glad of those talks with Lady M.B. otherwise I might not be quite sure that all is as it should be.  It feels rather like one's monthly “indisposition”, but it is not at all unpleasant; in fact I feel extremely smug and contented, and I shall never allow myself to be intimidated by a bitter old spinster like Aunt Emily again!  For what does she know of life, when all is said and done?

“More happy love, more happy, happy love,

Forever warm, and still to be enjoyed,

Forever panting and forever young!”

(O. prefers Keats to Shelley, and I am coming round to his way of thinking - we read this aloud only last night, and laughed for pleasure!)  

“Forever may I love, and he be fair!”

O. seems vastly pleased with himself, and enjoys showing much tenderness and concern.  I do not like to spoil it for him, although he knows perfectly well that I was neither ignorant - how could I be, with a father whose indiscretions were the talk of the household? - nor apprehensive!  He insists that all his past experience counts for nothing, that there was no-one to compare to me, and of course that pleases me.  And he is so beautiful … I nearly told him what Lady M.B. said to me about the Rajah on her wedding night, but feared that instead  of amusing him it might offend.  His delicacy is so delightful, I hope he never loses it ...

Oh, Oscar!  I really think I had better not send this letter.  Embittered and cynical as I have become, it still brings an indulgent smile to my lips, even a nostalgic tear or two.  And Robert Sherard!  Not that I have any particular suspicions, for it is true that he was infected with a lingering puritanism … but even so, more than one of my friends thought it strange, on the second day of our honeymoon, and said so!  Well, it comes as no surprise to me now, to remember that I thought the two of you charming together.  But see what comes next:

 

I am interrupted by a knock at the door, and there has just been delivered a beautiful bouquet from O., who has not yet been gone more than an hour and a half, and a card with sweet words on it! What must Mr Sherard think of us?

  

(What indeed?  I remember how, a few days later, he threatened to throw his swordstick out of the carriage door on the grounds of being tempted to murder us for being too happy.  I thought it a great joke, and offered to relieve him of the tempting weapon there and then...)

 Ah, Oscar, our honeymoon!  Visits to John Donaghue's studio (you remember the bas-relief of the naked boy harpist we both admired so much?); Sarah Bernhardt's wonderful Lady Macbeth; ordering heaps of new clothes (at last I could order with impunity the costumes of which Aunt Emily so disapproved - soft flowing fabrics, rich colours, no bustle); reading Keats to one another in the evenings, when “Chatterton” had made his bow and retired.  And we were in Paris, in June!  Of all places and all seasons!  I felt as though a banner had unfurled in my heart declaiming Liberté, égalité, fraternité!  Strolling through the Tuileries in the evening, lamps flaring out against an indigo sky - I felt like a queen newly crowned, installed in the palace of your heart, Oscar, with all your adorers hastening to cast themselves at my feet also.

  After Paris, Dieppe was quiet, was it not?  A little too quiet for you, I think, but for me it was just what I wanted, for I needed time to reflect, and prepare for our return to London.  I had much to reflect on – at least, I seem to have thought so at the time, for my diary entries become quite copious, all much in the same rapturous vein:

  

Oscar is like the white moon, hiding the secret blue of his eyes under langorous heavy lids, and the amber waves of his hair are like an aureola around him. He makes me feel as deep and as powerful as the sea; the moon leans down, and she rocks him in her lap, like a lover.

  

A little too “utter”, perhaps, but not all bad I think – even comparable to something of yours?  I was told that you described me on occasion as a “violet-eyed Artemis” - well, I cannot imagine that you found me much like Artemis on our honeymoon!  Looking back, I wonder whether I might even have frightened you a little?

  

Received today a letter from Lady Wilde, who addresses me as “Dearest Constance” and signs herself “La Madre Devotissima”!  Mainly compliments about the wedding...  Will I ever live up to her expectations?  I wish I had the courage to display even half her unconventionality!  I really do not want to be a  Virgilia to her Volumnia, though I am sometimes afraid that is how people will see us.

  

Ah, poor Speranza. She was looking for a daughter to fill the chasm left by your little sister's death all those years ago.  I think that in time I did come to fill it, at least partly.  I certainly did come to love her, with a true affection; it is one of my greatest regrets that I was not more of a comfort and support to her at the last.