Oscar Wilde himself (documentary)

you wild have been the center of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men it is the worst case that I have ever tried the sentence of the court is hard labor for two years I always wanted to be openly proud of my grandfather but it was never easy and if you asked me whether I was proud of being Oscar Wilde's grandson ten years ago I would have said I have no feeling of pride what they wanted was sleaze they wanted to dig in the gutters and they wanted to destroy everything that he stood for I'm gonna shoot you live and his goal today the 16th of October is a special day it is Oscar Wilde's birthday and the cafe royal is where Oscar and my great-great uncle Posey used to come in happier times I'm sure the dasker would approve of this exhibition although he might shudder at the twist of historical connections in that my family is sadly related to his downfall and I have perhaps ended up working in prison because of the shadow through the generations I'd like to propose a toast to all the people I've worked with in prison and to ask a wild happy birthday you the whole family was all but destroyed when they choked Oscar Wilde caught and the name Wilde hasn't been used for a hundred years and it makes me sad to think that it can't be changed back I was given the opportunity when I was 21 by my father but I thought I was too much my father's son rather than my grandfather's grandson I'd known my father I was proud of him but I'd like to think that one day it could be done maybe a hundred years on now all is forgiven I've been haunted all my life by the knowledge that it was my family who's responsible for Oscar Wilde's downfall for me personally growing up as as I suppose Lady Alice Douglas was something that horrified me I was a little punk rocker and the fear that anyone would ever find out that I was a lady but just ate me up and I tried to keep it a secret from people at school my great-great uncle was Lord Alfred Douglas my great great grandfather was the Marquess of Queensbury and the man responsible for destroying Oskar it's something that I've always been terribly ashamed about and something that I've tried to hide from ever Manzo's so shall we reap no charity My dear Miss prism charity none of us is perfect I myself AM peculiarly susceptible to drafts will the interment take place here no he seems to have expressed a desire to be buried in Paris in Paris if you have that hardly points to any very serious state of mind of the last he grew up in an extraordinary household in Marion Square they were a they were a professional family but it was the professionals in Dublin men who who was a Great Society and he had all sorts of people around him great conversation lists people of learning people of literature artists and he it can't have failed to influence him his mother speranza was a larger-than-life sort of woman she was an ardent nationalist and a revolution repaired I expressed the soul of a great nation nothing less would satisfy me I Who am the acknowledged voice in poetry of all the people of Ireland she's always struck me as being a very proud woman but quite flamboyant and witty with it in fact all the things which one finds in Oscar later on it is only trades people who are respectable we are above respectability Oscar's intellectual brilliance almost certainly came from his father Sir William he was an outstanding year and eye surgeon in Dublin at the time a sort of father of modern medicine really but he wasn't without his fault and the lure of the petticoat sometimes proved to be too strong Oscar had seen his mother bravely stoically living in a marriage where her husband chose other women for sexual dilatation and where of course her husband arriving at the marriage had illegitimate children already so you'll see Convention was hardly a current word in the wild household Oscar went off to a Protestant boarding school when he was nine which speranza liked to call the Eton of Ireland I have forgotten all about my school days I have a vague notion they were detestable it's fairly significant to that he should have gone to a school portora where no reference to Ireland whatsoever can be found in the curriculum which was in total contradiction to his early upbringing and his mother's nationalist sympathies there's even a suspicion that his mother had him baptized Catholic when he was quite young so he had violated the taboos of his entire cast really by being involved in his parents enthusiasm for the folklore of the people of Ireland possibly if he was made a Catholic as at the instance of his mother and in a sense that starts him out on a regime throughout his life of defying convention and believing I think that there is something more worthwhile than seeking to conform very dubious laws as laid down by state authority I am one of those who are made for exceptions not for laws while he was at Pretoria Oscar seems to have discovered the classic and within three years he'd won himself scholarship to Trinity Dublin the Berkeley gold medal for Greek while he was there and another scholarship on to Oxford I was the happiest man in the world when entering modeling for the first time Oxford is paradise to me my Irish accent is one of the things I forgot at Oxford when he was at Oxford wild made a great show of not doing any work and of living up to his blue China adoring his lilies whatever you like and poo pood the idea that he could do well he's going to get a fourth and greats he said but it's quite clear from for example his oxford notebooks which have been published in a scholarly edition a few years ago but he was reading extraordinarily widely and are really interested in the very latest thought of his day the longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels that behind everything that his wonderful stands the individual I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world and I was going out into the world with that passion and my soul and so indeed I went out and so I lived to everyone's surprise except Oscar's he got a first in his finals and won the new ticket prize for poetry as well Oh Gloria Gloria thank you a million times for your telegram it is the first pleasant throb of joy I've had this year well after all we have a genius with joy and pride your loving mother my dear old boy you are the best of fellows to Telegraph your congratulations the Don's are astonished beyond words the bad boy doing so well in the end when Oscar came down from university he made that famous remark just before coming down I went being famous and if I can't be their famous I should be notorious and he was determined that he was going to succeed he went up to London calling himself a professor of aesthetics and became a man about town and I believe that at that moment he started I suppose what we'd call today a PR machine you can read it through his letters he's absolutely there's an iron determination to succeed if you're anxious not to shine in the fires the decline as a man of count or prayer you must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms and lump them everywhere you must lie upon the dais and discourse at novel places on your gated state of mind for meaning doesn't matter if it's only I your chat another transcendental Chi he'd behave as a dandy he behaved in an esthetic fashion he was I suppose what we call today rather cam why what very singularly deep young man this deep young man women are never disarmed by compliments men always are that is the difference between the sexes to be around Sarah Bernhardt to go and fling lilies at Sarah Bernhardt's feet in Dover when she arrived in England was a tremendous publicity stunt dear Harold I was very sorry you did not come to tea as I could have introduced you to some very beautiful people mrs. Langtry and lady Lonsdale and a lot of very clever beings who would appear with me he found great empathy with these women they were successful they were beautiful they were in the theatre and he loved being around them and all of this led to the famous lecture tour in America where Richard D'Oyly carte of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas more or less hired him to go ahead of the Opera patients to show the Americans what was supposed to be funny in the aesthetic poets satirized in patients so wild quite consciously went ahead as an example of the aesthetic idiot and had a lovely time then the sentimental passion of the vegetable nation must kaity on language scheme and attachment allah plea to for a bashful young potato or unlock to French French bean go the Philistines with jostle you will rank us on a puzzle in the highest antic band if you walk down we continue with a puppy or a lily in your beedi evil air and everyone will say as you walk you're far away if he's content with a vegetable love would certainly not sue to me why water most particularly for young man these young men must be he got off the boat and said he had nothing to declare except his genius and nothing he said after that failed to be recorded and quoted all over the place My dear Norman I have great success here nothing like it since Dickens they tell me I am torn in bits by society in men's receptions wonderful dinners crowds wait for my carriage girls very lovely men simple and intellectual I am now six feet high my name on the placards drinka din those primary colors against which I passed my life protesting but still it is famed and anything is better than virtuous obscurity the Americans are the best politically educated people in the world it is well worth one's while to go to a country which can teach us the beauty of the word freedom and the value of the thing Liberty they drove me out to see the great prison afterward poor odd types of humanity in hideous striped dress making bricks in the Sun and all mean looking which consoled me but I should hate to see a criminal with a noble things he lectured very successfully he also courted all the well-known American names well Whitman was of course himself a queer or whatever you call it and he was immensely impressed by the homage that the young wild paid to him mr. Oscar Wilde's seemed to me like a great big splendid boy so Frank and outspoken and manly the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips it was perhaps when he came back and did some British lecturing that he found himself closer and closer to a young lady called Constance Lloyd with whom he found he was falling very deeply in love Cecily ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty I have dared to love you wildly passionately devotedly hopelessly I don't think you should tell me you love me wildly passionately devotedly hopelessly hopelessly doesn't seem to make much sense does it seseri I am going to be married to a beautiful girl called Constance Lloyd the grave slight violet a little Artemis with great coils of heavy brown hair which makes her flower like hair droop like a blossom and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the bird stopped singing to listen to her we are to be married in April prepare yourself for an astounding piece of news I am engaged to Oscar Wilde and perfectly and insanely happy his engagement to Constance came as a tremendous surprise I think to everyone but I think it's unfair to say that it was either to deflect rumors or as a smokescreen for his nascent homosexuality it's a great game people play how far back can you trace Oscars homosexuality you only have to look at the letters that but Wilde sent to Constance whenever he couldn't be with her whenever he was lecturing in Edinburgh Glasgow and even stranger places that wasn't kidding that wasn't Bhutan that was a love match although sadly it wasn't as time to last too long dear and beloved here am i and you with the Antipodes o EXA Crabble facts that keep our lips from kissing though our souls are one what can I tell you by letter now last nothing that I would tell you for I feel your fingers in my hair and your cheek brushing line the air is full of the music of your voice my soul and body seem no longer mine I have no power may do anything but just love you my whole life is yours to do as you will with I will hold you fast with chains of love and devotions so that you shall never leave me the baby is wonderful he has a bridge to his nose but the nurse says it's proof of genius it also has a superb voice which he freely exercises his style is essentially Vardhan Aryan my father had so much of the child in him but he delighted in playing our games he would go down on all fours on the nursery floor being in turn a lion a wolf a horse caring nothing for is usually immaculate appearance when he grew tired of playing he would keep us quiet by telling us fairy stories or tales of adventure Cyril once asked him why he had tears in his eyes when he told us the story of The Selfish Giant and he replied that really beautiful things always made him cry on the face of it it was a typical Victorian marriage what probably started to destroy it was Oscars enormous intellectual capacity I think that to live with Constance who she was well-read she spoke several languages she tried very hard to keep up with him but he was intellectually on another plane altogether and I think he needed the intellectual stimulus but when as far as we can gather he and she found it impossible to have any more children for financial reasons then he seems to have been led by his friend Robert Ross towards homosexuality he no doubt he always had a very strong homosexual direction but in fact it was far from being his only sexual direction I think we do have to be quite clear about that the intensity of sensation was what mattered and I believe that he was searching for sensations and as part of the search for sensations there was in him inevitably there was a femininity homosexuality if you'd like to call it that and through this he experienced Robby Ross the affair with Ross and the friendship of Ross I think made him much clearer where he wanted to go I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last I don't think his marriage was a sham at all I think he he loved his wife I think was quite a complicated and intricate relationship he certainly loved his children but he was bisexual and it must have been very difficult for him to deal with that and he dealt with it on the surface recklessly sometimes almost four ceaselessly as if daring it to be serious he did not want to betray his wife a little bit of fun and games with Robbie Ross didn't seem like a betrayal of his wife at all I should marriage makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties sometimes I feel wild had a sense of his own destiny I knew where he was going knew what a tragedy his life was going to be sometimes he seems to be acting out his own view of his own tragedy you have nothing to conceal have you no nothing but my dear lady children I think if you will allow me to say so that in practical life of which you know so little Lord goring of which I known nothing by experience though I know something by observation I think that in practical life there is something about success actual success that is a little unscrupulous something about ambition that is unscrupulous always once a man has set his heart and soul on getting to a certain point if he has to climb the crag he climbs the crag if he has to walk in the mile well he walks in the mire of course I'm only speaking generally about life I hope so once you understand the wilds characters are not standing on opposite sides of the stage competing in epigrams to see who can be funnier but that in fact whenever any character invents an epigram it is to mask an intense feeling to control an intense feeling to contain an intense feeling then you can start to manufacture an inner life for the actor and the real emotional truth of the melodrama starts to be revealed to some extent that's also true in the importance Kyleigh turn around sweet child and no side view is what I want yes quite as I expected there are distinct social possibilities in your profile the two weak points of our age eyes want of principle and its want of profile chilling idea style largely depends on where the chin is warm and they are warm very high at present Belgium yes aunt Augusta there are distinct social possibilities in Miss cardew's profile Cecily is the sweetest dearest prettiest girl in the whole world and I don't care tuppence the social possibilities never speak disrespectfully of society Algernon only people who can't get into it do that my great-great uncle Lord Alfred Douglas was a young man who was at Oxford and who met Oscar Wilde and was greatly impressed with him and it was the start of a a very passionate love story really my friendship was bosey began in May when his brother appealed to be in a very pathetic letter asking me to help Posey in terrible trouble with people who were blackmailing him what he saw in bosey Douglas was youth Beauty I think there was perhaps an element there of snobbery people have talked about it he was the son of a lord equally on Bozize side there was Beau's he was an aspiring poet he was a man of letters who had succeeded and there was an element in in bosie of being seen on Oscars arm at the theatre I think to begin with it was probably a mutual infatuation Oscar Wilde needed to live on the edge of danger whereas Beau's he could plums right into it and in some ways probably that was his power over Oscar Alfred Douglas Posey had come from a very unhappy home life where he tried to protect his mother from a brute of a father the Marquess of Queensbury who's my great-grandfather I'd ask a world in some ways protected him from all this but also gave him guidance as a father as a teacher and offered him a great deal of love he was in a sense a mad obsessive plaything he was rather a hobby Oscar went quite goofy about him in certain ways and you can see it in the letters he writes to Alfred Douglas in a very different way and over the way he writes to anybody um not that these are great love letters but they're letters of somebody who in the same way could you imagine somebody who takes up woodwork as a hobby and keeps on going on about it he started going on about Posey in the same sort of way my own boy your sonnet is quite lovely and it is a marvel that those red rose leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry I know hyacinth as' whom Apollo loved so madly was you in Greek days always were undying love yours Oscar he was fascinated by him I think partly because there was as part of Oscar not so much a homosexual Bertie gluttony ended up Sarah thoroughly gay and certainly he was homosexual martyr there's no question about that but I think himself as regards Alfred antlers in particular that he was always looking with some part of him for the notion of involvement with a singer which would betray him it's a consistent theme in his writing before he ever meets Doug as you find it in the serious stories you'll find it in various other of the stories the search in a sense for a kind of traitor you have passions and thoughts that fill you with terror dreams whose memory stains your cheek with shame yet those great sins take place only in your mind the only way to get rid of a temptation is to give in to it beause he couldn't be Oskar world he couldn't speak as Oscar Wilde spoke and that for him was a great humiliation and so he he loved this man more than anything but there was also part of him that wanted to poison him that wanted to kill him because it showed him all his his faults where and that he made him realize that he could never be that and that he was inadequate Ozu must not make scenes with me they kill me they wreck the loveliness of life I cannot see you so Greek and gracious distorted with passion I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me I would sooner be blackmailed by every renter in London than have you bitter and just hating that kind of fatal fascination drew him almost knowingly towards you see people said that it was the case of Dorian Gray coming to life yes but it wasn't so much that Busey was beautiful and Dorian Gray was beautiful it was the Dorian Gray was somebody who had a destructive quality about him outside I shall grow old but this picture will always remain young if only it could be the other way round and I could remain young while the picture grew old for that for that I would give my soul the portrait of Dorian Gray is a myth which stands like Odysseus or stands like Medusa it's there it's the most extraordinary capacity to invent a myth which will go on reverberating like that it's wonderful don't battle it would be murder I'm glad you appreciate my work at last appreciated I am in love with it basile it is part of myself there is a paradox about while that during the time when he must have known that the net was closing in on him he wrote some of his most joyous and extraordinary work but it still has that dark undertone as it has it has an ideal husband lady children I have sometimes thought but perhaps you are a little hard in some of your views on life I think that often you don't make sufficient allowances in every nature there are elements of weakness or worse than weakness supposing for instance that though any public man my father all Lord Merton or Robert said years ago written some foolish letter to someone what do you mean by a foolish letter let her gravely compromising one's position I'm only putting an imaginary case Robert is as incapable of doing a foolish thing as years of doing a wrong thing nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing wild and Douglas stop being lovers in a sexual sense are quite soon though they remained infatuated with each other in other kinds of ways and I think that it's very clear that Douglas led Wilde into temptation there wasn't very much physically between the two men that they hunted in pairs and hunted for boys and that they were more interested in boys when it came to physical sex and each other when it came to ideas friendship the soul over while didn't start going with lower-class young men until he'd met Alfred Douglas this was Alfred Douglass's idea he described the dangers of the relationships of the rent boys as part of the excitement this was feasting with Panthers people thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life and to have found pleasure in their company but they from the point of view through which I as an artist in life approached them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating it was like feasting with Panthers the danger was half the excitement elfrid your intimacy with this man wild must either ceased or I will disown you with my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome a disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression never in my experience have I ever seen such a sight as that in your horrible features no wonder people are talking as they are telegram from Alfred Douglas to the Marquess of Queensbury what a funny little man you are if I catch you again with that man I will make a public scandal in a way you little dream off if you try to assault me I shall defend myself with a loaded revolver which I always carry and if I shoot you I shall be completely justified when your father first began to attack me it was as your private friend and in a private letter to you as soon as I had read the letter with it obscene threats and coarse violence's I saw at once that a terrible danger was looming on the horizon of my troubled days I told you I would not be the cat's paw between you both in your ancient hatred of each other the whole of Oscar Welles downfall was heaped on his shoulder in that he was young he acted very rashly he had a feud with his father he dragged Oscar Wilde into it and he never stopped to think of the consequences boses father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it for Oscar Wilde posing as a sober might I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution my whole life seems ruined by this man well there were three trials in the first trial Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensbury because he was going around London saying and writing that wild was some kind of homosexual and while evident he felt he had to resist this accusation because otherwise the slander and the scandal would destroy his position the charge that John Sholto Douglas Marquess of Queensbury did write and publish a false scandalous and malicious libel that the said Oscar Wilde had committed the abominable crime of buggery if he'd had his wits half of wit about him he would have known that Queens crew would dig up all the dirt on him that he could have believed that this trial was going to be purely based on his relationship with Douglas is simply unthinkable inevitably it all came out in court and before long Oscar was having to defend his work as well as his lifestyle in your introduction to Dorian Gray you say there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book books are well written or badly written that expresses your view my view on art yet a perverted novel might be a good book I don't know what you mean by a perverted novel then I will suggest that Dorian Gray is open to the interpretation of being such a novel I will never again attempt by a prayer any terrible power if the picture is to alter it is to alter that is all I will be to you the most magical of mirrors as I have revealed to you your own body so I shall reveal to you your own soul were these young men all about 20 yes I like the society of young men did you know that one Parker was a gentleman's valet and the other a groom and I did not know it but if I had I should not have cared and he was totally surprised when he found the kinds of witnesses that Queensbury could bring into the witness box and so his counsel said to him half way through look you know this is ridiculous we're gonna lose in a big way so we have to call it off so they did that and the consequence was that while was then arrested and prosecuted by the state in the second trial was inconclusive and he you know he nearly got off mr. Wilde what is the love that dare not speak its name the love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare it is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect it is in this century misunderstood so much misunderstood and on account of it I am placed where I am now the jury couldn't agree so they tried him a third time and they brought in no no other person and the the Solicitor General himself they were absolutely determined they were going to secure a conviction the charge that Oscar Wilde unlawfully did commit acts of gross indecency with Charles Parker William Parker Frederick Adkins Edward Shelley Alfred would Sidney Arthur you Wilde have been the center of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men it is the worst case that I have ever tried the sentence of the court is hard labor for two years and I may I say nothing my lord the royalist Puritan divide I mean we're mad eccentric romantic with plumed feathers and and abandoned last on one hand and with tight-ass Puritans wanting everybody to be uniform and compelled compelled them all to be the same on the other and while got jammed in the middle of that and a lot of people have been jammed in the middle of it and go on being jammed in the middle of it and if we look at our tabloid press it's the same thing isn't it read all about it buggery must stop and enjoy a vent of reading about buggery i mean it's that's the english i think anybody who pokes fun at the english establishment and shows a floor of some sort will get their comeuppance that the Macaulay said the english lot of their periodic fits of morality but it wasn't only that I think when the English aristocracy close ranks against an outsider you haven't got a hope in hell I had to stand on the center platform of Clapham Junction in convicts dress and handcuffed for the world to look at of all possible objects I was the most grotesque when people saw me they laughed that was of course before they knew who I was for a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time Wilde had to be killed I think English society that moment would have liked to have killed him so they did the next best thing they broke him on the wheel they broke his health they broke his talent they degraded him completely ruined him I mean it is a sexual ethnic cleansing of the most disgusting kind we sewed the sacks we broke the stones we turned the dusty trail we banged the tins and bawled the hymns and sweated on the mill but in the heart of every man terror was lying still we who live in prison have to measure time by throbs of pain and the record of bitter moments as I sit here in this dark cell in convicts clothes a disgraced and ruined man I blame myself the effect on the family was absolutely devastating when Oscar was arrested constants thought that she'd be able to ride it out her first thought was to go to Dublin and spent six months there and then the whole thing blew in the New York newspapers and I think she realized then that this was going to be very very big so she sent the boys off the continent and she stayed until Oscars last trial and his conviction and then she followed them and the most first most distressing thing that happened to her was to be thrown out of a Swiss hotel because she carried the name wild what you say is what you mean in prison yeah you could be bring every emotion way you wouldn't on the outside you wouldn't say so many words in The Ballad that I didn't feel was the best piece of poetry personally that I have ever read you know and I've only picked that up and since my dealings with you I mean I've written a lot of poetry but I don't need a lot of point B I had to find out what it was like to have your freedom taken away from you and that's that's always been a great fear of mine and that led me to apply for a job at one with scrubs and start working with men serving life sentences and he of the swollen purple throat and he of the staring eyes waits for the holy hands that took the thief to paradise and a broken and a contrite heart to the Lord will not despise prison walls suddenly seem to you and the sky above my head became like a cask of scotch and steel and though he was a soul and pain my pain I could not feel and thus we rust life's iron chain degraded and alone some men cost and some men weep and some men make no moon but God's eternal laws are kind and break the heart of stone I don't think I have ever had such a Christian poem in my life in the fullest sense of that term it's a poem with profound horror at the cruelty of human beings to one another but it's a bull so a poem of blazing faith of what the relationship should be of humanity to God one of the effects of the trial and imprisonment was to give Constance custody of the boys he says that more than anything he's prepared to accept poverty when he comes out he's prepared to have to start all over again but the one thing which affects him most deeply of all is the fact that he's probably not going to see his boys again they've been literally taken away from him I do hope the court will see in me something more than a man with a tragic vice in his life there is so much more in me and I always was a good father to both my children I love them dearly and was dearly loved by them it would be better for them not to be for the children is a must see Vivian he shall certainly not visit you do you think I would allow my son our son my son to visit the man who spoiled my youth who ruined my life who has tainted every moment of my days you don't realize what shame and suffering you've put upon me don't take my children away don't break my lovely links with the humanity will you do me to be solitary while my son still live if my two children are taken away from me by legal procedure it will be a source of infinite distress to me if the law should take upon itself to discipline it so to decide that I am one unfit to be with my own children that is and always will remain to me grief without end or limit we are doomed to be solitary while our sons still live i envy the other men who tread the yard along with me they are children wait for them look for their coming will be sweet to them so sorry go away then Constance I release you do not know how to leave you must take hold of those little hands close your eyes and walk I have killed you just as surely as if I had fed you poison from a spoon I do not wish to sever myself entirely from mr. Wilde who was in the very lowest depths of misery and he is very repentant and mines most of all what he has brought on myself and the boys by sticking to him now I may save him from even worse and I believe that he cares now for no one but myself and the children I think the prison changed Oscar Wilde's completely the he could never be it killed him he could never walk away from from that pain I am dazed by the wonderful wonder of the world I feel as if I have been raised from the dead the Sun and the sea seem strange to me Oh beautiful beautiful world they released Oscar from prison on the 19th of May 1897 and he went straight over to France really he had no choice the disgrace was absolute he totally misunderstood what life was going to be like when he came out he believed that he is he says some are like just quoting from memory he says I'd be quite happy to sleep in the summer on the grass under the stars so long as there was love in my heart but by the time he came out I think he realized that life was going to be very very difficult people have said that Alfred Douglas deserted Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment which actually isn't true he wrote to him he talked to many people and tried to communicate with him after prison they tried living together but it was hopeless they quarrel dreadfully and parted forever it is a blow quite awful and paralyzing that it had to come I know it is better that I should never see him again I don't want to he fills me with horror but I think the most tragic thing but those last years was the three and a half years that he spent wandering around Europe he was never completely penniless but he was quite poor my dear Robi the clothes are quite charming suitable to my advanced age the trousers are too tight round waist that is the result of my rarely having good dinners nothing fattened so much for the dinner at one rare bother you if I asked you to let me have my allowance for December now wretched innkeeper at no Jean threatens to sell Reggie's dressing-case my overcoat and two suits if I don't pay him by Saturday my last meeting with Wilde was terrible I was walking one morning along the streets of Paris when they lurched around the corner at all shabby man Madame Elbe you don't know who I am I'm Oscar Wilde he said and I'm going to do a terrible thing I'm going to ask you for money I took all I had from my purse and he quickly took it muttered a word of thanks and was gone and when he was looking into a future bright with exactly what his friends had shunned him he had very little money he tried to write and it didn't seem to work the two women he'd loved were gone his mother had died while he was in prison and Constance who he never saw again died after an operation on her spine it's really awful I don't know what to do if we had only met once and kissed each other it's too late how awful life is while Constance was still alive there was still just possibility that he might be able to see his children again but with her death the door was simply slammed in his face forever I wrote when I did not know life now that I know life I have no more to write the wallpapered and i are fighting a duel to the death one of us has to go there's a sort of tragic inevitability about the whole story which in a sense I suppose appealed to him as a classicist and it was the Greek fates the fates rocked my cradle he said it was almost as if he knew that he was going to finish up as he did but I wouldn't change a single thing it's one of the great tragedies of modern history it was sad to change it exactly 100 years ago tonight on a freezing sin Valentine's Day The Importance of Being Earnest opened appleson James theater 100 years later we honor Wyles genius by dedicating a panel in this new parish corner memorial window and I welcome all who have come you came to me to learn the pleasure of life and the pleasure of art perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful the meaning of sorrow and its beauty your affectionate friend Oscar Wilde

Channel: Karin Ek

Views: 160,761

Rating: 4.7906785 out of 5

Keywords: Oscar Wilde (Author), Documentary

Id: l4x3ADf0eBo

Length: 59min 35sec (3575 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 21 2015