Backlisted - De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Our guest is Stephen Fry, writer, actor and polymath, who last week joined John and Andy in person to discuss Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, the essay addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas 'from the depths' of Wilde's incarceration in Reading Gaol in 1897. It has been described by Colm Tóibín as 'one of the greatest love letters ever written'; it is also Wilde's most powerful testament of the sacred duty of the artist as he conceived it. We discuss the work's convoluted publication history, Wilde's posthumous reputation and his ongoing relevance in the 21st century. In addition, Andy has been reading Hayley Campbell's fascinating All the Living and the Dead (Raven Books), which he describes as "a work of true rigour mortis"; while John digs enthusiastically into Villager (Unbound), the new novel from writer and former Backlisted guest Tom Cox. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 14:25 - All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell. 21:09 - Villager by Tom Cox. 25:51 - De Profundis by Oscar Wilde * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Other conditions apply. Have you seen where your earphones are where they're plugged in? Should be here. Oh, yeah, there's a light there, Andy. Plug it where the light is. That could be the medium speaking. How's that? Plug it where the light is.

Come to the light. Yes. Yes, well, you can imagine my frustration. There it was. I mean, it's a 17-bank Tesla charging station, and there wasn't a free bay. So I had to wait an enormous length of time before one of the Teslas removed itself,

and I got in and was able to charge. I felt such a fool. Are you recording this fried gold, Nicky? Oh, that's good. Excellent. What are you engaged in at the moment, Stephen? You've got multiple projects. What can you talk about? Like a lot of people, the tundra, the permafrost of lockdown,

which is now slowly enjoying a spring melt, is pushing out all kinds of long, dormant plants that I'd almost forgotten about, a couple of documentaries. And I have one final week to finish a very exciting documentary to me about the seasons, really, about the sun's annual journey. Brilliant. Or rather, our annual journey. I have read my Copernicus.

I have corrected the error that I previously had. It's us. It's you that's moving. Those are far away. So I've got a week in Iceland, which I'm looking forward to in two weeks' time. I'm doing another documentary about dinosaurs, which is a fascinating subject,

though I'm feeling very guilty that I look as if I'm trying to sort of hog David Attenborough's terrain. That would be an act of l'es-majesté if ever there was one. It's just a sort of coincidence to say these two things have popped up because they've been waiting for a long, long time. Well, it's very good of you to mark your return to freedom by coming here. Close to saintly.

But at least the subject of the conversation is one that you are deeply familiar with and sympathetic to. Well, one assumes sympathetic to, Stephen. Sympathy is a word I think is very appropriate. For a while, he had a sympathetic nature himself.

And yes, I feel great pity and sadness when thinking of what happened to him. And yes, he has so much meaning for me, a professional meaning as well. I mean, to have played him in a film, to play a lead role, if you look like me, is not something you expect. I mean, I've never been, I hope,

either unduly, absurdly modest about my attainments and physical appearance, but nor have I been particularly vain. I was always aware that I was never going to get the parts that Brad Pitt had just turned down. So when I was offered to play Oscar Wilde, it was an extraordinary feeling for me. Amazing.

Yeah, really amazing. I watched the film again the other night. Me too. I barely looked at Jude Law. I was transfixed, Stephen. I was transfixed. Without. I was transfixed. Without, as it were, blowing smoke, it is a really extraordinary performance.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I mean, aside from everything else, one of the miracles of doing a film like that is firstly, we had Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, as a consultant.

Just to stand next to him, to shake his hand, and to see the fingers, not exactly like the Max Beerbone cartoons, I mean, not really fat, but a certain pudginess, which is clearly a genetic Wilde marker that is just so identical. And that face, the soft face and that was extraordinary and also with Jude say to scenes at Magdalen College Oxford walking along a little sort of

ditch like river that goes along the side of the Deer Park and then towards some balustrades and stone pillars and things that there is a photograph of Wilde and Bosie, Lord Alfred, in exactly that position. So we were standing just where they were,

and my hand was on the same baluster that Wilde's hand was on, and the skyline was identical. And those things have a kind of almost mystical effect on one to feel so connected. Right, yeah. Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us peering into a narrow, whitewashed cell

in a provincial English jail. It is March 1897. Seated at the tiny desk is a tall, gaunt man dressed in prison uniform, drab, coarse trousers, blue worsted stockings, heavy boots, a loose jacket and vest bearing the number C33 on his back. His hair is close cropped and pokes out from beneath a grey and red cap printed all over with crow's foot arrows. In front of him is a single sheet of fool's gap paper resting on a coarsely bound notebook.

is a single sheet of foolscap paper resting on a coarsely bound notebook. He picks up his pen and begins to write. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and as you may have realised, we are delighted to be joined today in real life, in the same same room by Stephen Fry. Hello, Stephen. Hello, and thank you for inviting me to a room, not a Zoom.

You're welcome. Stephen is an actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer. To focus just on his literary achievements, he is the author of five novels, three volumes of autobiography and numerous non-fiction works that stretch from the retelling of Greek myths to classical music, mammalian conservation, English prosody, and as of last November,

his own remarkable collection of neckties. Bravo. Fries ties. Oh, can we talk all right, or is the sound of the barrel being scraped getting in the way? I love it. What are you interested in, Stephen? His audiobook performances are legendary, encompassing Anton Chekhov, Pushkin, and the entire Harry Potter era, of course.

He is also a master podcaster, collaborating most recently with my colleague John on Stephen Fry's Inside Your Mind, a 12-part history of the brain for Audible. And let me ask you, Stephen, while I've got you here, as a collaborator, do you find John to be reliable? Is he on time? Does he deliver scripts? If there's one thing that is joyous, it's to have a friend who is messier, more disordered, later... Amen! ..than one is oneself. One can polish one's medals and think, at least I get things done better than John. But no, John is a genius, as you know.

He's a magnificent mind and a wonderful man. But yeah, like my dear friend Douglas Adams, he has a casual relationship with the deadline. It's my nerves, Steve. I was here early today, I may say.

He's like my husband. Who is absolutely wonderful, but is just not a punctual person. So if we're going out somewhere, I just find myself always pacing up and down by the front door, knowing the taxi's there, terrified that it's going to give up and drive away. And I'll sort of try not to call up. And once he came up with this immortal line

when I was really panicking as we were about to leave, I don't know what you're fussing about, we're not late yet. I love that. That word, yet, wow. And on this week of all weeks, let us just step back in awe at the fact that since he joined in 2008, an early adopter, always an early adopter in the realm of tech, in fact, Stephen has amassed 12.4 million Twitter followers. Although, has that gone down in the last 48 hours

on the day we're recording this? Like everyone's hands? I haven't checked, to be honest. It went down about five years ago from 16 million when they had a great clean-out of bots and it was discovered that I had at least five million bots following me. And how would you characterise your... We can ignore the Elon Musk in the room.

How would you characterise your relationship with Twitter these days? You were a very warm presence on Twitter early on and then you stepped back a bit because you found it, I think, too stressful. Was it really better in the old days, do you think? Oh, yes, it was. It was just more amiable. I compare it to a watering hole, a pool, a natural pool or lake somewhere in the countryside and you discover it's a great place to swim

and you swim around and other people join in and you all swim and you wave at each other and then slowly more and more people join in and enjoy it and some of them pee in the pool. And then suddenly you see something very unfortunate floating towards you on the ground and then you sort of tread water and your foot touches the bottom and there's broken glass and

the thing has become a pit and a stye and a horror and it just isn't fun anymore and so there were a couple of occasions where I however one wants to put it, stormed off through my toys out of the pram, however you like to say these things, all just got fed up

but I've always come back and I have to be honest, part of it is just simply selfishness. It's incredibly handy for self-publicity purposes to have 12.4 million people. And also for the purposes of one's friends who have things they want to publicise and

various charities and so on. It's such an easy way to help them to get get such a number of eyeballs onto their projects and causes. The book we're here to discuss is, in fact, a letter known since 1905 as De Profundis, Latin for Out of the Depths, and a translation of the first line of Psalm 130. It's a 50,000-word missive composed in Reading Prison by Oscar Wilde between January and March 1897, towards the end of his two-year sentence for gross indecency.

It is addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, otherwise known as Bosie, his estranged lover and the prime cause of his downfall. Now, there are many editions, with and without contextual material, of De Profundis available on the internet, in bookshops, in libraries. We thought it would be useful to just recommend one to you. The first one we would recommend is Volume 2 of the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. And that is currently available direct from Oxford's website

for £232.50. If you can't stretch to that... You'll want one for all the family. I've got the London Library's copy here, incidentally. I borrowed it for this. But if you can't stretch to that, there is a Penguin Classic Edition called De Profundis and Other Prison Writings.

It's about a tenor and that is edited and with an introduction by Colm Toybin, the novelist. That's really excellent. I think you mean Colm Toybin. I think I do. Thank you for that.

Colm Toybin, thank you. And I also one final shout, you can probably pick this up for Pence, it's the old 80s and 90s Oxford World Classics edition of The Soul of Man and Prison Writings by Oscar Wilde, edited by

Isabel Murray, this is really excellent this has the essays, The Soul of Man De Profundis, some letters and The Ballad of Reading Jail. So all the contextual material is there as well. And it's worth saying that if you were to look online for a free download of the text from a wonderful source like the Gutenberg Project, you will find that that's an older edition that isn't the complete letter. The letter did have redactions or excisions until... 1962. 1962 was the final full version.

Well, we're going to delve into the various versions, so it's just edge-of-the-seat stuff. The next exciting thing I was about to say, Andy, was that the publishing history of De Profundis is complicated. It was first published in 1905 by Wiles' friend and literary executor robert ross who published the text shorn of the autobiographical elements and the references to bosey and the rest of the queensberry family the full version wasn't published until it appeared

in 1962 in the letters of oscar wilde edited and published by rupert hart davis so it's a book of two halves the first is a long examination of Wilde's relationship with Boese Douglas and just how it destroyed his life and reputation. The second is a remarkable meditation on the life of Jesus Christ, not in his usual role as divine saviour, but as the model of a creative artist.

Now established as one of the greatest prose works in the English language, most readers would agree with Max Beerbohm's early review that in De Profundis, we see Wilde here as the spectator of his own tragedy. His tragedy was great. It is one of the tragedies that will always live on in romantic history. But before we settle down to pick our literary oakum and plumb our own emotional deaths, Andy, what have you been reading this week?

Thanks, John. I've been reading a book, new book, called All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell. And I've started doing a thing on backlisting. I've noticed that publishers occasionally quote us, John,

and it's made me very paranoid about what we say in these slots. Because a lot of the time, if I'd written it, I'd try and make it good. But a lot of the time, you see yourself... Really great, Andy Miller. Yeah, wow, it was just so wonderful. Andy Miller, blacklisted.

That's happened. Thank you, whoever did that. Anyway, so I'm going to read a quote now that if the publicist at Raven Books is listening to this, you can have this because I prepared it earlier. It's about All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell. In this thoroughly morbid new book, Hayley Campbell explores the subject of death

in compelling and forensic detail, a display of true rigor mortis. That's very good. You can have that. That's free. Take it. So this is a book about death, an exploration of death. I want to hear a little bit of Hayley reading it,

so I'm only going to talk for a couple of minutes. want to hear a little bit from Hayley reading it so I'm only going to talk for a couple of minutes Hayley is the daughter of the co-creator with Alan Moore of From Hell Eddie Campbell and she mentions that very early because she says early in the book I grew up obsessed with death because I grew up surrounded by death because my whole childhood dad and alan were working on this epic graphic novel about the jack the ripper murders and so i got very used to hearing the words jack the ripper and seeing dad's often quite graphic um roughs for what was going to go into the finished comics and then the graphic novel. And she has become a very successful journalist, broadcaster, and she decides that what she's going to do is go and spend time with people whose day-to-day life is death.

An embalmer, a funeral director, grave diggers, crime scene cleaners, that's a particularly grim chapter, creators of death masks. And what could be a series of journalistic assignments, however, as it goes on, she begins to find that it is having a terrible effect on her personally. it is having a terrible effect on her personally. And so the writing of the book becomes part of the process of the trauma that she's inflicting on herself by writing the book. And as you know, I love books about books. So this is a book about death, but it's also a book about books. So I learnt a lot from it, journalistically. I was infotained.

It made me think about my own mortality. It made me think about where I might want my remains to go. Medical science, the earth, upper chimney, other. And I was really moved as well by the way in which the process of writing the book takes its toll on the author. So here's a little clip of Hayley reading from quite near the start, and this will just give you a taste of her voice written and spoken. About 50 of us are in a large room at the University College London, holding a wake for a long-dead philosopher on his 270th birthday. His severed head, on show for the first time in decades, is in a bell jar by the Budweisers. Down the hall, his skeleton sits in a glass box as usual. Dressed in his own clothes, his gloved skeletal hand perched on his walking stick, with a wax head where his real one was supposed to go, back before the plan for preservation went wrong. Students nearby pay him as much attention as they would a piece of furniture. Between annual checks to note new stages of decrepitude,

Jeremy Bentham's real head is locked away in a cupboard, and nobody gets to see it. Dr. Southwood-Smith, executor of Bentham's will and dissector of his body, had tried to preserve it so it looked untouched, extracting the fluids by placing the head under an air pump over sulfuric acid. But the head turned purple and stayed that way. He admitted defeat and contacted a wax artist to create a fake one, while the real head was hidden. But three years prior to tonight's wake, a shy academic in charge of Bentham's care had shown it to me for a piece I was writing. We peered at his soft blonde eyebrows and blue glass eyes as his dried skin filled the room with

the smell of beef jerky. He told me that when Bentham was alive, he used to keep his future glass eyeballs in his pocket, getting them out at parties for a laugh. Here they were now, 186 years after his death, wedged in leathery eye sockets, looking out on a room full of people gathered to talk about society's backward attitude towards death. Poppy Mardle, a funeral director in her mid-thirties, stood up and told us that the first dead body you see should not be someone you love. She said that she wished she could bring schoolchildren to her mortuary to confront death before they have to. You need to be able to separate the shock of seeing death from the shock of grief, she said. She thanked us for listening and sat down, the beer bottles clinking

on the table. In all of my thinking about death, I had never considered this idea, that you could deliberately separate these specific shocks to save your own heart. Wow. That last line seemed really relevant to De Profundis and what we're going to be talking about today. Anyway, terrific book.

All the Living and the Dead, Hayley Campbell, Raven Books. I love all that Bentham stuff. I thought you'd like that. I know, I'm loving it. I chose that for you. Bentham wanted to, he wanted, instead of cemeteries, he wanted, he wrote to London Municipal Council and saying, can we not just preserve people

as kind of ornaments in parks? So instead of burying them under, he's a great horror of being buried and putrefaction. So he said we should sort of literally pickle these people and turn them into ornaments. It's quite. Do you know, Benson, also a great pioneer of gay rights? Yeah. Again, in keeping with today.

Yeah. No, I wrote an essay on him in the QI Book of the Dead, which he slept with a live pig, amongst many other things. He's very strange. Anyway. John. You're going to ask me, aren't you? What have you been reading this week? Well, I'm going to talk about a book that,

which I don't do very often in this slot, a book that I'm bound to publishing, Villager by Tom Cox. The reason I'm going to talk about it is, apart from the fact that I know Stephen is a fan, but that Tom is, it's his first novel. He wrote a collection of stories a couple of years ago, really brilliant dark stories called Help the Witch.

This is maybe the sixth project we've done with Tom. And that thing when you really hope that somebody's first novel is going to deliver and it comes in, it's even better than you'd hoped for. It's a really extraordinary book, I think, Tom has written. It's set in a village in a hill on Dartmoor, which is where he now lives. And it has a kind of an Ulverton-y

feel in that it's across time. Tom was our guest, wasn't he, to talk about Ulverton. Yeah, it came from 1932 through to 2099. There's a brilliant bit at the end of the book where he figures out what a search engine in 2099. There are stories that are threaded through through the book so it's that it's that kind

of portmanteau story different people take up different bits of the stories um through it there is uh in the late 60s a guy called rj mckendry blows into underhill he's a kind of american singer songwriting he writes a remarkable sequence of songs and how those sequences of songs are discovered and rediscovered and then written about and then that's a kind of theme to the book. It also turns out that Tom has released with his friend Will

Twynham. They have released the songs of R.J. McKendry. So life imitating. There is a thing in it that he does too that the book begins and ends and in various places, the hill, the sentient landscape. He actually goes as far, a bit like, reminded me very much of Max Porter

with his dead papa toothwort. He turns the hill into a character. So I thought I'd just read a little bit. It gives you the flow. It's really funny. It's profound in places. A lot of his non-fiction is about folklore and about walking and about landscape he's policing that interesting that

interesting boundary between what is folklore and what is actual history what is natural history all of that in this book but here is the here is the the hill uh reflecting and this is sort of now in 2022, reflecting on having had pylons stuck into it for several years. Can you imagine it? You're there, the dew is fresh all over you, the sky has not long got light, and the most dystopian sights in your immediate vicinity are a mounted hayturner that's slowly shedding its paintwork

and sinking into a spinny on your pelvic girdle, and Charles Bamford's abandoned prototype Vauxhall Cadet on Riddlefoot Lane, and then suddenly these men arrive, and they appear to be erecting these giant robots on the bridges of your feet, a long line of them marching off into the distance, towering metal soldiers that seem to presage the coming of something terrible, but you don't quite know what. And you are powerless. All you can do is stand there and watch as they're put in place, as they become an intrinsic part of you that you've never asked for.

And then lines are connected between them, lines that fizz and crackle. That is even scarier because it's ugly and dark, and there have been ugly and dark things forever, which it has been possible to accept because they seem part of the natural balance of everything. But now it seems that the ugly and dark things will be controlled by machines, and that is going to be different. You don't know how it's going to be different, but you know. The word pylon means gateway in ancient Greek. The fact we call them pylons is probably a lot to do with the

fact that in the 1920s when pylons were first introduced was an archaeologically excitable decade especially in egypt pylons were that were what the double towers were called that you found at the entrance to egyptian temples i don't have an entrance unless you count several hundred fox and badger holes but i do have three pylons. Am I a temple? I can certainly play that role if you want me to. People do seem to draw to me spiritually, although not in any official capacity. I notice that people are often quieter, calmer when they're on me,

sometimes even inspired to find parts of themselves that they can't quite reach when they're down below, although I can't take even most of the credit for that. I feel on the whole that it most of the credit for that. I feel on the whole that it is less the entrance protected by my pylons is in me, and more than I am an entrance to what resides directly behind me, almost all of which is bigger, taller, darker, more untamed. Yeah, Villager, Tom Cox.

Available in hardback from which publisher? That's from Unbound. Ah, good to hear. We'll be back in just a sec. Am I alone and unobserved? I am. Then let me own, I'm an aesthetic sham. If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line As a man of culture rare

You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms And plant them everywhere You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases Of your complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind. And everyone will say, as you walk your mystic way, if this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, why, what a very singularly deep young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me. Why, what a very singularly deep young man

this deep young man must be. It's heading back to the top of the charts. Yes. Do you know, there's a whole terrible symbolic poem you could write about that, that leads from the jollity of the Victorian middle classes to feces and blood by way of Richard Doily Cart. It's just a peculiar and horrible coincidence that it was Richard Doily Cart who produced Gilbert and Sullivan, their operas, and made a fortune from it, of course,

and he always took them over to Broadway as well. And when they wrote Patience, an extract from which we've just heard, which was a parody, a guying, a satire on the aesthetic young men, Whistler and Wilde and their set. Bunthorne was the character. Richard Dollycutt realised that patients wouldn't play in New York because they had no concept of these people. The British knew about them because of punch cartoons of them,

you know, going down the Strand with a lily in my hand and all that sort of thing, saying everything was too utterly utter. And it didn't mean anything to America. America had just come out of the Civil War, for heaven's sake. It wasn't yet the Gilded Age quite. So he offered Wilde a huge sum of money to go to America to tour around and lecture and let everybody look at him and understand the nature of the Eastheat.

So Wilde went and he gave possibly the first ever lectures ever given on interior decoration. He called them the house beautiful. And he lectured on Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance silversmith. And he was quite a sensation, famously arriving in the customs hall saying he had nothing to declare but his genius. He then, of course, some people think he may have developed syphilis from a female prostitute at some point along his journey, maybe in Leadville, Colorado, where he went. He returned to England and determined to be an MP and a respectable figure and a great man

and he'd write novels and maybe plays and he met Constance and married her. But fast, fast forward to the very terrible moment where he's standing in the dock having lost his libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury. He's then arrested and servants from the Savoy Hotel

testify they found things on the bedsheets when he'd spent time there with youths. And Richard Doily Cart, from his profits from patients and other things, built the Savoy Hotel and got Escoffier, the great chef, and made it the finest hotel in Europe. And Wilde would stay there a lot. So there is a kind of weird circularity.

So when I hear that song, I think, how peculiar, isn't it? And in a sense, this is what Wilde speculates about in De Profundis, that the life of pleasure does lead to something profoundly to do with sorrow, squalor and misery. And until you've come to terms with that and hit the bottom, you will never achieve any kind of stasis or happiness. I wanted to play it in because it premieres in 1891, which is the first great Annus Mirabilis for Wilde. He buys a box for the opening night.

So this idea of him as modern celebrity, which is much from Marks Bond, but he's already become famous in London for being Oscar Wilde, and then he's become famous in America for touring with lectures. I was thinking like a stand-up comedian. You go out and you spend two years breaking America.

And then he comes back. But if you listen to the song, what's so interesting is I think you can hear within the song the very seeds of the things which the English come to hate him for. Yeah, yeah. Right? So it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. He's clever, he's unmanly, he's unhealthy.

Yeah. There's something wrong. The seeds of the tragedy are there. Yeah. Stephen, when did you first read De Profundis' Some Version, Vell? I was about 16, I think. I'd loved Oscar Wilde for six or seven years and had slowly begun to engage with his more difficult writing for a child.

The Soul of Man, you mentioned, The Soul of Man Under Socialism is the full title, which sounds like a very heavy political essay, but it's utterly brilliant. It really is a remarkable piece of writing. And we could do well to read it now. It speaks so much towards politics and thought. I grew up in the country,

and my parents were not particularly enamoured of television. We had one. It was a small thing about the size of a large coffee mug and it lived in a cupboard. And if a member of the royal family should decide to get married or Winston Churchill died or some Americans

decided to skip around on the surface of the moon, then it would be taken out and looked at because something important should be seen. But my father did not approve of his children sitting around watching it during the day or night, even. Always more things to be done. But anyway, he was away, over the way, as we used to say. He used to work in his laboratory.

He was a scientist. So it was a rainy Sunday. I turned on the television and it's snowy black and white was a film. And I couldn't quite work out what it was. I could tell it wasn't Shakespeare, but at the same time, it clearly wasn't contemporary. And people were speaking in the most remarkable way. And you know how it is with a film.

When it's good, you sort of remember every single part of it. When it's bad, the whole thing flies from your memory. So these scenes were burned into my memory. And even the phrases. There's a young man who says to a beautiful young woman, I hope I won't offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

And I thought, I've never heard that. I knew it was funny because, of course, there's an inbuilt irony that you don't have to consciously be aware of, which is that a declaration of love should be in Saxon language. I love you. Not you are the visible personification of absolute perfection. If you have time to develop an Orton sentence like that, you can't be in the throes of love. And so it's a wonderful joke.

And I just knew it was funny. But also, I had never heard language used like it. And I ran to my mother afterwards and said, Mummy, I hope you won't be offended if I say that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection. And she said, what are you talking about? Anyway, she explained that obviously

what I'd been watching was the importance of being honest. And we lived in the country. And as Sidney Smith once said, miles from the nearest lemon. But we did have a portable library that came every other Thursday in a Pantechnicon, a little grey van. Amazing.

And it trundled along and there I was waiting for it and the driver got wheezingly out and went round and opened the door in the side, lowered the steps and patted my bottom into the interior in the way that people did in those days without having to be arrested. And there was the nice woman in the cardigan and the little demi-loon spectacles on a chain

and powdery cheeks who said, Hello, my dear. And I said, Have you got The Importance of Being Honest by Oscar Wilde? And she helped me find it and stamped it out, that springy stamp that the library books used to be adorned with. And I rushed home with it and read the four comedies, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, Lady Fandom, Here's Wind, and, of course, The Importance.

And I learnt The Importance more or less off by heart from then on. Then I ran back and said, have you got anything more? And she eventually found the complete works of Oscar Wilde. I rushed home with those and started to read them and didn't understand them all. And then went back the next week. Have you got anything more? She said, well, you've had the complete works and that's the complete works. But I found in that little van a book by Montgomery Hyde called The Trials of Oscar Wilde.

And she looked at me and said, how old are you, my darling? And I said, 14. I was probably 12. And she said, well, all right, and she stamped it. And I took it home and I started to read it, and slowly this story emerged. And it began to get darker and darker and unhappier and unhappier. Because it was so wonderful to read about what a friend he was, what a supporter of others, what a cause of wit in others,

as Shakespeare says about Falstaff, you know, not just a wit but a cause of wit in others. And then to see him pulled down like that and all the time inside myself to know that the crime he had committed was a crime that I might perhaps commit, that I shared, to use his own wonderful word, his nature. And so it was both a thrilling thing to read, but also a terrifying thing to read. Yeah, yeah. Why don't we hear from, you've mentioned him already, Stephen, Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland, to just tell us what De Profundis is. Brilliant. When they sent my grandfather, Oscar Wilde, to prison in 1895, such was the scandal surrounding his prosecution that his wife and children had to leave the country and change their names.

that his wife and children had to leave the country and change their names. The family, partly as a permanent rebuke to Victorian morality, has never reverted to its rightful name, which is why I'm called Merlin Holland and not Merlin Wild, as I should be. So they put him away for two years in grey Victorian prisons and deprived him at first of something which was almost more important to him than his freedom, pen, paper, words, and the colours of the outside world. Like all prisoners, he was allowed to write one letter under strict supervision every three months. But that was all.

It was not until he had been in prison for fourteen months, and had passed from Pentonville to Wandsworth to Reading, that he was finally allowed writing materials in his cell. At first Oscar only had a coarsely bound notebook, but as he wrote to a friend in September 1896, I take notes of books I read, and copy lines and phrases in poets. The mere handling of pen and ink helps me. I cling to my notebook. Before I had it, my brain was going in very evil circles. Then, early in 1897, he started on this long letter to young Bosie Douglas,

which has now become known as De Profundis. letter to young Bosie Douglas, which has now become known as De Profundis. So I'm going to ask my colleague, John Mitchinson, is this a letter? Well, when it was presented in 1905, it wasn't really a letter. It was presented more as a kind of a philosophical meditation on Christianity and the romantic artist. I mean, it's an uneasy letter in that it is definitely, at the beginning, he is writing, as far as we can see, he is writing to Bosie and explaining what's happened. And there are people, I think, at the time

who felt it was, that he was just, it was just self-justification and he was pinning all the blame on. But rereading it again, and I first read this when I was a student and actually have come back to it this time, like so many things, having lived more, this just is a more profound more um more precise more humane

more beautiful piece of work than i even remember it being and i was i was always keen on it i think he comes back to the to the kind of letter towards the end and so it's sort of it's topped and tailed as a letter but in the middle yeah you have i think one of the most i mean it's topped and tailed as a letter, but in the middle you have, I think, one of the most... I mean, it's one of the great, I think, reflections on the function of religion in a secular age. He isn't religious. He converts, we think, at the end, but does he really? To please Robbie, probably.

But really, this is radical. Taking up all of that kind of... He'd read Renown's Life of Christ. He'd taken on board all the biblical scholarship of the 19th century. And his vision of Christ is, I would contest, the vision of Christ that most people who have a relationship with Christianity without being believers. I mean, he did it first and he did it better. I've weirdly just read over Easter weekend or reread Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom, which is, again, an interesting 20th century version

of a difficult human being dealing and grappling with the Gospels and going back to original text. And I thought, reading that back to back with this, I thought, well, Wilde was doing something so... I mean, he was writing a letter in prison under the worst possible circumstances, but finding a way of being... genuinely adding to our understanding of religion,

genuinely adding to our sense of what it's possible for words to do. When the review in Vanity Fair by Max Bierbaum calls it the Lord of Language, which is a phrase that... He uses himself. About himself. So is it a letter? Well, it was a letter that he...

A letter not to send, is that not right? I think... After he left jail, he gave the copy to Robbie and Robbie had it typed out under his orders twice and sent a copy to its supposed recipient, Bosie. Who didn't read it. Claimed to have not read it and thrown it on the fire and then later claimed not even to have received it.

That was in a later court case. There is that horrible moment when Oscar is writing. He's released and he's writing against the advice of everybody to Bosie. And Bosie's warm response to him makes him think he's read my letter and understood it. It's just it's tested with the Derbyville's. Yeah, isn't it? That kind of I find this deception. I think this is one of my favourite pieces of prose ever.

In a sense, I don't care if it's a letter. Every time I read it, I think I've found the centre of it, but it's always different. And I think as a result of preparing for this show, I'm finally getting closer to understanding why that might be. Firstly the prose is written under very difficult circumstances over three months attention is wandering

although concentration on quality of output is remarkable. The phrase making is as great as it always was but as I understand it, Wilde did not necessarily necessarily, we don't know for sure, intend for the whole manuscript to be published as one document. And what he saw it as was a kind of pot of material which could be divided up in several ways, some to Lord Alfred Douglas.

divided up in several ways, some to Lord Alfred Douglas. But, and this is my final point before I go back to you, Stephen, I think that the magic of it, like all the great white or black magic in books, is partly deliberate and partly accidental. Do you know what I mean? There's space in it as a result of it not following any one template. is that his vision in the second half of Christ Artist is part of his lifelong search for an understanding of the creative act and of art. And he ends up, and this is a word we were using earlier when talking about him, sympathy.

He understands that the fact that he's the one who has suffered, he's the one whose name is forever mired, and as far as he knows will never ever rise again, that his reputation has been trashed, that his future life will be one of exile and disgrace, but he has won because he's found in that suffering something profoundly important, whereas Bosie, he suspects as he writes the

letter, and of course it turns out to be true, although he is free as air, is the one who is really suffering. And that is what he understands the Christ to be about, that the Christ tells people to give up money and follow him, not because the poor need to be given the money and you'll give it away, but because the money is ruining your soul and is bad for you. And you will be free if you give it away. You will be free if you do things that are often painful and you humiliate yourself. And Wilde is in that position because he's come to the depths.

From the depths he writes. I cry out from the depths. And it is, you know, it's something we know in a more finished kind of psychological closed world of things like addiction or whatever, that you have to get to the depths before you can purify yourself and arise again and be cleaned of your addiction, whatever it might be. It could be gambling. It doesn't have to be a substance. It can be a behavior. And in that wider sense, Wilde was an addict.

And he writes about it very honestly and in a sort of unknowing way avant la lettre, as the French would say. of unknowing way avant la lettre, as the French would say. He is, part of the letter is a very good example of how you can reinvent yourself. I mean, the irony is, of course, he didn't because the love story, the terrible love story with Bosie is bigger than anything else. And that's what makes it true, of course. It makes it feel almost authored,

that having come to all these amazing resolutions and understandings as he does in the letter, the moment he meets the rose red lips and the blue eyes of Bozy, he's off to Naples and Capri and then Paris into a pretty life, even worse than the one before. And that's another thing. I'm just going to finish this, but every addict will tell you that if you... I mean, let's just take it with cigarettes. If you give up smoking when you're smoking 20 a day and it's taken you maybe 10 years to go from four or five a day to 20 a day, and you give up for 20 years, when you fall off the wagon and start again, you don't start like you did when you...

You start at the 20. And he started with the squalor and the terror as soon as he was out of jail, almost. Is it a book you go back to, Stephen? I mean, you know, is it a book that you find, as it were, de profundis in your life, that you've found helpful? I do remind myself of passages,

and I do quote the ones that I like a lot to myself or to others. Having been in prison myself, which I was for a while, not as long and not as harsh, I also you know,

I find it very, very personal. When I read it, I actually can actually picture him at that desk with that pen in the pain that he was in. He'd had a miserable time the first year or so, especially, and even at Reading, the first governor, Michael Colonel Isaacson, was not at all sympathetic. But fortunately, Major Nelson came to replace him, who was a much more progressive and sympathetic person who allowed him the writing and so on

and he was immensely grateful for that and he'd burst his eardrum and his health had been appalling and dysentery and all that. I mean, he was told by his lawyer that if he got the maximum sentence of two years at hard labour which the Labour share amendment which was the law he had transgressed of two years at hard labour, which the Labouchere Amendment, which was the law he had transgressed,

that he wouldn't be expected to survive. People of our class are not expected to survive such a sentence. Yes, yes. The governor, the second... What's the name of the second Reading governor? Major Nelson. Major Nelson told Robbie Ross, he said to him, he's got two years. And the fact that Wilde lived three and a half...

The treadmill was equivalent to climbing Ben Nevis twice in a day. Just horrible. This is the current caretaker, Sandy Frow, of Reading Jail, recorded in Wilde's cell, talking to Neil Bartlett about the conditions in Reading Jail, recorded in Wild's cell, talking to Neil Bartlett about the conditions in Reading Jail at the time Wild was composing the prison manuscript. Sandy, what would Oscar's experience have been when he first came in through these doors? It was a feared prison. The separate system was in place and the separate system was where prisoners were segregated from each other. They also had to wear what was known as a scotch

bonnet so it meant that they had a cricket type cap with a veil hanging down. The prison guards at night wore felt boots so that the place did run absolutely in silence. The only sound you'd have heard were the keys. So it was a place that must have been a kind of mental torture for Oscar himself. Oscar would have been actually confined to his cell for more or less 23 hours of the day because the oakum picking, which was his hard labour, was actually done within the cells. They had an hour's exercise where they went down to the yard and unless they were actually going to chapel, then they were confined to their cells.

That's quite a change from sitting in your study writing the importance of being earnest to watching your fingers start to bleed from picking up. I've had the pleasure of being shown around that prison by Sandy, in fact. Hello, Sandy, if you're listening. He's a terrific fellow and a wonderful guardian of the memory and a great understanding of the details of the appalling penal system. I wanted to just keep that fresh in people's minds

while we ask you to read to us, because we talked about... It's fascinating, this with Wilde. Such is Wilde's genius and reputation for genius that I find the experience when reading De Profundis is... I'm going along quite nicely and I'm thinking, oh, that's very good. Oh, I like that. Oh, that's so moving.

And every so often I think, and you wrote this by gaslight on whatever paper you could get under tremendous... I mean, it actually does really defy belief that under those circumstances you could produce something like this. I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I'm trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself, pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me,

what I did to myself was far more terrible still. I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me, it was different. I felt it myself and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope. 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. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility."

Wow. It's quite a passage that, isn't it? Tremendously. It is strong and right and good. And of course, there is behind it an echo of, I have come to this conclusion, Bosie, you must too. Because, yeah, being careless of lives of others, even though he might be right to say that he was careless of the lives of others, there's nothing like as careless, as aristocratically careless as Bosie was. Oscar was known for his kindness to people and his

consideration and his thoughtfulness. In the manuscript, just the next line in the manuscript, what you were saying there, Stephen, there is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. Just as there is only one thing for you, meaning Bosie, absolute humility also,

you had better come down into the dust and learn it beside me yes beautiful and the phrase that I've underlined the spendthrift of my own genius here's a question about Wilde

and here's a question about a trick John and Stephen both, a trick how does he do it? how does he say I am a genius and you feel sorry for him? How do you say I am a genius with humility? It's so interesting that isn't it? There is something in his manner that as you say does allow one to feel sorry for him and not to think that it's just a showy peacock making grand claims for himself. It's, I suppose, the fact that you trust his honesty. You trust his vision and his understanding of things

to be greater than just about anybody else you know. I mean, underneath all that serene, swan-like ease was a very, very busy pair of feet paddling through the literature of the world. He understood Russian and German literature and French literature and philosophy, and he read constantly and remembered and quoted and thought hard.

And it didn't come that easily, but he made it look as if it came easily, like a Ronnie O'Sullivan, if we're talking of geniuses. He liked to work, though. He did, yeah. He liked to work. This is part of the torture of prison life, is the eternities of...

He says the suffering just goes on and over and on and over. And tomorrow will be the same. And today has lasted an eternity. And we start again tomorrow. Because, as we heard from Merlin Holland there, he had no paper. He had nothing to distract him. Yeah. And, of course, when he was in various places on the south coast or in hotels or borrowed houses trying to write plays,

or in hotels or borrowed houses trying to write plays, Bosie was the one who was stopping him from working and plucking at him and pulling at him and stopping him from concentrating. And spending all his money. I mean, it's that thing of having... It's very rare to have anyone who has been that famous, that fated, to have everything taken away. And you can see why the biblical story is so attractive to him and why he doesn't need Christ to be the son of God.

He just needs him to be somebody with a poetical soul, with an artistic soul. I see to Christ that imagination was simply a form of love. All he has left in the end in this cell is, I mean, he has some access to literature, but he has a way of telling a story that makes sense out of what he's been through. And the thing is that he does it, but it is, I think, the bit where he comes out of jail

that is so painful. You know, the fact that he's... He knows he's disgraced. He knows he's going to have to leave. He wants to leave England. He's sick of England. But the slow kind of descent into that terrible death in a cheap hotel in Paris, sort of drunk and sort of even he's squandered many of his closest friendships by this point as well. It's almost unbearable to read. Yeah, it is. And I think

you're right about that point about Christ and the imagination being a form of love. And one of the most remarkable things about Wilde is that even in the height of his apparently profligate days, when he was beginning to see Bosie and rarely saw his children or his wife, except occasionally to read them stories, or his wife, except occasionally to read them stories, which he then put into a book, The House of Pomegranates, and had those wonderful fairy stories, The Young King and The Happy Prince and so on. Even at that time, those stories show that he had an awareness of precisely

what was going to happen to him. Because almost every one of the fables he writes is about a glorious, happy, luxurious thing, having to learn that actually life is suffering. Yeah. And whether it's the statue of the young king who sees that every piece, you know, who sees the poverty, although the young king is about to be crowned, if you remember, and he has a series of dreams before his coronation. He's so looking forward to his tissue of gold cloak

and his amazing crown. He's going to be so beautiful. He's going to be the most stunning picture anyone has ever seen of riches and luxury. But in his dream, he sees the old woman sewing, trying to make his tissue, and her children are dying around her. She's hardly got enough light.

She's going blind. And then another dream happens, and he sees a boy being sent down from a boat to pluck pearls from an oyster. And he comes up with the best pearl, but blood streaming from his ears because of the pressure. And the boys push back into the water to die. The pearl will be perfect for the young king's coronation. And so when he when he finally wakes up, having had these dreams in which he sees

the provenance of beauty, the beauty is carved from hillsides by, you know, emerald miners whose lives are held at nothing. He sees this, he has this vision. And so he tells his chamberlain and everyone else that he doesn't want the tissue of gold cloak. He doesn't want the crown.

He just wears a peasant's hessian and ruffled straw for his hat. And when he goes into the church, the light shines through the stained glass and lights him up. And it becomes a blaze of gold and colour and jewels. And it's a wonderful story. But it's a magnificent way of explaining what we all feel, which is every day when you buy something, you know, we all know about, you know, blood diamonds and so on. But, you know, it's true of almost, you know, clothes, cheap fashion.

How is it made? And he was asking those questions. So he always had that same instinct of imagination of where do things come from? What really are they? What is poverty? What are riches? And he hid himself from himself. And found the language to express it.

Well, that's the thing. The story you've just told, of course, also prefigures De Profundis. It's a pearl retrieved from the depths. Absolutely. And the fact that, as John said, Right. But absolutely. And the fact that, as John said, he kind of defaults on his intentions, as stated in the essay, in the letter, that matters. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't. The capturing, as I say, what I find so incredible about De Profundis is fixing something that isn't fixed. The flow of intellectual and emotional thought and how those two things relate to one another. Extraordinary, really.

This is Tom Stoppard speaking in a documentary, an omnibus documentary from the 90s this evening, which you took part as well. This is Stoppard on Wilde's downfall. I think that one of the things which make us feel for Wilde's downfall? I think that one of the things which make us feel for Wilde is what Richard Ellman calls that berserk passion, that he met somebody and it was as though the rest had been written by Aeschylus.

It just went on and on until... And it was self-aware. And he knew that it was tragic. I think that he was a notable victim of that English genius for cutting down the people who are too smart for their own good. And I think there was quite a lot of pleasure, much of it expressed in quite malign terms when he fell. You know, I would quite like to read what the Daily Telegraph said at that moment, but there were worse things said. I mean, real glee to typify

Wilde from our perspective as a gay hero is to do him a disservice he was a hero to humanity there was an edge to that delight in paradox which made it more than humorous it was it was more than wit. He did make people, he forced people to consider the unconsiderable. You're nodding furiously. I think that's so true. Of course he tries. Where he talks in the passage that I read earlier about, Wilde talks about what the paradox was for me, you know, in the verbal and the artistic sphere. Perversity became for me in the, you know. But the paradox and his classic examples of wit are an inversion of what was understood to be true by the Victorians. to be true by the Victorians.

And by turning upside down the morality that the Victorians were so proud of and so addicted to and so utterly insistent about, by turning it upside down and showing the reverse is true, he really was humiliating, essentially. I mean, you can take an obvious example of turning it upside down is a Bonneau-like, work is the curse of the drinking classes. Now, what's great about that is it's true.

The drinking classes, the leisure classes who go and drink a lot do not like the work. But of course, what he's doing is turning upside down the sanctimonious Victorian phrase that drink is the curse of the working trust. And that's just one small example. But he does that in everything. I think elsewhere in some point in De Profundis, he says, I change the colour of things. And again, here's an example, which again is trivial. But if you expand it, if you extrapolate from it, this is what he means. At table, he would always, when

the waiter came, asked what he would like to drink, he would say, and some yellow wine for me. Because he thought it ridiculous to call white wine white, because it wasn't. It was yellow. He saw that it was yellow. That is the colour white wine

is. And, you know, that's just to say it's just a small thing. But if you do that to something in a deep area of philosophy where you realize that your culture and your society has misnamed sin, he was a moralist. And everything that was upside down was that one of the reasons he was actually found guilty was because they thought Dorian Gray was an immoral book. It's a morality tale. And so everything was upside down. I tweeted this the other day from... It's very short, from The Soul of Man on Socialism. And as I tweeted it, I thought, well, this is 130 years old.

And I felt anxious tweeting it because it seemed so insolent and provocative. But it's so great. Stick around to the punchline. The public has always and in every age been badly brought up. Right already, you're going oh no oh no they are continually asking art to be popular to please their want of taste to flatter their absurd vanity to tell them what they have been told before to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much,

and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now, art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. Yes. It's glorious, isn't it? I agree with that. Totally.

I agree that that. Totally. I agree that's so true, but also that's not... Every publisher should have it pinned over their desk. That's the opposite of late capitalism. Yes, it is. Yes, I mean, he also made the extraordinary point, which Marxists make, you know, about charity perhaps, but he said the enemy of the slave is the kind slave master. But also this idea of, you see the thread, this is why I was recommending The Soul of

the Man According to Socialism in relation to David Fundus, the thread of, and whatever the centre of David Fundus might be, Wilde's career is one of self-realisation. Yes, absolutely right. He is trying to make his life a work of art, not as a pose, though posing would be part of it, but as the natural end point of a human being, of his talents and aims. And actually there is a through line from the earlier work in all its different plays, stories, genres, epigraphs, epigrams, right through to David Funnett. It. Probably not into the Ballad of Reading Jail, but even there. No, there's a hint, I agree.

It is full of it. And I wanted to read a section here, just a very short bit. Well, this is just a bit here because of our neuroscience podcast, John. You might enjoy this. He says, I said in Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world take place in the brain. But it is in the brain that everything takes place.

We now know that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is the brain. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous,

that the skylark sings. He's spot on with that. It's amazing. I quote this a lot when, you know, talking at schools and things like that. And it's as true as it ever was. As regards the other subject, the relation of the artistic life to conduct, it will no doubt seem strange to you that I should select it. People point to Reading Jail and say that is where the artistic life leads a man. Well, it might lead to worse places. The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation, depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed, they succeed in being the parish beadle, and no more.

no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of parliament or a successful grocer or a prominent solicitor or a judge or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it. But with the dynamic forces of life and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it's different. People whose desire is solely for self-realization never know where they're going. They can't know. In one sense of the word, it is, of course, necessary,

as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself. That is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the first achievement of knowledge, but to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance and measured the steps of the moon and mapped out the seven heavens star by star,

there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to look for his father's asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation and that his own soul

was already the soul of a king. And he wrote it in prison. I know. Just remind ourselves again. It's so wonderful that though, isn't it? Absolutely. The self-realisation issue, and it's as modern as any thought

anyone ever had. This is Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys speaking in the late 1990s about why we still are talking, well, why we were talking about Wilde 25 years ago and why we're talking about him now. I've had the theory in pop music

that when someone or a group or artist becomes successful, when they carry on being successful, they go from success into what I call their imperial phase where they can do no wrong, where it seems like it will go on like this forever. And, you know, as with Napoleon's career, it never does go on forever. It, um...something goes disastrously wrong,

and the imperial phase is followed by either survival... ..or it's followed by disaster, that the whole thing fades away. For me, the most fascinating moment of Oscar Wilde's life is the afternoon when the libel trial has collapsed and a warrant is going to be issued for his arrest. And he decides to stay in the country. And it's a fact that at the time the warrant for his arrest was delayed to give Oscar Wilde the chance to catch the last boat train.

And he has lunch. I think he must have weighed up what was going to happen to him. He must have known that he was going to... that he would be found guilty, because, of course, he knew that he was guilty, and decided that it was going to give him a platform which would, as I say, make him into a legend. I think the fact that Oscar Wilde still matters

proves that that afternoon in the Cadogan Hotel, Oscar Wilde made the right decision. The writing is really only a part of the Oscar Wilde story and it's the tragic downfall from someone who was so... who had this imperial sense of... everything he would do would turn right, would fascinate people. What do you think? I mean, we're not... I'm not seeking to cause a 25-year late fight with Neil Tennant.

No, I think a logician might say post hoc ergo prop talk. Because what happened afterwards happened, it must have been because of that moment. It's undoubtedly true that the importance of being earnest will always be held up to be the only Victorian play written at a time when more theatres were built anywhere in the world, in London alone. And yet only one masterpiece from that entire long reign exists. And that is the importance of being earnest.

It is utterly flawless. And we would still be celebrating that play if the fellow had died like Conan Doyle in the 30s or 40s or something, had a large waistcoat and a gold watch and was Sir Oscar. We would still worship that play. But even that play, because of his life, everything about him is, I wouldn't say tainted, is informed by, maybe has a halo or an unheard halo effect, as it were, of the terrible story of his downfall

and the messianic nature of it, that he was a secular bohemian Christ. He had disciples, some of whom betrayed him, and he kind of rose again. I mean, one of the things, you know, when I started becoming sort of vaguely well known and being asked to go to universities and give talks or whatever and i noticed that as in the 70s in the early 80s or mid 80s people still on students in their walls on their posters they tended to have jimmy

hendrix and carl marx john lennon whatever, because if the world was going to be put to rights, it would be put to right by rock and roll music or by, you know, revolutionary politics. But as the period changed into the 90s, I noticed more and more often there would be posters of Einstein and Oscar. Those two, you know, but the life of the mind, because pop music and revolutionary politics had been sort of exploded and somehow shown to be worthless by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the whole business of Russia. Stadium rock. And stadium rock and so on. Whereas you could look into Einstein's eyes,

and even if you didn't understand a word of his physics, you could see the crinkly international humanitarian in there and sort of believe that this was someone who mattered. And with Wilde, he was the student prince, and is the student prince. He is the prince of

Bohemia, and that's true around the world. And I used to paint this image. If you've ever been to New York City and you've got in a cab, one of those yellow cabs, and asked you to go down, say, to the village from Midtown, you'll be going probably down one of the down avenues. And the most obvious one is Fifth Avenue, a very famous avenue. And it goes downtown one way. Bear with me. This is relevant. As you pass 33rd Street, there's a very famous building,

which is the Empire State Building. And you look out of your window and you crane round, and there are nearer buildings in the way. So you can't quite see it. But there's a phenomenon in New York traffic, which is wonderful when it goes right. And that is the synchronization of the traffic lights. So if all the greens go at the right time, all the way down to Herald Square or whatever it is where you're going down to, you can look out through the back window across the parcel shelf

and you see the Empire State Building launching up and up and up as the buildings that are nearer fall down to their right size. And so it's like a Saturn 5 rocket launching and launching and launching. And the further away you get, the higher and higher and higher it is, until it's just dominating the entire cityscape.

And it was like that in 1900. Wilde was nothing. He was destroyed. His reputation had gone completely. But as each decade passed, the pygmies that were closer had suddenly fell away and he became more and more of a symbol of all that's right and good in art and life and friendship and all the issues that, you know, you turn to him for.

I should say, in the programme maker's defence, they follow that little clip of Neilil tennant talking by playing david bowie's rock and roll suits which is uh which i think is is where he was heading from so i thought it would be nice if you said steven that you know 1900 uh wild was nothing and well the good news is that in 1923, he returned via the offices of a medium called Hester Travers Smith. She published a book called Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. Wow.

Which I can tell you, I'm no expert, but I question the veracity of this. You silly, spoiled, sceptical. 146 pages of pseudo-Wildian wit. Great. Or Wildian pseudo-wit. Anyway.

But this being the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce. And when this episode goes out, it will be very close to Bloomsday. I noticed that one of the questions the medium asked Oscar in 1922 or three was, what is your opinion of Ulysses by James Joyce? I thought we might end by hearing that.

This is what Oscar Wilde thought, Oscar Wilde, quote-unquote, thought of Ulysses. Yes, I have smeared my fingers with that vast work. It has given me one exquisite moment of amusement. I gather that if I hope to retain my reputation as an intelligent shade, open to new ideas, I must peruse this volume.

It's obviously wild. You can't doubt it for a moment, Stephen. Peruse. Oh, my. It's so pooterish. It is pooterish. That's right. It is a singular matter that a countryman of mine should have produced this great bulk of filth.

You may smile at me for uttering this when you reflect that in the eyes of the world I am a tainted creature, but at least I had a sense of the values of things on the terrestrial globe. It goes on from there. But what I thought, just as a postscript to that, Joyce was so delighted with that review

that he encoded a review of it in Finnegan's Wake. There is a section of Finnegan's Wake where they tap the table and Oscar comes through and expresses disapproval of the book you are reading at that moment. So I think a victory to joyce on points there really i'm afraid that's where we must leave the inimitable oscar huge thanks to stephen for generously sharing his thoughts insights memories about this extraordinary text to nicky birch for putting us at ease with her oral aptitude and to unbound for smuggling

in the dante and the flow bear you can download all 162 previous episodes of Backlisted plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted We aim to survive without paid for advertising

Your generosity helps us to do that. All patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for considerably less than Oscar spent on Bosie in a single evening lock listeners get two extra locklisted a month. Our very own hotel suite where we three recline, smoke

pose and turn, find phrases of three recline, smoke, pose and turn fine phrases of praise regarding books, films, shows and music who detained us in the previous fortnight. Stephen, before we go, is there anything you feel we haven't covered that you would like to say about Oscar Wilde? Here's a thought. Again, pondering on what Wilde, as he lay dying in Paris, may or may not have thought that posterity would do for him

or say about him. His body lies in Père Lachaise, the famous cemetery in Paris, and there's the sarcophagus by Jacob Epstein, and it's really wonderful. But a few years ago, you may recall, the Irish government and the French department responsible for the upkeep of Père Lachaise raised a sum of money to restore that monument. And the reason it needed restoring was that the surface of the marble had become corroded by the number of kisses. Daily, people go there.

It's like Abbey Road in London where you see all those messages to John, Paul, George and Ringo on the wall of the studios. It's the same thing. They come and they want to commune with Oscar. He stands for something for people all over the world. And he'll cry when you see the little post-it notes and torn pages from the Metro carnets that are stuck in there, all saying, they killed you, Oscar. I cry for you every day. Oscar, you help me. Oscar, you do this. And people have a knowledge and a relationship with him,

which is quite rare in all art and literature. That was wonderful. I think John and I and all the listeners, we're so grateful to you for making the time and coming in and giving us real insight into this wonderful text. One last thought. You know your original question about the letter. It strikes me, listening to you, Stephen,

that actually what he produced in De Profundis is a secular gospel, isn't it? It's a religious text that isn't religious. It isn't self-help. He's not setting himself up as a philosopher. He's created something that is so original and to use a word that he uses himself it's antinomian which is to say

it doesn't lay down laws of codes of behaviour but it gives you an insight into the very nature of one's soul and the fact that it didn't solve all his problems that he did end up for everybody, every broken person out there, he is a kind of... he is a secular saint, I think. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks, Johnny. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.

And we'd also like to thank Reduced Listening for the extract from their programme, Oscar Wilde's Less From The Inside, producers Jodie Wardman and Jeremy Mortimer. Thank you, guys. I often turn to this paragraph. It's the last paragraph of the Oscar Wilde biography by Richard Ellman, an American academic.

We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria's. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us, still a towering figure, laughing and weeping with parables and paradoxes

so generous, so amusing, and so right. episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.