People whose desire is solely for self-realization never know where they are going. They can't know . . . to recognize 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?

Oscar Wilde

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Outcasts Always Mourn: Wilde's De Profundis


A few years ago, I attended a film screening and Q&A session with legendary German director Werner Herzog. Events that solicit audience questions always make me a bit nervous . . . I assume that a good half of the questions are going to be mortifying, inane, and generally unanswerable. Listening to someone ask a ridiculous question is a bit like watching someone fall down in an Olympic sport; you are so thoroughly embarrassed for them that you try to melt away into the fixtures around you. If you are not there to see it, perhaps the failure is less painful for everyone involved.


The first few questions Herzog fielded were standard fare: questions about his past films; questions about his future projects; and questions about his directorial method. The first question of the evening that really stood out came from a woman interested in his documentaries. Why, she wanted to know, did these always have to focus on people who were so "out there?" Was it not possible to make a compelling documentary about a normal human being? 


For anyone who is familiar with Herzog's documentaries, this question is not entirely unfounded. He made a documentary (Grizzly Man) about Timothy Treadwell, the man who found personal redemption - and death - by communing with Grizzly bears; he made a documentary (The White Diamond) about Dr. Graham Dorrington, the man who sought to assuage guilt through airship explorations of the Guyanese rainforest; and he made a documentary (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) about Dieter Dengler, the German born Navy pilot who escaped a Pathet Lao detainment camp. 


Although such a question is not without foundation, its hostile and accusatory tone troubled me. Why, she seemed to shriek, couldn't Herzog focus on something more seemly than these social outcasts? 



Herzog's answer, which came after a lengthy pause, began with a story about the making of his film Fitzcarraldo. The film was shot in the Amazonian rainforest, in an area that was both remote and dangerous. The cast and crew were warned upon arrival that the area was home to several dangerous types of plant and animal life. The bite from one particular snake alone could cause death within five minutes. One day, a member of the crew was sent out to chop down a tree; he went alone, with merely the chainsaw needed to do the job. In the process of cutting down the tree, he was bitten in the calf by the deadly snake. He knew that he was more than five minutes away from camp, and medical assistance, and knew that his death was imminent. In Herzog's words, his response was automatic: he used the chainsaw to cut off his own leg (to stop the venom from spreading), and limped/dragged himself back to camp. His actions saved his life. 


For Herzog, the moral of the story was clear: only through crisis does one discover who she truly is, and what she is capable of becoming. The individuals profiled in his films -- Timothy Treadwell, Dr. Graham Dorrington, and Dieter Dengler among them -- were not freaks; they were not abnormal people living abnormal lives. They were interesting subjects because they were normal people who had been touched by crisis and who had adapted to meet it. Whether their reactions were right or wrong, normal or abnormal, was not for us to judge. 


The notion of suffering as a transformative experience is not unique to Herzog. Many individuals, and many religions, have explained suffering as a way for the individual to gain new insight into herself and the world around her. One is distilled through crisis into her true, essential self.



While imprisoned in Reading Gaol for "gross indecency" (read homosexual acts), Oscar Wilde became an adherent of this belief. As he wrote: "while to propose to become a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become" (De Profundis, p. 182).


Wilde had suffered a great deal by the time these lines were penned: he had lost his wife and sons, forever; his entire estate had been rooted through and sold to pay off his creditors; his criminal trial had made him an international joke and led to his incarceration; and the man he loved, Lord Alfred Douglas, was anything but a source of support and solace. 


The route by which Wilde ended up in Reading Gaol is a circuitous one, worthy of a Greek tragedy all its own. For some time, Wilde had maintained a close friendship with a much younger man: Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, objected to the relationship; in one show of his displeasure, he left a derogatory calling card for Wilde at his club. While the club porter believed it read "To Oscar Wilde, ponce and somdomite," the Marquess had most likely tried to write "To Oscar Wilde, posing [as a] somdomite." (Miss Merricat would, at this point, simply like to interject one thing. If you are going to leave someone an offensive calling card, shouldn't you at least try to spell words correctly in it? Just a thought.)



Douglas was infuriated by his father's actions and pressured the irate Wilde to sue for libel. To Douglas, this was merely another opportunity to vilify and attack the father he despised; he believed that the libel suit would be an easy victory for Wilde, and even suggested that his family would pay Wilde's attorneys fees. Against the advice of his other friends and family, Wilde proceeded with the lawsuit.


In England, as in the U.S., truth is a defense to a libel action. The Marquess of Queensberry's attorney therefore argued that Wilde was a sodomite, and amassed documents and witnesses which would attest to this "fact." Unfortunately, Wilde's own testimony helped, rather than hindered, the defendant's case. When asked whether he had ever kissed Walter Grainger, a youth he was acquainted with, Wilde responded: "Oh, dear no.  He was a peculiarly plain boy.  He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly." 


In reading the transcripts of Wilde's libel trial (a full transcript exists in Merlin Holland's fascinating book, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, and portions are available online here) one sees the extent to which Wilde relied on his charm, humor, and artistic skill to plead his case. Many of his replies are glib attempts at humor, lines better left to a fictional entity than to a human being whose character - and future - were on trial. It is almost as if Wilde, brilliant man that he was, failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation he was in. 



Not surprisingly, Wilde lost his libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry. He was held up to the entire world as a middle aged aesthete, a fan of rent boys and decadence, and a man inappropriately attached to the Marquess's son, Alfred. The criminal trial for "gross indecency" followed close behind; Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years imprisonment. 


But imprisonment was not all that Wilde was forced to bear. Heavily in debt before his libel action, the resulting attorney's fees and costs forced him into bankruptcy. The sale of his estate was far from the orderly process it would have been in this day and age; Wilde's notoriety caused buyers to bust through locked doors and cabinets and take items which had never been intended for auction. The sale of his possessions - including his vast personal library - became another way for the vengeful Marquess, and an equally spiteful public, to punish the man and his behavior. (For a great discussion of the sale of Wilde's possessions, see Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.)


British society had also deemed Wilde unfit to be a father, making his two sons - Cyril and Vyvyan - the final losses Oscar was forced to bear. Wilde was sent to Reading Gaol in 1895; he never saw his children again. Although Victorian society undoubtedly saw this as an appropriate way to punish a moral "degenerate," it had a devastating effect on both Wilde and his sons. The extent of the harm, and its impact on his sons, is the subject of Vyvyan's book, Son of Oscar Wilde (Vyvyan and Cyril were raised with their mother's last name, Holland).


From being one of England's most preeminent playwrights, Wilde had become a pariah. And in his jail cell, away from the people and things he loved, he suffered: "wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb" (De Profundis, p. 152 ). He found himself trapped in the "one very long moment" that is suffering; rather than experience the passage of time and season, he felt himself "circle round one centre of pain" (De Profundis, p. 141). Suicide was an option he frequently contemplated; although he eventually made up his "mind to live," he planned to "wear gloom as a king wears purple . . . [and] to turn whatever house [he] entered into a house of mourning" (De Profundis, p. 159).



The man he had been - prior to the libel action and its fallout - had shied away from suffering. He used to "live entirely for pleasure," and "shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind" (De Profundis, p. 160). As he testified in the libel case:


"I think that the realization of oneself is the prime aim  of life, and to realize oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain."  


His two years in Reading Gaol were to change his viewpoint entirely. Through his grief, anger, and despair he came to see suffering as a profound form of "revelation." Not only did suffering enable one to see "things one never discerned before" but suffering was, in and of itself, "the supreme emotion of which man is capable" (De Profundis, p. 160). Whereas "joy and laughter" could be used as masks to hide a "temperament, coarse, hard and callous" sorrow was completely without guile:


"Other things may be illusions of the eye or of the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain." (De Profundis, p. 161)


Although one's suffering may seem endless, it is not without meaning. Suffering provides the individual with a "starting point for fresh development;" it spurs on personal growth and self realization. For Wilde, self realization required him to "free [himself] from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world" (De Profundis, p. 153). He cannot turn away from his past and the choices he made: "to deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life" and "is no less than a denial of the soul" (De Profundis, p. 156). The only feasible option is total acceptance; he must "make everything that has happened to [him] good for [him]" (De Profundis, p. 155).  


Wilde recounts these thoughts in De Profundis, the manuscript he drafted while finishing out his prison term. Structured as a letter to his one time companion, Lord Alfred Douglas (nicknamed Bosie), it reflects both the wealth of pain he had experienced as well as his own attempts at coming to terms with the past. As Wilde was only allowed a single sheet of paper at a time, he never had the opportunity to edit or revise the manuscript. In reading through the letter one traces not only the passage of time but also the course of Wilde's personal growth and self realization.



The first pages of De Profundis clearly illustrate Wilde's anger at Douglas, the man whom he loved (by all accounts, extravagantly). Douglas was a decadent child, prone to tantrums and threats, and - in Wilde's opinion - "not worthy of the love" he was given. Wilde loved him not because he was deserving of such love but because love is not the result of a computational process or a lengthy pro and con list: "the aim of love is to love[,] no more and no less" (De Profundis, p. 134). Love does not ask whether the beloved is a worthy recipient; it is merely there to be felt and expressed.


Although Wilde claims that he "ruined himself," and was "the spendthrift of [his] own genius," he clearly blames Douglas as well (De Profundis, p. 151). He writes that he tried to break off his relationship with the volatile Douglas many times, but was always coaxed back; his nature was simply too kind to shun a man of whom he was so fond. Wilde suggests that this same desire to please Douglas prompted him to pursue the foolhardy libel action. But not for Bosie's unquenchable desire to clash with his father, Wilde may have been a free man still.


But then, "the gods are strange[; i]t is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us." One can be brought to "ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving" (De Profundis, p. 119). Even our finest feelings and "most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for" (De Profundis, p. 200).


Portions of De Profundis are the bitter recriminations of one who has loved - as the maxim holds - not wisely but too well. The reader is privy to all of Wilde's complaints against Bosie and his behavior: his childishness; his profligacy (with Wilde's money); his violent temper; and his insensitivity. At one point, Wilde spent days nursing an ill Bosie back to health only to catch the same sickness himself; rather than return the kindness he was shown, Bosie left an ill Wilde to fend for himself while he went out to party and gamble away Wilde's money. Worse still, he later informed Wilde that "when you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting" (De Profundis, p. 117).



The litany of charges against Douglas  - and himself - are part and parcel of Wilde's attempt to come to terms with what has happened. Wilde's desire is for acceptance; his goal is to use the suffering he has experienced as a guide to new and better forms of self realization.  He must no longer be the "real fool . . . he who does not know himself." Only "that [which] is realized is right" (De Profundis, p. 98).


Wilde encourages Bosie to see his own role in what occurred and be shamed by it:


"In your own eyes, and some day, you will have to think of your conduct; you are not, cannot be, quite satisfied at the way in which things have turned out. Secretly you must think of yourself with a good deal of shame. A brazen face is a capital thing to show the world, but now and then when you are alone, and have no audience, you have, I suppose, to take the mask off for breathing purposes. Else, indeed, you would be stifled" (De Profundis, p. 193).


Wilde subjects Bosie to more than just reprobation and guilt; there are also moments in which Wilde is seen to encourage and support the man he once loved. At its conclusion, De Profundis instructs Douglas not to be afraid of the past: "time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought" that the imagination can transcend. Our minds can make of the world what we will, reality constrained solely by the reach of our own thoughts. "At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been" (De Profundis, p. 164).


Of course, Wilde was also providing hope for his own future. His past and its sufferings - a subject of painful common knowledge - could not be allowed to limit and define his future. He needed to forge a "fresh mode of self-realization" out of all that had occurred, to harness his pain and fashion from it something which provided hope and meaning (De Profundis, p. 153). And through this new mode of understanding, he hoped to one day "learn how to be happy" again (De Profundis, p. 153).



For an example of how to live, Wilde looked to Christ. Although not a religious man - Wilde was too much of an individualist to believe in set dogma - he saw in Christ a rare form of individuality and self awareness. Christ was "not merely the supreme individualist, but [ . . . ] the first individualist in history" (De Profundis, p. 169). 


To Wilde, Christ represented the ideal artistic life:


"his morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be[, . . . ] his justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be[, . . . and] that which is the very keynote of romantic art was to him the proper basis of natural life" (De Profundis, p. 177).


Ultimately, the life of Christ becomes an example for how to live in the world. Wilde cannot hope to return to the type of life he led before -- the life of the successful artist, father, and pleasure seeker. His only option is to fashion for himself a new sort of existence, one that turns the horrors of the past into lessons that enable the future.


The future cannot be plotted out with scientific exactness nor with the banality of a to-do list. One must seek self realization and happiness, but one must do so knowing that the "soul of a man is unknowable" (De Profundis, p. 180). Wilde hopes to regain a sense of joy in the future; he also hopes to produce great art again. And while he prays that the "orbit of his own soul" includes passages through both of these destinations, life offers no guarantees (De Profundis, p. 180). De Profundis ends with Wilde's future all potentiality -- the pain and anguish melted down and looking to be recast into hopes and dreams.


Whether Wilde's reactions to his circumstances were right or wrong, absurd or rational, is - as Herzog would say - not for us to decide. As the suffering was his to bear, the decisions were his to make. All we can do, as the audience, is focus our eyes on his orbit across time and space and watch.




[Above quotes are from: De Profundis and Other Writings, published by Penguin Classics in 1986.]











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