Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
Thus A.E. Housman on the jailing of Oscar Wilde. Wilde was freed from prison a hundred years ago. A new film of his life, starring Stephen Fry, is released tomorrow (October 17th), and has sparked new interest in the man, and in his work.
Wilde was a man of extravagant talent and grandiloquent style. A combination of Eric Cantona, Brendan Behan, Woody Allen and Liz Hurley, according to one recent commentator. It s said his last words were: It s the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go.
No better man than the droll wit Fry to depict that gay indomitability. But there was more to Wilde, too, and we must wait and see what sort of fist Mr. Fry makes of the other aspects of his hero s persona.
Wilde was a socialist. Not many people not enough, anyway know that. He proclaimed himself a socialist years before there were Labour Parties in Britain and Ireland to drain the word of meaning.
Wilde had no personal experience of working-class life. He came from a comfortable, Dublin nationalist background, whence he moved with casual brilliance through Oxford, and onwards to the London literary society which he was to scandalise, dominate and delight for some 15 years.
He wasn t the only successful writer in London in his time to make the connection between artistic creation and political radicalism. But he was the only one to put his literary celebrity at the service of his politics and to carry his convictions onto the street.
Wilde marched alongside Elanor Marx, Ben Tillet and Tom Mann at the head of a huge demonstration to Hyde Park in support of the 1889 docks strike, one of the key events in the development of British and Irish trade unionism. And he was the only literary figure in London to speak up for and sign a petition in support of the Haymarket Martyrs, five radicals sentenced to hang in Chicago. His association with the mob and endorsement of an 1890s equivalent of the Birmingham Six, horrified the establishment.
It wasn t just his homosexuality, but the fact that it was combined, so to speak, with political attitudes of that sort, which was to have him denounced by the press at the time of his trial as the most depraved man in England .
His essay, The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, published in 1892, sold tens of thousands of copies and, at gatherings organised by socialist and trade union groups, was read out in instalments to illiterate workmen and women in east London.
The Soul Of Man Under Socialism is as much about the necessity of artistic freedom as about economic organisation. In parts, it is very much of its time. But it also contains passages which could have been written here and now.
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments the good have inflicted. A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than by the occasional occurrence of crime.
And in days like these when journalistic dolts insist that we put dead princesses and brain-dead popstars on pedestals because they have emoted in public, and that we join with the multitudes in gratitude for gifts bestowed upon them, is it not exhilarating to read: We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. But the best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are right to be so. Charity is a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalists to tyrannise over people s inward lives .
To emphasise Wilde s neglected socialism is not to deny that it was mainly because of his sexuality that he was dragged down in the end. Although he had been sexually attracted to males since adolescence, Wilde s first homosexual act came in 1896, when he was 32. He then made up for lost time. It is far from coincidental that his creativity flowed in fullest spate in this period. But this circumstance ensured, too, that when he came to trial, his prosecutor, the future UVF leader Edward Carson, was able to call a succession of low-lifes, some from the gutters, others from great houses, some telling the truth, others bribed to lie, to ensure his destruction.
Now tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
and the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.
It is commonly assumed that when Wilde went to jail, it was the end of him. And it is true there was scarcely a friend for him in the glittering world when he emerged in 1897, crushed in body and bruised in spirit. He was to die three years later in poverty and loneliness in Paris.
But his prison writings were not mere marginalia on the last chapter of his life. It s interesting that they are so little known in his own country, where jail journals of questionable value are celebrated.
Wilde suffered horribly in prison, but there is a sometime serenity about him there, too. I have no desire to complain, he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis. One of the many lessons one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
The letters to friends which have been published are full of delicate feeling. Two long letters he wrote to the Daily Chronicle suggest no self-pity but concern for children and other innocents behind bars, and for the way the prison system can brutalise the jailers as well as the jailed. And, of course, his prison period yielded what some account his greatest work, The Ballad Of Reading Gaol, a cri de coeur not at all against his own imprisonment but against the death penalty, and against all prisons, and all punishment.
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long . . .
This too I know and wise it were
If each could know the same
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame.
If Wilde had been a fighter for Irish freedom only, he d be better and more accurately remembered. But he was a freedom-fighter for the world, a wilde man altogether.
Jim Morrison is buried in the same cemetery in Paris, but Oscar opened wider the doors of perception. n