Dead Letters: The Gallery

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

I went to the Old Bailey in the spring of 1895 to watch a man be destroyed, and I am ashamed to say I went eagerly. So did everyone. That was the nature of the thing.

Oscar Wilde was, at that moment, the most successful playwright in London. The Importance of Being Earnest was selling out every night a few streets away, and the man who wrote it was on trial, and the city could not decide which fact it found more delicious. I was sent to cover the proceedings for a syndicate that wanted colour — the wit, the spectacle, the famous tongue that had made fools of so many dull men now defending itself in a courtroom. I was good at colour. I went to get it.

The background, briefly, for those who do not know it. Wilde had sued the Marquess of Queensberry — the father of the young man Wilde loved — for criminal libel, after Queensberry left a card at Wilde's club accusing him, in a misspelled scrawl, of being a sodomite. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. Queensberry's defence had spent months assembling witnesses: working-class young men, hotel servants, chambermaids prepared to testify about what they had seen. When it became clear the defence intended to call them, Wilde's own case collapsed, and within hours of its collapse a warrant was issued for his arrest. The hunter became the hunted in the space of a single afternoon. He was tried twice more. The second jury could not agree. The third convicted him.

I was in the gallery for most of it. The gallery was full every day. People queued in the street for seats. They brought lunches. There were women in good hats who laughed at the cross-examinations the way one laughs at a play, which I suppose, to them, it was. I sat among them with my notebook and I wrote down the clever things, because the clever things were what I had been sent for, and for the first several days Wilde supplied them generously. He treated the prosecutor's questions as straight lines. He was funny. The gallery loved him for it, right up until the moment they didn't.

Then came the afternoon I have never been able to write about until now.

The prosecutor read aloud a line from a poem written by the young man Wilde loved — a poem that referred to "the love that dare not speak its name" — and asked Wilde to explain what it meant. It was a trap. The question was designed to make him incriminate himself, or to make him squirm, or to make him stop being clever for once in his life.

Wilde stood. And he did not make a joke.

He said that the love in question was a great affection of an elder man for a younger, the kind that had existed between David and Jonathan, the kind Plato made the basis of his philosophy, the kind found in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. He said it was beautiful, and fine, and the noblest form of affection, and that there was nothing unnatural about it. He said it was misunderstood in this century, and that because it was misunderstood, a man could be placed where he now stood. He said it repeatedly, and he said it without a single ornament, and the room was completely silent while he said it.

And then the gallery — the same gallery that had come with its lunches to laugh — broke into applause.

I have been in a great many rooms where important things happened. I have never been in another where the spectators applauded the man they had come to see torn apart. It did not save him. Nothing was going to save him. But for the length of that answer, the wittiest man in England stopped being witty and became something else, something I did not have a word for in my notebook and do not have one now, and the people who had come to be entertained recognised it, and could not help themselves.

I wrote it all down. I had my colour. I had the best copy of my career — the famous tongue, the trap, the speech, the applause. I went back to my room and I sat down to write the dispatch the syndicate wanted, the one that would run alongside the others, the ones with the chambermaids and the stained sheets and the snickering accounts of a great man's ruin.

I could not do it.

I filed instead a short piece about the crowd. About the women in good hats and the queue in the street and the lunches and the laughter. I wrote about the gallery, because the gallery was the story I could bear to tell — a city that had come to feast on a man and got, for one unscheduled moment, a glimpse of what it was feasting on. The syndicate ran it small. They wanted the chambermaids. Everyone wanted the chambermaids.

Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour. It broke his health and most of the rest of him. He wrote two more things of permanent value — a long letter from prison and a poem about a hanging — and then he died in Paris in 1900, in a cheap room, in debt, at the age of forty-six. The plays still run. The gallery, in one form or another, is still full.

I had the quote. The best one I ever heard in a courtroom. I have kept it for sixty years because the men who wanted it would only have used it to laugh.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.