Running to Ruin

This week I was reading a conversation in Forbes with Rupert Everett about Oscar Wilde. Everett has just directed and stars in The Happy Prince, a film that concentrates on Wilde's last three years.

Why did you want to make a film focused on the final, tragic years of Oscar Wilde's life?

Oscar Wilde had an appointment with the gutter from very early on. Self-destruction always seems like something made up for books, because you can't really imagine why we deliberately ruin things for ourselves. But it does happen and he had it very strongly. As he himself said, "why does one run towards ruin?" He was a big star, the most famous man in London, the life and soul of the Café Royal. And it's fascinating to me, how big stars become blind ... I wanted to create the impression that it happens to us all at some point — we do something so wrong that the universe freezes around us and the whole world watches in horror as you make this move you won't ever be able to retrieve yourself from.(1)

I'm not sure specifically what Everett meant that Wilde had done wrong that made the universe recoil in horror. Was it his open homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, his decision to sue Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, that Marquess of Queensberry) for libel when he called Wilde a "sodomite", or was it Wilde's refusal, after his libel case collapsed and he was going to be charged with sodomy (illegal in 1897), to flee to safety in France?

In any case, Wilde was tried and eventually found guilty. The judge sentenced him (with extreme prejudice) to the maximum penalty allowed by law: two years in prison at hard labor. So, the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, who had been the toast of London literary society just weeks before, was escorted first to Newgate Prison and then to Reading Gaol to serve out his sentence. At last permitted books and paper, he wrote a 50,000 word letter to Lord Alfred, which was published in expurgated form in England as De Profundis, and the long poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

On his release, Wilde finally went to live in France (two years too late) under an assumed name. Reading the conclusion of Richard Ellmann's magnificent biography of Wilde, he relates that at the end of November 1900, Wilde was stricken with what was then called meningitis and died. Ellmann speculated that he could possibly have died from tertiary syphilis - a disease he contracted at Oxford from a (female) prostitute. Those present at the moment of his death reported that an extremely noxious smelling black liquid oozed from all of his orafices.


But I go back to the words of Rupert Everett: that Wilde had destroyed himself, that he had been running toward ruin for some time when ruin descended on him. Someone close to me recently told me something in an email that filled me with apoplectic indignation. I get that way whenever someone accuses me of doing something that I didn't do. Something to do with my seeming to make the same great mistake in my life in 2007 that I made in 1995 - by leaving the Navy in 1995 and coming straight to the Philippines (to be married) only to realize within a month that I had made a huge mistake and I needed help getting myself back home to the States. Then, 12 years later, divorced, I did it again - leaving my sister's house in Alaska and coming back to the Philippines, only to (within weeks) realize I had made a huge mistake a second time - though under entirely different circumstances. This person close to me admitted that if they had helped me in 1995 to get myself out of the mess I'd made, they would be reluctant to help me again. So, I'm the boy who cried wolf.

In Proverbs, it says, As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. But I have often said, after the fact of course when it was too obvious to overlook, that I am my own fool and I will make my own folly. My own folly. My sister liked to say that she didn't "suffer fools," as in another Proverb: Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him./Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. This meant that, especially towards the unexpected end of her life, my sister managed to drive some friends and potential friends away from her.

But Blake said that if the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man. And I have persisted. But have I become wise? Yes, but after the event. Giacomo Casanova, writing his memoirs in his old age, concluded that the wisdom that age had brought him had stolen his youth into the bargain. What good was wisdom when it came too late?

I have paid for my latest mistake by being exiled to an island in a foreign country for 10 years of my life. Not at hard labor. But I have grown old, which is immeasurably harder than Reading Gaol's treadmill. "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." So wrote Oscar Wilde, who didn't live long enough to see old age. I haven't had a medical examination since I was 49. I am losing all of my teeth. And an as yet undisclosed portion of the small government pension upon which I have depended all these years is about to be taken away from me.

The Greeks believed in the Furies, a divine force that intervenes at the moment in our lives when we somehow make up our minds that the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to us, transgressing laws that we never suspected were written down somewhere. Are our own lives not our own property, to do with as we see fit? I am learning that they are not.

44 years ago, Philip Larkin had this to say about "A Life With a Hole In It":

When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your own way
A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) . . .

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get.  Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly.  Years.



One of my all-time favorite movie lines occurs in Cutter's Way, in which the late John Heard, who plays a disabled Vietnam vet, looks into his alcoholic wife's eyes and says, "Some day in Tahiti we'll look back on all this and laugh." At this stage, and for quite some time now, I would settle for Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Secaucus, New Jersey - anywhere in the Contiguous United States from which to look back on this and laugh. Some day.


(1) Forbes, "Drinking Absinthe With Rupert Everett (And Talking About Oscar Wilde)" by Adam Morganstern, October 15, 2018.