Tear Down Reading Gaol

"Prison life makes one see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns one to stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusions of a life in constant motion. They revolve with life and contribute to its unreality. We who are immobile both see and know."

Excerpt from the Preface of De Profundis

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. 

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol," Part V by Oscar Wilde


Two BBC News articles, from May 30 and June 6, reported that a building now derelict that was formerly known and utilized as Reading Jail faces an uncertain future: "The Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which owns the Grade II listed jail, announced last month it would sell the site. It said it was working with the local authority to look at alternative uses for the site, including housing. It added it wanted the site to 'get value for money for taxpayers'."

This news item would not have attracted attention (it wouldn't have been in the news in the first place) if a cell in Reading Jail hadn't been occupied between 1895 and 1897 by Oscar Wilde, imprisoned at hard labor for "gross indecency" (i.e., homosexuality, which was illegal in England until 1967). Now people and groups in Reading and around the world are trying to have the site protected as some kind of national heritage center.(1)

The same day I read the BBC report, Reuters News Service issued a report that "Public education officials in Colorado are considering a plan to tear down and rebuild Columbine High School, saying the site remains a “source of inspiration” for potential gun violence 20 years after a mass shooting there left 15 people dead."(2) Strange, how different people in different places think so differently about the disposition of sites of great suffering and injustice. Reading Jail is becoming a place of pilgrimage for LGBT people, just like Oscar Wilde's tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. But it appears that, because of their interest, the derelict old jail may soon be protected from demolition and turned into a tourist attraction.

Look at the remaining buildings at Auschwitz in Poland. It was the location of a Death Camp at which the Nazi Final Solution sought to, and nearly succeded in, exterminating every European Jew. The whole complex is protected and no one would think of pulling it down. It seems to me that Reading Jail, too, stands there rather like the remaining buildings at Auschwitz - as a monument to injustice and human suffering. But the injustice carried out upon Oscar Wilde in that place, irrespective of the totality of the suffering that was carried out there upon all of its far less famous inmates, whom Wilde describes in moving detail in his great long poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," that was written and published in France after his release, is personal, applicable to one man, and not to the more than one million people who perished at Auschwitz.

George Orwell once wrote that "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp."(3) The Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes, but they didn't have time enough to complete the task. The preservation of the Nazi concentration camps (as well as the labor camps and death camps) as reminders of human depravity has its own special importance, especially when half of the millennials recently polled could not identify Auschwitz from photographs.

I think there is something distastefully fetishistic about the campaign to preserve Reading Jail - something sadomasochistic, like the Christian symbol of the cross, which is an instrument of torture. But if we could consult Oscar Wilde himself about the issue of the disposition of Reading Jail, is there any doubt that he would enthusiastically recommend what the people in Colorado are considering - that the offending structure should be razed to the ground? And that perhaps the site should instead be devoted to joy in the form of a peaceful park or a children's playground? A plaque should be all that is necessary to remind visitors to the site of what once stood there, commemorating its historical (and literary) importance, without having to go to the ridiculous expense of maintaining the decrepit building, which must by now be in danger of collapse.


(1) "Campaigners fight to save Oscar Wilde prison in Reading". Between January and March 1897, Wilde wrote "De Profundis" ("from the depths"), a letter to Sir Alfred Douglas.
(2) Reuters.
(3) "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali," George Orwell: Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

Numerology

I turned 61 today - or yesterday. I live in the Far East, but my thoughts are somewhere in North America. A friend wished me a happy birthday and then said "come home". I will, I will. But first there's this rough patch to get through, this unnecessary detour. It's unavoidable, can't be helped. But for now, time to reflect on my progress.

Poets always put a patina on it, getting old, I mean. Like découpage. Two poets I have long admired talked about the common perceptions of age, without really feeling them in themselves. Thomas Hardy saw how his spirit, still willing, had to contend with his flesh, which had altered:

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’

For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Hardy felt betrayed, by the changes in others and the changes in his physical appearance. But the incongruity of his still youthful passion against the image in his mirror was too much for him, too absurd to accept. Only one can be true, but which one?


Philip Larkin, who was a great admirer of Hardy, felt deeply the difference between his life and the lives of others; a disconnect between what was expected of his life and what his life had amounted to. Not by regret, but by the refusal of others, people he once knew, to imagine their own lives otherwise.

‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Ah, but Larkin was afraid of dying - not so much death as the moment when he would die. He anticipated it, just as Shakespeare had in Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

And Shakespeare died at 52! "Death is but the shifting wind that fills the living sail." I wrote these words when I was 20. How did I know it at 20? "The idea is to die young as late as possible," wrote the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. And Oscar Wilde's lovely line, "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." And poor Oscar was dead at 46!

I feel myself to be exactly the same at 61 as I was at 20 - as I was at 10! One's age is unimportant.

A Decent Factory

Finding myself reading, once again, the film criticism of Stanley Kauffman from the year 2005, and coming across a review of a documentary called A Decent Factory, about a Nokia cellphone assembly factory in China, I paused at a passage in which Kauffmann poses a challenge to one of Karl Marx's better-known observations on Labor. Kauffmann mentions the working conditions in the factory:

"As far as the workers' comments are concerned, the only complaint we hear is about the food, which they find poor. They often slip out at night to buy food. And one woman reports a fight that another of the women had with a rough-tongued female supervisor. The one true grievance we do not hear from any of the women: we learn it from one of the bosses in a matter-of-fact way. The average pay is only about half the legal minimum wage. The factory had been built in China because labor is cheap, and it is being further cheapened. When the inspectors later report this fact back in Finland, management promises to do something about it.

"As the film progresses, expectation of exposé dwindles. Half salary is hardly a trifling matter, but the factory seems well enough run and is apparently a haven for some of the young women whose homes are a lot less attractive. Why, then, is the picture chilling? Because it is a calm reminder of an inevitability. The sight of long lines of young women doing tiny bits of attachment work or packing hour after hour, day after day, is saddening. The fact that the factory conditions are decent, as the title says wryly, makes it even sadder. Marx said that the alienation of labor--the gap between the worker and his work--is an evil of capitalism, but this is too limited: factories like this one flourish everywhere under every system. Marx's percept is not a charge against a system but a condition of modernity. Thousands of factories around the world where the attaching and packing go on and on--it's like Chaplin's Modern Times without Charlie."(1)

I'm not certain whether or not Kauffmann is being disingenuous here. He knew enough about Marx's idea of alienation to recognize it in the Nokia factory, but he must've known that China is only nominally a Marxist society. Finland (or, for that matter, the USA) is closer to being a Marxist society that communist China. Besides, China has embraced market capitalism on an unprecedented scale in order to expand its economy. This has created, as Marx predicted, enormous inequalities in China that didn't exist before - inequalities between people who want nothing more than a decent life and people who want impossibly more than they will never need.

Marx put it succinctly: a worker in a capitalist society "does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs."

Marx knew that as long as the nature of work, which reduces the worker himself to a commodity, remains the same, work will forever be reduced to an utterly depersonalized and soul-destroying repetition of manual tasks. Almost seven years ago, I wrote about Oscar Wilde's brilliant pamphlet, which is utterly forgotten today, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":

Wilde's vision of Socialism is unorthodox and often unrealistic. At times, when he discusses work and the freedom from work that he believes Socialism promises, he sounds like Eric Hoffer's remark about the modern "worldwide revulsion for work. To the new generation, 'la dolce vita' is not a life of plenty but a life of as little effort as possible."

Wilde believed that some time in the future all menial labor will be performed by machines, and men and women would be completely free from toil, suffering, and pain. He seems to think that work itself, and not just the motive behind it, will be eradicated under Socialism. I don't think that any socialist thinks this way. Work, which is mostly mindless toil, even for the middle class, will attain its true purpose once the motive behind it (making a living) is changed. Work, I think, is essential to living when it places the individual in the position of realizing that he is not simply an individual, but a part of a huge organism that is more than the sum of its parts. Soldiers find this out, whether they serve in combat or not. And its why they are willing to lay down their lives. They recognize probably more directly than anyone else the meaning of human brotherhood.

Marx elaborates: "Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."

Wilde concludes his essay in quite uncharted territory:

"It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development."

Wilde even defends his "scheme" against the charge of Utopianism:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 4, 2005. It is well known that Chaplin had "communist sympathies." In Modern Times, there is a scene in which a truck carrying a load of lumber passes him and the red flag hanging off the end of the load falls on the ground in front of Charlie. He picks it up and, waving it, chases after the truck. Just then a large group of communists waving their red flags rounds the corner and marches right behind Charlie. The police arrive and Charlie is arrested.
(2) "A Brotherhood of One" May 10, 2012.

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.