Oscar Wilde’s Escape from the Culture of Death

A series examining the newly released book by journalist and author Melanie McDonagh titled "Converts."

“We are all in the gutter,” says Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, “but some of us are looking at the stars.” These words, spoken by a fictional character in a comedy written for the stage, are nonetheless applicable to all of us. We are all in the gutter, but only some of us are looking at the stars. Many of us are face down in the gutter without any interest in the stars. A decadent few are so addicted to being face down in the gutter that they have forgotten that anything beautiful exists beyond the squalid and sordid world in which they exist. For these unhappy few, nothing exists except the gutter.

These thoughts, inspired by one of Oscar Wilde’s wittiest lines, serve as a curtain-raiser to the discussion of Wilde and the English Decadents in Melanie McDonagh’s book, Converts.

I began my own book, Literary Converts, with a chapter on Wilde, who was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed in 1900. Mrs. McDonagh goes one better, both literally and literarily, by beginning with a chapter on the 1890s, the decade of Decadence, which had seen Wilde’s rise and fall. This is appropriate, not merely because it sets the scene and gives the context for Wilde’s conversion, but because it illustrates that the English Decadence, like the French Decadence that preceded it, was a fertile ground for conversion.

Mrs. McDonagh is duly deferential to the influence of the French Decadence. Her discussion of the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans is adept and adroit, albeit sullied by her apparent dislike and disdain for anything that might be seen as sensational or sensationalist. Take, for instance, her assessment of the character of Durtal, the protagonist in several of Huysmans’ novels, who, in Mrs. McDonagh’s words, “makes a dramatic ascent from a life of vice—diabolism, black masses, startling sexual excess—to repentance and redemption in a Trappist monastery.”

Mrs. McDonagh seems to suggest that such a dramatic ascent from the gutter and such a radical assent to the will of God is somehow in poor taste:

Huysmans offered a disastrous model of conversion, characterized by the pursuit of rarified sensations and thrillingly dramatic. Few converts could match the sheer drama of Durtal’s initial depravity nor the exoticism of his repentance (his confession is followed by a satanic attack), nor the completeness of his final surrender, for he became a lay associate of the Trappists. Most conversions seemed humdrum by comparison.

Why, one wonders, is the radical and dramatic nature of Durtal’s conversion considered to be a “disastrous model”? Perhaps, if we replaced the name of Durtal with that of Mary Magdalen, we might better understand the curious nature of Mrs. McDonagh’s objections. Mary Magdalen’s real-life conversion is at least as dramatic as Durtal’s. And what of the “once at a crash” conversion of St. Paul, as Gerard Manley Hopkins described it? As for today, there is no shortage of similarly dramatic conversion stories: prisoners, murderers, rapists, drug addicts, gangsters, satanists. Why are such sensational manifestations of God’s grace considered a “disastrous model”? Shouldn’t they inspire us in the conviction that nobody, however miserable, is beyond the love of Christ?

Take the conversion of Francis Thompson, for example, a contemporary of Wilde, whose wonderful poem “The Hound of Heaven” says all that needs to be said on the subject of God’s relentless hunting down of the recalcitrant sinner. Thompson, a cradle Catholic of convert parents, had dropped out of seminary and then dropped out of medical school before living as a dropout, addicted to drugs and homeless on the streets of post-Dickensian London, befriended by charitable prostitutes at a time when Jack the Ripper was stalking his victims. Although Thompson was not a convert, his reversion to the Faith is at least as sensational as the most dramatic of conversions.

Although Mrs. McDonagh doesn’t mention Francis Thompson, except in one passing reference, the reversion to the Faith of the French Decadent poet, Paul Verlaine, is described by her in singularly sensational terms:

He had an even more dramatic conversion (or reversion) to his baptismal faith, which took place during his 555 days in prison for the attempted murder of his lover, Arthur Rimbaud, in 1873. Their relationship was violent, not to say, sordid, which made Verlaine’s embrace of the Church and the passionate and affective poems that came from his return to the faith even more striking.

Is Verlaine’s real-life reversion, or Francis Thompson’s, any less dramatic than the fictional conversion of Durtal in Huysmans’ novels? Clearly, they are not. Indeed, perhaps we should remind ourselves that truth is stranger than fiction, not least because Durtal’s conversion was itself a quasi-autobiographical account of Huysmans’ own real-life journey to the Church, and finally to his becoming a Benedictine oblate. Since the novelist’s own quest for heaven was at least as dramatic as that of the fictional character that he modeled on himself, can we really agree with Mrs. McDonagh that “Huysmans offered a disastrous model of conversion”?

This quibble aside, Mrs. McDonagh’s discussion of the 1890s is, for the most part, very good. Her treatment of the convert poets, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, is most welcome, even though one wonders why John Gray, a less accomplished poet of the 1890s, is given a whole chapter to himself, while Johnson and Dowson are mentioned almost in passing. It’s as though a footnote has usurped their place in the body of the narrative. That being said, John Gray is a fascinating figure who deserves to be better known. It is refreshing, therefore, that Mrs. McDonagh allows him to take center stage, offering him an all-too-rare moment in the limelight.

Nonetheless, and to reiterate what was said above, Mrs. McDonagh is to be praised for devoting a chapter to the 1890s before she proceeds to the chapter on Oscar Wilde. This sets the scene for her discussion of Wilde, which includes much of which I had been previously unaware, not merely in the chapter itself but also in the footnotes, some of which offer priceless nuggets of fascinating information.

The highlight of the Wilde chapter for me was the words of William Welsford Ward, Wilde’s friend from his days as an undergraduate in Oxford, recalled to Wilde’s son Vyvyan:

I have been reading lately a bundle of old letters written to me by him during his undergraduate days at Oxford, and they show … that his final decision to find refuge in the Roman Church was not the sudden clutch of the drowning man at the plank in the shipwreck, but a return to a first love, a love rejected, it is true … yet one that had haunted him from early days with a persistent spell.

Wilde’s lifelong love affair with the Catholic Church would not be consummated, due to his own infidelity, until his deathbed conversion and reception. This love affair is the theme and thesis of my book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. Even when Wilde was at his worst, face down in the gutter and wallowing in sexual depravity, he always knew that something healthier and holier was calling him. As with Francis Thompson, he always felt the Hound of Heaven on his heels. In the end, his pride was broken by the very fall that it had caused.

Ironically and paradoxically, Wilde had escaped the culture of death by going to prison. As he wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, “God’s eternal Laws are kind and break the heart of stone.” He had been saved in the nick of time by the God whom he’d forsaken but who had refused to forsake him:

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?