This article has been published as Marland, R. & Mead, D. (2023) Of what does Lord Douglas Dream? Intentions, 125, 19–23. I thank Vanessa Heron, editor of Intentions, for permitting me to share it here.
Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde in 1892.
Lord Alfred Douglas was twice interviewed by the French journalist and playwright Georges Docquois for Le Journal, the articles appearing on 25 May 1895 and 8 May 1896.The interviews are quoted in Laura Lee’s article for The Wildean No. 57 and reprinted in my Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews (2022). In the 1930 French edition of his Autobiography Douglas would describe the first interview as ‘very kind’.Lord Alfred Douglas (1930) Oscar Wilde et Quelques Autres. See Don Mead’s translation in The Wildean No. 60. Docquois also assisted Douglas with the publication of his Poems. This perhaps explains why the two men kept in touch. Another of Docquois’s articles about Douglas, which was printed in Le Journal on 9 July 1895, is also of interest and is reprinted here in a translation kindly provided by Don Mead. Docquois does not reveal how he obtained the information for the article, but it seems likely that he had received a letter from Douglas, who was then renting the Villa Tarnasse in Sorrento. The article throws new light on Douglas’s activities in Rouen during the Wilde trials – bicycling and betting, apparently – and his mental state during the first weeks and months of his friend’s imprisonment. But the omissions are equally edifying: the description of Douglas as ‘alone, sadly alone’ is not quite true, as the young lord was staying with the antiquarian and home ruler Charles Tindal Gatty. Still, the pair had little in common and in August Douglas would beg More Adey and Robbie Ross to come to Sorrento as he was ‘utterly wretched for want of a kindred spirit’.Letter from Lord Alfred Douglas to More Adey, 25 August 1895, in Rupert Croft-Cooke (1963) Bosie, 135. Douglas would later claim that the articles of Docquois and of Eugène Tardieu (to whom he had been introduced by Docquois) proved that Wilde was not his ‘prey’ but that, in fact, the opposite was true. Docquois’s article of 9 July certainly presents a picture of the younger man in thrall to the elder.
Georges Docquois, ‘Of What Does Lord Douglas Dream?’, Le Journal (Paris, France), 9 Jul. 1895, 2
[Translated by Don Mead]
In a small house in Sorrento, Alfred Douglas is dreaming.
The windows are wide open and look out onto the gulf where the islands of Ischia and Capri, like sparkling bouquets of flowers, are gently cradled in the waters, and the young lord, intoxicated by all the mixed perfumes of the gardens, silently savours the indefinable joy of living thus, before one of the most marvellous prospects in the world.
An article about Lord Alfred Douglas in the French newspaper Le Journal.
To be in exile there would be sweet, were it shared. But Douglas is alone, sadly alone; and all his thoughts are of the hideous Pentonville jail, where the convict he loves spends his wretched days twisting hemp fibres into rope, rope for a noose to hang convicted English men.Wilde had been transferred from Pentonville to Wandsworth on 4 July. Docquois is confused about Wilde’s punishment: he was picking oakum.
What a shame! murmurs the younger son of the Marquis of Queensberry; and his head falls heavily onto the page of the novel by Walter Scott that he has been distractedly reading.Douglas appears to have been a regular reader of Scott. He noted in his Autobiography (1929; 3) that Scott often referred to the ‘dark grey man’ who founded the Douglas line (references can be found in Scott’s novels The Abbot [1820] and Castle Dangerous [1831]).
Lord Alfred Douglas has been in Sorrento for eight days.
Eight days ago he was still in Rouen. During the two months that he spent in that city, nothing interested him except bicycling. Horse racing also put some life into his dull existence. On 22 June, remembering that in the recent Jubilee Stakes his brother Lord Douglas of Hawick had won a thousand pounds by betting superstitiously on a horse called Victor Wild, Alfred bet on a horse called Oscar, and won ten Louis.Victor Wild won the Jubilee Stakes at Kempton Park on 11 May ‘with great ease’ despite being a 20–1 shot (Reynolds’s Newspaper, 12 May 1895, 8). Percy Douglas must have bet £50. The race was run during the interval between Wilde’s first criminal trial, which ended on 1 May, and his second, which began on 20 May. A horse named Oscar won the Premier Prix du Gouvernement at Rouen on 23 June; the racing paper La France Chevaline had predicted that Oscar would not be among the horses placing first to third.
But finally, he left Rouen – it had become unbearable for him when he learned of the terrible verdict.Wilde was found guilty and sentenced on 25 May, so Douglas remained in Rouen for at least a month after it had become ‘unbearable’.
And now, opposite Naples, which is between Posillipo and Vesuvius, melancholy and ‘unmatched’, he dreams of a small house in Sorrento, where Oscar Wilde’s room is already prepared!
Yes, in the mind of the young lord everything is arranged: having served his sentence Wilde will come to join his faithful disciple who will wait for him patiently under the orange and lemon trees.
A colourised photograph of Sorrento (c. 1895). Image: Wikimedia.
The prisoner in Pentonville does not know anything yet about this welcome project. In just six weeks, he will hear from Alfred. Three months will then have passed, and it is only at the end of this time that he will be allowed to read – after the police have done so – the letter begun for him under the skies of France and which he will finish at leisure under the Italian sky.Wilde was permitted to receive only a single letter and chose to receive one from his wife. A sonnet will be attached to this letter. Douglas had been working on this sonnet for almost six months. He recently completed it. No one will know about it, he swore, except the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In these fourteen lines, Douglas has tried to define the quality of the feelings he has for his absent lover, and also how, from afar, the spirit of this absent lover still fascinates him.This is presumably ‘To Oscar Wilde’, a sonnet that Douglas intended for the dedication of Poems but which Wilde suppressed. Discovered by John D. Stratford among Douglas’s papers, it can be read in Lee’s article for The Wildean No. 57. From the depths of Pentonville, the personality of Oscar Wilde still exercises its dominant force. Douglas cannot – and, moreover, does not wish to – escape.
Newly arrived and alone in Sorrento, in his little house on the edge of the magnificent gulf, he dreams of all this, which is at the same time both strange and human. He thinks of the talk that went round about the friendship between Wilde and himself; he remembers the events of the infamous trial; he sees himself again fleeing London, putting between England and himself first all the waters of the English Channel, and then the broad solid barrier of the French countryside.
And, whilst Douglas is lost in refection, breezes from the beautiful Tyrrhenian Sea pass through his hair; and his thoughts continue to be directed towards Wilde.
Soon, he tells himself, the unfortunate man will be freed from forced labour; books and paper will be brought to him, and – such a consolation! – he will be allowed to write the poem that has been haunting him.This prediction would come true, as Wilde would write The Ballad of Reading Gaol after his release.
When night comes, Douglas sees the crackling fires lit by the fishermen on the gulf shore. The memory of a sonnet he wrote about London at night comes back to him, and he murmurs:
See what a mass of gems the City wears
Upon her broad live bosom!…The first lines of Douglas’s poem ‘Impression de Nuit’, written, according to Douglas, in London in 1894, and first published in La Revue Blanche, 15 May 1896, 469. Caspar Wintermans (Alfred Douglas [2007] 292) hypothesises that the poem’s dedicatee, Count Louis de Laveaux, was Comte Louis-Ernest de la Vaulx, but since this naval officer died in February 1896 aged 81 it is perhaps likelier that Douglas was thinking of Stanisław Ludwik de Laveaux, a Polish painter who had visited London and Oxford and died in Paris in April 1894 aged 25.
And when the moon begins to rise, blue and soft in a sky more brightly adorned than Otero, he congratulates her on not having let, despite herself, her reflection linger in the dirty mirror of the mud of the city. Finally, in his bed, still impressed by reading Grecque, by Juliette Lamber,Grecque (1879) by Juliette Adam. he sleeps and dreams that Wilde, having returned, walks by his side in the Phlegraean Fields;The Phlegraean Fields is an area of supervolcanic calderas to the west of Naples. A shallow volcanic crater, the solfatara, emits jets of sulphurous steam; these were once used for medical purposes. that both of them there rekindle their ardour by drinking in the powerful rays of Helios; and that together, like Pandion of Athens, they seek the healing sulphurous waters of the solfatara, and the heat of the sun to cure the languor of their bodies and the ills of their minds.
What did Lord Alfred Douglas do next? To find out, see John Cooper’s article ‘The friend of Oscar Wilde’, which describes Douglas’s visit to the French resort of Le Havre in August 1895.