De Profundis

Writing from the Depths

Wilde wrote De Profundis between January and March 1897, during the final months of his imprisonment in Reading Gaol. He was allowed paper and pen — prison regulations permitted it for correspondence — and he wrote, over many weeks, a letter of approximately fifty thousand words addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, the beautiful, reckless young man whose relationship with Wilde had ultimately destroyed him. The letter was not delivered to Douglas on Wilde’s release. It was given to his friend Robert Ross, who kept it, published an edited version in 1905 (four years after Wilde’s death), and deposited the manuscript with the British Museum with instructions that it be sealed for fifty years. The full text did not appear in print until 1962.

The title — Wilde’s own, from the Psalm “Out of the depths” — gives the work its tone from the first. This is not Wilde the wit. The wit is still present, and at moments devastating, but it has been transformed by two years of imprisonment, hard labour, and systematic humiliation into something harder, more precise, and more honest than anything he wrote at the height of his fame.

Accusation and Self-Examination

The letter begins as an accusation. Wilde rehearses, with the methodical memory of a man who has had two years and no distractions, the specific ways in which Douglas’s behaviour destroyed him: the dinner-table tantrums, the telegrams of abuse followed by telegrams of reconciliation, the demands for money, the disastrous libel suit that Wilde brought against Douglas’s father at Douglas’s insistence despite every reasonable friend urging him not to. The account is one-sided — it is a letter, not a court transcript — but it has the ring of truth that comes from genuine grievance held too long.

But the letter does not remain an accusation. As it proceeds, Wilde turns the same clear-eyed attention on himself, and the result is more interesting than the indictment of Douglas. He examines the specific nature of his own failure: not the love itself, which he does not renounce, but the manner of his life with Douglas — the vulgarity he had descended to, the way the relationship had made him prefer the third-rate, the way he had squandered the one genuine thing he possessed, which was his art and his intelligence, on pleasures that were not even very pleasurable.

Christ the Artist

The most original and unexpected section of the letter is Wilde’s extended meditation on Christ — not Christ the theological figure but Christ as the supreme artistic personality, the man who understood more completely than any other the connection between imagination and suffering. Wilde argues that Christ transformed the beggar, the prostitute, the sick, and the condemned into materials for a new kind of poetry — that the Incarnation was an aesthetic act, the descent of infinite imagination into finite suffering. The argument is heterodox, personal, and completely original. It is also, as a piece of prose, among the finest Wilde ever wrote.

What emerges from the letter’s final sections is not reconciliation — Wilde does not forgive Douglas, exactly, and he does not pretend that the disaster was anything other than what it was — but something close to the aesthetic acceptance he had always preached and had never, until prison forced it on him, actually experienced. He had argued for years that art could transform suffering into beauty. De Profundis is the proof.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the great prose documents of the nineteenth century, written by the most brilliant wit of his age in the conditions most likely to destroy a wit: prison, ruin, and enforced silence.