Backlisted - De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

Back in 2022, our guest was Stephen Fry, writer, actor and polymath, who joined John and Andy to discuss Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, the essay addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897 'from the depths' of Wilde's incarceration in Reading Gaol. It has been described by Colm Tóibín as 'one of the greatest love letters ever written'; it is also Wilde's most powerful testament of the sacred duty of the artist as he conceived it. We discuss the work's convoluted publication history, Wilde's posthumous reputation and his ongoing relevance in the 21st century.This feels like a good time to promote the brilliant series John has written on all the living species on this incredible planet. It is narrated by Stephen Fry and is available for free to Audible subscribers - just search 'Wonderful Life with Stephen Fry'. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes + original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, it's Andy. Hi, it's Nikki. Welcome to Batlisted one of our rerun episodes from our archive. This time, it's Day Profundis by Oscar Wild with our guest, Stephen Fry. Is he Sir Stephen Fry? Yeah, he is Sir Stephen Fry. I'm not sure whether he was to Stephen Fry when we recorded this. No.

He was just Steve. Yeah, that's right. I remember. This is one of my favourite episodes from our. Batlist because it's about one of my favorite books, not just from our Batlist, but from my reading of the last however many years. And it was one of those occasions, Nikki, where it felt like a privilege to have the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite pieces of writing with somebody so expert and invested in the subject of Oscar Wilde and of De Profundis. And I think

when you listen back, at about the 10 minute mark, you can hear Sir Stephen really begin to engage with the conversation. Yes, he realizes that all of a sudden these guys are, they're also as deep book nerds as he is. You know, it was like, oh, okay, is this kind of a conversation? Yeah, it was a really fantastic feeling to bring this particular book and author to Sir Stephen Fry. and know within 10 minutes that we were doing okay. So that's what, that's what I remember, nothing but good things. Yeah, it's lovely. It's a lovely show and everybody, yeah, it's a delight.

I think you'll all enjoy it. I would just reiterate that if you're planning to read De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, I can recommend two specific ways of doing so. The audiobook read by Simon Russell Beale is absolutely superb. And in my opinion, one of my favourite audio. books, one I actually listen to several times now, just for the pleasure of listening to Simon Russell Beale, bite into it. And the other way is we, I think we recommend on this episode the edition of Wilde's prison writings edited by Colin Tobin. I would say that again.

If you have the opportunity to pick that up, that is the contextual material which really works soulfully with the original letter by Wilde. Fabulous. So that was the past, Nikki. But the future. Tell me about the future. Yeah, we're doing some great shows for our subscribers at the moment, for our Patreon subscribers.

If you would like to hear our Booker Prize-winning show, we're focusing on a different Booker Prize-winning book each month. Yeah, we haven't won. the book before it. Not yet. Yet. The last show we did is available on our patron platform. It's offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, warmly received. Fantastic book about a family living on a houseboat in the Thames. That's available there. And actually our next show, which will be up on May the 2nd, is Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. And that's one of our backlisted readers shows. also on a boat.

That was, yes, it's all boats. So we've eaten on boats against the current, etc. That was a really good conversation about Jerome K. Jerome's three men in a boat. I was lucky enough to be part of that. So that's coming up when on May the 2nd? That's coming up on May the 2nd. Again, you can get that on if you go to patreon.com forward slash backlisted. And actually, if you want to read along to our booker show, which we're calling Posh Bingo,

The next book that we're reading is Profitsong from 2023 by Paul Lynch. And that will be on May the 11th. It's actually doing a live show on that. So again, you need to be a subscriber for that. So, yeah, three great shows. We've got two coming up, three men in a boat and profit song, and one's up there already, Penelope Fitzgerald's offshore. And just to say, we don't choose the Booker Prize winners to discuss.

The name comes out of a biscuit tin. And so at the end of the discussion of Prophet's song by Paul Lynch on May the 11th, we will choose, or the tin will choose for us, the book we'll be reading in June. I will hand you over now to Sir Stephen Fry and two young whippersnappers. Enjoy the show. Have you seen where your earfins are, where they're plugged in? Should be here. Oh, yeah, there's a light there, Andy.

Plug it where the light is. That could be the medium speaking. How's that? Plug it where the light. It is. Come to the light. Yes. Yes.

Well, imagine my frustration. And there it was. I mean, it's a 17-banked Tesla charging station. And there wasn't a free bay. So I had to wait an enormous length of time before one of the Tesla's removed itself and I got in and was able to charge. I felt such a fool.

Are you recording this fried goals, Nicky? Oh, that's good. Excellent. What are you engaged in at the moment, Stephen? Have you got multiple projects? What can you talk about? Like a lot of people, the tundra, the permafrost of lockdown, which is now slowly enjoying a spring melt,

is pushing out all kinds of long, dormant plants that I'd almost forgotten about, a couple of documentaries. And I have one final week to finish. a very exciting documentary to me about the seasons, really, about the Sun's annual journey. Brilliant. Or rather, our annual journey.

Yeah, I have read my Copernicus. I have corrected the error that I've seen. It's us. It's you that's moving. Those are far away. So I've got a week in Iceland, which I'm looking forward to in two weeks' time. I'm doing another documentary about dinosaurs,

which is a fascinating subject, though I'm feeling very guilty that I look as if I'm trying to sort of hog David Ambrous terrain, and that would be an act of Les Magistee, if ever there was one. It's just a sort of coincidence, as I say, these two things have popped up because they've been waiting for a long, long time. Well, it's very good of you to mark your return to freedom by coming here. Close to saintly. But at least the subject to the conversation is one that you are deeply familiar with and sympathetic.

Well, one assumes sympathetic to Stephen. Sympathy is a word I think is very appropriate. The while he had a sympathetic nature himself. And yes, I feel great pity and sadness when thinking of what happened to him. And yes, he has so much meaning for me. professional meaning as well. I mean, to have played him in a film to play a lead role if you look like me

is not something you expect. I mean, I've never been, I hope, either unduly, absurdly modest about my attainments and physical appearance, but nor have I been particularly vain. I was always aware that I was never going to get the parts that Brad Pitt had just turned down. So when I was offered to play

ask a while it was an extraordinary feeling for me that I'm amazing yeah really amazing I watched the film again the other night me too

I barely looked at Jude Law I was transfixed I was transfixed without as it were blowing smoke it is a really extraordinary performance well thank you thank you so much

it wasn't I mean aside from everything else one of the miracles of doing a film like that is first of you we had Merlin Holland Wilde's grandson as a consultant

and just to stand next to him to shake his hand and to see the fingers, not exactly like the Max Beerbone cartoons, I mean, not really fat, but a certain pudginess, which is clearly a genetic wild marker that is just so identical. And that's face, the soft face, and that was extraordinary. And also with Jude, say, to scenes at Maudlin College, Oxford walking along a little sort of a ditch-like river that goes along the side of the deer park and then towards some balustrades and stone pillars and things that there is a photograph of Wilde and Bozy, Lord Alfred, in exactly that position. So we were standing just where they were and my hand was on the same baluster that Wilde's hand was on and the skyline was identical.

and those things have a kind of almost mystical effect on one to feel so connected. Right, yeah. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us peering into a narrow, whitewashed cell in a provincial English jail. It is March 1897. Seated at the tiny desk is a tall, gaunt man dressed in prison uniform, drab, coarse trousers, blue worsted stockings, heavy boots, a loose jacket and vest, bearing the number C-3-3 on his back.

His hair is close-cropped and pokes out from beneath a grey and red cap, printed all over with crow's foot arrows. In front of him is a single sheet of fool's-gap paper resting on a coarsely bound notebook. He picks up his pen and begins to write. I'm John Mitchinson. And I'm Andy Miller, and as you may have realised, we are delighted to be joined today in real life in the same room

by Stephen Frye. Hello Stephen. Hello, thank you for inviting me to a room, not a Zoom. You're welcome. Stephen is an actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer to focus just on his literary achievements.

He is the author of five novels, three volumes of autobiography and numerous non-fiction works that stretch from the retelling of Greek myths to classical music, mammalian conservation, English prosody, and as of last November.

his own remarkable collection of neckties. Bravo. Fry's ties. Oh, can we talk all right or as the sound of the barrel being scraped getting on the way? I love it. What are you interested in, Stephen?

His audiobook performances are legendary, encompassing Anton Chekhov, Pushkin, and the entire Harry Potter era, of course. He is also a master podcaster, collaborating most recently with my colleague, John, on Stephen Fry's Inside Your Mind,

a 12-part history of the brain for audible. Let me ask you, Stephen, while I've got you here, as a collaborator, do you find John to be reliable? Is he on time? Does he deliver scripts? If there's one thing that is joyous, it's to have a friend who is messier, more dismal. ordered later. Amen.

Than one is oneself. One can polish one's medals and think at least I get things done better than John. But no, John is a genius. As you know, he's a magnificent mind and a wonderful man. But, yeah, like my dear friend, Douglas Adams, she has a casual relationship with the deadline. It's my nerves, Steve.

I was here early today. It's my nerves. I was here early today. I may say. He's like my husband who is absolutely wonderful but is just not a punctual person. So if we're going out somewhere,

I just find myself always pacing up and down by the front door, knowing the taxis there, terrified that it's going to give up and drive away. And I'll sort of try not to call up. And once he came up with this immortal line when I was really panicking as we were about to leave, I don't know what you're fussing about.

We're not late yet. I love that. That word yet. Wow. And on this week of all weeks, let us just step back in awe of the fact that since he joined in 2008, an early adopter,

always an early adopter in the realm of tech, in fact, Stephen has amassed 12.4 million Twitter followers. Although, has that gone down in the last 48 hours on the day we're recording this? Like everyone's has? I can express a check. I haven't checked, to be honest.

It went down about five years ago from 16 million when they had a great clean out of bots. It was discovered that I had at least five million bots following. And how would you characterize your... We can ignore the Elon Musk in the room. How would you characterize your relationship with Twitter these days? You were very warm presence on Twitter early on. And then you step back a bit because you found it, I think, too stressful.

Was it really better? in the old days, do you think? Oh, yes, it was. It was just more amiable. And I compare it to a watering hole, a pool, a natural pool or lake, Lut somewhere in the countryside. And you discover it's a great place to swim

and you swim around and other people join in and you will swim and you wave at each other. And then slowly more and more people join in and enjoy it and some of them pee in the pole. And then suddenly you see something very unfortunate floating towards you on it. And then you sort of tread water and your foot touches the bottom and there's broken glass. And the thing has become a pit and a sty and a horror.

And it just isn't fun anymore. And so there were a couple of occasions where I, you know, however one wants to put it, stormed off through my toys out of the pram. However you like to say, these things all just got fed up. But I've always come back, and I have to be honest, part of it is just simply selfishness. It's incredibly handy for some publicity purposes to have 12 points. 4 million people and also for the purposes of one's friends who have things they want to

publicise and you know their various charities and so on it's such an easy way to help them to get those such a number of eyeballs onto their projects and causes the book we're here to discuss is in fact a letter

known since 1905 as de profundis Latin for out of the depths and a translation of the first line of Psalm 130 It's a 50,000 word missive, composed in Reading Prison by Oscar Wilde between January and March 1897 towards the end of his two-year sentence for gross indecency. It is addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, otherwise known as Bosi, is a strange lover and the prime cause of his downfall. Now, there are many editions with and without contextual material of de profundis available on the internet, bookshops in libraries, we thought it would be useful to just recommend one to you. The first

one we would recommend is volume two of the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. And that is currently available direct from Oxford website for £2.50p. If you can't stretch to that. You want one for all the family. I've got the London Library's copy here. But if you can't stretch to that, there is a Penguin Classic Edition called Day Profundis and other prison writings. It's about a tenor, and that is edited and with an introduction by Colm Toibin, the novelist, Colin Toibin. That's really excellent.

I think you mean Coltoybin. I think I do. Thank you for that. Toybin, thank you. And I also, one final shout, you can probably pick this up for Pence. It's the old 80s and 90s, Oxford World. Classics edition of The Soul of Man and Prison Writings by Oswald, edited by Isabel Murray.

This is really excellent. This has the essays, The Soul of Man, The Day Profundis, some letters and the Ballad of Reading Jail. So all the contextual material is there as well. And it's worth saying that if you were to look online for a free download of the text from a wonderful source like the Gutenberg project, you will find that that's an older edition that isn't the complete letter. The letter did have redactions or excisions until...

1962. Sixty-two was the final full version. Well, we're going to delve into the various versions, so this edge of the seat stuff. The next exciting thing I was about to say, Andy, was that the publishing history of de profundus is complicated. It was first published in 1905 by Wiles' friend and literary executor Robert Ross, who published the text, Sean of the autobiographical elements

and the references to Bosi and the rest of the Queensbury family. The full version wasn't published until it appeared in 1962 in the letters of Oscar Wilde, edited and published by Rupert Hart Davis. So it's a book of two halves. The first is a long examination of Wiles' relationship with Bosi Douglas and just how it destroyed his life and reputation. The second is a remarkable meditation on the life of Jesus Christ, not in his usual role as divine saviour,

but as the model of a creative artist. artist. Now established as one of the greatest prose works in the English language, most readers would agree with Max Beerbones's early review that in De Profundus, we see Wild here as the spectator of his own tragedy. His tragedy was great. It is one of the tragedies that will always live on in romantic history. them everywhere you must lie upon the daisies and a discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind the meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental pine and everyone will say as you walk your mystic way if this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me why what a very singer-theworthy deep young man, this deep young man must be. It's heading back to the top of the charts.

Yes. Do you know there's a whole terrible symbolic poem you could write about that that leads from the jollity of the Victorian middle classes to feces and blood by way of Richard Doyley Carte. It's just a peculiar and horrible coincidence that it was Richard Dolly Carter who produced Gilbert and Sullivan. Their opera is and made a fortune from it, of course. And he always took them over to Broadway as well. And when they wrote Patience, an extract from which we've just heard,

which was a parody, a guying or a satire on the aesthetic young men, Whistler and Wilde and their set, Bunthorne was the character. Richard Dollycartes realised that patients wouldn't play in New York because they had no concept of these people. The British knew about them because of punch cartoons of them, you know, going down the strand with a lily in my hand and all that sort of thing, saying everything was too utterly utter and it doesn't mean anything to America.

America had just come out of the Civil War, for heaven's sake. It wasn't yet the gilded age quite. So he offered Wilde a huge sum of money to go to America, to tour around. and lecture and let everybody look at him and understand the nature of the East Theat. So Wild went and he gave possibly the first ever lectures ever given on interior decoration.

He called them the House Beautiful. And he lectured on Benvenu to Chalini, the Renaissance silversmith. And he was quite a sensation, famously arriving in the customs hall saying he had nothing to declare, but his genius. He then, of course, some people think

He may have developed syphilis from a female prostitute at some point along his journey, maybe in Ledville, Colorado where he went. He returned to England and determined to be an MP and a respectable figure and a great man and he'd write novels and maybe plays. He met Constance and Married him. But fast, fast forward to the very terrible moment where he's standing in the dock, having lost his libel case against the Marks of Queensbury. He's then arrested.

And servants from the Savoy Hotel testify they found things on the bed sheets when he had spent time there with youths. And Richard Dolly Cart, from his profits from patients and other things, built the Savoy Hotel and got Escoffier, the great chef, and made it the finest hotel in Europe. and Wild would stay there a lot. So there is a kind of weird circularity. So when I hear that song, I think, how peculiar, isn't it?

And in a sense, this is what Wilde speculates about in de profundis, that the life of pleasure does lead to something profoundly to do with sorrow, squalor and misery. And until you've come to terms with that and hit the bottom, you will never achieve any kind of stasis or happiness. I wanted to play it in because it premieres in 1891, which is the first great Anas Maribolis for Wilde. He buys a box for the opening night. So this idea of him as modern celebrity,

which is much from Arkansas upon, but he's already become famous in London for being Oscar Wilde. And then he's become famous in America for touring with lectures. I was thinking like a stand-up comedian, you go out and you spend two years breaking America. And then he comes back. But if you listen to the song, what's so interesting is I think you can hear within the song the very seeds of the things which the English come to hate him for.

Yeah, yeah. Right? So it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. He's clever, he's unmanly, he's unhealthy. Yeah. There's something wrong. The seeds of the tragedy are there. Yeah.

Stephen, when did you first read Dave Profundis some version of? I was about 16, I think. I'd loved Oscar Wilde for six or seven years and had slowly begun to engage with his more difficult writing for a child. The Soul of Man, you mentioned, the soul of man under socialism is the full title, which sounds like a very heavy political essay, but it's utterly brilliant.

It really is a remarkable piece of writing. And we could do well to read it now. It speaks so much towards politics and thought. I grew up in the country and my parents were not particularly enamored of television. We had one. It was a small thing about the size of a large coffee mug. And it lived in a cupboard. And if a member of the royal family should decide to get married or Winston Churchill died

or some Americans decided to skip around on the surface of the moon, then it would be taken out and looked at because something important should be seen. But my father did not approve of his children sitting around watching it during the day. day or night, even. Always more things to be done. But anyway, he was a way over the way, as we used to say. He used to work in his laboratory, he was a scientist. So it was a rainy Sunday. I turned on the television and it snowy black and white was a film.

And I couldn't quite work out what it was. I could tell it wasn't Shakespeare, but at the same time, it clearly wasn't contemporary. And people were speaking in the most remarkable way. And you know how it is with a film, and it's good. You sort of remember every single part of it. when it's bad, the whole thing flies from your memory. So these scenes were burned into my memory and even the phrases,

there's a young man who says to a beautiful young woman, I hope I won't offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection. And I thought, I never heard it. I knew it was funny because, of course, there's an inbuilt irony that you don't have to consciously be aware of, which is that a declaration of love should be in Saxon language.

I love you, not you are the visible personification of absolute perfection. If you have time to develop an Oratan sentence like that, you can't be in the throes of love. And so it's a wonderful joke. And I just knew it was funny, but also I had never heard language used like it. And I ran to my mother afterwards and said, I hope you won't be offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

She said, what are you talking about? Anyway, she explained that obviously what I've been watching was the importance of being honest. And we lived in the country. As Sidney Smith once said, miles from the nearest lemon. But we did have a portable library that came every other Thursday

in a penthekineken, a little grey van. And it trundled along, and there I was waiting for it, and the driver got wheezingly out and went round and opened a door in the side, lowered the steps, patted my bottom into the interior in the way that people did in those days

without having to be arrested. And there was the nice woman in the cardigan and the little demi-lune spectacles on a chain and powdery cheeks who said, hello, my dear. And I said, have you got the importance of being honest by Oscar Wild? And she helped me find it

and stamped it out that springy stamp that the library books used to be adorned with. And I rushed home with it and read the four comedies a woman no importance, an ideal husband, Lady Fandamere's Wind, and of course the importance,

and I learnt the importance more or less off by heart, then on. Then I ran back and said, have you got anything more? And she eventually found the complete works of Oscar Wilde. I rushed home with those and started to read them and didn't understand them all. And then went back the next week, have it got anything more?

She said, well, you've had the complete works, and that's the complete works. But I found in that little van, a book by Montgomery Hyde, called The Trials of Oscar Wild. And she looked at me and said, how old are you, my darling? I said, 14. I was probably 12. And she said, well, all right, and she stamped it.

And I took it home, and I started to read it, and slowly this story emerged. And it began to get darker and darker and unhappier and unhappier. Because it was so wonderful to read about what a friend he was, what a supporter of others, what a cause of wit in others, as Shakespeare says, about false stuff, you know, not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.

And then to see him pulled down like that, and all the time inside myself, to know that the crime he had committed was a crime that I might perhaps commit, that I shared, to use his own wonderful word, his nature. And so that was, it was both a thrilling thing to read, but also a terrifying thing to read.

Yeah, yeah. Why don't we hear from, you've mentioned him already, Stephen, Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, to just tell us what Day Profundis is? Brilliant. When they sent my grandfather, Oscar Wilde, to prison in 1895, such was the scandal surrounding his prosecution, that his wife and children had to leave the country and change their names. The family, partly as a permanent rebuke to Victorian morality,

has never reverted to its rightful name. which is why I'm called Merlin Holland, and not Merlin Wild, as I should be. So they put him away for two years in grey Victorian prisons, and deprived him at first of something which was almost more important to him than his freedom, pen, paper, words, and the colours of the outside world. Like all prisoners, he was allowed to write one letter under strict supervision every three months. But that was all. It was not until he had been in prison for 14 months

and had passed from Pentonville to Wonsworth to Reading that he was finally allowed writing materials in his cell. At first Oscar only had a coarsely bound notebook, but as he wrote to a friend in September 1896, I take notes of books I read and copy lines and phrases in poets. The mere handling of pen and ink helps me. I cling to my notebook.

Before I had it, my brain was going in very evil circles. Then, early in 1897, he started on this long letter to young Bozy Douglas, which has now become known as De Profundis. So I'm going to ask my colleague, John Mitchinson, is this a letter? Well, when it was presented in 19, It wasn't really a letter. It was presented more as a kind of a philosophical meditation on Christianity and the romantic artist.

I mean, it's an uneasy letter in that it is definitely at the beginning. He is writing, as far as we can see, he is writing to Boise and explaining what's happened. And there are people, I think, at the time who felt it was that he was just, it was just self-justification. and he was pinning all the blame on. But rereading it again, and I first read this when I was a student, and actually I've come back to it this time, like so many things, having lived more,

this just is a more profound, more precise, more humane, more beautiful piece of work than I even remember it being, and I was always keen on it. I think he comes back to the kind of letter towards the end. And so it's topped and tailed as a letter, but in the middle you have, I think, one of the most, I mean, it's one of the great, I think, reflections

on the function of religion in a secular age. He isn't religious. He converts, we think, at the end, but does he really? To please Robby, probably. But really, this is radical. Taking up all of that kind of, he'd read all the, you know, he'd read Renan's Life of Christ. He'd taken on board all the biblical scholarship of the 19th century.

And his vision of Christ is, I would contest the vision of Christ that most people who have a relationship with Christianity without being believers. I mean, he did it first and he did it better. I've weirdly just read over Easter weekend or reread that Emmanuel Carreres, the kingdom, which is an amazing, again, and one of an interesting 20th century version of a difficult human being. dealing and grappling with the Gospels and going back to original text. And I thought, reading that back to back with this, I thought, Wilde was doing something so, I mean, he was writing a letter in prison under the worst possible circumstances,

but finding a way of being, genuinely adding to our understanding of religion, genuinely adding to our sense of what it's possible words to do. When the review in Vanity Fair by Max Beabom calls it, the Lord of Language, which is a phrase that... He uses himself. So is it a letter? Well, it was a letter that he... A letter not to send, is that not...

I think... After he left jail, he gave the copy to Robbie. Yeah. And Robbie had it typed out under his orders twice. And that sent a copy to its supposed recipient, Bozzie, who didn't read it. Claimed to have not read it and thrown it on the fire. And then later claimed not even to have received it.

That was in the later court case. There is that horrible moment when Oscar is writing, he's released and he's writing against the advice of everybody to Bozzi. And Bozzi's warm response to him makes him think, he's read my letter and understood it. It's just, it's tested with the Durbeville's awful, isn't it? That kind of self-deception. I think this is one of my favourite pieces of prose ever.

In a sense, I don't care. if it's a letter. Every time I read it, I think I've found the centre of it, but it's always different. And I think, as a result of preparing for this show, I've finally getting closer

to understanding why that might be. Firstly, the prose is written under very difficult circumstances over three months. Attention is wandering, although concentration on quality of output is remarkable. The phrase-making is...

as great as it always was amazing. But as I understand it, while did not necessarily, necessarily, we don't know for sure, intend for the whole manuscript to be published as one document. And what he saw it as was a kind of pot of material which could be divided up

in several ways. Some to Lord Alfred Douglas. But, and this is my final point before I go back to you, Stephen, I think the magic of it, like all the great white or black magic in books, is partly deliberate and partly accidental. Do you know what I mean? There's space in it as a result of it, not following any one template.

Yeah, I quite agree. And there are parts that you could read as recrimination and even bitterness, and there are other parts you can read as great forgiveness. but I think what makes it cohere is that his vision in the second half of Christ artist is part of his lifelong search for an understanding of the creative act and of art. And he ends up, and this is a word we were using earlier when talking about him, sympathy. He understands that the fact that he's the one who has suffered, he's the one whose name is forever mired, and as far as he knows will never ever,

rise again, that his reputation has been trashed, that his future life will be one of exile and disgrace. But he has won because he's found in that suffering something profoundly important, whereas Boise, he suspects as he writes the letter, and of course it turns out to be true, although he is free as air is the one who is really suffering. And that is what he understands the Christ to be about, that the Christ tells people to give up money and follow him, not because the poor need to be given the money and you'll give it away, but because the money is ruining your soul and is bad for you, and you will be free if you give it away. You will be free if you do things that are often painful

and you humiliate yourself. And Wilde is in that position because he is, He's come to the depths. From the depths he writes. I cry out from the depths. And it is, you know, it's something we know in a more finished kind of psychological, closed world of things like addiction or whatever, that you have to get to the depths before you can purify yourself and arise again

and be cleaned of your addiction, whatever it might be. It could be gambling. It doesn't have to be a substance. It can be a behavior. And in that wider sense, Wilde was an addict. And he writes about it very honestly. And in a sort of unknowing way, avant la letter, as the French would say, he is part of the letter is a very good example of how you can reinvent yourself.

I mean, the irony is, of course, he didn't because the love story, the terrible love story with Bozzi is bigger than anything else. And that's what makes it true, of course. It makes it feel almost authored that having come to all these amazing resolutions and understandings as he does in the letter, the moment he meets the rose-red lips and the blue eyes of Bozy,

he's off to Naples and Capri and then Paris into a pretty life even worse than the one before. And that's another thing. I'm just going to finish this, but every addict will tell you that if you, I mean, let's just take it with cigarettes. If you give up smoking when you're smoking 20 a day

and it's taken you maybe 10 years to go from four or five a day to 20 a day. And you give up for 20 years. When you fall off the wagon and start again, you don't start like you do when you start at the 20. And he started with the squalor and the terror as soon as he was out of jail. Is it a book you go back to, Stephen? Is it a book that you find, as it were, day profundis in your life that you've found helpful.

I do remind myself of passages, and I do quote the ones that I like a lot to myself or to others, having been in prison myself, which I was for a while, not as long and not as harsh. I also, you know, I find it very, very personal. I mean, when I read it, I actually, I can actually picture him at that desk with that pen in the pain that he was in.

He'd had a miserable time the first year or so, especially. And even at Reading, the first governor, Michael Colonel Isakson, was not at all sympathetic. But fortunately, Major Nelson came to replace him who was a much more progressive and sympathetic person who allowed him the writing and so on. He was immensely grateful for that. And he'd burst his eardrum

and his health had been appalling and dysentery and all of them. I mean, he was told by his lawyer that if he got the maximum sentence of two years at hard labour, which the Lavasher Amendment, which was the law he had transgressed, that he wouldn't be expected to survive.

People of our class are not expected to survive such a sentence. Yes. The governor, the second, what's the name of the second Reading government? Nelson. Major Nelson told Robbie Ross, he said to him, he's got two years. And the fact that the world lived three and a half. The treadmill was equivalent to climbing Ben Nevis twice in a day.

Just to be horrible. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja or the Orange One. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on anti-examination. acids, ginger tea and milk. Habiniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. This is the current caretaker, Sandy Frow, of Reading Jail, recorded in Wilde Cell, talking to Neil Bartlett about the conditions in Reading Jail at the time Wilde was composing the prison manuscript. Sandy, what would Oscar's experience have been when he first came in through these doors?

It was a feared prison. The separate system was in place, and the separate system was where prisoners were segregated from each other. They also had to wear what was known as a Scotch bonnet, so it meant that they had a cricket-type cap with a veil hanging down. The prison guards at night wore felt boots, so that the place did run absolutely in silence. only sound you'd have heard with the keys. So it was a place that must have been a kind of mental torture for Oscar himself. Oscar would have been actually confined to his cell for more or less

23 hours of the day because the Oaken picking, which was his hard labour, was actually done within the cells. They had an hour's exercise where they went down to the yard and unless they were actually going to chapel then they were confined to their cells. That's quite a change from sitting in your study writing the importance of being honest to watching your fingers start to bleed from picking up. I've had the pleasure of being shown

around that prison by Sandy, in fact. Hello Sandy, if you're listening. He's a terrific fellow, a wonderful guardian of the memory and great understanding of the details of the appalling penal system. I wanted to just keep that fresh in people's minds while

we ask you to read to us because we talked about, we It's fascinating this with Wilde. Such is Wilde's genius and reputation for genius that I find the experience when reading day profundis is, I'm going along quite nicely

and I'm thinking, oh, that's very good. Oh, I like that. Oh, that's so moving. And so often I think, and you wrote this by gaslight on whatever paper you could get under tremendous, I mean, it def,

It actually does really defy belief that you, under those circumstances, you could produce something like this. I must say to myself that I ruined myself and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I'm trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. this pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me. What I did to myself was far more terrible still.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. few men hold such a position in their own lifetime and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me, it was different. I felt it myself and made others feel it.

Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope, that gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flannur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius,

and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire at the end was a malady or a madness or both. I grew careless of the life. of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. I forgot that every little action

of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now. Absolute humility. It's quite a passage that, isn't it? Tremendously. It's unbelievable. It is strong and right and good. And of course, there is behind it an echo of I have come to this conclusion, Boise, you must too. Yeah. yeah, being careless of lives of others, even though he might be right

to say that he was careless of the lives of others, nothing like as careless as aristocratically careless as Boise was. Oscar was known for his kindness to people and his consideration and his thoughtfulness. In the manuscript, just the next line in the manuscript from what you were saying there, Stephen, there is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. Just as there is only one thing for you,

meaning Bozzy, absolute humility also, you had better come down into the dust and learn it beside me. Yes. That's beautiful. And the phrase that I've under the spendthrift of my own genius. Here's a question about wild. And here's a question about projecting, no, a trick. John and Stephen both, a trick.

How does he do it? How does he say, I am a genius and you feel sorry for him? How do you say, I am a genius with humility? It's so interesting that, isn't it? There is something in his manner that, as you say, does allow one to feel sorry for him and not to think that it's just a showy peacock making grand claims for himself. It's, I suppose, the fact that you trust his honesty. You trust his vision and his understanding of things

to be greater than just about anybody else you know. I mean, underneath all that serene, swan-like, ease was a very, very busy pair of feet paddling through the literature of the world. He understood Russian and German literature and French literature and philosophy. And he read constantly and remembered and quoted and thought hard. And it didn't come that easily. But he made it look as if it came easily like a, you know, like a Ronnie O'Sullivan talking of geniuses.

But he liked to work, though. He did. He liked to work. Very much. This is part of the torture of prison life is the eternities of. He says the suffering just goes on and over and on and over. And tomorrow will be the same. And today has lasted in eternity.

And we start again tomorrow. Because as we heard from Merlin Holland there, he had no paper. He had nothing to distract him. And of course, when he was in various places on the south coast or in hotels or borrowed houses trying to write plays. Bozzy was the one who was stopping him from working and plucking at him and pulling at him and stopping him from concentrating.

And spending all his money. I mean, it's that thing of having... It's very rare to have anyone who has been that famous, that fated, to have everything taken away. I mean, it's... And you can see why the... the biblical story is so attractive to him and why he, you know, he doesn't need Christ to be the

son of God, he just needs him to be somebody with a poetical soul, with an artistic soul. I see to Christ that imagination was simply a form of love. All he has left in the end in this cell is, I mean, he has some access to literature, but he has a way of telling a story that makes, that makes, that makes. sense out of what he's been through. Yeah. And the thing is that he does it, he does it, but it is, I think, the bit where he comes out of jail that is so painful, you know, the fact that he's, he knows he's in disgrace,

he knows he's going to have to leave, he wants to leave England, he's sick of England. But the, the slow kind of descent into that terrible death in a cheap hotel in Paris, sort of drunk and and sort of even he's squandered many of his closest friendships by this point as well it's almost unbearable to read Yeah, it is

and I think you're right about that point about Christ and the imagination being a form of love and one of the most remarkable things about Wilde is that even in the height of his apparently profligate days when he was beginning to see Bozzi and rarely

saw his children or his wife, except occasionally to read them stories, which he then put into a book, The House of Pomegranates and Haddits, those wonderful fairy stories, the young king and the happy prince and so on. Even at that time, those stories show that he had an awareness of precisely what was going to happen to, because almost every one of the fables he writes is about a glorious, happy, luxurious thing having to learn that actually life is suffering. And whether it's the statue of the young king or who sees that every piece, you know, who sees the poverty, although the young king is about to be crowned, if you remember. He has a series of dreams before his coronation.

He's so looking forward to his tissue of gold cloak and his amazing crown. He's going to be so beautiful. He's going to be the most stunning picture anyone has ever seen of riches and luxury. But in his dream, he sees the old woman. sewing trying to make his tissue and her children are dying around her. She's hardly gone off light, she's going blind. And then another dream happens and he sees a boy being sent down from a boat to pluck pearls from an oyster. And he comes up with the best pearl, the blood streaming from his ears because of the pressure

and the boys push back into the water to die. The pearl will be perfect for the young king's coronation. And so when he finally wakes up having had these dreams in which he sees the provenance of beauty, the beauty is carved from hillsides by you know emerald miners who whose lives are held at nothing he sees this he has this vision and so he tells his chamberlain and everyone else that he doesn't want the tissue of gold cloak he doesn't want the crown he just wears a peasant's hessian and and a rough old straw for his for his hat and when he goes into the church the light shines through the stained glass and lights him up and it becomes a blaze of gold and colour and jewels.

And it's a wonderful story, but it's a magnificent way of explaining what we all feel, which is every day when you buy something, you know, we all know about, you know, blood diamonds and so on. But, you know, it's true of almost, you know, clothes, cheap fashion, how is it made? And he was asking those questions. So he always had that same instinct of imagination of where do things come from, what really are they? What is poverty? What are riches? And he hid himself from himself. And found the language to express it. Well, that's the thing. The story you've just told, of course,

also prefigures Dave Profundis. It's a pearl retrieved from the death. Yeah, right? Absolutely. And the fact that, as John said, he kind of defaults on his intentions, as stated in the essay, in the letter, that matters and it doesn't matter. It doesn't. The capturing, as I say, what I find so incredible out about De Profundis is fixing something that isn't fixed. The flow of intellectual and emotional thought and how those two things relate to one another. Extraordinary, really. This is Tom Stoppard speaking in a documentary, an omnibus documentary from the 90s at evening which you took part as well.

This is Stoppard on wild downfall. I think that one of the things which make us feel for wild is what Richard Elman calls that berserk passion, that he met somebody. And it was as though the rest had been written by Eeschylus. He just went on and on until. And it was self-aware. And he knew that it was tragic. I think that he was a notable victim of that English genius for cutting down the people who are too smart for their own good. And I think there was quite a lot of pleasure.

Much of it expressed in quite malign terms when he fell. You know, I would quite like to read what the Daily Telegraph said in that moment. But there were worse things said. I mean, real glee to typify wild. from our perspective as a gay hero is to do him a disservice he was a hero to humanity there was an edge to that delight in paradox which made it more than humorous it was it was more than wit he did make people he forced people to consider the the the the unconsiderable

You're nodding furiously. I think that's so true. Yeah. Where he talks in the passage that I read earlier about, while talks about what the paradox form was for me, you know, in the verbal and the artistic sphere, perversity became for me in the, you know. But the paradox and his classic examples of wit

are an inversion of what was understood to be true by the Victorians. And by turning upside down the morality that the Victorians were so proud of and so addicted to and so utterly insistent about, by turning it upside down and showing the reverse is true, he really was humiliating essentially the – I mean, you can take an obvious example of turning it upside down is a bomo-like work is the curse of the drinking classes. Now, what's great about that is it's true. The drinking classes, the leisure classes who go and drink a lot do not like that work. But of course, what he's doing is turning upside down the sanctimonious Victorian phrase that drink is the curse of the working classes. And that's just one small example, but he does that in everything. I think elsewhere in some point in Deppervantes, he says,

I change the color of things. And again, here's an example. Here's an example, which again is trivial, but if you expand it, if you extrapolate from it, this is what he means. At table, he would always, when the waiter came asked what he would like to drink, he would say, and some yellow wine for me. Because he thought it ridiculous to call white, white, white, because it wasn't. He saw that it was yellow. That is the color white wine is.

And, you know, that's just to say, it's just a small thing. But if you do that to something in a deep area of philosophy where you realize that your culture and your society has misnamed sin, he was a moralist. And everything that was upside down was that one of the reasons he was actually found guilty was because they thought Doreen Gray was an immoral book. It's a morality tale.

And so everything was upside down. I tweeted this the other day from, it's very short, from the soul of man on the socialism. And as I tweeted it, I thought, well, this is 130 years old. But I felt anxious tweeting it because it seemed so insolent and provocative. But it's so great.

Stick around to the punchline. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. Right? Already, you'll be like, oh no. Oh, no. No. They are continually asking art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before,

to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now, art should never try to be popular. the public should try to make itself artistic. Yes. I agree with that. I agree that's so true, but also that's not...

Every publisher should have it pinned over their desk. That's the opposite of late capitalism. Yes, I mean, he also made the extraordinary point, which Marxists make, you know, about charity perhaps, but he said the enemy of the slave, is the kind slave master. Yeah. But also this idea of through,

you see the thread, this is why I was recommending the solar manner according to socialism in relation to David Friedman. It's the thread of, and whatever the center of David's Venice might be.

Wilde's career is one of self-realization. Yeah, yes. Absolutely right. Yeah. He is trying to make his life a work of art not as a

pose, though posing would be part of it, but as the natural end point of a human being of his talents and aims. And actually there is a through line from the earlier work in all its different plays, stories, genres, epigraphs, epigrams,

right through to Dave Funn. It's probably not into the Ballad of Reading Jail, but even there. There's a hint. I agree. It is full of it and I wanted to read a section here just very short

short bit well this is just a bit here because of our science our neuroscience podcast John you might enjoy this it just said he says I said I said in Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world take place

in the brain but it is in the brain that everything takes place we now know that we not see with the eyes or hear with the ears, they are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is the brain. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings. It's absolutely great.

He was. He was. It's amazing. I quote this a lot when, you know, talking at schools and things like that. It's as true as it ever was. As regards to the other subject, the relation of the artistic life to conduct. It will no doubt seem strange to you that I should select it. People point to Reading Jail and say, that is where the artistic life leads a man. Well, it might lead to worse

places. The more mechanical people, to whom life is a shrewd speculation, depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere. they are placed, they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of parliament, or a successful grocer or a prominent solicitor or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment.

Those who want a mask have to wear it. But with the dynamic forces of life and those in whom those dynamic forces become, incarnate, it's different. People whose desire is solely for self-realization never know where they're going. They can't know. In one sense of the word, it is, of course, necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself, that is the first achievement of knowledge, but to recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance and measured the steps of the moon and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

When the sun went out to look for his father's asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the soul of a king. And he wrote it in prison. I know. Just remind ourselves again. It's so wonderful that though, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean. The self-realisation issue.

And it's as modern as any thought anyone ever has. This is Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys speaking in the late 1990s about why we still are talking, well, why we were talking about wild 25 years ago and why we're talking about him now. I've had a theory in pop music. that when someone become or a group or artist becomes successful, when they carry on being successful, they go from success into what I call their imperial phase

where they can do no wrong, where it seems like it will go on like this forever. And, you know, as with Napoleon's career, it never does go on forever. Something goes disastrally wrong. And the imperial phase is followed by the survival. or it's followed by disaster, that the whole thing fades away. For me, the most fascinating moment of Oscar Wilde's life

is the afternoon when the libel trial has collapsed and a warrant is going to be issued for his arrest. And he decides to stay in the country. And it's a fact that at the time, the warrant for his arrest was delayed to give Oscar Wild the chance to catch the boat. the last boat train. And he has lunch.

I think he must have weighed up what was going to happen to him. He must have known that he was going to, that he would be found guilty. Because, of course, he knew that he was guilty. And decided that it was going to give him a platform, which would, as I say, make him into a legend. I think the fact that Oscar Wilde still matters proves that that afternoon in the Kudogan Hotel,

Oscar Wilde made the right decision. The writing is really only a part of the Oscar Wilde story, and it's the tragic downfall from someone who was so, who had this imperial sense of everything he would do would turn right would fascinate people. What do you think, listening? I mean, we're not, I'm not seeking to cause a 25-year-late fight with Neil Tenet. I just...

No, I think a logician might say post hoc, ergo-proptop-ta-hawk, because what happened afterwards happened, it must have been because of that moment. It's undoubtedly true that the importance of being earnest would always be held up to be the only Victorian clay

written at a time when more theatres were built anywhere in the world in London alone, and yet only one masterpiece from that entire long reign exists and that is the importance of being honest. It is utterly flawless. And we would still be celebrating that play

if the fellow had been a, you know, died like, I don't know, Ken Doyle in the 30s or 40s or something had a large waistcoat and a gold watch and with Sorosca. We would still worship that play. But even that play because of his life, everything about him is, I went say, tainted, is informed by,

maybe he has a halo or an unhoed halo effect, as it were, of the terrible story of his, downfall and the messianic nature of it, that he was a secular bohemian Christ he had disciples, some of whom betrayed him, and he kind of rose again. I mean, one of the things, you know, when I started becoming sort of vaguely well-known and being asked to go to universities and give talks or whatever, and I noticed that as in the 70s, in the earlyish 80s or mid-80s, people. People still on students in their walls on their posters,

they tended to have Jimmy Hendricks and Karl Marx, John Lennon or whatever, because if the world was going to be put to rights, it would be put to write by rock and roll music or by, you know, revolutionary politics. But as the period changed into the 90s, I noticed more and more often there would be posters of Einstein and Oscar. Those two.

But, you know, but the life of the mind because pop music and revolutionary politics have been sort of exploded and somehow shown to be worthless by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the whole business of Russia and stadium rock and so on it just became...

Whereas you could look into Einstein's eyes and even if you didn't understand a word of his physics you could see the crinkly international humanitarian in there and sort of believe that this was someone who mattered and with Wilde he was the student prince and is the student prince. He is the prince of Bohemia. And that's true around the world.

And I used to paint this image. If you've ever been to New York City and you've got in a cab, one of those yellow cabs, and asked you to go down, say, to the village from midtown, you'll be going probably down one of the down avenues and the most obvious one is Fifth Avenue,

a very famous avenue, and it goes downtown one way. Bear with me, this is relevant. As you pass, 33rd Street, there's a very famous building, which is the Empire State Building. And you look out of your window and you crane round and there are nearer buildings in the way. So you can't quite see it. But there's a phenomenon in New York traffic, which is wonderful when it goes right.

And that is the synchronization of the traffic lights. So if all the greens go at the right time, all the way down to Herald Square or whatever is where you're going down to, you can look out through the back window across the parcel shelf And you see the Empire State building launching up and up and up as the buildings that are nearer fall down to their right size. And so it's like a Saturn 5 rocket launching and launching and launching. And the further away you get the higher and higher and higher it is until it's just dominating the entire cityscape. And it was like that in 1900. Wild was nothing.

He was destroyed. His reputation had gone completely. But as each decade passed, the pig. that were closer had suddenly fell away and he became more and more of a symbol of all that's right and good in art and life and friendship and all the issues that, you know, you turn to him for. I should say in the programme maker's defence, they follow that little clip of Neil Tennant talking by playing David Bowes rock and roll suits. Which is, which I think is where he was heading from. So I thought it would be nice if you said, Stephen, that you know, 1900 Wilde was nothing. Well, the good news is that in 1923, he returned via the offices of a medium called Hester Travers Smith.

And she published a book called Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. Wow. Which I can tell you, I'm no expert, but I question the veracity. of this. You're silly not spoiled, skeptical. 146 pages of pseudo-wildian wit. Great. Or wildian pseudo-wit.

Anyway. But this being the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce. And when this episode goes out, it will be very close to Bloom's Day. I noticed that one of the questions the medium asked Oscar in

22 or 3 was what is your opinion of Ulysses by James Joyce? I thought we might end by hearing that. This is what Oscar Wilde thought Oscar Wilde quote unquote. Yeah. Thoughts of Ulysses.

Yes. I have smeared my fingers with that vast work. It has given me one exquisite moment of amusement. I gathered that if I hope to retain my reputation as an intelligent shade, open to new ideas. I must peruse this volume.

It's obviously wild. You can't doubt it for a moment, Steve. A ruse. Oh, my, it's so puterish. Yes. It is putterish. That's right. It is a singular matter that a countryman of mine should have produced this great bulk of

filth. You may smile at me for uttering this when you reflect that in the eyes of the world I am a tainted creature, but at least I had a sense of the values of things on the terrestrial globe. It goes on from there. But what I thought, just as a postscript to that, Joyce was so delighted with that review

that he encoded a review of it in Finnegan's Wake. There is a section of Finnegan's Wake where they tap the table and Oscar comes through and expresses disapproval of the book you are reading at that moment. So I'd think a victory to Joyce on points there, really. I'm afraid that's where we must leave the inimitable Oscar.

Huge thanks to Stephen for generously sharing his thoughts, insights, memories about this extraordinary text. To Nikki Birch for putting us at ease with her oral aptitude and to unbound for smuggling in the Dante and the Flowbear. You can download all 162 previous episodes of Battlisted, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, batlisted.com. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook

and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patrian.com forward slash backlisted. We aim to survive without paid for advertising. Your generosity helps us to do that. All patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early. And for considerably less than Oscar spent on Boise in a single evening, lock listeners get two extra locklisted a month,

our very own hotel suite where we three reclines. smoke, pose and turn, fine phrases of praise regarding books, film, shows and music who detained us in the previous fortnight. Stephen, before we go, is there anything you feel we haven't covered that you would like to say about Oscar Wilde? Here's a thought. Again, pondering on what Wilde, as he lay dying in Paris, may or may not have thought that posterity would do for him or say about him.

His body lies in Pellashez, the famous cemetery in Paris, and there's the sarcophagus by Jacob Epstein and it's really wonderful. But a few years ago, you may recall, the Irish government and the French department responsible for the upkeep of Pelléle shares raised a sum of money to restore that monument. And the reason it needed restoring was that the surface of the marble

had become corroded by the number of kisses. Daily, people go there. It's like Abbey Road in London where you see all those messages to John, Paul, George and Ringo on the wall of the studios. It's the same thing. They come and they want to commune with Oscar. He stands for something for people all over the world.

And he'll cry when you see the little post-it notes and torn pages from the Metro Caneis that are stuck in there, all saying, they killed you, Oscar, I cry for you every day. Or Oscar, you help me. Oscar, you do this. And people have a knowledge and a relationship with him, which is quite rare in all art and literature. That was wonderful.

I think John and I and all the listeners, we're so grateful to you for making the time and coming in and giving us real insight into this wonderful text. One last thought. You know your original question about the letter. It strikes me listening to you, Stephen, that actually what he produced in De Profundus is a secular gospel, isn't it? It's a religious text that isn't religious. It isn't self-help.

He's not setting himself up as a philosopher. He's created something that is so original. Yes. And to use a word that he uses himself, it's antinomian, which is to say it doesn't lay down laws of codes of behavior, but it gives you an insight into the very nature of one's soul. And the fact that it didn't solve all his problems,

that he did end up. For everybody, every broken person out there, he is a kind of, he is a secular saint. Thanks Stephen, thanks, Johnny. We'll see you next time. Bye. And we'd also like to thank reduced listening

for the extract from their program Oscar Wilde's Less from the inside producers Joby Wardman and Jeremy Mortimer. Thank guys. I often turn to this paragraph. It's the last paragraph of the Oscar Wilde biography by Richard Elman, American Academic.

We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitised and standardised, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victorias. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us. Still a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.