That is, the difficulty is less intellectual than characterological. Rather, the intellectual problem is the framework or context in which to understand Wilde. The intellectual context poses both personal and political puzzles. And why, after the failure of that suit and before Wilde was charged himself, or even when Wilde was briefly released on bail between his trials, did he not flee to France, as most other sensible legally-endangered homosexuals did?
Equally or more important are the social and political riddles. How did men who had sex with young men conceive of themselves? Was Wilde, in addition to being a prominent writer and a genuine celebrity, also a proto-gay activist? Was there a nascent gay political movement in the closing years of the Victorian Era in England? The intellectual issues can, I think, be resolved. Anyway, the truth of personality is, as we know, pluralistic, as are many other truths.
So, the desire to have Wilde in the room, sitting in a chair, legs crossed, smoking a tipped cigarette, about to speak, must be the undertow in any meditation. Upon entering Reading Gaol, partway into his two-year sentence, Wilde was a ruined man.
I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter waters sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. Now, in the winter evenings of early , in his cell, beneath the light of flaring gas jets, on a makeshift table constructed from a plank bed and two trestles, Wilde began to write his letter.
Of course, De Profundis is a marred document. At the end, he comes close to turning the bitter waters sweet. If it prove so, read the letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused.
