Chapter 1: What is the significance of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis?
Hello, it's Andy.
Hi, it's Nicky.
Welcome to Backlisted, one of our rerun episodes from our archive. This time it's De Profundis by Oscar Wilde with our guest Stephen Fry.
Is he Sir Stephen Fry?
Yeah, he is Sir Stephen Fry. I'm not sure whether he was Sir Stephen Fry when we recorded this.
No. It 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 favourite books, not just from our Batlist, but from my reading of the last however many years. And...
It was one of those occasions, Nicky, where it felt like a privilege to have the opportunity to discuss one of my favourite 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 saying, really begin to engage with the conversation.
Yes, he realises 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, it's this kind of a conversation.
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Chapter 2: How did Stephen Fry's relationship with Wilde influence his perspective?
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.
Yes, it's all boats. So we beat 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 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 Profit Song from 2023 by Paul Lynch. And that will be on. May the 11th. I was 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 Profit Song by Paul Lynch on May the 11th, we will choose... or the tin we'll 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 earphones 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 is.
Come to the light.
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Chapter 3: What are the historical contexts surrounding the publication of De Profundis?
But at least the subject of the conversation is one that you are deeply familiar with and sympathetic to. Well, one assumes sympathetic to, Stephen.
Sympathy is a word I think is very appropriate. 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 gonna get the parts that Brad Pitt had just turned down. So when I was offered to play Oscar Wilde, it was an extraordinary feeling for me. Amazing. Yeah, really amazing.
I watched the film again the other night. Me too. I barely looked at Jude Law. I was transfixed, Stephen.
I was transfixed.
Without, as it were, blowing smoke, it is a really extraordinary performance.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I mean, aside from everything else, one of the miracles of doing a film like that is, firstly, we had Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, as a consultant.
Just to stand next to him, to shake his hand, and to see the fingers, not exactly like the Max Beerbohm cartoons, I mean, not really fat, but a certain pudginess, which is clearly a genetic Wilde marker that is just so identical. And that face, the soft face, and that was extraordinary.
And also with Jude, say, to scenes at Magdalen College, Oxford, walking along a little sort of ditch-like river that goes along the side of the Deer Park and then towards some balustrades and stone walls. stone pillars and things, that there is a photograph of Wilde and Bosie, Lord Alfred, in exactly that position.
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Chapter 4: How does Wilde's writing reflect his views on love and suffering?
But, yeah, like my dear friend Douglas Adams, he 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 taxi's 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. LAUGHTER 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 worldwide. Although, has that gone down in the last 48 hours on the day we're recording this, like everyone's has?
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 me.
And how would you characterise your... We can ignore the Elon Musk in the room. How would you characterise your relationship with Twitter these days? You were a very warm presence on Twitter early on, and then you stepped back a bit because you found it, I think, too... Stressful? Was it really better in the old days? Oh, yes.
Yes, it was. It was just more amiable. I compare it to a watering hole, a pool, a natural pool or lake 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 all 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 public.
And then suddenly you see something very unfortunate floating towards you. 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 stye and a horror. And it just isn't fun anymore. And so there were a couple of occasions where I, however one wants to put it, stormed off through my...
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Chapter 5: What philosophical themes are explored in De Profundis?
It's the old 80s and 90s Oxford World Classics. Edition of The Soul of Man and Prison Writings by Oscar Wilde, edited by Isabel Murray. This is really excellent. This has the essays, The Soul of Man, De 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 was the final full version.
Well, we're going to delve into the various versions, so it's edge-of-the-seat stuff. The next exciting thing I was about to say, Andy, was that the publishing history of De Profundis is complicated.
It was first published in 1905 by Wilde's friend and literary executor, Robert Ross, who published the text, shorn of the autobiographical elements and the references to Bossey and the rest of the Queensberry 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 Weil's relationship with Boese 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.
Now established as one of the greatest prose works in the English language, most readers would agree with Max Beerbohm's early review that in De Profundis, we see Wilde 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.
If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare, you must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms and plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
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 singularly 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... A terrible symbolic poem you could write about that, that leads from the jollity of the Victorian middle classes to faeces and blood by way of Richard Doyley Cart. It's just a peculiar and horrible coincidence that it was Richard Doily Carter who produced Gilbert and Sullivan, their operas, and made a fortune from it, of course.
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Chapter 6: How does Wilde critique Victorian morality in his letter?
So it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
He's clever, he's unmanly, he's unhealthy. There's something wrong.
The seeds of the tragedy are there. Stephen, when did you first read De profundis, some version thereof?
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 enamoured 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 or night even. Always more things to be done.
But anyway, he was away, 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's snowy black and white was a film that 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. When 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. LAUGHTER And I thought, I never heard it.
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Chapter 7: What parallels can be drawn between Wilde's life and his literary work?
I was 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 Falstaff.
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 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 De 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 Wandsworth 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 Bosie 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 1905, 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 Bosie and explaining what's happened. There are people, I think, at the time who felt it was just self-justification and he was... pinning all the blame on.
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Chapter 8: What lasting impact has De Profundis had on modern literature?
It's what's just it's tested with the Derbyville's. Yeah, 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'm 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. But as I understand it, Weil 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 that 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.
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 Bosie, 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'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.
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