The remarkable Dorothy Bussy translation should be noted. Dorothy Bussy, a lifelong friend of Gide, was born Dorothy Strachey, a sister to Lytton and James Strachey, and was a teacher at the Allenwood Academy in England where Eleanor Roosevelt was among her students:

Some people taxed me with selfishness; I taxed them with stupidity. My claim was not to love anyone in particular—man or woman—but friendship itself, or affection, or love. I refused to deprive another of what I gave to one, and would only lend myself – just as I had no wish to appropriate another’s body or heart. A nomad here too, as in nature, I took up my abode nowhere. A preference seemed to me an injustice; wishing to belong to all men, I would not give myself to anyone. 13

The first part of In Memoriam then, depicts the brilliant 1891 Oscar Wilde without revealing the extent of the psychic possession he had upon the young man, evidence of which has just been cited. The second part where the “tragic memories” (p. 13) begin is set in North Africa at the end of January 1895 when Gide left Algiers for Blidah, and chanced upon the names of Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas on the hotel register. 14 He began by erasing his own name, but was sorry for the act of cowardice, had his trunk carried back up again, and stayed to dinner with them. 15 While the essay gives a relatively respectful account of the meeting, Si le grain ne meurt (If It Dies), Gide’s autobiography published twenty years later, gives another far less delicate account of the events. It explores Oscar Wilde’s role and responsibility in initiating Gide and others into the culture of homosexual and heterosexual brothels, venereal diseases, drugs, and lavish hedonism. Jean Delay, the eminent psychiatrist already cited, is definite about the fact Gide was fascinated by the insolence, the extravagance, the provocations, and pretensions Wilde and Bosie had of being above the laws and morals of ordinary persons. 16

Total disgrace for Oscar would follow when he returned to London. It came about when the Marquis of Queensberry sent him an insulting card at the Albemarle Club that he received from a footman on 28 February 1895. 17 Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquis, lost it, was put on trial twice, and was convicted and sentenced to two years hard labor. In Paris, Stuart Merrill circulated a petition in Paris—a petition was also circulated in London—for mitigation of his sentence. Gide was among the few to sign it, 18 a harbinger of his stances in standing fast by his moral convictions, unpopular though they might be. 19

The third part of In Memoriam is a moving account of the lugubrious changes that prison wrought upon Wilde. Gide was among the first to visit Sebastian Melmoth, the alias he adopted when he was released from prison and took up residence in a small hotel in Berneval, a village near Dieppe in Normandy. The two men saw each other for the last time in Paris shortly before Oscar Wilde died in a small discreet hotel, rue des Beaux-arts, destitute, penniless and scorned by the literary world, while his friend would become one of the most successful authors in the western world, the recipient of a Nobel Prize in 1947, and in France, his generation’s most important conscience. Today, posterity may have rebalanced the equation: Wilde’s tales are widely read, his plays performed everywhere, and he ranks at the very top of the pantheon of English-speaking authors.

1 That is the phrase used by Richard Ellman, Wilde’s biographer: “… in 1891, his annus mirabilis, he published four books (two volumes of stories, one of critical essays, and a novel) and a long political essay (“The Soul of Man under Socialism”) and wrote his first successful play, Lady Windermere’s Fan as well as most of Salomé.” Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) 307.

2 The work contains the subtitle, “theory of the symbol,” and it is dedicated to the poet Paul Valéry. Earlier in the year, the two friends had cemented their friendship with a visit to “Narcisse’s” tomb in Montpellier. Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) 73.

3 Ellman 337-9.

4 André Gide, Journal I 1887-1925, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1996) 1389.

5 André Gide and Paul Valéry, Correspondance 1890-1942, ed. Robert Mallet (Paris: Gallimard 1955) 139.

6 Correspondance 141. “Wilde s’étudie pieusement à tuer ce qui me restait d’âme, parce qu’il dit que pour connaîitre une essence, il faut la supprimer: il veut que je regrette mon âme. L’effort pour la détruire est la mesure de cette chose.”

7 Marcel Schwob and Stuart Merrill were among the French authors who worked on and corrected the French of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé.

8 Jean Delay, The Youth of André Gide, abridged and trans. June Guicharnaud (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1963) 289.

9 Correspondance 144.