You Demanded without Grace and Received without Thanks.

 

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis read by Neil Bartlett

Writer and performer Neil Bartlett reads Wilde’s De Profundis – a 50,000-word letter to his lover and betrayer ‘Bosie’ – in its entirety, live from the old chapel in Reading Prison, 4 September 2016. 

Find out more https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/i...

Performed by Neil Bartlett:  

http://www.neil-bartlett.com

Filmed and broadcast live by Kinura : http://www.kinura.com/

Thumbnail image: Jean-Michel Pancin's 

In Memoriam (2016). 

Materials: Concrete plinth, steel frame, 

Original wooden door to Oscar Wilde’s cell. 

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Analix Forever and Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham. 

Installed in the old chapel as part of 

Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison. Photograph: Will Eckersley 2 September 2016.

"I blame myself again for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin. 

I remember one morning in the early October of ’92 sitting in the yellowing woods at Bracknell with Your Mother. At that time I knew very little of your real nature. 

I had stayed from a Saturday to Monday with you at Oxford. You had stayed with me at Cromer for ten days and played golf. The conversation turned on You, and Your Mother began to Speak to Me about Your Character. 

She told me of your two chief faults, Your Vanity, and your being, as she termed it, “all wrong about money.” 

I have a distinct recollection of how I laughed. 

I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison, and the second to bankruptcy. 

I thought Vanity a sort of graceful flower for a Young Man to wear; as for extravagance — for I thought she meant no more than extravagance — the virtues of prudence and thrift were not in my own nature or my own race. But before our friendship was one month older I began to see what your mother really meant. Your insistence on a life of reckless profusion : your incessant demands for money : your claim that all your pleasure should be paid for by me whether I was with you or not : brought me after some time into serious monetary difficulties, and what made the extravagances to me at any rate so monotonously uninteresting, as your persistent grasp on my life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was really spent on little more than the pleasures of eating, drinking, and the like. 

Now and then it is a joy to have one’s table red with wine and roses, but you outstripped all taste and temperance. You demanded without Grace and received without Thanks. 

You grew to think that you had a sort of Right to Live at My Expense and in a profuse luxury to which you had never been accustomed, and which for that reason made Your Appetites all the more keen, and at the end if you lost money gambling in some Algiers Casino you simply telegraphed next morning to me in London to lodge the amount of your losses to your account at your bank, and gave the matter no further thought of any kind."