Love in a Dark Time 
Colm Tóibín
- The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis
The first two months of 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love.’ On Sunday 27 January André Gide, also in Algiers, was, according to his own account, checking out of the Grand Hôtel d’Orient when he saw the names ‘Oscar Wilde’ and ‘Alfred Douglas’ on the slate on which guests’ names were written. Theirs were at the bottom, which must have meant that they had only just arrived. His was at the top in one of his versions of the story; it was beside Wilde’s in another. In either case, he later wrote that he took the sponge, wiped his name out and made his way quickly to the railway station.
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Colm Tóibín is Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University. His essay in this issue is based on a lecture he gave at the University of Genoa’s Ford Madox Ford conference.
Other articles by this contributor:
Dissecting the Body · Ian McEwan
A Man with My Trouble · Henry James leaves home
Don’t abandon me · Borges and the Maids
How to be a wife · The Discretion of Jackie Kennedy
The Wickedest Woman in Paris · Rupert Everett
My Darlings · Drinking with Samuel Beckett
Issues of Truth and Invention · Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts
Roaming the Greenwood · A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods
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