Oh Oscar!

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde


Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions
by Frank Harris


Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellman

it's not possible to come up with a witty title when one wants to talk about Oscar Wilde. and no words could express my total sympathy for someone whose life was like a mirror that reflects the ultimate shame and terror of humanity even in one of its better forms.

i started with Dorian Gray. it is a very fine book with a clever design and intriguing possibilities. i say "possibilities", instead of stories, because the whole design is evidently fictional, from start to end, and readers are fully prepared for it. this sets it opposite to the conventional "realistic style", which, in Wilde's words, is "art imitates nature", and dictates a distinct reading experience as if pondering a philosophical question (with disbelief suspended): what would happen if one remained young and beautiful while his portrait (art) aged in his place?  in Oscar's mind the answer is likely open-ended and Dorian for one takes on ever extravagant and bizarre sensual adventures, with his portrait taking a beating with each of his "successes".  "possibilities" are also felt as Dorian is constantly redirected by his friend Lord Henry Wotten. Henry lives a more mundane do-nothing life, except providing hints, suggestions and encouragement: Dorian is his artwork in constant need of touching up and perfection. the creator of Dorian's portrait is the virtuous Basil Hallward, who is hopelessly attracted by Dorian but tries in vain to illustrate the right way of living for the latter - the road not taken. The writing is absolutely absorbing in the first half of the book but becomes repetitive and tiresome slowly, only to be saved by a well-thought of ending. and my interest in Wilde was kindled.

thanks to my new kindle, i read Frank Harris's Oscar first (it's free). it's not a scholarly biography but a friend's recounts, biased and intimate.  in fact, it's very much a fictional story with two main characters. fictional because Harris was criticized even at his own time for recreating dialogues, an obvious no-no for an ordinary biographical writing. it is okay with me, however - i take it as a fact that memory is always "reconstructed" each time it is called into action, knowingly or unintentionally, obviously or subtly.  Harris himself becomes a major part of the narrative because he has an overbearing personality loaded with opinions and conviction.  Harris is highly sympathetic to Wilde for two reasons: he appreciates the latter's genius more than most of his contemporaries and he believes in fighting for a more liberal and tolerant society (for art and artists). it attests to his strong belief that he also shows a total lack of understanding of Oscar's homosexuality. thus, they are friends of contrast, but not of intimacy; of respectful deference, but not of love. one "casualty" of this powerful and revealing book of his is that i found Harris himself rather too straight-arrow-ish and ended up with no wish to learn more about him (his autobiography is fairly known, mostly for its frank and abundant sexual contents).

Ellman's book is considered the most authentic Wilde biography. it is well researched and comprehensive, but the writing is a little tedious. Ellman's Wilde is more mature if not as vivid. reading Ellman, i evolved from sympathy for Oscar's personal tragedy to appreciation of his true genius. with that, i do not feel Wilde had had too much to regret in life. tragic as it was, he knew what his desires were and dared to live them, too - not many human beings could have claimed that.  to a large extent, his contemporaries, supporters and detractors, behaved as well as their own nature had dictated.  the real terror is their well functioning society, with its capacity to exaggerate and multiply the collective sentiment or hatred of the populace, under which, Wilde was simply pulverized, as numerous before and after him.  and Wilde knew: 'as one reads history, not in the expurgated edition written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishment that the good have inflicted.' not just sickening but horrifying. and Oscar becomes a martyr - most unwillingly, i am sure.

most memorable quotes:

"The Love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it."


------ his speech in the court


Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

- from The Ballad of Reading Gaol


"A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys" (it is a relief that he never regretted his true nature)

Wilde had always held that the true "beasts" were not those who expressed their desires, but those who tried to suppress other people's. 

"What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. without it,the world would grow old and colorless". “by its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notion about morality, it is one with the highest ethics."


How Wilde is remembered now:


from Harold Bloom:
...after more than a hundred years literary opinions has converged in the judgement that Wilde, as Borges asserts, was almost always right. This rightness, which transcends wit, is now seen as central to the importance of being Oscar. Daily my mail brings me bad poetry, printed and unprinted, and daily i murmur to myself Wilde's apothegm:"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." -  Harold Bloom


from Ellman:


the monument bears an inscription from The ballad of reading goal: 
And alien tears will fill for him
pity's long-broken urn,
for his mourners will be outcast men, 
and outcasts always mourn.


'There is something vulgar in all success,' Wilde told O'Sullivan.'The greatest man fail, or seem to have failed.' he was speaking of Parnell, but what was true of Parnell is in another way true of Wilde. His work survived as he claimed it would. We inherit his struggle to achieve spureme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being santized and standarized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria's. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.

I also copied a passage from an old biography of Carson "Carson the advocate" by Edward Marjoribanks - probably the only one that has survived him, which nobody reads anymore. I searched for his biographies with the desire to find something like this, and did:

There remains only to be recorded a circumstance as strange and terrible as the culminating scene in Dorian Gray.

Some years afterwards, Edward Carson was walking by himself in Paris on a wet day in the early months of the year. He was about to cross the street when the driver of a fiacre, with Parisian recklessness, almost ran him down, and splashed him clothes with mud. He stepped back quickly on to the pavement, and knocked someone down. Turning around to apologize, he saw a man lying in the gutter, and recognized the haggard, painted features of Oscar Wilde. Like a flash, his mind went back to that occasion eight years before, in London, when Wilde's fine carriage had almost overrun him. the eyes of the two men met, and they recognized each other. Carson turned around and said, "I beg your pardon." Wilde, under the name of Sebastian Melmoth, was living in Paris, dying of a terrible disease, "beyond his means," as he observed with the wit which never deserted him, preying on the generosity of his friends. In a week or two, he was dead.