Wilde Thing

In 1987, Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde marked a turn in that “tide in the affairs of men” which these subsequent books, among so many other studies, anthologies, entertainments and exorcisms, variously swell--nor does such a tide give any indication of being stemmed, though frequently redirected. More than a decade later, even Ellmann, for all his masterly sympathy and scruple, must give way to new biographical method, or at least to new biographical theory, as well as to new biographical discoveries; for Wilde, like Virginia Woolf (notoriously plied and plagued by every kind of revisionary delineation) is an icon our age feels it must transform, and the transformation is being conducted in hundreds of essays in Queer Studies manuals, in “interpretive” productions of his plays, in “experimental” films and documentary exhibitions, and in canny scrutinies of such unexpected evidence as the recently published “Oxford Notebooks,” which oblige us to stir a precocious Victorian humanist into the aesthetic pudding we had perhaps too blandly concocted.

These six books, among so many others of quite discrepant merit, necessarily appeal to disparate tastes or appetites; let me attempt to characterize them briefly before I approach their cumulative significance, which is to participate in that necessary metamorphosis we discover in those overdetermined writers who represent (and produce) a reciprocal metamorphosis in ourselves.

“The Cambridge Companion” (a particularly refreshing collection of essays--after all, Oscar Wilde had so many Oxford companions) is certainly the first of these volumes a Wilde enthusiast (or even anadversary) will want to own. Edited by Peter Raby (himself the author of a compact 1988 life-and-works study of Wilde which is still the best brief introduction to the matter), these 15 essays venture more deeply into the manner and more deftly into the manners of the subject than so many works of scholarly inquiry and speculation, some of the latter by the same contributors who have here been more succinct, more pointed than in their bookmaking projects elsewhere. This is particularly true of Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, whose “Album” is an affable piece of familiarity in the old blood-is-thicker-than-learning sense, but whose essay in the “Companion” on “Biography and the Art of Lying” is strong and corrective; and of Regenia Gagnier, whose 1986 study of Wilde and the Victorian public is here boiled down to 15 indispensable pages on the pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, Wilde’s excruciated recherche amid so much that was languid or intemperate among his contemporaries.

Indeed, Wilde studies have become a series of interlocking directorates, and in “Wilde the Irishman,” the other particularly valuable book in this late Wilderness (if I may), there are valuable essays by the same scholars who companioned Oscar at Cambridge, liveliest among them editor Jerusha McCormack’s portrait of “Oscar as Aesthete and Anarchist” and professor Declan Kiberd’s of “The Artist as Irishman.” Notable also are some brilliant postulations by the arts editor of the Irish Times, Victoria White, on “Misogyny in the Work of Oscar Wilde” and by the Oxford medievalist Bernard O’Donoghue on “Sacrifice and Scapegoats in Irish Literature.” This remarkably various collection--17 essays divided among “appropriations” and “continuities” ends with Seamus Heaney’s 1995 dedication of the Wilde window at Westminster Abbey, in which this fine poet appropriately makes the most conclusive perception of all, to which I shall momentarily return.

Some notice must first be taken of “The Uncollected Oscar Wilde,” John Wyse Jackson’s collection of reviews (and two lectures delivered during Wilde’s American tour) from the 1880s. Most of these instances of a very young man’s journalism are silly indeed, but determined readers will be glad to have contemporary access to Wilde’s pieces on Pater and Keats, on Ben Jonson and Balzac, perhaps even on Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“Mrs. Browning is unapproachable by any woman who has ever touched lyre or blown through reed since the days of the great Aeolian poetess”). The editor will not defend his failure to supply notes or critical apparatus--he wishes merely “to share the pleasure I felt when I happened across that great and courageous memorial to Oscar edited by his friend Robbie Ross: “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde” (1908). This does Wilde no service at all, for without some sort of effort to “place” the texts, an unprepared reader risks confusing the “shared pleasure” of these callow commercialisms with “Intentions,” Wilde’s important essays of 1891. Wilde wrote a great deal of bad prose (and bad verse too), but he is the kind of strong (i.e., iconic, i.e., major) author whose writing must be seen in the context of his development (and of his failures to develop). Only minor writers can stand such naked revelation as Wyse Jackson affords, without “placing” and with only pleasure for criterion, shared or not.

Even less principled is Jonathan Fryer’s breezy and reductive book purporting to narrate the complex relationship between Wilde (referred to on the cover as “the controversial British playwright”) and Andre Gide. Utterly bypassing Gide’s own study of Wilde (which Edmund Wilson, who loathed Gide, once called the best thing ever written on the subject), Fryer’s prose is a preposterous substitute for literary criticism or biographical probity: “Blond, twenty-one, masculine and obtuse, Sherard was one of a long series of bewitched young admirers whose attentions Oscar so savored, though until his seduction by the young Robert Ross in 1886, Oscar seems not to have given physical expression to his desire for youthful male bodies.” This is the discursive style of Robin Byrd, and it is pursued throughout, first names and all: “Andre was in heaven . . . but he was increasingly incapacitated by a cold that had been bugging him since he left France.” But what bugs me, so to speak, is the penultimate page, where we find, among comparable solecisms: “Andre resumed to peacetime Paris to find himself one of the grand old men of French literature. . . . Several commentators at the time made the perceptive remark that the Nobel Prize had been awarded to Gide partly as an act of atonement to Oscar Wilde for what society had done to him.” It is Fryer’s view that this remark was perceptive, a view aptly characterizing his entire enterprise, which of course is called “Andre and Oscar.” Fryer may not write well, but he is very intimate with his authors.

Even the editorial page of the New York Times has recently found it pertinent to remark on the amount and diversity of attention paid to Oscar Wilde these days, of which attention these books are but a representative sampling which ought to include two new plays and a movie of very diverse merits and any number of revisionary studies from Camille Paglia to Eve Sedgwick (a distance only the most flagrant academic runner could cover without heavy breathing). As I began by suggesting, we go in for this kind of intensive scrutiny (and extensive modification) only when, as in the case of Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, we feel the need to alter something in ourselves. It is not as an act of atonement to a mistreated homosexual (pace Mr. Fryer) that we worry Wilde so at the present time: Notice how little such worrying attaches to E.M. Forster, for instance, about whom Lionel Trilling wrote an initial study back in 1943 without even mentioning (noticing?) that his author was a gay man. The fact is that we are now, at many points of our consciousness, both as individuals and as a society, much more concerned to transform our notions of what a gay man and a gay writer is--or was--than ever before; Wilde has become the empty space in which we inscribe our explanations, our much-altered hopes and fears of what a homosexual man is and might be. How valuably Heaney puts it, in his Westminster Abbey dedication, reprinted in “Wilde the Irishman”: “All our current awareness about the way gender roles and sexual orientation are constructs rather than destinies, all our lost trust in the essential stability of a category such as ‘human nature,’ all our nascent tolerance of diversity, all these things were foreshadowed in Oscar Wilde’s life and writings.” That is why we cannot let him rest--and will not rest, ourselves, until we have arrived at a finer and fairer notion of the truth about what Gide once called “a not inconsiderable peninsula” of human geography.

In their various ways, all these books are committed to that undertaking, and it is not an act of atonement to a mistreated homosexual that this should be so, but an act of honor to a great writer.