The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Lewis, Roger
against a book reviewer would seem to prove Howe's point. Apart from getting even with Max Appel, Ztickerman's major pursuit is getting rid of the mysterious pain. He decides that the way to do...
...Wilson gives him the intriguing realization that the failures in his life stem from a subconscious self-destruct mechanism which "wanted things to go wrong from the first...
...Wilde drew attention to himself to such an extent he expired under the scrutiny of self-generated spotlights...
...He excited the curiosity of women, from novices in a convent to barmaids in inns to the for...
...What there is of plot never advances unobtrusively through conversation...
...Decorousness betrays the sham within...
...He has done the best of any novelist with the mandarin vaudeville style Bellow inaugurated in A ugie March...
...As Wilde's fame grew, the chasm between his private self and the public image likewise expanded...
...Where others, like the poet Philip Freneau, the moralist Emerson, the devoutly tormented Nathaniel Hawthorne, the naturalist philosopher Thoreau, all took Some kind of passionate stand or other, Irving accepted a commission from the self-made millionaire furrier John Jacob Astor, moved to an old Dutch farmhouse "as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat" in a bend on the Hudson River, and went on writing biographies, travelogues, and constantly revising, devulgarizing, in edition after edition, his biting early work...
...Reviewers often praise Roth's style, and his writing/s smooth...
...Americans are blessed to have been given, in the infancy of their nationhood, a writer with a romantic and comic piety...
...tions...
...His dandyism and fame were ruined and mocked by the discovery of his secret proclivities...
...Or so it seemed to this literary pilgrim returning, on a windy and appropriately spooky November 28 morning, to the village which bears his name, after having performed a solitary ritual of ancestorworship at his grave tn the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in neighboring Tarrytown...
...Superannuated, androgyne appears as Tiresias in T.S...
...Somebody should have told me about them long ago," runs the epiphany...
...The medieval Tretis begins to speak for the first time as literature and not as a bundle of grammatical idiosyncrasies...
...Wilson/Viking Press/S13.95 Roger Lewis P e t e r Ackroyd is a master of disguise...
...Wise Virgin finds Giles middle-aged and lonely, tinkering with a medieval religious tract called the Tretis of Loue I-feuenliche which he is meant to be editing...
...As a student he was arch and bitter...
...Like Kafka'his early legal education, along with bronchial attacks, perhaps shaped the playful melancholy in all his writings, as if he is always arguing a flawed case...
...that there was nothing which I could not do . . . . But in t r u t h . . . I was imprisoned by my success just as if I had been caught in a house of mirrors where, turning quickly about myself, I saw only my own image...
...Oswald in King Lear is sneered at because "a tailor made thee" and ParoUes in Ali's Well that Ends Well is dismissed for "the soul of this man is his clothes...
...If our commentators about myth are to be believed, androgyne is the primal, undivided whole from which the rest of us have sprung...
...He has already essayed Ezra Pound, an author whose endless Cantos form a ventriloquial epic...
...He hid himself in words for in sentences his personality could unftirl as in a sanctuary...
...I took off one mask only to reveal another...
...Like Don Quixote mountVictor Anant has written for the London Spectator and other publications...
...Wilde has been on trial, imprisoned, and now exiled to the continent...
...Perhaps deliberately, Washington Irving pioneered an American concept: the package deal...
...What makes Last Testament so breathtaking is that this invented diary is dangerously plausible...
...ing his nag Rosinante to set off on mythic crusades, Irving ruffled the feathers of contemporary prophets and upset their followers without mocking their faiths...
...As the century turns it is not moral law which hounds him but diseases within his own body...
...What in fact happened was that his personality became entangled in a drama which not even his conversation could outface...
...Wilson has scooped the literary awards...
...A cancer ward, it seems, will do as well as the Gulag...
...He was rising from his own ashes like an exquisite phoenix...
...We see Wilde convert his degradation into a symbol of the theological Fall...
...those which fear and cowardice murmured to me...
...Hints come that Giles might even be serene, like Milton who On His Blindness understands he will at least no longer have to regard "the world's vain mask...
...However, his most recent disaster is the affliction of blindness, and so he is forced to hire an assistant who will transcribe his notes and take down his ideas...
...He refused to play god: He played "the holy fool...
...Parallels, such as they are, are parodic...
...The disintegration of his marriages was merely par for the course...
...Yet, as he confesses later, "When people believed in me, I ceased to believe in myself...
...it lurches from soapbox to soapbox...
...He used language as Pope used a couplet: a machine to hide in which was simultaneously a weapon to wield...
...But the reader knows there will be another turn of the screw, for dotard Louise has inserted silently into Giles's Tretis howlers all of her own...
...The duty of the pun, the maxim, and the lightning retort is to draw attention to itself...
...He decides that the way to do this is to shuck the writer's trade and find a profession which would make him focus on something beside himself...
...It is the same trick that most "serious" Broadway dramatists use these days, and it makes the assembly of characters in a room seem arbitrary...
...Edited with meticulous notes by James W. Tuttleton, this commemorative edition of Irving's Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., Salmagundi, A History of New York, ~ ' ~" Sketch Book resurrects Irving ces him in perspective, as a truty orlgi ' American pioneer...
...There is nothing of the kind...
...The crux of the novel is Giles's coming to terms with his own bitterness...
...Built from fragments of recollected conversations and snatches of dialogue overheard in history, the Cantos "moan round with many voices, " like the memories cloaked by the ocean in Tennyson's Ulysses...
...But it is not he who dresses up: His talent is to divine the masquerades of other people...
...on the other he was a frequenter of male brothels, a wallower in his own sins...
...She is also personally unprepossessing...
...We see Wilde erecting about himself verbal paradoxes and conundrums through which he intends to be redeemed...
...He is sometimes more Wildean than Wilde...
...Wilde was trapped in the filigree cage of his own cleverness...
...He also views himself as a martyr, a stumbled messiah...
...I am an 'effect' merely: the meaning of my life exists in the minds of others and rio longer in my own...
...his style playfully imitative of the old world...
...The best bits in his last books have been the letters which the characters compose~off-stage, of course...
...He grew up learning to play the flute at a time when the American Revolution had drawn to a close: George Washington had entered New York to the blare of trumpets and drums, brass and plumery...
...But Wilde's dressing up--both linguistic and sartorial--reflected the brilliance of his Vital intellect...
...Ostensibly about transvestism, it charted the couturial aids which help blur sexual distincRoger Lewis is fiction critic for the New Statesman (London...
...Throughout this novel, Wilde meditates upon the manner in which he had invented disguises to protect himself only to discover that they proved treacherous and were used in evidence against him...
...Soon his reputation as a scandalous wit had reached Philadelphia where he was hailed as the voice of young America pricking the jingoism of fashionable playwrights and their brave American sailors in love and war...
...handsome prince is in fact a strutting girl...
...And with a magical touch of necromancy the Library of America Series, honoring America's foremost writers, now pays tribute in a handsome volume to four works of Washington Irving in their original, outspoken, robust versions...
...The package never burst at the seams...
...Although I possess the wonder of Miranda~ I have also the faintness of Prospero who forswears his art as soon as life has quite matched his expectations...
...He even affects a disinterested inquisitiveness about his own fate...
...I knew every spot where a murder or a robbery had been committed or a ghost seen...
...From the age of sixteen, he says, he wandered around the nooks and crannies of little New York...
...Rust, sword...
...It is as though Ackroyd had been chosen as the amanuensis for Wilde's spectral jottings...
...There follow a number of discussions between the forty-year old novelist and his friends about the "real world" and what he is going to do in life--the sort you last heard senior year in college...
...I have lied to so many people--but I have committed the unforgivable sin, I have lied to myself...
...It is the only fun the reader has, as well...
...With rather heavy symbolic aptness, Wilson has Tibba read King Lear...
...WASHINGTON IRVING: HISTORY, TALES, AND SKETCHES Edited by James W. Tuttleton/Library of America Series, distributed by Viking Press/S27.50 Victor Anant J u s t as it appears as if posterity is counterparodying a writer who parodied his times and as if observances for the bicentenary of his birth last April 3 had completely petered out with the dismantling of the exhibits in the New York Public Library third floor hallway, the sanguine spirit of the "New World's first man of letters" is reincarnated again...
...Giles Fox, the hero in Wilson's novel, a librarian and medieval philologist, propagates, on the contrary, an unhealthy sourness...
...Instead of mastering life, I allowed it to master me...
...Ackroyd has also written a book called Dressing Up...
...Because he worked close to the grain he raised the hackles of republicans, and while his precocious wit and dandyism won the ladies, his family decided to pack him off on a long discovery of Europe on the grounds of his weak health...
...Wise Virgin cannot hope to compete with this, yet A.N...
...and Parolles live Safest in shame...
...Louise Agar, the recruited helper, had written a failed doctorate "on a subject of staggeringly peripheral importance...
...A dirty old man named Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent...
...Wilde was apparently in the pay of D'Oyly Carte, helping to advertise Patience...
...He highlighted the disguise with real costumes for "dress is the most complete repr~entation of modern civilization...
...In Chicago he has a nervous breakdown, bangs himself falling on a tombstone (shades of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle") and lands up in the hospital...
...his wickedness never malicious...
...Giles's cantankerousness is not that of unregarded age in corners thrown but the grumpiness of Timon of Athens...
...I woke one afternoon and left my compartment to purchase a sandwich, a fanciful leadcoloured thing, only to find John Howson, who played Bunthorne, that absurd caricature of myself, standing upon the observation platform dressed in a costume similar to my own and reciting one of my poems...
...His characters don't talk, they sandblast each other with words...
...There, once he recovers some of his health, he makes the rounds with the doctors in intensive care and discovers that cancer, among other maladies, is worse than the pangs of a solipsistic literary conscience...
...Eliot's The Waste Land ("throbbing between two lives/Old man with wrinkled female breasts") and in an elliptical way underpir~s Ackroyd's latest book, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde...
...This combination of masculine and feminine traits is the basis of comic confusion in much of Shakespeare (where girls turn into boys) and is the major convention in British pantomime (where the Ugly Sisters are vamps played by comedians and the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 39 of his nature clashed together like fatal cymbals...
...he represented the abiding virtues of "limitations...
...On the one hand he was a famous author, aphorist of the Cafd Royale with a respectable wife and family...
...But looked at with a critical eye, free from moral and social distaste, the concept of a man trying to turn himself into a woman enacts something important...
...And as he tasted the adventures of the road, he also consumed vast quantities of travel writing...
...cool, blushes...
...This affected carapace hardened into a firm characteristic when he failed to win a Fellowship at Cambridge...
...Ackroyd's novel pretends to be a journal of the writer's last few weeks when these two halves THE LAST TESTAMENT OF OSCAR WILDE Peter Ackroyd/Harper &Row/S12.95 WISE VIRGIN A.N...
...The fam'ily had prospered through two decades of turmoil, and had been a safety net of silken ropes...
...His trials saw him pilloried: The version of himself which performed deeds shocking to Victorian England stripped the finery from the peacock he had striven to become...
...I felt quite revolted...
...Irving, a spoilt child, hated school and refused to go to college...
...I became extremely curious about the world which had suddenly been revealed to me, for it seemed to be formed upon principles quite different from those I had imagined...
...He tried to cope by becoming almost a caricature of the wisecracking fop who was, like the characters in his plays, "shielded by perfect sentences...
...Tibba loses the humility and wisdom of Cordelia to be wooed by the bounder Peverill...
...His sources were always secondary...
...He survived wild escapades, acquired a smattering of French, Italian, and also Spanish, the only language he seriously studied...
...Maybe Roth should try an epistolary novel...
...The blind scholar acknowledges he has been like a man who "casteth forth his ice like morsels: who is able to abide his frost...
...Irving lived and wrote in concentric circles...
...W i l d e ' s lifelong quest, as Ackroyd perceives, was to turn conversation into an art and his personality into a symbol...
...Dowdy, plump, and plain, she wins the scorn of Giles's daughter, Tibba, whose life has been lived through the heroes and heroines of books...
...his feel of the pulse, his timing, impeccable...
...How do we know when an actor is acting...
...He flies to Chicago to enroll in medical school...
...Other people...
...I imagined that the world was mine...
...This youngest son of a dour Scottish Presbyterian commercial family had been whimsically named after the great hero...
...Ackroyd's Wilde is as fluent as the genuine article and in addition achieves wisdom from his humiliations...
...his instincts reverential...
...Now I must try to break the habit of a lifetime...
...He should also take a cue from his literary alter ego, whose only fun in The Anatomy Lesson is when he gets out of his own skin and pretends to be a pornography magnate...
...With the looks of a lady and the appendages of the male, the transvestite is a creature closest to androgyne (andros male, gun~ woman, in Greek...
...The tragedy was that Wilde was neither the stagemanager of his own performance nor placed within the safety of a script known to the actor in advance...
...Recognizing the blindness motifs, we are informed "there was surely much of Giles in Lear...
...To the native American there must have been something subversively alien in the work of a humorist who anticipates Chaplin, Nathanael West, Damon Runyon, and others who have not plodded the beaten paths of country humorists...
...Wilde certhinly could not have put an unevasive answer to this kind of discrimination...
...Wilde it is who throbs between two lives...
...When I entered the courtroom of the Old Bailey it was as if I were going upon a stage...
...The fact that a gilded mask was taken for the human face confirmed and strengthened the laws of my own being...
...being fool'd, by fool'ry thrive...
...had started lampooning pretensions of the New World in New York's Morning Chronicle, a paper edited by Irving's brothSr Peter...
...There's place and means for every man alive...
...instead of being the extraordinary dramatist which I was, I became an actor merely, mouthing the lines of others an...
...We leave him treasuring the realization that he doesn't have it so bad after all, and there is a hint that he will return to the typewriter...
...In feature a Boer farmer, in manner a vestal virgin, as Wilde says of Walter Pater...
...But his dialogt/e, even though it can be amusing, is something of a cheat...
...He collapses into a delirious slumber ahd his last words are recorded by a friend: " I knew I should create a great sensat i o n . . . " Wilde hid himself in words...
...We had stopped at a little station and the credulous population assumed at once that Howson was Wilde...
...Now that he is done with Nathan Zuckerman, Roth should leave the exploration of the literary ego to the dozens of novelists currently working the terrain and let his not inconsiderable talents for gags and mimicry feed on more solid fare...
...His early notebooks are full of moody passages, comic or picaresque folk tales, and the sudden, deadly, throwaway insight...
...It was thus a trauma to meet on an American train a grisly double...
...I have always worshipped at the altar of imagination, but I never believed that I would become a sacrifice upon i t . " The genius of The Last Testament 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 is that the squalor which was the reality of Wilde's last days is transfigured into art...
...By nineteen, he had already cultivated his "sense of the ridiculous...
...The idea is an old one...
...But he is mortally ill...
...The more beleaguered he was, the wittier he became...
...There is a funny skit on the airplane where Zuckerman pretends to the staid businessman sitting next to him that he is a pornographer named Max Appel...
...Wilde deflected the world's blows with epigrams...
...He wanders Paris, bearing his past like a curse...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
