Oscar Wilde

...The oil-slick irides- Wilde at least was keen to do so...

...extended far beyond his immediate social circle, even to the scornful dismissal of far greater writers...

...In both cases, art...

...In its passage, the slug left a in most of his sordid dalliances...

...He saved that relevance...

...Ac- was a generous man whose socialism cording to one of the doctors present, was nothing more profound or serious a contributory cause was syphilis, than a chronic overspender's desire to which might also explain some of his share other people's wealth...

...he stopped Ellmann succeeded in capturing his writing, dying under sordid cir- subject's genuine good qualities when cumstances after spending a few years not claiming undeserved ones...

...He seldom emotional follies in the years im- intentionally hurt others, although his mediately preceding his fall...

...Johnson...

...choosing the title for his best Wilde, a meticulously detailed but °e- V. / remembered play, Oscar Wilde casionally sycophantic examination of settled on The Importance of Being Wilde's life and letters, is a case in Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious point...

...failure, and his continued passion for Perhaps it is fitting that the man who that thoroughly nasty little piece of found Little Nell's death scene in The work, Lord Alfred Douglas, with the Old Curiosity Shop so amusing died an attendant, self-inflicted scandal (it was even more squalid, melodramatic death Wilde who insisted on going to court in a cheap Paris hotel room...

...He felt himself omnipotent, renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred and he became gross not in body years ago...

...If it is, the title should be The Im- his verbal facility and painstaking portance of Being Oscar: A Serious research allowed him to produce Comedy for Trivial People, for his life readable, informative lives...

...thoughtless indulgence brought much It is a sad story, but not a particular- suffering on his wife, children, and ly tragic one...

...He was an arand as a light entertainer while also dent admirer of Wilde, as he was of recognizing the unbearable heaviness James Joyce, the subject of his other of his self-conscious attempts at serious major literary biography...

...Along with Blake and new information to light to justify the Nietzsche, he was proposing that good and autopsy...

...ty of earnestness, an earnestness which It was an arrogance, a grossness, that he also disavowed...

...His greatness as a writer is partly the Aram Bakshian, Jr., a member of the result of the enlargement of sympathy National Council on the Humanities, which he demanded for society's victims...

...He ranged over the was the most enchanting company, visible and invisible worlds, and don't you know...

...viewer must add that Professor He did the right thing...

...Max Beer-girth, he shared with Dr...

...His conversation was dominated them by his unusual views...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988...

...The questions posed by both only—he did become that—but in his his art and his life lend his art a quali- relations with people...

...He bohm, reminiscing in his own old age, occupied, as he insisted, a 'symbolic recalled that " . . . in the beginning, he relation' to his time...

...so simple and natural and flowing—He is not one of those writers who as not at all epigrammatic, which would the centuries change lose their have been unbearable...

...Whitman, Longfellow, Eliot, Toward the end of his life, Wilde found Thackeray and Meredith were all found himself guilty of committing the one, wanting by the author of the flimsy, to him, unforgivable sin: He began to over-decorated parable of Dorian bore himself...

...One suspects its subject, though flattered, would have found this effusion ended only with the deaths of Noel embarrassing and vaguely comic...

...His wit is an agent of rogant...

...Wilde's debased legacy than art...

...Dickens, he In so disavowing, Wilde took a more claimed, was an inferior novelist to down to earth view of his life and Disraeli, a perfumed poseur Wilde art than Professor Ellmann...

...Wilde is one of us [here, the for his plays, thank heaven...

...following comparison a few lines later: It is considered as an entertainer, and "Some of . . . [Wilde's] interest lies an amiable bon vivant, that Wilde in a characteristic that, along with deserves remembering...

...he jumped...

...Perhaps someday an adequate, who died at Oxford in 1987 shortly balanced biography of the great wit after completing this work, was a will be written, one that captures distinguished scholar who wrote, if not Wilde's brilliance as a conversationalist too wisely, all too well...

...Unlike his found much closer to his own tastes biographer, he seems to have caught on and, arguably, to his own lower level of to his limitations and basic fatuity...

...wilting lily ever pretended to: What has kept these fragments of Wilde's extensive work alive—most Of While the ultimate virtue of Wilde's essays it now read only by scholars—is their is nm dramas ak e-ndb enhaerv, the rea t itvees denouement n m that oue masksen t o fh ahvi es creator's ability both to dazzle and dis- to go...

...Though he cence of his word play worked its magic offered himself as the apostle of pleasure, - aca of generation after generation his created world contains much pain...

...Nobody pushed Oscar friends who did not share his peculiariWilde...

...guilty in the eyes of the law) left him both ended as botched jobs...

...This inward realization of Gray...

...titularly insightful, may bring enough pose a e knew all the pretense...

...without illusions, and painfully aware of the tawdriness of most of the aesthetics he had claimed to live by as H aving said all of which, this re- well as write about...

...Wilde as a wandering remittance man...

...In on the smashup of his fortunes rather than in demic coroners, scholarly but museless their apogee his cast of mind fully men who build their reputations on the appeared...

...writes and broadcasts on history, the arts, and politics...

...of trivia, album scraps and disembod- Thus, in his fulsome introduction to ied bon mots memorized by middle- Oscar Wilde, Professor Ellmann claims brow, would-be wits and aspiring bohe- more for his subject than that far from mians devoid of originality...

...But, reader might be forgiven for interject- you know, as Oscar became more and ing, a la Tonto, "What you mean us, more successful, he became . . . arMauve Man...

...Essentially Wilde was conducting, in the If the coroner is able and thorough most civilized way, an anatomy of his socieenough, the results, even if not par- teyt h, and a radical althe e reconsideration s and d e e raant iocno could of its ethics...

...quiet drab people...

...He in the first place, knowing that he was claimed that his life had been his art...

...The late Professor Ellmann, People...

...They also was a farce that ended in squalor if not helped him to get away with claiming tragedy and his literary work survives a bit more for his heroes than they for the most part as thinly sliced bits probably deserve...

...talent...

...The great, flabby, ties...

...We must acknowledge what we are...

...sequined slug, captured forever by Max He could also be genuinely good Beerbohm's later caricatures, was an company, and, in the last analysis, was ugly indulger in quest of unattainable far more the victim than the predator beauty...

...Inerations of inferior imitators who stead, he overreached himself, as does calcified the London stage and kept his latest biographer, taken in, like so English drama a bloodless admixture many others, by the gas and gossamer of simpering and sighing for another of an output that was more artfulness half century...

...celebrity of the corpses they dissect...

...fellatio, he might have lived out a quiet But even these probably caused more old age as a competent, colorful critic harm than good, spawning several gen- and writer of light theatre pieces...

...But Coward and Terence Rattigan, though, if Wilde would have tittered at the in fairness to Coward, he never above, the shade of Samuel Johnson claimed to be anything but an enter-would have bellowed his wrath at the tainer...

...If his few slimy but shimmering traces of its pretenses had been fewer, and his hob-course, most notably in aphorisms and by had been philately rather than entertaining drawing room comedies...

...Richard Ellmann's Oscar evil are not what they seem, that moral tabs cannot cope with the complexity of behavior...