More Letters of Oscar Wilde
DUNLEA, WILLIAM
BOOKS Paradoxes all spilled out Oscar Wilde is one of the most colorful legends of world literature, endlessly fascinating, forever "onstage." He never grew tired of revealing himself...
...I should in fact object to them...
...He did not foresee — or did he ? — that with it he had written his own epitaph...
...It is too accidental...
...He exhilarated: MORE LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis Vanguard Press, $14.95, 215 pp...
...William Dunlea A great sympathetic electric people who cheered and applauded and gave me a sense of serene power that even being abused by the Saturday Review never did...
...By 1881 Wilde was already dame culture's gadfly to the London beau monde and being caricatured as Benthorne, poet and jack-of-all-esthetes, in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, whose U.S...
...France, the "modern mother of all artists," offers him "a lovely asylum...
...Bankrupt and deserted by all but a handful of his friends, he bears up well under the ordeal...
...Bard of the fin de siecle , pied piper of early modernism, art-for-art's-sake supplied the decadent banner under which he vitalized musty Victorian esthetics and moribund Victorian theater...
...The aftermath of his release — permanent separation from his wife and children on brutally punitive terms — turns out to be more painful than his incarceration...
...Disclaiming any leaning toward realism, he dismisses 20: Commonweal that genre as "only a background...
...It indicates the arrogance that went before the fall...
...From Napoule in 1898 he laments, "I am leading a very good life and it does not agree with me...
...He finds only passing gratification in the nearly unanimous acclaim accorded his Ballad of Reading Gaol, which will stand as his last testament to the world...
...We were followed by lovely brown things from forest to forest...
...Till the end, however, he remains devoted to Bosie, the love of his life...
...Though he modestly represents his latest collection of Wilde's correspondence (1875-1900) as a supplement to his monumental Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962, now out of print), it offers us many choice backstage glimpses into the theater — and finally the tragedy — that was Wilde...
...At Philadelphia a new school of design is called after me and they really are beginning to love and know beautiful art...
...I don't know what to do with money except to throw it away...
...But soon he is plagued by "that detestable preoccupation with money that poverty entails . . . fatal to all fine things...
...This, I hope, will be allowed...
...All he wants now is anonymity (under the alias of "Sebastian Helmeth") and "freedom from English people...
...Here Wilde indulges himself to the point of self-caricature...
...In a letter of 1890 he predicts — accurately — that his just completed Picture of Dorian Gray will "make a sensation...
...If culture was his cause, art was his religion...
...He pontificates, "The personality of the artist is not a thing the public should know anything about...
...He wryly concludes that he has been "quite incapable" of managing his affairs...
...I must advertise for some new friends...
...Life becomes as horrendously "real as a dream...
...He never grew tired of revealing himself to us, nor are we likely to tire of him as long as there are hidden treasure-hunters of the mettle of Rupert Hart-Davis in our midst...
...The notion that "a single dramatist in this century has in the smallest degree influenced" him is imperiously discarded...
...With An Ideal Husband early in 1895 all London is at his feet...
...Not long before Wilde's quixotic challenge to Queensberry, an interview appeared, "Mr...
...There is a sad lack of fauns in the pinewoods, and if the sea has its Proteus he is always disguised as an elderly Member of Parliament...
...On excursion in the mountains, "shepherds fluted on reeds to us...
...Whether lecturing cozy, genteel, English provincials or taking in thousands of tumultuous American midwesterners at a go, he is a light unto the Philistines...
...To a Catholic socialist friend he had written, "What is to become of an indolent hedonist like myself if socialism and the church join forces against me...
...My doctor says I have all the symptoms...
...they shuffled off but Wilde is still "there...
...He allows that "only mediocrities improve...
...The pleas for money become desperate...
...As always, the London reviewers are his betes noires...
...The beggars have profiles, so the problem of poverty is easily solved...
...Oscar Wilde on Mr...
...production in 1882 provided the launching pad for Wilde's fabulous American romp (they called it a literary tour...
...It is comforting to have them all, it makes one a perfect type...
...I travel in such state, for in a free country one cannot live without slaves and I have slaves — black, yellow, and white...
...In so doing, this new volume becomes a miniature self-portrait of Wilde the man and the exotic, as well as a veritable kaleidoscope of the oncefamous and now (mostly) footnoted among his contemporaries...
...The import of Earnest"] "That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality...
...From Reading prison emerges more and more fully the dark underside — until it takes center stage...
...Oscar Wilde" (included here), contrived by the writer and his friend Robert Ross...
...If, before he died, Wilde finally opened his eyes to the author of the beauty which he worshiped — and these letters give no iindication — we may be sure that esthetics, after all, had something to do with it...
...Up to this point the letters display the shimmering insouciance at the surface of the paradox which permeated the man...
...Having won his First in Greats (classics) in 1878, two years later he congratulates a friend on his Second: "Greats is the only fine school at Oxford, the only sphere of thought where one can be simultaneously brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about truths which belong to the august serenity of old age...
...A few other writers, he concedes, may inform his poetry and fiction — but the concession gives little ground, since "style must be in one's soul before he can recognize it in others...
...If I ask him to lend me five francs he grows yellow and takes to his bed...
...Yet the fisherfolk have "beautiful eyes, crisp hair of a hyacinth color, and no morals: an ideal race...
...He gives George Alexander, actor-director of Lady Windermere's Fan, a magisterial dressing-down for not executing his most minute staging instructions: "Details in life are of no importance, but in art details are vital...
...In the fall he is operated on (unsuccessfully) for more serious complications than neurasthenia, and his last pathetic letter is a plea from his deathbed for help in paying the surgeon...
...Of a benefactor he complains that he "carries out the traditions of the ancient Midas...
...it cannot form an artistic motive for a play that is to be a work of art...
...For he has "lost the joy of writing...
...Winter 1900: "I am now neurasthenic...
...He smudges an inscribed copy of a play and asks his publisher to ask one and six pence for it...
...Bigger successes are to come in the theater...
...I want to stand apart and look on, being neither for God nor for his enemies...
...it is quite exquisite: three puffs and then peace and love...
...But Wilde's whole career contradicts this pronouncement, as indeed does he a few paragraphs later when he declares, "Humility is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent...
...But not necessarily to wisdom, as he discovers that "suffering is the most real mode of life, the one for which we are all ultimately created...
...On sabbatical in Algiers with "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas) he rhapsodizes, "the Kabyle boys are quite lovely . . . Bosie and I have taken to hashish...
...Soon after his return to London for the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, the success story ends in a real life comedy of errors involving Bosie's dotty father, the Marquess of Queensberry, which in turn leads to the courtroom farce whose ultimate effect is to make Wilde a martyr in a rather different cause than art...
...Seeking a license for the production of his first play (1880), Wilde announces, "I am working at dramatic art because it's the democratic art and I want fame...
...16 January 1987: 21...
...I don't want any certificates of good character...
Vol. 114 • January 1987 • No. 1
