Fortunate in His Biographer

...In the midst of the evanescent whirl of impressions stands a three-dimensional core, solid as Wilde in the flesh...

...Go through his plays carefully and you will get a better idea of what was wrong with Victorian England than a dozen solemn social histories would provide...

...He painstakingly charts Wilde's ideas and attitudes as they emerged from his early friendships and from the cultural ambiance of the 1890s, in which he played a commanding role until his sensational trials virtually brought that literary decade to an end...

...But feelings about Wilde remained strong, and those who did not think of him as a debauched villain were tempted to go to the other extreme and present him as a martyred hero...

...True, the danger of lawsuits had diminished with the death of Wilde's associates— especially the fanatically litigious Lord Alfred Douglas, his best-known lover and the son of his accuser...

...Then, with equal empathy, Ellmann vividly evokes the sheer wretchedness of Wilde's closing years of exile, after he had been broken by the brutality of the 19th-century English prison and rejected by the unpitying moralism of an age that feared and hated those who defied its norms...

...Bynowmoral standards have changed sufficiently for a fair and balanced life of Wilde to be written, and Richard Ellmann has discharged the task so definitively and yet so sympathetically as to belie his subject's suspicion that biography is tantamount to betrayal...

...After Wilde'sdeath in 1900 at the age of 46, enduring prejudice made it hard for critics to consider his work apart from the issue of his homosexuality, and harder still for biographers to approach him objectively...

...Contemporaries who dared to tell something close to the truth about his life—like Arthur Ransome and the Canadian Robert Ross, who were perhaps the most faithful of all his friends—found themselves assailed with libel suits by people who had flattered Wilde in his glory days and then shunned him while he lived out the last years of his life as a nearpauper in Paris...

...Ellmann, who died shortly before the publication of this book, was helped by the fact that he had already produced magisterial works on other great Irish literary figures—notably Joyce and Yeats —and was therefore thoroughly familiar with the Dublin background Wilde shared with them...

...Being earnest was most important to this self-proclaimed esthete, although that might be obscured by his strategy of using trivial means to tell serious truths...

...Even at the end of the 1940s, when I wrote my own book, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde, I found myself in the interest of objectivity concentrating more on the writings than on the life...

...But he was also assisted by the passage of time itself, which sifts achievements and puts them in evaluative perspective...

...It will set the standard for many more years to come...

...No one today would gainsay the superb wit and dramatic effectiveness of Wilde's comedies, the poignancy of his tales or the dark clumsy power of The Ballad of Reading Gaol...

...Wilde's personality has always seemed elusive because it was so mutable...

...It is a tribute to Ellmann's artistry as a biographer that he was able to construct a sensible pattern out of all the seeming eccentricities and inconsistencies in the Irishman's life...

...And ultimately he had much reason to feel that way: Following his notorious and appalling punishment for acts that in civilized countries are no longer crimes, he saw his life misrepresented as much by friends who wished to distance themselves from him as by enemies gloating over his downfall...

...And you will get a great deal of amusement along the way...

...Moods flashed across his rather loose and mobile face as quickly as they do through his writing...

...InWilde'scase time has had a magnifying effect...

...As for that ornate monstrosity of a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, its addictive fascination is such that even George Orwell once confessed to me he liked it...

...Ellmann has given us an outstanding intellectual biography, too...

...Whereas earlier in the century he was often dismissed as minor and derivative, he is now viewed as a writer of genius who had a profound influence on modern attitudes toward art and manners, indeed as one of the great men of his age...

...By the end of the book, I must confess, Ellmann had brought tears to my eyes without resorting to sentimentality—a dramatic achievement Wilde would have appreciated...

...It is always Judas who writes the biography, " he once said...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Oscar Wilde loved poets and was willing to admit critics into the ranks of great artists, but he never trusted biographers...

...He magnificently catches Wilde's euphoric period of social and artistic triumph, when disciples flocked to him and no fashionable dinner table was complete without him...

...In virtue of its scope, sensitivity and excellent style, Ellmann's biography is a very special addition to what is by now an immense Wilde literature...

...Finally—and here we come to where a biographer can, through a failure of compassion, turn out to beakind of Judas—Ellmann manages to enter into the feelings as well as the thoughts of his subject...

...In addition, we have come to acknowledge Wilde as a highly original critic, both of the arts (where his example has enriched the work of later critics like Northrop Frye) and of society...