BOOKS

Killing the self he loved

John Lahr

OSCAR WILDE by Richard Ellmann

Hamish Hamilton, £15

0 scar Wilde was famous before he had achieved anything. This in itself makes him our contemporary. 'But what has he done?', asked the fiery Polish actress Mme Modjeska in 1880, to whom Wilde was trying to gain access. 'He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act. . . he does nothing but talk. I do not understand'. Many people, at first, did not understand the spectacle Wilde made of himself. He was his own greatest inven- tion, a flamboyant work of romantic egot- ism, the first modern self-styled star of English letters. (Wilde even had a star painted above his bed.) Wilde's reputation was vast but his literary life was short. Most of his work was written in seven years between 1888-1895. After his famous im- prisonment for indecency in 1895 and until his death in 1900, Wilde published only The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde's out- put was variable; but it was his sensational persona, as Richard Ellmann's fascinating, erudite biography documents, that mis- chievously debated with his era.

'I was a man who stood in symbolic relation to the art and culture of my age,' Wilde wrote accurately in De Profundis. 'I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of manhood and had forced my age to realise it afterwards.' To stand out in philistine Victorian culture Wilde had to stand against it. Wilde's wit gave publicity to unorthodox ideas. His impudence was irresistible. `To get into society nowadays,' he said, 'one has either to feed people, amuse people or shock people . . . that is all.' But epigrams, however brilliant, only startled the mind; and Wilde knew that 'an idea is of no value until it becomes incar- nate and is made an image.' Wilde turned into a walking advertisement for aesthetic- ism and himself. An entrepreneur of para- dox, he was unashamedly 'artificial': that is, he made himself into a work of art which to him was 'the most intense mode of individualism'. Part of the process was surrounding himself with beautiful. things and 'beautiful people', a phrase he coined in a letter to Lillie Langtry. Wilde's cult of beauty was an antidote to Victorian mater- ialism; his frivolity a solvent for Victorian morality. Wilde saw life as a performance and treated the world as a figment of his imagination. 'I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me,' he said. Wilde had not actually walked down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily as satirised in Patience. 'Anyone could have done that,' Wilde said. 'The great thing was what I achieved — to make the world believe that I had done it.' The role-playing that Wilde saw as regenerative, others, like W.B. Yeats, saw as problematic. 'Wilde perpetually per- formed a play which was in all things the opposite of what he had known in child- hood and early youth'. Ellmann is Pollyan- na about Wilde's parents and strangely obtuse about the deadly combination of privilege and neglect that afflicts children of renowned parents. 'Wilde,' he writes, 'seems to have had an untroubled upbring- ing'. Sir William Wilde, knighted for his work as a Dublin eye and ear surgeon, was also a writer, manic depressive, and noto- rious womaniser who fathered three ille- gitimate children. Lady Wilde, a poet with an Irish Nationalist political pedigree, was a spirited, iconoclastic literary figure who confessed she liked to make a sensation. 'I want to live on some high place, Primrose Hill or Highgate,' she was overheard to say, swanning it at one of her salon teas in London in later years, 'because I was an eagle in my youth'. Lady Wilde had always spouted the gospel of attainment (`God alone is. Man is eternally becoming.') She believed in the Wilde genius. 'Well, after all, we have genius,' she wrote to Oscar at Oxford when he'd won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, her fortunes already in decline after Sir William's death. 'Attor- neys cannot take that away.'

From the outset, Lady Wilde implanted in her children a sense of destiny which echoes arrogantly in De Profundis:

She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured not merely in Literature, Art, Archaeology and Science, but in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation.

Even Wilde's own name — Oscar (as she wrote it) O'Flahertie Wills Wilde — re- flects a grandiosity that betrays Lady Wilde's narcissism. Lady Wilde, whose pen name was 'Speranza', spoke of 'the wild ambitious adventurous nature of mine.' One hears the single-minded ferocity of her dreams of glory in a letter about her first son, Willie: 'I will rear him as a Hero and President of the future Irish Republic. I have not fulfilled my Destiny yet.' Lady Wilde projected this overweening sense of family destiny onto her sons, and it undid them. Willie could not live up to the challenge of greatness and became a feck- less journalist; Oscar fulfilled her every dream and it killed him.

'I was made for destruction,' Wilde wrote, after he'd ruined his career. 'My cradle was rocked by the Fates'. The man who codified camp role-playing into a way of life, who wrote brilliant essays on the art of lying and the truth of masks, could never be loved for himself. In gaol, brooding over Lord Alfred Douglas's awful mistreat- ment of him, Wilde returned to one punishing comment: 'When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting'. Even as a child Wilde was forced to make himself outstanding to win and hold affec- tion. It was the start of a lifetime of manoeuvering to avoid his sense of doom. He had lived through the death of his beloved nine-year-old sister Isola; the dis- grace of his father in a scandal involving a patient who claimed to have been sexually compromised; the discovery of illegitimate siblings. No wonder in early poems Wilde speaks of 'my tortured life' and his fear of 'losing a soul's inheritance'. Wilde turned to frivolity as both a mask and an admis- sion of his pain. His epigrams were de- ployed not so much to change the world as to keep the world from changing him.

I shunned sorrow and suffering of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible, to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection.

Wilde's frivolity acknowledged the futility of life while adding flavour to it.

'I have nothing to declare but my genius,' Wilde said, passing through Amer- ican customs at the beginning of his lecture tour in 1882. The joke was as well worked out as Wilde's persona. He had become a dandy of both dress and detachment. Wilde lost his Irish accent at Oxford where he took a double-first in Greats and later worked up his delivery CI want a natural style with a touch of affectation,' he told his teacher.) Once he'd evolved his image, Wilde took it on the road. 'I revealed myself first to myself,' he wrote in De Profundis. 'And then to the world.' Wilde made a vaudeville of style. By setting his own standards, he called Victorian stan- dards into question. 'Whatever is realised is right,' he said. Wilde's spectacular pre- sentation of himself was an exhibition of his search for fresh modes of self- realisation.' He hid his intellectual anarchy and his social ambitiousness behind the play of his humour. 'Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction,' wrote Wilde, whose joking was a form of 'non- friction' that smoothed his way into the mainstream of English society. 'Such bat- tles do not always intensify strength; they often exaggerate weakness.' Wilde's lavish displays of wit and wealth were meant as a show of potency. His. epigrammatic deliv- ery was designed not simply to delight but to conquer. And he did. 'In the natural world of Art, I was the King,' Wilde wrote from prison.

'The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide,' Wilde said before he had engineered his own. He had made himself into a legend, and was now lived by it. 'Prudent?' he wrote to Douglas, 'how could I be that? It would mean going backward. I must go as far as possible.' Fame could not satisfy the greed of Wilde's self-aggrandisement; in- creasingly he turned to passion. 'Tired of being at the heights,' he wrote, 'I deliber- ately went to the depths in search of new sensation'. Wilde's first homosexual seduc- tion, according to Ellmann, was in 1888, four years after he had married Constance Lloyd. Wilde met his homme fatal, the spoiled and reckless 20-year-old Douglas, in 1892.

Douglas became Wilde's sexual obses- sion; and through him, Wilde descended into a subterranean world of rent boys and blackmailers from which he never reco- vered. 'The difference between us was this,' wrote Douglas, of Wilde's passion. 'I was at the time a frank and natural pagan, and he was a man who believed in sin and yet deliberately committed it, thereby obtaining a doubly perverse pleasure'. Wilde, who saw himself as 'a born antino- mian', was compelled to test the bound- aries of sexuality as he tested the bound- aries of ideas.

flee from what is moral as from what is impoverished,' Wilde said. Morality meant denial of appetite, self-sacrifice, 'the ne- cessity of living for others', all of which Wilde saw as a form of arrested develop- ment. 'The fierce misery of those who live for pleasure' fed his paradoxical imagina- tion, and made his wit combative. In some of Wilde's best fables and stories he ruminates over the spiritual price to be paid for selfishness. In his pursuit of pleasure, he feared 'starving his soul'. This loss of soul is an issue in The Picture of Dorian Gray and such fables as 'The Fisherman and His Soul', The Remarkable Rocket', and 'The Selfish Giant', a tale whose hope of redemption brought tears to Wilde's eyes when he told it to his two sons. 'A man may commit a sin against society,' Wilde said, 'and yet realise through that sin his own perfection.' So it seemed to Wilde whose great burst of literary energy coincided with his immer- sion in promiscuity. All his social comedies deal with a shameful secret about to be discovered; and dramatise good coming out of evil, and evil done in the name of good. Wilde laughed moral categories off the stage. 'The good ended happily', says Miss Prism, discussing a novel in Wilde's masterpiece The Importance of Being Ear- nest. 'The bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.'

Wilde's life soon proved his comedy wrong. The doom that Wilde half feared and half courted arrived in February 1895 when the Marquis of Queensbury, Doug- las's hated and demented father, sent Wilde his notoriously misspelled note accusing him of 'posing as a Somdomite'. At the height of his celebrity, with his two plays on 'Ai the West End, Wilde found himself manipulated by Douglas into a family feud. Wilde pursued a libel action against Queensbury that proved his un- doing. He was not posing. Queensbury's council found many defendants (paying them £5 a day for their testimony) who confirmed Wilde's practice. Between his first and subsequent trials, Wilde could have fled England; and nothing in Ellmann's meticulous research quite ex- plains why he stayed. Lady Wilde, true to form, threatened to withdraw affection unless he did the heroic thing: 'If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son. If you go, I will never speak to you again.' In the end, torn between retreat and resignation, Wilde faced the music: 'I decided it was noble and more beautiful.' By May 1895, he was in prison, serving two years at hard labour. Wilde had become a martyr to the respectability he mocked.

In prison Wilde became 'a zany of sorrow'. Ellmann paraphrases De Profun- dis and Wilde's letters in readable if not sparkling prose to give a punishing account of Wilde's suffering in prison and his aimlessness after it. Wilde spent his re- maining years on the continent under the alias of 'Sebastian Melmoth', a name that combined both the mythic martyr and outcast. The name of 'Oscar Wilde', so carefully coaxed to glory, was almost im- mediately anathema: struck off the prize notices of the Portora Royal School; off the marquees of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Ideal Husband; even from his wife's grave. (The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published under his prison name, C.3). Wilde survived his brother, mother, and wife. He lived to see himself bank- rupted; his copyrights sold; his library dismantled; his children deprived of access to him; and Douglas, whose reckless spending had forced Wilde into enormous debt, refuse him any part of his £20,000 inheritance.

Wilde lost everything, including the will to write. His genius required an audience; and he was now a social pariah. He died at 46, according to Ellmann, of syphilis.

'Why is it that one runs to one's ruin?' Wilde asked. 'Why has destruction such a fascination?' Only the famous know how much of themselves and of others they have sacrificed for celebrity. This guilt is a terrible, hateful knowledge. Wilde felt it and reported it to Douglas: 'I was no longer the Captain of my soul'. Ellmann never risks an interpretation of Wilde's destructiveness; for that one has to read between the lines of Wilde's wit. 'I have never given adoration to anybody except myself,' Wilde joked at his first trial, getting a big laugh from the gallery. Wilde loved nothing more than his persona of brilliance; but the strain of its bad faith produced a kind of moral exhaustion to which prison put an end. As Wilde wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: 'Yet each man kills the thing he loves'. Wilde's terrible end gave his writing an added paradoxical dimension. His essays . and epigrams make a scintillating case for uninhibited individualism; but his life illus- trates the failure of a philosophy built on 'the destiny of me'.

The Orton Diaries, edited by John Lahr, is published in paperback by Methuen at £3.95.