by Alison Benney (© The Irish Eyes Magazine - 1998)
November 30, 1898: Oscar Wilde lay dying at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris, with only his long-time friends Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner at his side. Penniless, lonely, exhausted, he would have been hard to recognize as the provocative author of such elegant witticisms as "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”. Exiled from the fickle London society which had lauded his vivacity and genius only five years before, he died far from his native Dublin. It wasn't until 1909 that his body was moved from a burial ground in Bagneux to Père Lachaise cemetery, where his irreverent tombstone has become, like those of Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg and Jim Morrison, a cult icon for contemporary admirers.
It can be argued that Wilde and his works are as controversial today as when he resided in London, from his arrival post-Oxford in 1879 as a callow Dublin aesthete, living life for art's sake, up to his 1895 conviction and sentence of two years hard labor, for “acts of gross indecency with other male persons.” The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic in English literature, although it's been termed “the first French novel to be written in the English language.” His epigrams are ubiquitous: “A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”; “If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out”. Most readers have stumbled across at least one of his short stories or fairy tales, such as Lord Arthur Savile's Crime or The Nightingale and The Rose. His plays, notably The Importance of Being Earnest, are constantly on the boards in capitals around the world, and this month the Paris Opera Garnier is presenting a new production of Der Zwerg, an opera version of Wilde's fairy tale, The Birthday of the Infanta.
Lately attention has been drawn to the man as well as his works. Richard Ellman's definitive biography, Oscar Wilde, has just been published in French, and The Judas Kiss, a play based on Wilde's notorious trial and starring Liam Neeson, recently played on Broadway. Most recently, Brian Gilbert's excellent film, Wilde, opened in Paris to generally good reviews, with two qualifications. The first is that, as Le Monde's reviewer observed, the screenplay is a bit academic. The story is told chronologically, from Wilde's US tour, to his marriage and artistic achievements in London, finishing with his release from Reading Gaol and subsequent reunion with Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover and nemesis. Theatre critic Sheridan Morley, whose father, Robert Morley, played Wilde in the 1959 film, considers that the new version “ended far too abruptly and seemed unusually obsessed with his mother and Alfred Douglas.”
The other criticism is that Stephen Fry's insightful portrayal emphasizes Wilde's reput-ed pose of indolence but passes over his well-known scintillating personality and generous charm. This is the personnage that Morley, also one of his biographers, points out would have been a perfect foil for television. Editor Alvin Redman, introducing a collection of his epigrams, insists that he was above all a conversationalist. Even Wilde is quoted as saying, “We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks”.
“If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen, society would be quite civilised.”
Not that everyone was charmed. During his tour of the US, he spent a couple of days lecturing in San Francisco (which he called “Italy without its art”) on such subjects as “The English Renaissance” and “The House Beautiful”. March 31, 1882, Ambrose Bierce came out with a scathing critique: “...this gawky gowk has the divine effrontery to link his name with those of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris - this dunhill he-hen would fly with eagles.”
His friends and enemies were mostly artists and writers of the day, includ-ing James Whistler, John Ruskin, Aubrey Beardsley, André Gide and fellow hibernians George Ber-nard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. His first girlfriend jilted him for Bram Stoker, and Toulouse Lautrec painted his portrait. A Greek scholar and erudite gentleman, he had the sexual naiveté of Bill Clinton, the urbane sophistication of Noel Coward and the arrogant flamboyance of Andy Warhol. But André Gide noted, “People did not always realize how much truth, wisdom and seriousness were concealed under the mask of a jester.”
One could argue for an allegory between Wilde's hubris and tragic end and his fairy tale, “The Birthday of the Infanta”, in which a misshapen dwarf, thinking himself handsome and entertain-ing, falls in love with a beautiful princess. When he discovers his “ugliness”, he realises that the princess is not laughing with him but at him. He dies of a broken heart and she forbids any more playmates that come bur-dened with a heart.
So on November 30, light a candle for Oscar, log on to the abundant Oscar-related websites, read “De Profundis”, his final magnum opus, and remember that Wilde said: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”