Taking a Wilde ride to despair
WANDERING around Dublin city centre last weekend, with a few hours to spare before the Steely Dan concert, we decided to accomplish a ‘first’ that was a few decades overdue – visiting the Book of Kells in Trinity. The ‘Turning Darkness into Light’ exhibition, on view within the inspiring colonnades of the Old Library, is indeed a wonder of artistic genius – and one made all the more appealing late on a Saturday afternoon, shared with just a handful of tourists. Also on display in the adjacent Long Room, we chanced upon another jewel almost as bright as the iconic 9th century manuscript – the aptly titled ‘From Decadence to Despair’ story of Oscar Wilde (right). In its trawl through the hectic life and eventual hard times of Ireland’s greatest satirist, the exhibit is a tragic reminder of the slender thread even the greatest must dangle from. One of Trinity’s most famous alumni, Wilde’s biting wit, extravagant dress and glittering conversation made him a ‘global personality’ long before the term was invented. So adept was he at selfpromotion, his face was used to advertise everything from cigars to capes to kitchen stoves and – in a move even the Kardashians must marvel at – extending his endorsements to bosom beautifiers.
But then, after the glory came the fall – two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol. Released in May, 1897, he immediately sailed for France, adopting the alias Sebastian Melmoth to further cloak his anonymity.
“I have passed through a very terrible punishment and have suffered to the pitch of anguish and despair,” he said in the first week of an exile that would last to his death three years later. And yet, within the anguish, the genius still raged, as he wrote in ‘De Profundis’: “To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life.”
Though impoverished and a social outcast, Wilde still found joy in “the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights”. Later came the poem more defining than even the sublime plays of his prime – ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ – published under the pseudonym ‘C.3.3’ – cell block C, landing 3, cell 3. His tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery is inscribed with a few lines from the poem: “And alien tears will fill for him/Pity’s long-broken urn/For his mourners will be outcast men/And outcasts always mourn.”
There are a thousand Wildean witticisms – one for everybody in the audience, really. My favourite is a phrase useful to any life: “Be yourself – everybody else is already taken.”