Perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so wild about Oscar
Oscar Wilde was a self-pitying pederast with a slight literary output, yet we worship him, writes Donal Lynch
THIS month marks the 116th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s death and he looms as large over the cultural landscape as he ever did. Colm Toibin and Patti Smith were amongst those who recently read from Wilde’s works in Reading Gaol itself. In The Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole wrote last week of the “trauma tourism” that brought the less-literary minded crowds to the cell that once housed the playwright. The New Statesman last month played up the idea of Wilde as gay Jesus — its writer saw in the flowers now laid out in Wilde’s old cell a metaphor for the modern victories of LGBT rights.
Wilde is probably the most accessible and popular figure in our literary pantheon. He’s a tourist attraction, a saint, and an endless font of quips. If he were alive today we could doubtless add ‘chat show wag’ to the list.
That he hardly produced anything of real literary heft outside of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Picture of Dorian Gray, doesn’t seem to matter any more (you had to feel slightly sorry for his poor grandson recently, beefing up Wilde’s literary resume by insisting he “edited a high-profile women’s magazine as well,” while conceding that “the jury is out” on whether Oscar produced great literature).
That Wilde’s great trials were really driven by his own hypocrisy and spite didn’t seem to bother the gay campaigners who made a martyr of him. That he was convicted of using underage prostitutes is conveniently forgotten now. And that many of his aphorisms could only really be considered witty by the blue- rinse coach parties who mouth them every summer at the Gate, we conveniently set aside in the name of national pride (even though, to be honest about it, he was barely Irish either.)
In some ways the popularity that Wilde currently enjoys mirrors the popularity he enjoyed in the part of his own adult life that preceded the infamous libel trial. As he points out in De Profundis, his genius was recognised early in his career. His appearance was against him, and his Irish accent was a burden (he quickly ditched it), but everything else was in his favour.
He had a top-class education in the arts, he had talent, he soon had fame. His stardom was evidenced by the extent to which he himself became a punch line. In Patience there was a whole opera, the humour of which was heightened by the creeping realisation that it was Wilde who was being sent up. Dandyism was all the rage in those last years of the 19th century, but Wilde was an aesthete who wafted through Soho with a lily in his hand. The public adored him then because the guiding theme of his writings and life seemed to be the delight of sin and the dullness of virtue. His jokes were just shocking enough to be delicious. Wilde seemed to really believe that he could sail above the morality of the Victorian era, even while on some level perhaps knowing the danger in which he lived by virtue of his private loucheness.
The mythology around Wilde’s sex life forms one of the cornerstones of the worship of him. We now know that Wilde was probably bisexual for a long time before he met the spoilt and reckless Bosie. Their relationship was based around the older man paying the younger one to find other youths for sex. Bosie pestered Wilde for cash and went nearly so far as to blackmail him. There’s nothing wrong at all with being sordid — it’s bloody good fun for one thing — but, fatally, Wilde had seemed to confuse debauchery with beauty. And at his trials he would confuse it with love.
Wilde need never have gone on trial. The Marquess of Queensberry (Bosie’s father) called him a sodomite, it’s true, but the Wilde who saved his genius for living would have easily ignored this as malicious rumour-mongering. Friends advised him to go abroad but Wilde was intoxicated by the limelight now. He could, like his great fan Morrissey a century later, have said that he was above confirmation or denial and that would probably have been that. But he decided to go to court and nobody came to his aid. This was hardly surprising. When you have based your entire career around mocking bourgeois society you cannot then turn around and do something as deeply bourgeois as invoking that society’s libel laws.
Wilde’s lack of self-awareness did not end there. During the court case he issued glib bon mots — telling counsel that he had not kissed a particular boy because he was not pretty enough, for instance — which delighted the gallery, but were fatal to his case. He used the now immortal phrase “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Over the next century this became the slogan of a movement but the full context was forgotten. Wilde himself may have felt this unnamed love, but the time to invoke it hardly seemed to be when there was a list as long as your arm being read out of boys, some of them under age, whom you hardly knew except in Braille. Other writers, including our own contemporaneous writers have attempted similar defenses when faced with the extent of their own moral dubiousness, but none were as successful in the court of public opinion as Wilde. But if he succeeded in convincing later generations of his martyrdom he failed to convince the magistrates. In prison Wilde came to the understanding that truth was to be found in pain, not pleasure. There are moments of heart-rending clarity in his writing but his two key works of this period, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis are also suffused with a self-pity that is nauseating (Oscar very much thought of himself as Christ-like by the time he wrote the latter work, it seems). You have to keep reminding yourself that the prison sentence he served was not very long, not very brutal by the standards of the times (he was a VIP prisoner, granted special dispensations) and that the whole thing came about because he would not take any advice to exit the stage for a while.
For Wilde the very worst thing was not being talked about — this was his downfall. He never recovered but after his death his lore steadily grew and his witticisms became woven into hearts, minds and tourist tea towels.
With the hindsight of his ignominious end and the selfpity that came with it they now seem less like deathless wisdom and more like bandages covering Wilde’s weeping sore of self loathing. But don’t expect the coach parties or the heritage barons to understand any of that.