To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde, by Rupert Everett Matthew Sturgis

MATTHEW STURGIS

To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde By Rupert Everett Little, Brown £20

‘Like a shark, I am at my best on the move,’ Rupert Everett declares. ‘Arriving doesn’t suit me. I hate leaving – and staying in the same place feels like drowning. But once I am on the tracks and the past falls behind, I experience a kind of weightless ecstasy, a sloshed affection for the world, which looks its best after all from a passing train.’

And, indeed, this book, the third instalment of Everett’s memoirs (after

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and Vanished Years), is in part a hymn to European rail travel. The author, in a decade-long struggle to finance, and make, a film about the last days of Oscar Wilde, shuttles, in quest of inspiration, funding and locations, across the continent: London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Cologne, Rome and Naples.

To the End of the World is quite as brilliant as its two predecessors. It is sharp, camp, fearless, touching and very, very funny. If the book is centred on the Herculean struggle to make The Happy Prince, it also reflects on Everett’s lifelong engagement with the figure of Wilde, as a weaver of words, a subversive wit, a great dramatic role (in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss) and as the definitive homosexual.

Everett writes wonderfully well. There are beautiful evocations of seaside hotels, Belgian suburbs and Parisian S&M bars. And if he occasionally overwrites,

he overwrites wonderfully well, too.

As is no doubt proper for a book about film-making, the author deploys a full range of cinematic tropes from the jump cut and the flashback to the dream sequence and the montage. It allows the pace to be maintained, and the mood to shift, along with the scene.

There are crystalline vignettes of the gilded titans: Joan Collins at the Ivy, ‘FURIOUS’ at Everett’s non-appearance – but magnanimously forgiving him, a decade later; Azzedine Alaïa working alone on a wedding dress in an empty atelier; Gregory Peck and Luise Rainer in Roddy Mcdowall’s home cinema, watching old black-and-white movies ‘after an early supper’.

Among the insights into the arcana of A-list existence, Everett says, ‘Don’t say I love you’ to a movie star: ‘They can’t cope. The fourth wall will tumble down like the tabernacle veil. They will reply either “OK” (Madonna) or “Thank you” (Michael Douglas).’

But these flashes of celebrity are balanced by moments of more pungent nostalgia – for his childhood reading of Wilde’s fairy stories or the travails of drama school; for the youthful excitement of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre (where he learnt his craft – and his pose – from Philip Prowse); for the memory of his transsexual Parisian friend Lychee, murdered in the Bois du Boulogne and now buried within a green carnation’s throw of Wilde, at Père Lachaise.

Everett’s battle to bring his vision to the screen is a long one. Over the course of endless pitches, production meetings and funding cuts, the film shifts and changes – growing bigger, smaller and smaller again.

In the first heady days of the project, it could have been a major Hollywood production, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the leading role.

But Everett, having written the script, was determined to star – and direct – as well. Hollywood turned its back. And so – more shamefully – did the BFI. European money – and compromise – became necessary.

For one brief moment, Everett considered keeping the main characters in period dress, but setting the action in the modern day. It was an idea tentatively endorsed by footballer Thierry Henry, with whom he shared it on the Eurostar to Paris. The pervasiveness of football in contemporary life is one of the less expected themes of the narrative: the game is always on in the background.

Everett confronts each fresh setback with a mixture of histrionic despair, practical stoicism and camp humour. It is a cocktail that mystifies his longsuffering German co-producers.

‘The problem is that things are either funny or tragic in Germany but rarely both. And, anyway, from the English standpoint, humour is not the Germans’ strongest suit. The language is not built for it and neither are they.’

Nevertheless, in spite of all reverses, through the imaginative use of smoke and mirrors (literally), through EU subsidies and the selfless generosity of Colin Firth, the film was made. At last. It came out in 2018.

In his desire to chart the movie’s ‘reception’ (ignored in America; scuppered in Germany – by the World Cup; admired but largely unwatched in England; loved in Glasgow; and ecstatically greeted by the bohemians of St Petersburg), Everett rather hurries over the actual achievement of his cinematic creation.

It is worth pausing to acknowledge that it is a really impressive piece of work. Ditto this book.

Matthew Sturgis is the author of Oscar: A Life