Oscar, the camp king of cool with a punch like a pile-driver

Oscar: A Life Matthew Sturgis Apollo €35 ★★★★★

When Oscar Wilde died, the newspapers were pretty well unanimous that this would be the last they would ever hear of him. ‘Nothing he ever wrote had strength to endure,’ wrote The Pall Mall Gazette.

Wilde has had the last laugh. The Pall Mall Gazette went under in 1923, but Oscar Wilde is more popular than ever. This year, Rupert Everett wrote and starred in a film about him, and he is currently the only playwright to have a year-long season in a West End theatre. His life still generates books galore: on his family background, his reading, his tour of America, his early days, his last days and so on. Meanwhile, the Christian name Oscar – once as awkward as Adolf – is the ninth most popular name for a baby boy in the UK, ahead of William, James and David.

The villain has become a hero. As Matthew Sturgis points out in this admirably sane and wonderfully exciting biography, the characteristics that once made Oscar so despised now ensure his celebration. ‘He has appeared as the countercultural rebel, the gay martyr, the victim of British colonial oppression, the proto-modernist, the postmodernist, the precursor of “Cool”.’

His father was an eminent Dublin surgeon, whose own life was also prey to scandal, and his mother a flamboyant poet and translator, from whom Oscar inherited his gift for dramatic overstatement. ‘I want to introduce you to my mother,’ he said to a college friend, inviting him to his parents’ house. ‘We have founded a Society for the Suppression of Virtue.’

True to form, his parents christened him Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. Unlike Johnny Cash’s Boy Named Sue, he relished its peculiarity, repeating his name to guests, over and over again, at the tender age of two.

He was brought up in a household where ‘ideas were taken up, played with and discarded. Nothing was sacred’. At school, he hated games and was uninterested in lessons, but he read voraciously and at phenomenal speed.

Inevitably, at Trinity College, Dublin he found most of his contemporaries boorish. But, over six-foot tall, he was wellequipped to deal with any trouble. When a fellow student sneered at one of his poems, he ‘led out with his right like it was a pile-driver. He followed the surprised bully up with half a dozen crushers and that ended it.’

At Oxford, he became known for his outrageous witticisms. ‘I remember your name, but I forget your face.’ ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ They were to last him a lifetime. In his last days, dying in his dreary lodgings, he quipped, ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has to go.’

Sturgis is deft at conveying what it was like to be in a room with Oscar. He spoke, recalled a contemporary, with ‘one of the most alluring voices I have ever listened to, round and soft, and full of variety and expression’. In one of many fascinating little footnotes, we learn that Wilde made a habit of enunciating both letters in double-lettered words such as ‘ad-ding’ and ‘yel-low’. And contrary to his popular image, he engaged in proper conversation, not just holding forth, but listening to people, then illuminating their thoughts with the fireworks of his own wit.

He had a hunger for fame, coupled with an instinct for how to gain it. Asked at Oxford what his ambition was, he replied with sudden seriousness, ‘I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.’

With barely a published word to his credit, he rapidly became famous for being famous – an exotic man-about-town, squiring women around art galleries, spouting aphorisms while employing a pair of lavender gloves to lend drama to his gestures. He delighted in undermining the bullish spirit of his age. At a party, he looked a little peaky, and someone asked him if he was unwell. ‘The fact is, I picked a primrose in the wood yesterday, and it was so ill, I have been sitting up with it all night,’ he replied. Such high-campery was soon being lampooned, not least, by Gilbert and Sullivan in their comic opera Patience. Oscar was clever enough to embrace the ridicule, allowing himself to be hired by the impresario D’Oyly Carte to promote the opera in America. With only one slim, little-read volume of poetry to his name, he arrived in America as a star, boasting to a friend that he employed ‘two secretaries, one to write my autograph and answer the hundreds of letters that come begging for it. Another, whose hair is brown, to send locks of his own hair to the young ladies who write asking for mine; he is rapidly becoming bald.’

For a year, he whizzed back and forth across America, delivering lectures everywhere – Macon, Memphis, Milkwaukee, Mobile, Montgomery – though he steadfastly refused to set foot in the town of Griggsville, ‘because the name was so ugly and the inhabitants would not change it’.

Success was followed, very sluggishly, by achievement: by the time he was 35, he had still only published a book of poetry and a volume for children, The Happy Prince. But, married to a beautiful, intelligent woman, and with two happy children, his private life seemed perfect. Perhaps too perfect: the intuitive WB Yeats, who visited him at this time, came away thinking that it ‘suggested some deliberate artistic composition’.

His great secret has since become the most famous thing about him. Aged 32, he had been seduced by the 17-year-old Robbie Ross, and before long his thirst for men and boys, most of them still in their teens, had grown reckless and insatiable. As Sturgis points out, the danger was half the excitement: he was ‘reckless of young lives’, picking up young men, fast growing bored with them, and then cutting them out of his life.

‘What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion,’ he recalled, after his downfall. It is hard to read the details of these pick-ups without recognising their perversity. For instance, at the age of 39, he befriended a 16-year-old boy at Worthing, inviting him to his little son’s birthday party, before putting his hand down his trousers. And what of the teenage Walter Grainger, who he employed as a servant at Goring, took to bed, and then later, in court, described as ‘a peculiarly plain boy’ who was far too ugly to kiss? It was cruel, and a lie, and undermined Wilde’s case, suggesting he would have been open to kissing anyone prettier. It is a sign of our times that if these and all the others had been young women rather than young men, Wilde would today be seen not as an icon, but as a predator.

Most of Wilde’s biographers have seen him through the prism of his own heightened sense of tragedy. Sturgis’s great achievement is to take on board his great flurry of contradictions – celebratory yet self-pitying, indifferent to his wife’s agonies yet kind to total strangers, broken by prison yet still capable of day-to-day merriment – while at the same time conjuring him up as a coherent whole.

It was, of course, Lord Alfred Douglas – ‘your loving boy-wife, or your “little bitch”’ as he described himself in one letter – who was his nemesis, goading him to take his mad father, The Marquess of Queensberry, to court for, however coarsely, telling the truth. And it was Bosie who ruined Wilde a second time, descending upon him after his release, and dragging him once more into what Wilde called ‘the abyss of ruin’.

‘The mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him,’ explained Wilde, the master of paradox, but also its most captive prisoner.