Oscar Wilde: A Life
by Matthew Sturgis (Knopf, $40)
“A definitive biography if there ever was one,” Matthew Sturgis’ 861-page Oscar Wilde might disappoint readers who like to remember Wilde as a saintly gay martyr, said Brooke Allen in The Wall Street Journal. Sturgis’ Wilde is by no means a bad man. The legendary Irish writer, humorist, and bon vivant comes across instead as kind, attentive to others, and unusually generous. But Sturgis, a historian, aimed to find the true Wilde beneath the myth, and “he has succeeded remarkably well.” When the story calls for it, he reminds us that Wilde was at times prideful and self-indulgent, and that many of his sexual partners were boys, not adults. This is, in other words, “the story of the man in full,” and we readers are lucky to have it.
Wilde’s life “reads almost like a perfectly formed work of art,” said Scott Bradfield
in the Los Angeles Times. While studying at Oxford in the 1870s, he said his main aim was to become famous or at least notorious, and he went on to become both. Sturgis’ book tracks that arc well. “The first two-thirds is as bright and entertaining as an evening with its subject; the final third describes one of the saddest stories ever told.” In 1895, as Wilde’s professional acclaim peaked, the 40-year-old playwright picked a legal fight with the father of his 24-year-old male lover and wound up being tried, convicted, and imprisoned for engaging in sex with men and boys. He died, impoverished and broken, at 46.
There’s a major weakness in Sturgis’ justthe-facts approach, said David Hare in The New York Times. “No writer of English was ever better at acute and devastating self-dramatization than Wilde,” and we can’t truly understand how he put himself in such jeopardy without considering how such thinking may have motivated him.
Did he wish to become a martyr when he started paying rent boys for sex? How about when he sued for being accused of such activity? When Sturgis needs to explain motivation, “his approach breaks down altogether.” Wilde wanted to have symbolic impact. To forget that is to misunderstand him.