Truth and Wit: The Many Faces of Oscar Wilde
New York: more than a century ago, an eccentrically dressed young
Irishman on a lecture tour cast his image across the United States.
The United States, being an obliging young nation in such matters,
threw his image back to him in a form even larger and more
colourful than the original.
Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic made note, made fun and
lionized, reporting every change of clothing and every quotable
quote, whether he actually said it or not. and so was born the
international legend known as Oscar Wilde, who, up till now, was
merely a London poetaster of some social notoriety.
Wilde’s actual accomplishments, disregarding a brilliant
undergraduate career at oxford, were scant at that point. “what has
he done, this young man, that one meets him everywhere?” a polish
actress had asked in London in 1882. in fairness, by 1882, the year
Wilde made his American tour, he had published a volume of highly
perfumed poems and completed a rather embarrassing melodrama.
But the reason he had been contracted to lecture had little to do with
anything he had written.
It was that he was a personality… indeed, it was Richard D’Oyly
Carte who engaged Wilde, thinking it might give the box office a
boost. Besides, as an English journalist observed at the time, the Americans are far more curious than we are to gaze at all those
whose names, from one cause or another, have become household
words.
Long before Americans, Oscar Wilde: who died 100 years ago this
month: was expertly practicing the modern art of making celebrity
the first step in a career rather than its culmination. This is, after all,
a man who observed in his twenties that “ success is a science”.
Looking back on the press coverage of Wilde’s American tour, it is
astonishing to see how completely the image with which he is now
identified was in place. Before… and “ The Importance of Being
Earnest”, before his disastrous romance with Lord Alfred Douglas
and the following scandal of his trials and imprisonment, before
what really guaranteed his place in literature and history, the figure
that comes to mind when one hears “Oscar Wilde” already existed.
Also firmly established during the tour was the idea of Wilde as the
champion of art for art’s sake. This wasn’t, by the way, precisely his
philosophy, but in those days the philosophy was not yet quite in
shape. The subject of his American lectures was basically the pursuit
of beauty and its powers to ennoble. But he was still inventing his
theories more or less as he went along. What mattered at that time
was less what he said than how he said it, which was of course in
epigrams, rendered with both flourishes and simplicity. Then there were the costumes: the knee breeches, the cavalier capes, and the
much-commented-upon legwear. The overall impression was ---and
is---arch, amusing, divinely decadent.
This was the image in the popular imagination. Therefore it is
amazing how so many different images have come from this single,
certain, and fixed image since his time.
The crudest versions have much to do with changes in society. For
the first few decades of the 20th century, he was largely seen as a
symbol of corruption and self-destruction. The Wilde of the
century’s last decades is, in contrast, a gay martyr.
Much more intriguing are the other Oscar Who keep showing up in
everything from mainstream movies to academic papers…
How fitting that the collected works of Wilds offer a source of
inspiration for all sorts of intellectual viewpoints. Care to find an
attractive little phrase to spice up a speech promoting elitism? How
about a defense of the idea that art shapes history or that history
shapes art, or even that each exists entirely independent of the other?
Some of these seeming contradictions are the natural reversals of
opinion brought about by a dramatically eventful life… this
multisided sensibility was what made Wilde seem so dangerous in
twilight of the Victorian era, an age that had been built on sturdy
certainties. Paradox, Wilde insisted, is the very root of all existence; truth, he wrote, is simply “one’s last mood”. All one can really do in
life is to exalt and cater to the organ of these shifting impressions.
Words would always be Wilde’s most powerful defense, and made
an art form of the single sentence and the perfectly poised,
contradictory phrase. For that very reason, too much Wilde at once
can cloy, like a diet of chocolates.
There is, however, one work of art in which the style of Wilde
becomes its own end, without one inappropriate detail to mar its
perfection: “the Importance Of Being Earnest”, which created a
sealed world in which everyone speaks the same shapely language of
paradox and practices the same religious worship of things trivial.
Wilde once said that one should avoid the “I” in art, and in “Earnest”
He produced his one major work in which he is invisible, though no
one else could have written it. “Earnest” is Wilde at his best, turning
style into substance and vice versa. Unlike most satires, it never
steps outside itself to point a finger. It may be the most perfect
comedy ever written.
