Titans of History

OSCAR WILDE

1854–1900

From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands.

W.H. Auden, in the New Yorker (March 9, 1963)

Oscar Wilde—poet, playwright, aphorist, novelist and writer of children’s stories, aesthete, victim of prejudice and hypocrisy, and insouciant, irrepressible wit—treated his own life as a work of art; he was its hero—and should remain ours. A lover of paradox and a connoisseur of life’s absurdities, he effortlessly skewered the pretensions, prejudices and hypocrisies of his age. His destruction by the society that had lionized him was a tragic echo of the themes he explored with such charm and forensic skill in his own work.

Wilde’s plays, such as A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest, are rarely off the stage. His dazzling wit is enduringly quotable: “I take my diary everywhere I go. One must always have something sensational to read on the train,” declares Gwendolyn to Cicely in The Importance of Being Earnest, a play that is said to be the most perfect comedy ever written. More than any other writer of the time, his satire deconstructs the pompous edifice of late Victorian society and does so with considerable élan. But under the glittering surface lies the potential for tragedy, and much of his work shimmers on the edge of darkness. The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel Wilde published in 1889, pushed the limits of respectability with its themes of decay, cruelty and illicit love, causing Wilde’s wife, Constance, to remark that “since Oscar wrote that book no one invites us anywhere anymore.” Yet it is a timelessly sensitive and affecting evocation of our fears of death and aging. Even his fairy tales, The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, do not shy away from the unpalatable reality of cruelty going unpunished and heroism unrewarded.

Wilde was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, but his desire to be center stage prompted him to pursue an education and a life in England. The archetype of a fin de siècle aesthete, Wilde cultivated a flamboyant appearance and a quick and cutting way with words, turning himself into a celebrity long before his writing confirmed that he was worth all the attention. “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” he said. By his early twenties the tall, drawling Oxford graduate, got up in a velvet suit with Regency-style knee-breeches, was notorious. Even the prince of Wales demanded an introduction, declaring: “Not to know Mr. Wilde is to be not known in society.” From celebrity came a career: caricatures of the dandy who declared art to be the highest form of action began to appear on the London stage. When an enterprising producer took one of these plays on an American tour, he decided to take Wilde on a parallel lecture tour on the subject of aestheticism. Wilde—who reportedly arrived at US Customs with the comment “I have nothing to declare except my genius”—became as famous across the Atlantic as he was in England. It was only in the half decade before his fall that Wilde fully became the writer he had always planned to be.

Wilde’s homosexuality has become as famous as his work. He was a butterfly broken on a wheel. His provocative effeteness had prompted rumors about his sexuality for years, but Wilde was a married father who only became actively homosexual in his thirties after his marriage hit a bad patch. “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it,” said Wilde famously. He described his sexual adventures as “feasting with panthers.” Caught up in a vendetta between his preposterously vain and destructive lover Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas and Douglas’ father, the lunatic martinet the marquess of Queensberry, Wilde found himself the subject of a sustained campaign of childish abuse. Queensberry sent him phallic bouquets of vegetables, and the note he left at Wilde’s club in February 1895 accusing him of being a “posing somdomite” [sic] was the final straw. Urged on by Bosie, Wilde sued for libel.

It was a terrible mistake. Under cross-examination Wilde was as flippantly witty as ever, playing to his new audience, the occupants of the court’s public gallery. But even his eloquent defense of immorality in his work could not cancel out details of his dalliances. The establishment could not tolerate such revelations. Wilde lost the case and was immediately tried and sentenced to two years’ hard labor for gross indecency. Cries of “Shame” filled the galleries. Queensberry called the bailiffs in to repossess Wilde’s house in lieu of costs. His son, who had fled to the Continent to escape indictment, publicly bemoaned his suffering, at a safe distance.

While Wilde was serving out his time in Reading Jail, a fellow inmate, Trooper Charles Thomas Wooldridge, convicted of murdering his wife by cutting her throat with a razor, was hanged. It was to “C.T.W.” that Wilde dedicated his last great work, the elegiac Ballad of Reading Gaol, written in exile in France after his release in 1897. The poem had to be published under a pseudonym, “C.3.3” (his prison number), due to the notoriety of his own name. Intermingling light and shade, the poem expresses a longing for innocence, beauty and redemption even in the mire of despair, and at the same time calls for forgiveness and understanding.

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by.

The poem concludes:

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

While in prison Wilde wrote De Profundis, a bitterly brilliant 50,000-word letter to Bosie, a testament to his destruction by his great love. He never recovered, physically or psychologically, from his incarceration. Ostracized by society, unable to see his beloved sons, he spent his final years wandering the Continent. His wit was undiminished to the last: “I am dying, as I live,” he declared, “beyond my means.” Shortly before his death, as he lay in a dreary room in Paris, he is said to have murmured, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”