Oscar Wilde: Detective!

Yesterday we looked at Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, one of the most original and fascinating biographies of Oscar Wilde in years.  But … fiction writers have also pursued the shade of our favorite Victorian aesthete.  Have they fared as well as biographer Thomas Wright?

In short, no.  There is no shortage of novels that “star” or feature Oscar Wilde, and too many of them are hardly worth the time and effort necessary to read them.  Here are some to avoid.

Writer Gyles Brandreth has his own cottage industry of Oscar Wilde mysteries, with four already on bookshelves and more on the way.  They are (as of this writing): Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder, Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile and, of course, Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders.  These books have the fairly original conceit of being “narrated” by Robert Sherard, a real-life poet and man of letters who wrote several volumes of reminiscence regarding his friendship with Wilde.  Various other luminaries of the period make appearances in the books, including Dracula author Bram Stoker, actress Sarah Bernhardt and, naturally, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

There has been an enormous vogue for mixing historical figures and detective fiction ever since Nicholas Meyer wrote of Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes in his 1974 novel The Seven Percent Solution.  The Freud-Holmes novel is actually a very strong one, presenting a fresh look at two fascinating personalities, one actual the other fictional.  The downside of the book has been its long-ranging influence.  We have now been treated to a crime-busting Teddy Roosevelt, Leonardo da Vinci as detective, the poet Longfellow solving crimes, even, believe it or not, the sleuthing team of Edgar Allen Poe and Davy Crockett.  Conan Doyle and magician Harry Houdini has been paired together in so many novels, I’m sure their ghosts have taken up housekeeping.  I keep waiting for a mystery solved by LBJ’s dog.

It’s not the Brandreth’s Wilde mysteries are bad … they are often entertaining trifles.  But his concept of Wilde is in keeping with your secretary’s monthly book club: velvet jackets, a few tired epigrams and a touch of twee charm.  In addition, the frequent collaboration in these books between Doyle and Wilde rings false – they may have inhabited the same historic space, but they lived in different worlds.

Moving from the ridiculous to the more serious, we have Desmond Hall’s I Give You Oscar Wilde.  This biographical-novel is told from the point of view of one of Wilde’s acquaintances, and hits all the highs and lows of Wilde’s life.  It commits the one unpardonable sin when writing about Wilde: it’s dull.

Perhaps the most egregious offender in the Wilde-in-fiction sweepstakes is author Louis Edwards for his book, Oscar Wilde Discovers America.  Edwards writes of Wilde’s American lecture tour and his real-life valet, an African-American named Traquair.  Of course, the two become fast-friends (Wilde calls his manservant Tra) and when the young son-of-slaves is not whispering epigrams into the great man’s ear, he is opening him up to the possibilities of life.  At one point, deep under Tra’s influence, Wilde even predicts the advent of jazz.  (I swear I’m not making this up.)  Yes – you guessed it – Oscar Wilde Discovers America is The Help dressed with a green carnation.  And, like Kathryn Stockett’s novel, Edwards’ book is alternately tedious and ridiculous.

Others have used Wilde as a fictional character – and more successfully.  We’ll be looking at some of those books in future weeks.

Part II -- Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde

Today we conclude our review of Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, by Thomas Wright

In short, Wilde is too large a personality, too large a mind for us to get our hands around comfortably.  Just when we think we’ve cut him down to a manageable size – oh yes, the man who loved not wisely nor well enough – some other aspect of Wilde comes to pull away the veil through which we see the distorted image.  Just when we think of Wilde’s life as a great tragedy, he laughs at us; and when we think of his deep and rich vein of comedy, he makes us weep at the equally rich and deep agonies of life.  (Languishing in prison, Wilde was asked by a guard about then-popular novelist Marie Corelli.  And Wilde, a man at that time in hell, said from behind his prison bars, “Now I don’t think I’ve got anything to say against her moral character, but from the way she writes, she ought to be in here.”)

We keep returning to Wilde, but none of our recreations rings entirely true.  The movies have been particularly unkind to Wilde.  Robert Morley, a gifted actor within his own range, was never more than a walking aphorism in Oscar Wilde (1960), and Peter Finch and Stephen Fry (in 1960s’ Trials of Oscar Wilde and 1997’s Wilde, respectively) both have a martyred look, as if Wilde’s life was all tragedy and no comedy.  And the Wilde of Nikolas Grace in Salome’s Last Dance (1988) was … not the Wilde of history or myth.  None of these actors manage to convince as a man of genius, though Vincent Price, in Diversions of Delights, has come, perhaps, closest to the Wilde of fact and legend, and Edward Hibbert was also excellent as the replacement Wilde in Gross Indecency.

Wilde has now turned up in a series of detective novels of varying qualities by Gyles Brandreth, the latest of which is Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile.  These books are amusing time-wasters, rich with little details of Victoriana, but Wilde running around pretending to be Sherlock Holmes is something of a misconception.  And Neil McKenna's 2003 biography, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde is an insult both to Wilde and to anyone engaged in real biographical research.  I have never seen a “biography” use the words “perhaps” and “possibly” with such wilde abandon.  Indeed, many of McKenna’s assertions (and McKenna makes a bunch them) start as off-hand jokes made by Wilde morph into bizarre and convoluted theories of Wilde’s sexual practices.  This is rather like the Life of Wilde authorized by The National Enquirer … and about as authoritative, too.

However, every now and then a new book on Wilde comes along that manages to both capture the real, multiform Wilde, and also radically redefine how we think about him.  And Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, by Thomas Wright, is such a book.

Built of Books (published as Oscar’s Books in the UK) is a visionary type of literary biography: a look at Wilde’s life as measured by the books he had read.  As such, it is not obsessively concerned with the factual incidents of Wilde’s external life.  (For that, I recommend Richard Ellmann’s masterful Oscar Wilde.)  Instead, what Wright attempts to do is immerse himself in Wilde’s reading and, by so doing, enter into the great man’s mind itself.  Few biographies dare intrude upon the subject’s internal life; Wright attempts to recreate it.  It is a daring and audacious plan, one that in lesser hands could only end is disaster or ridicule.  Instead, Wright manages to magically resurrect Wilde and map the myriad and poetic byways of his mind.  In more than 30 years of reading about Wilde, I have never come across so original, so accessible and so successful a book.  Here is Oscar Wilde, brought back to life.

Wright takes us through Wilde’s upbringing – largely resting on the oral tradition of Irish folklore.  Wright posits that this is the wellspring of Wilde’s particularly musical language, and his gifts as a talker, as well.  He takes us by the hand and leads us through Wilde’s years at university, outlining the Hellenism that was one of the tent poles of his philosophy, as well as introducing us to the aestheticism that grew out of this hothouse atmosphere.

Later chapters take us through Wilde’s personal Tite Street library, his prison reading lists (and book bills), and the books he bought while roaming the Continent following his disgrace.  Wright had the enviable honor of examining many of Wilde’s personal volumes, and makes deductions about the physical act of Wilde reading (usually while drinking wine or sometimes actually nibbling on the pages themselves).  He also traces Wilde’s thinking based on various marginalia and from inscriptions in presentation copies to friends and lovers.

Like most great biographies, Built of Books was the result of a personal quest.  Like many who worship at the Alter of Oscar, it started for Wright with a boyhood reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray.  His interest in Wilde and the intellectual life of Victorian England grew, and, over time, he became obsessed by the man and his reading.  As he writes, Wilde would be my Virgilian guide to the circles of world literature; his life and art the thread with which I would navigate the labyrinth of the history of ideas.  I hoped, too, that he would be a sort of Socratic mentor, who would help me give birth to a new self.  He vowed to read every book that Wilde had read, as well, and eventually ended up in Wilde’s alma mater, Magdalen.  Candidly, Wright notes in the final chapter that he was not intellectually up to the task.  Having produced a list of volumes that I was certain Wilde had read (or at least owned), I was forced to confront the even more depressing truth that, intellectually, I was simply not up to the task of comprehending them all … It is ironic that Wilde characterized his own period as an “age of the over-worked and the under-educated;” an age in which people were “so industrious that they become absolutely stupid” and where thought was “degraded by its constant association with practice.”  What would he say if he came back to visit the philistine, workaholic, mortgage-enslaved England of our day?

Wright recognizes that Wilde was that rarity – a dandy with a sense of humor – and writes with sly wit, himself.  His book is peppered with little asides that gladden the heart.  When writing about an impassioned fan letter Wilde received from a young man, he writes: [Wilkinson] was also very appreciative of Wilde’s suggestion regarding his reading.  “I shall always,” he wrote, “be grateful to you if you trouble to recommend me particular poetry to read; I am thankful to say that I play neither football nor cricket, so I am really comparatively at leisure.”  It is a shame that the pair were destined never to meet, because Wilkinson sounds exactly Wilde’s type.

Like others, Wright was introduced into the furnace of Wilde’s art and intellect through The Picture of Dorian Gray, and has come out of it a different man.  He more than repays that debt by breathing life into Wilde once more with Built of Books, the most remarkable, enjoyable and revitalizing act of literary alchemy I’ve read in many years.

Part I -- Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it.  – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I will break from tradition somewhat with this post, and insert an annoying autobiographical passage.

I started reading detective and gothic fiction of the Victorian era when I was a boy.  It was almost as if a world opened before me – a world of the mind and of the senses.

Armed with these twin passions, I also greatly enjoyed the pop culture transformations of them, including (or, perhaps, especially) the series of films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe starring Vincent Price.  I became a card-carrying Vincent Price devotee.

So, imagine my delight when, in 1979, Price came to New York to star in the Broadway production of John Gay’s Diversions and Delights.  Diversions is a one-man show that takes as its conceit Oscar Wilde lecturing a Parisian audience near the end of his life.  The Broadway run did not last long, but it rapidly moved off-Broadway, where it settled at the Roundabout Theater (then on West 23^rd Street) for an extended stay.

Diversions and Delights is a remarkable work.  Culled largely from Wilde’s own writings, it also incorporates bits of later-written biographies and much of Gay’s own keen dramatic sense.  I believe that only two plays about Wilde have really captured him to some extent: Diversions and Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

I initially went first to see Price, but returned again and again for Wilde.  I asked the management of the Roundabout if I could work as an usher at the theater in exchange for seeing the show every night, and I managed see Price as Wilde some 30-odd times.  It was a revelation to me.

Once the show was over, I immediately procured a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it became my golden book – I read it countless times after first buying it, so much so that passages of it are now forever locked in my memory.  It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with Oscar Wilde.

In Dorian Gray, Wilde writes of a book that poisoned Dorian – a heavily perfumed volume that opened to him wonderful sins disguised with incomparable beauty.  I was indeed luckier than Wilde’s fantastic hero – instead of being poisoned by a book, I was saved by one.  London during the Yellow Nineties and fin de siècle Europe became for me an alternate world where I lived another, perhaps more intense, life.  Just as Renaissance Italy became for Wilde and his mentor, Walter Pater, more of a state of mind than an historical period, the world of the aesthetes became a cornerstone of my philosophical compass.

Aside from the dramatic and fantastic events of Wilde’s life, I became deeply enamored of the philosophy of aestheticism, and looked too at others who explored the same creed.  I became interested in Walter Pater, John Ruskin, James Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Théophile Gautier.

But more than aestheticism and a fascination with the Victorian era, I was deeply moved and beglamoured by Wilde himself.  And the thing that most fascinated me was that he was a figure at times fully-defined, and at others horrifyingly indistinct.  And that is because, I believe, that Wilde the man was too multiform and protean.  He embodied the Renaissance ideal of mastery of many types of mind and genius.  Even after reading Wilde for more than 30 years, I find it remarkable that the man who wrote the witty drawing-room comedy The Importance of Being Earnest is also the man who wrote the strangely musical, Symbolist Salome.  I have difficulty reconciling that the keen mind who deduced the possibility of Willie Hughes with the brain responsible for The Selfish Giant; and that the pen responsible for The Mind of Man Under Socialism is the same that wrote The Harlot’s House.  And is it possible that the bare, blunt and deeply affecting lines of The Ballad of Reading Goal could be written by the same man who wrote the perfumed and sensual Picture of Dorian Gray?

In the contemporary public mind, we have cut Wilde down to our own smaller-size.  We do not have the proper aspect ratio of the whole, multi-talented man.  We think of Wilde the Gay Martyr, or Wilde the Sensualist.  But these are only parts of the picture – if indeed they make up any significant proportion of the man at all.  To really know Wilde, we must know Wilde the gifted classics scholar and intellectual; Wilde the poet and Wilde the playwright; Wilde the novelist and Wilde the political thinker.  We have to consider Wilde’s upbringing and his deep appreciation of Irish folklore before knowing Wilde the fantasist.  We must know Hellenism and the works of Pater, Ruskin, Symonds and Mahaffy before we can fully understand Wilde the aesthete and dandy.  Aside from his success as a writer, the list of his accomplishments in so brief a life are immense, staggering: the finest talker and raconteur of his age, lecturer and arts advocate, moralist and social critic.  One of the most fascinating images in my mind’s eye is the thought of Oscar lecturing the denizens of the Old West about Cellini’s place in the history of art – it’s too delicious.  And to top it off, his was one of the most fascinating personalities of an age crammed with remarkable figures.  In his bravery and insouciance, his remarkable panache and élan, Wilde was also a swashbuckler without a sword, a courtier who became a type of personality unto himself.

Perhaps the only constant in Wilde’s life was his deep an abiding aestheticism; his passionate, deeply-ingrained and unending devotion to Art.  An appreciation of the arts (and the art of life) was encoded in Wilde’s DNA, it was impossible for him to engage in the world in any other way.  He saw his personal experience (both his joys and his tragedies) through the prism of art, and the world around him either reflected the canons of art, or fell disappointingly short.  There are many disparate facets of Wilde the man to explore, but if they are not seen through the green-tinted glasses of an aesthete, we do not see them as they really were.  It was the filter through which his protean intellect travelled, and the fundamental core of his philosophy and personal vision.

It is not impossible to believe that Wilde courted, to some degree, his own ruin and disgrace because it was the ending most dictated by satisfying dramaturgy.  That every epoch of his life, from his meteoric rise to his exile where he roamed Europe under the name Sebastian Melmoth, was in some way performance art, that he lived strictly for dramatic, aesthetic effect.

Tomorrow we finish our review of Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde