Oscar Wilde Discovers America, by Louis Edwards (2003)

We have in previous months looked at contemporary novels featuring poet, playwright and aesthete Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) as a fictional character. 

Wilde has now turned up in a series of detective novels of varying quality by Gyles Brandreth, the latest of which is Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Goal.  These books are amusing time-wasters, rich with little details of Victoriana, but Wilde traipsing around pretending to be Sherlock Holmes is something of a misconception.  Also popular were Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Friend of Oscar Wilde, by Russell A. Brown, and The West End Horror, by Nicholas Meyer, both of which had Wilde meeting the Baker Street detective himself.

Though these books are non-serious entertainments, Wilde does show up in other, more adult fictions, as well.  He is the center of Peter Ackroyd’s most adroit novel to date, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), which includes a fascinating closing chapter written in the voice of Wilde’s (imagined by Ackroyd) valet, Maurice.

A similar literary conceit was employed by Louis Edwards (born 1962) in his excruciating novel, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, first published in 2003.  Though the mysteries mentioned above are by no means serious literature, they are in almost every way infinitely superior to this misconceived, ham-fisted and poorly written novel.

Oscar Wilde Discovers America is mostly about the valet who accompanied Wilde in 1882 on this coast-to-coast American lecture tour.  (This is based on an actual event and a very real individual, though the valet’s name and identity have been lost to history.)  The valet is named Traquair in the novel, and he is the privileged son of New York City servants.  Traquair is a recent college graduate and with the help of his father, and the banker his father works for, Traquair lands a job looking after the celebrated Irish poet. 

Traquair is African-American, a great admirer of Wilde’s work (though, historically, there was not much work at this time for anyone to admire), and eager to learn about life from a master.  Wilde, of course, is captivated by the plain wisdom of his servant, and learns much from him, as well.  Yes – it’s The Help with green carnations.

Well, as would be the case with a premise so loaded with political correctness, Wilde takes to calling his servant Tra (sigh) and steals some of the young man’s epigrams as his own.  Sharing cocktails with Tra, Wilde even imagines a new form of music that is largely improvisatory and connected to non-European rhythms.  Yes … Oscar Wilde imagines jazz.

Of course Wilde falls in love with Tra, and they consummate their relationship before Wilde returns to England and Tra to his life in the US.  And despite the fact that Tra will love many women in the future (the novel is told in flashback), he will always remember the power of Oscar’s kiss.

Don’t look at me – I didn’t write it. 

Edwards’ novel is alternately tedious and uninvolving, with long, exasperating passages where his tin ear tries to reproduce the cadence of 19^th century prose.  Here’s an example of what Edwards serves up – a particularly apt example considering the author’s limitations:

“Oh, that’s enough about my book,” Mr. Davis said.  “Tell me, do you foresee yourself documenting your Aesthetic Movement in any way?”

“Daily,” Oscar said.  “I foresee my life itself being the documentation of my movement.  If my biographer is adequate, he will note this fact.  But biographers, in their enthusiasm to re-create life, bear a great resemblance to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and their creations are just as monstrous.  And I don’t think a talent so rich as mine should be wasted on the tediousness of writing an autobiography – an endeavor which, of course, modesty precludes.”

“You might change your mind about that point should you live as long as I,” Mr. Davis said.  “One might think that when an old man lies down upon his bed at the end of one of his many long days, all he would want to do is rest.  But what you will learn is that at some point simply to rest becomes too much like death.  In the relentless retreat that is old age, an old man looks for pauses.  He spends entire mornings and entire afternoons and evenings searching his mind for remote islands of memory, for familiar by exotic distractions.  He reflects incessantly upon a past illustrious or inglorious.  One way or another he writes his autobiography.  That is what I do now over there in my little library when the mood strikes me, which is often.  I must admit that there is a temptation to grant oneself perhaps more importance than one is due, to lend to oneself a representative quality, to attempt to take on all the meaning of one’s people.  This may be my personal predicament only, but I’m not so sure.  I would wager that a poor, destitute soul who dies a lonely death in a dark hole someplace feels bearing upon his spirit the weight of the entire Confederacy of the Wretched.”

There are pages of this stuff (287, to be exact), and Your Correspondent has waded through it so you wouldn’t have to.  Oscar Wilde may have discovered America, but this book has been merely … detected.

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.