RICHARD ELLMANN wrote the two greatest literary biographies of our century. He died having just committed the typescript of this second of his masterpieces to his publishers, and he can never know the gratification of the universally laudatory response that must greet this product of long and meticulous labour, which is also an expression of his exquisite critical sense, wide and deep learning, and profound humanity.
Why, having written his monumental life of James Joyce, did Ellmann turn to Oscar Wilde? There was, of course, a lifelong concern with Anglo-Irish literature, but he might have been expected to produce a great critical biography of Yeats, who matches in verse Joyce’s achievement in prose. Wilde has been considered minor, and his art still tends to be overshadowed by the scandal of his life. Joyce, too, was scandalous, but not in Wilde’s way. He lived in sin until testamentary prudence, rather than reconciliation with the Church he had abandoned, prompted him to regularise his ménage with Nora Barnacle; his great novel Ulysses was banned.
Wilde knew censorship too, but the proscribing of Salome and the murmurs about The Picture of Dorian Gray were nothing compared to the outrage aroused by the disclosure of his sodomy. Heterosexual fornication in the manner of his father, the ear and eye specialist, who begot bastards in the careless manner of the Irish Protestant ascendancy, would have done Wilde no harm. But, falling for Robert Ross at Oxford when Wilde was already a family man, and later, disastrously, for Lord Alfred Douglas, he precipitated a downfall which remains the major myth of homosexual martyrology. This continues to get in the way of sober appraisal of his literary achievement.
Of his importance as a writer Ellmann has no doubt:
Oscar Wilde: we have only to hear the great name to anticipate that what will be quoted as his will surprise and delight us. Among the writers identified with the 1890s Wilde is the only one whom everyone still reads. The various labels that have been applied to the age – aestheticism, Decadence, the Beardsley Period – ought not to conceal the fact that our first association with it is Wilde, refulgent, imperial, ready to fall.
These epithets are just. No one glitters as Wilde does but disaster was always just round the corner. He was kind and he was not worldly: paradox for him was a substitute for cunning. He made his own life an art in a manner calculated to infuriate the dull. He dressed too extravagantly, but always in accord with a philosophy of beauty sincerely held. He despised the rabble that included the Victorian establishment.
Physical disaster prepared itself early. As a student at Oxford he contracted the syphilis which was to kill him at 46 – paradoxically, since this was the great disease of womanisers. He could have picked it up later in his homosexual encounters through anal coition, but Wilde was not strictly a bugger: Ross probably introduced him to the oral and intercrural modes of release which he seems regularly to have practised. Wilde’s tendency to cover his mouth with his hand when speaking was a consequence of the mercury treatment, which did not cure but turned the teeth black.
And the work? Ellmann is not bemused by the shallow Keatsianism of much of the poetry. He cites
This English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea
Breaking across the woodland, with the foam
Of meadow-sweet and white anemone
To fleck their blue waves…
and points out that ‘the meadow-sweet blooms in June and the anemone in April, while the harebell, unlike the bluebell, does not grow in oceanic profusion’. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, usually considered sentimental doggerel, is treated with some respect: it introduces the colloquial and still appeals to readers who would shudder at aestheticism. It has branded an unforgettable phrase onto the language – ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’.
As for the unforgettable witticisms thrown off in speech, the one about having nothing to declare except his genius seems apocryphal, but he certainly remarked that only a heart of stone could fail to laugh at the death of little Nell: he said it while tremulously on bail. Of the brilliance of his conversation there is a plethora of evidence: he held Paris salons, which knew all about conversation, totally spellbound. So remarkable a man had to be pricked for slaughter.
The American lecture-tour was a kind of preparation for slaughter of the aestheticism which Wilde promoted. The Americans had laughed at the fleshly poet Bunthorne in Patience; D’Oyly Carte enabled them to laugh at Bunthorne’s prototype, extolling the house beautiful in velvet breeches and hyacinthine locks. But few laughed. This six-foot-three tough Irishman, who could drink any congregation of scoffing miners under the table, got his points across about the importance of beauty in a brash nation dedicated to piety and money.
One lady, Helen Potter, made an amateur phonetic transcription of Wilde’s delivery, which Ellmann reproduces in an appendix. She was impressed, and she was not alone. But the doctrine of beauty proved a dangerous one, since it seemed to deny morality. Between 1895 and 1900 at least 900 sermons were preached against Wilde in the United States alone.
That was after the great trial and Wilde’s condemnation to two years of hard labour. Ellmann spares us nothing of the horrors of either. As always, it was the common people who showed both tolerance and compassion, applauding Wilde’s sermon on male love in court, regretting that he should have been brought so low when tramping the prison yard or breaking his nails picking oakum. One warder was dismissed for compassion. There was no compassion above.
Worse than the ordeal of jail was the total ostracism afterwards. Few come well out of the wretched story: Shaw, Henry James, Max Beerbohm maintained a discretion unseemly in brother artists. There was no dignity in Wilde’s death: ‘He had scarcely breathed his last breath when the body exploded with fluids from the ear, nose, mouth, and other orifices.’ Unlike Joyce, he died in the Church.
Joyce was a Parnellite, and Wilde was thinking of Parnell when he said: ‘There is something vulgar in all success. The greatest men fail, or seem to have failed.’ As Ellmann concludes, we inherit Wilde’s struggle ‘to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being satirised and standardised, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy.’ Wilde cleansed of scandal, is a towering figure, ‘with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.’ It is an ending worthy of a great subject and a great book.
Observer, 4 October 1987
Review of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987)