OSCAR WILDE AND THE YELLOW ‘NINETIES—Frances Winwar—Harper ($3.50).
“To love oneself,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the beginning of a life-long romance.” Few have had such queerly spectacular romances with themselves as Oscar Wilde had. And none has been more queerly written about. Belligerently broadminded, owlishly psychiatric, sermonizing or smirking, Wilde’s biographies for 40 years have been only slightly less perverted than Wilde himself.
A really good Wilde biography—i.e., candid, sensitive, objective—is Frances Winwar’s Oscar Wilde and the Yellow ‘Nineties. Readers may find something reminiscent of Wildean paradox in the fact that a woman wrote it. To readers of her previous biographies (Farewell the Banner: Coleridge and the Wordsworths; The Romantic Rebels: Byron, Shelley, Keats; Poor Splendid Wings: the Rossettis) it is also a reminder of Biographer Winwar’s uncommon skill in portraying the pre-Wilde period. At its best, her book does for the decadent flowering of England’s Nineties what Van Wyck Brooks did for the flowering of New England.
In Algiers, shortly before his sensational trial for pederasty, Oscar Wilde said to French Novelist Andre Gide: “Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life—I have put only my talent into my works.” Like many another Wilde wisecrack—Biographer Winwar believes—that one had a solid core of astute truth, and contained a clue to Wilde’s ripe mixture of estheticism and grossness, charm and repulsiveness, sincerity and exhibitionism. His genius consisted in living, in the most hostile environment possible—Victoria’s industrial England—as though he were a pagan Greek, “noble and nude and antique.” With his trial, imprisonment and shabby ending, Biographer Winwar has no difficulty tracing Wilde’s life as a modern Greek tragedy—if an extraordinarily counterfeit one.
An overlooked influence on Wilde’s career was his mother, from whom Oscar apparently inherited more than his big, undulant frame. Massive-headed Lady Wilde, who claimed descent from Dante, wrote poetry under the name Speranza, hot-headed Irish patriot propaganda under the name John Fenshawe Ellis. When her hard-drinking, ugly doctor-husband got mixed up in sex scandals, she either denounced the girl or paid no attention. (Dr. Wilde, knighted nine months before his worse scandal, left a family in every farmhouse, said G. B. Shaw.) Grieved that Oscar was not a girl (he looked, said a visitor, like a little Hindoo idol), Speranza consoled herself by naming him Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, dressed him like a girl, let him stay up to mingle with the bohemians, patriots and poets who flocked to her salon.
Moralists liked to recall after his disgrace the unhealthy tendencies Oscar already showed at Oxford—his sermon-inspiring crack: “Would that I could live up to my blue china;” his incense-burning and precious bric-a-brac, decadent paintings, rhapsodies in verse to Actress Lily Langtry, his declaration that “I want to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world.” What was less frequently recalled was that he was the pet of Slade Professor John Ruskin and of the great Walter Pater, who was once so overcome by his protege’s beautiful talk about the “new Hellenism” that he went on his knees, kissed Oscar’s hand. No one enjoyed more than Ruskin and Pater the story of how Oscar had thrown four big athletes downstairs when they came to teach the “blue china cove” a manly lesson.
Revealing of Wilde’s character is Biographer Winwar’s picture of the sun-flower-&-lily school he dramatized, the arch-esthete contemporaries he cultivated and admired—Painter Jimmie Whistler, who hammered home the theory that art has no morals and trained Wilde in the most cynical wit of the century; Ernest Dowson, hashish-smoking, tuberculous poet who died young in the gutter after writing Cynara, a poetic rosary for disillusioned young men; Artist Aubrey Beardsley, spidery, sardonic, tuberculous genius, called “the most monstrous of orchids” by Wilde; French Novelist Huysmans, who carried decadent experiments in subtle sensations as far as they have ever gone; Theophile Gautier, “Holy ghost of the exotic-aesthetic, satanic-mystical school;” Smithers, the fantastic under-the-counter bookseller, “wonderful and depraved,” who aided mightily in finishing off his beloved protege Ernest Dowson with women and drink. “Good people,” declared Oscar, “exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.”
Such was the “new Hellenism,” which Wilde dramatized to the bitter end. Refusing his friends’ advice to flee rather than stand trial, broken by two years’ hard labor in prison (productive of his most sincerely questioning work, De Profundis), a drink-cadging exile in the Paris bistros, penniless, bloated, deaf, dying piecemeal at 44 of cerebral meningitis, Oscar could still summon up a deathbed defiance of what he called Philistia. “I am,,” said he, tossing off a glass of friends’ champagne, “dying beyond my means.”
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