The Master of Inversion

“In literature,” Henry James wrote, “we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it . . . .” The observation, as is usual with the Master’s obiter dicta, is touched with the wand of ambiguity. How is that world we enter via literature “blest”? What is it to be “saved”--and should we take the term to mean “preserved” or “redeemed’ or both? Despite these opacities, however, the sentiment is clear. It is one with which Oscar Wilde would have agreed, to the consternation, perhaps, of the ultra-respectable and firmly closeted James, who regarded poor post-lapsarian Oscar as an object of contempt and terror. Indeed, James’ aphorism might sit happily between the exchanges of one of Oscar’s critical dialogues--”The Decay of Lying,” say, or “The Critic as Artist”--or even within the preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” except that the style is not crisp enough.

An odd thing about Wilde, the centenary of whose death we mark this month, is that although his work revels in paradox, irony and self-contradiction--”Who wants to be consistent?” demands Vivian in “The Decay of Lying”--it is never ambiguous. He says what he means and means what he says. He startles us not because he intends to shock--though he does, he does--but because we have allowed ourselves to become lulled into complacency by the bromide of received ideas. To read Wilde is to experience repeated jolts to the moral system. Always playful but always wholly serious, he is as intent as Nietzsche on bringing about nothing less than a transvaluation of all values. In his determination to stand everything on its head, he made himself into a master of inversion; and yes, the pun, I’m afraid, is intended.

Life was too small for Wilde, and from the outset he was determined to be larger than it. His parents set a fine example. Mother was Jane Francesca Elgee, a statuesque high romantic with a taste for melodrama who, under the pen name Speranza, wrote extremely bad but fiery verse on the subject of Irish nationalism. At the comparatively late age of 30, Jane married William Wilde, a Dublin eye surgeon with a brood of illegitimate children to his credit, who later was to be accused of rape by one of his patients. Scandal, then, was in Oscar’s blood. He was born in the autumn of 1854 and was called by what Jane described as the “grand, misty and Ossianic” names Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, which scan as a slightly offbeat line of iambic pentameter. “How ridiculous of you to suppose,” Wilde later said to a friend, “that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me ‘plain Oscar.’ ” His birthplace was Westland Row, at the back of Trinity College, though in later life Wilde discreetly shifted the scene of his nativity to the more fashionable Number One Merrion Square, a fine town house to which the family moved when Oscar was a year old.

He attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, as would another great Anglo-Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, and later went on to Trinity and then Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a brilliant student, and in another life, in another personality, might have gone on to be a classical scholar; certainly, he is one of the best-read writers Ireland has produced, and it has produced some formidable swots. In 1881, he published a volume of poetry. It was not a success, despite his having sent gift copies to everyone from Prime Minister Gladstone to Robert Browning, accompanied by suitably gushing cover letters, all of which can be found in a mammoth new edition of the complete correspondence, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Wilde was shameless; writing to Browning, he described his little volume of poems as “the only tribute I can offer you in return for the delight and wonder which the strength and splendour of your work has given me from my boyhood.” The poems were mocked as derivative; indeed, one of Wilde’s contemporaries at Oxford went so far as to accuse him of plagiarism. Wilde reacted with dignity and disdain and an utter lack of repentance for his borrowings. As he was to write some years later, “The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.”

The year after the appearance of “Poems,” he was invited to embark on a lecture tour of America. Now he could begin in earnest the process of inventing the myth of himself. Like Buck Mulligan in “Ulysses,” he was determined to “dress the part.” Barbara Belford, in her elegant new biography “Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius,” describes his sartorial preparations:

“Along with several velvet aesthetic costumes to wear while lecturing, he asked his tailor to make an ankle-length, Lincoln green, otter-lined, seal-trimmed overcoat with frogged closures. Oversized, with extrawide cuffs and a deep-notched collar, this coat became Wilde’s favorite item of clothing; it had an aura that possessed him, and when it was sold while he was in prison, he mourned it as one does a lost friend. It ‘knows me perfectly,’ he said.”

He spent 10 months traveling from coast to coast of the United States, gave 140 lectures in 260 days, and ended up with a profit of $5,605.31. Hard work, but nice, all the same.

He returned home to take up again a passionate liaison with Constance Mary Lloyd that was to lead to marriage in 1884, the birth of a son the following year and another son in 1886. He was already a playwright and, although not yet successful, he soon would be. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly for the Wildes in their “House Beautiful” in Chelsea. Oscar, however, was restless in body and in spirit. Enter Robert “Robbie” Ross, a young Canadian with the face of Puck and a puckish personality to match. Ross was probably Oscar’s first male lover. “A seduction in Wilde’s vermilion-trimmed study surrounded by Hellenic mementos was convenient,” Belford remarks. She speculates that Ross introduced Wilde to “fellatio and the classical intercrural modes of copulation.”

The experience was a liberation for Wilde and released him into a period of high literary productivity. He had never been a disciplined worker, and the years with Ross were exceptional. “Acceptance of his sexuality,” says the laconic Belford, “was more compelling incentive to work than creditors’ letters.” Ross was to remain a friend for the rest of Wilde’s brief life and was with him when he lay on his deathbed in Paris in 1900. Despite Wilde’s description of him as “the cherub with the flaming sword, forbidding my entry into Eden,” it was Ross who summoned the priest to receive Wilde into the Catholic Church the day before he died. The friendship between the two survived even Wilde’s obsession with Lord Alfred Douglas, the egregious “Bosie” whom he never ceased to love, even after the catastrophe of the libel case which Bosie urged Wilde to take against his father, the Marquess of Queensbury.

Queensbury, rabid and half mad, had accused Wilde of sodomy--in fact, on the famous calling card the scrawled accusation was that Wilde was “posing as a somdomite [sic]” or perhaps “posing somdomite”--but it is likely that he was wrong. Wilde’s homosexuality seems to have been passive and was probably confined to such pursuits as mutual masturbation and fellatio. Yet what possessed him to issue the libel writ against Queensbury? Surely he must have known that at the least the court case would leave his reputation in tatters. Was there a drive in him toward self-destruction? On the night of his arrest at the Cadogan Hotel in London, the police tacitly allowed him time to make his escape and flee to Paris, but he chose instead to stay and meet his fate.

Perhaps the years of ceaseless public performance had so sickened him inwardly that he could not resist the opportunity to leap down from the stage and allow himself to be spat upon and trodden underfoot by the groundlings. His fellow artists in Ireland saw clearly from earliest days the predicament into which he had led himself, as Isobel Murray demonstrates in her introduction to the Oxford Authors edition of Wilde. She quotes W.B. Yeats: “I see in his life and works an extravagant Celtic crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity.” James Joyce placed Wilde in the line of Irish comic writers from Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw, and saw him as, like them, “court jester to the English.” Shaw himself, of course, recognized a fellow wearer of the cap and bells. The English, he wrote, “laugh angrily at his epigrams, like a child who is coaxed into being amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage and agony.” Of course, Wilde himself was aware of the role he had created for himself, and his resentment frequently shows, as when, for instance, he has one of the speakers in “The Critic as Artist” observe with bitter elegance that “the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.”

*

How great an artist is Wilde? Surprisingly, perhaps, the question is still open. Did he put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, as he had lamented to Andre Gide? His finest achievements, “Salome,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “The Portrait of Dorian Gray,” are curiously lifeless at the core, despite their surface flash and fire. It may be that Wilde’s true calling was as a critic, a calling which could not, however, have won him the fame and fortune he so fervently desired. “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” are masterpieces of aesthetic theory: even the brief preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” says more about the doctrine of l’art pour l’art than many a dusty treatise by his more earnest--one of his favorite adjectives of disdain--contemporaries could have managed. Wilde described himself as a “lord of language,” and it was in language, in the quality of Jamesian “style,” that he sought redemption and was surely saved.