Oscar Wilde, page 2
Wilde and his "dearest boy," Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie")
It's curious, given the sensibilities and preoccupations of our time, how little has been made of this centennial. But then what is there to make of it? To deify Wilde by depicting him as the sensitive, misunderstood victim of a bullying establishment ("Why Break a Butterfly on the Wheel?" and all that) is to grossly oversimplify the matter. The Marquess of Queensberry, author of the Queensberry Rules of Boxing, was a mean-spirited, contentious man who took Victorian notions of honor, challenge and combat seriously and then some. Wilde, for his part, understood the power of drama probably better than any man of his time (and there can be no doubt that he grasped the conservative character of Victorian society). Nevertheless, when he upped the ante and pushed the drama into the public theater of the courtroom, he grievously miscalculated his ability to control the script. Or did he do exactly what he intended?Was Wilde some kind of time-traveling secret agent assigned to catapult the inhabitants of the 19th century into the 20th, even if he had to sacrifice himself to do it? "I was a man," he wrote while in prison, "who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised it for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards." Granted, he had a healthy ego, and the confidence that a life of success brings with it, but he also understood that he existed as a symbol -- he made sure of it -- and in so doing he created the prototype for any number of 20th century characters whose life became their art. (That doesn't make Wilde a hero, but it does make him fascinating.) He took his theater to the streets; he was its personification. Before Oscar Wilde there was no such thing -- the Futurists, the Surrealists, conceptualism and hippies came later. That subsequent practitioners of this form have often rendered a less compelling product than he did can hardly be blamed on Wilde.
He once remarked that he'd put his talent into his work and his genius into his life. He should have added that he also made a point of erasing the line between the two -- a 20th century act if there ever was one. In spite of its crashing conclusion, Wilde's life was well (and lavishly) spent, though we could wish that he'd spent more of it in our century -- where he belonged. But maybe he has. "He ranged over the visible and invisible worlds, and dominated them by his unusual views," Richard Ellman wrote in his definitive 1988 biography. "He is not one of those writers who as the centuries change lose their relevance. Wilde is one of us. His wit is an agent of renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred years ago."
Raise a glass to Mr. Wilde on this, the centennial year of some very bad business.
