 Introducing Mr WildebyGillian Polack“A terrible danger is hanging over the Americans in London. Their future and their reputation this season depend entirely on the success of Buffalo Bill and Mrs. Brown-Potter.” A friend asked me if I would please write an introduction to the works of Oscar Wilde. I’d pointed out in a conversation that Wilde was an author who could be approached when one was short of time. His works can be dipped into and out of, as well as savoured in more depth. They don’t only work well from different directions, but approaching him from the direction of casual reading or filling in a half hour gives a different sense of the man and his work to thinking “This is a Great Author and I must spend two weeks in solitary study of him.” My friend, David McDonald, wanted to know more. I won’t explain my views of the different readings here, for that would spoil David’s fun. I’ll walk through Wilde’s work and introduce it, from his plays to his lectures to The Ballad of Reading Goal. When I was introduced to Wilde I thought he was mainly a writer of plays and fairy tales. I was at the excruciating age of twelve and I thought The Importance of Being Ernest was the best thing I’d ever seen that wasn’t Gilbert and Sullivan. Later, when I met his lectures and essays and letters and poetry, I discovered that he was a social commentator who cared profoundly about the Arts (and was fascinated by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement) and fashion and how children bring up their parents. In other words, he was a polymath and a very sharp observer. Black and white in his views; colourful with his adjectives. Somewhat ungenerous to those he didn’t respect (which included women and the poor) but fascinating for all that. In modern terms, I rather suspect he was a geek. This means that his short pieces are as interesting as his plays, and the tragedy that was the tail end of his life was by no means the whole of himself. Not even his complete corpus of writing is the whole of himself, but it’s a fine place to start. A lot of his work is underlined by social and political commentary: he cared intensely about the world he lived in and was very critical of it and its people. One of the fascinations of his writing is that all this criticism was expressed from his own unique perspective. Wilde loved sharing his views and he was positive, even when at his lowest point, that his deep insights were profound beyond the deep insights of others. Even when he was wrong-headed, therefore, he was entertaining. Many of the Wilde one-liners in his plays cover similar ground to his lectures. He talks about poverty and cleverness, he explores the attitudes people have and the attitudes they feel they ought to have. He can say things differently when it’s the character speaking, not him. He can be cynical and say things that are impossibly untrue. This means that there are more nuances when one reads the lectures and then toys with a play than if either is read alone. In A Woman of No Importance he balances action and behaviour, for instance, and demonstrates through the plot that poor behaviour shows an inner ugliness. Compare this to his notes on clothes and how dress should be both practical and beautiful and the pattern can be seen. He believed in his own opinions (“I am right,” his work declares, from his very first play right to the epistolary De Profundis, written in prison) and he had many opinions, but they covered some interesting terrain. There’s something fascinating about Wilde’s sense of his own intellectual and artistic perfection, and that fascination makes Wilde a very easy writer to read. It’s possible to read Wilde for the wit and for the look at his society, but it’s also possible to read him for matters that are far deeper. His play A Woman of No Importance is, for instance, a study of privilege. It demonstrates very clearly how those with privilege can act in a way that will ruin the lives of others, can refuse to take their views into account, can mock almost anything and feel that they have this as a right. It’s a very penetrating examination, hardly softened at all by Wilde’s quips and his unbearably upper class characters. It was one of my favourite plays when I was a teenager. It hurts more, now, for I’ve seen all the things he depicts, made modern, but it is still a wonderful play where fine words and clever aphorisms lead to a very dark view of those who do not take on responsibility to match their privilege. Wilde examines the idea of retribution for sin and shows how it’s easier to condemn than it is to live everyday with mistakes one has made. He shows us the shape and consequences of a society where there are the pure and there are the darlings of society and where everyone else is of no importance. The moment that still rings true—although the reasons for it have changed and the discussion is about rape rather than women who have sinned—is the cruelty of making a woman marry her abuser, an abuser who has not reformed and cares little about the feelings of the woman involved. His plays are his most well-known works, for they are performed (especially Ernest) still. He was as much known for his essays and lectures and thoughts during his lifetime, however. Wilde was the darling of society, and his opinions were treasured. Every word, in fact, was treasured, which is why his trial had such a spectacularly deleterious effect on his life. His essays include ones on art (descriptions of paintings encountered at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 and 1879, for instance) and on theatre performances (on Lily Langtree performing Hester Grazebrook in 1882), but he also wrote about moments that struck him. I don’t know whether it would be better to be liked or disliked by Wilde. Certainly, if one was disliked, one attracted the best lines. For instance, in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 21, 1885 he wrote: “Last night, at Prince’s Hall, Mr. Whistler made his first public appearance as a lecturer on art, and spoke for more than an hour with really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures of the kind.” It might have been worse to be loved by him and subsumed under a panoply of praise. Moderation was something Wilde seems to have been short of. This is, of course, one reason he’s so easy to read. He would have been a fine dinner guest. I’m not so certain he would have been a comfortable friend. Wilde’s 1880s aren't those of anyone else. They’re sprawling and fascinating and quite narrow in a glorious way. To enjoy Wilde’s essays to their fullest, it helps to have a knowledge of classics, of the nineteenth century artists and writers Wilde knew, and of his variety of hatred expressed through gentle rhetoric. If you don’t when you begin, however, you will develop this knowledge on reading him. In the volume entitled Miscellanies, for instance, there is an essay on the tomb of Keats, published originally in the Irish Monthly, July 1877. He wrote letters to editors and introductions to the books of others. He penned an interesting letter on fashion, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette on October 14, 1884, followed by another set of comments on November 11 that same year. Here is an extract from the second: Now, as regards the eighteenth-century costume, Mr. Wentworth Huyshe acknowledges that he has had no practical experience of it at all; in fact, he makes a pathetic appeal to his friends to corroborate him in his assertion, which I do not question for a moment, that he has never been ‘guilty of the eccentricity’ of wearing himself the dress which he proposes for general adoption by others. Not all his small writings are remarkable and not all of them avoid dullness (though most do), but these short pieces help give perspective to Wilde’s more notable words. His style is addictive. I don’t normally write like this, but re-reading so much Wildean prose over a few days has gently pushed my writing into emulating Wilde’s word use, though perhaps not Wilde’s wit (alas). Much of Wilde’s work was ephemeral. Only some lectures remain, for instance. Oscar Wilde was a brilliant speaker as well as an essayist and he used notes to deliver most of his lectures: his short pieces include various versions of lectures he delivered in the US and the UK, but many have gone the way of the spoken word. There is even a missing play, La Sainte Courtisane, referred to in the introduction to Miscellanies. Wilde left the nearly-finished manuscript in a cab. It’s apparently full of grandiloquence and meaningful utterances. It must go on my list of works I’d love to stumble across in a dark bookshop, along with the lost books of Livy. There are two other missing plays, stolen in 1895, but we have drafts of those and are not so bereft. The few passages remaining of La Sainte Courtisaine show that it’s portentous and grand, and quite different from the type of writing that first caused me to fall in love with Wilde. Wilde’s surviving writing includes letters and notes, such as those that were part of the public slanging match between him and Whistler, and refutation of bad reviews of Dorian Gray. He was quite capable of both feuding and claiming he was provoked—the letters are both entertaining and somewhat sad. Many of the comments could easily apply to today’s literary skirmishes, for instance: To the Editor of the St. James’s Gazette. St. James’s Gazette, June 30, 1890 “… you saved your critic from the charge of malice by convicting him of the unpardonable crime of lack of literary instinct. I still feel that. To call my book an ineffective attempt at allegory, that in the hands of Mr. Anstey might have been made striking, is absurd. Mr. Anstey’s sphere in literature and my sphere are different.” Aphorisms abound. David asked me if there was anything very short written by Wilde. These morsels are as short as works of literature come. They don’t simply occur as part of Wilde’s work—he published some as a separate work. In 1884, he published a list that he entitled Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young:
His fairytales, especially The Happy Prince, have a standard structure for nineteenth century fairytales (they are short and not complex), but they are Wilde’s own stories. There is not much happy-ever-after but a great deal of virtue and sacrifice and learning about true beauty. His other short stories, likewise, reflect the popular style of short stories. Some of them have the feel of twisted penny-dreadfuls, in fact, and others (“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”, for instance) use the same language but mock the concepts. The works in this latter group are very close to his plays in what they say and how they tell the tale. “The Canterville Ghost” has the vocabulary of a Gothic novel and the sensibility of a Gothic novel but turns the high seriousness of the Gothic entirely upside down, especially when the ghost steals its bloodstain from a girl’s paintbox. Oscar Wilde wrote just one novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). I’m not certain I need to say anything about it. It’s been deeply influential and is very well known. Wilde’s writing suffered an inevitable sea change after his trial. The fundamentals of his writing are still the same: the use of language, the high moral tone, the sense of Wilde’s own importance. The messages he wanted to convey, however, were dramatically different. De Profundis, the work he wrote while in jail, is technically a long letter written from jail. De Profundis explains his feelings for those outside and describes his new reality. It was published in various forms from quite early, but not in a complete version until, I believe, the 1960s. It’s on my list of things I must re-read before I die, for I read the shortened version when I was far too young to appreciate what Wilde was saying. It is the moment of catharsis for him, capturing those profound changes in his life and outlook. De Profundis led to The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), which is depressing. It begins: He did not wear his scarlet coat, There are so many things I ought to say about this poem and so many things I could say about this poem, but I shan’t. Many things have already been said by others—for The Ballad of Reading Gaol has been analysed and dissected for over a century. The one thing I shall say (apart from it being depressing) is that it’s quite different to Wilde’s other work. It stands alone in many ways and the best way of approaching it is simply to read it. The ballad form makes it very straightforward to read and even to read aloud. One thing I love about Wilde’s work is that he had such a reputation for both wit and penetrating cultural insight that a lot of material was put out (during his lifetime) that other people wrote. His historical gift was to the understanding and promulgation of aesthetics, but the man himself was larger than his writings which, considering those writings, is impressive. Books mentioned in this column: The Ballad of Reading Goal
Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.
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