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Excerpt

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.

Dorothy Parker

He left behind, as his essential contribution to literature, a large repertoire of jokes which survive because of their sheer neatness, and because of a certain intriguing uncertainty -- which extends to Wilde himself -- as to whether they really mean anything.

George Orwell

1. THE PUZZLE OF OSCAR WILDE

Nearly a century since his death, what shall we make of Oscar Wilde? Was Wilde merely a bright boy in a man's body or a thoughtful prophet cleverly wrapping profundity in dazzling giftwrap? Until his trials for "gross indecency," this puzzle intrigued Victorian England. From the time he packed his blue china to leave Oxford for London in 1879 until his imprisonment 16 years later, Wilde's contemporaries never knew how seriously to take him. During his two years in prison, they stopped wondering. Oscar Wilde's books were withdrawn from circulation and his plays canceled.

It didn't take long, however, for the fickle public to renew its interest in Oscar Wilde. A decade after his 1900 death at 46, Wilde's bankrupt estate was flush. By World War II more Europeans read Wilde than they did any English writer except Shakespeare. Today he is the only author of his time and place who still has a following. Oscar Wilde's writing remains fresh, alive, electric. His words stride off the page to grab us by the lapel and demand that we pay attention. "You've got to listen to what I'm about to tell you," they insist. And we do; gladly. Wilde's claim to our attention has kept The Picture of Dorian Gray continuously in print for over a century, The Importance of Being Earnest repeatedly staged, and The Happy Prince revived onto the bestseller list. "He is not one of those writers who as the centuries change lose their relevance," observed biographer Richard Ellmann. "Wilde is one of us."

It wasn't just Wilde's writing that was ahead of its time. His disdain for conventional morality and relentless pursuit of celebrity broke ground later tilled by counterparts ranging from Truman Capote to Andy Warhol. Wilde was an advance herald of existentialism, and the intellectual godfather of 60s "flower children." As estheticism's most prominent advocate, he helped create a climate receptive to Europe's contemporary design revolution. For better or worse, his contention that criticism could be an art form encouraged subsequent critics to follow Wilde's lead and impose themselves on whatever they were ostensibly criticising.

More than anything else, it is the sum of Oscar Wilde's 46 years that commands our attention. Wilde felt that way himself. "Do you want to know the great drama of my life?" he asked Andre Gide. "It's that I have put my genius into my life; all I've put into my works is my talent." Wilde's life was an ongoing performance starring himself. Writing was merely a vehicle propelling him toward his real goal: the dramatization of Oscar Wilde.

Men of Wilde's size (a bulky 6'3") typically dress down to take the edge off their imposing physical presence. Oscar dressed up. He wore knee breeches, red waistcoats, velvet jackets, and a massive fur coat. A hairdresser waved his hair daily. He chain-smoked gold-tipped cigarettes. His ring featured a large green beetle. The buttonhole of his jacket was invariably decorated with some expensive flower.

Wilde was unapologetic about his flamboyant hunger for attention. "Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous I'll be notorious," he told an Oxford classmate. After leaving Oxford for London, Wilde pioneered the use of mass media for self-promotion. He routinely wrote witty letters in duplicate, one for his correspondent, one for the press. By continually satirizing this easy target, Punch became Oscar Wilde's faithful publicist. So did Gilbert and Sullivan when they featured a Wilde-like fop named Reginald Bunthorne in their comic opera Patience. Londoners laughed, but they paid attention. As would be true of Dorothy Parker in New York half a century later, retailing Oscar's latest mot was quite the fashion in Victorian London. "Every omnibus-conductor knew his latest jokes," said Wilde's friend Ada Leverson.

Talking was Wilde's vocation, writing his avocation. Those who knew him were virtually unanimous that Oscar Wilde was the best conversationalist they'd ever met. Shaw thought him "the greatest talker of his time -- perhaps of all time." Sir Max Beerbohm -- who'd heard such other masters of table-talk as Henry James, Gilbert Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc -- said none could compare to Wilde. "Oscar in his own way was the greatest of them all," said Beerbohm, " -- the most spontaneous and yet the most polished, the most soothing and yet the most surprising."

During his 1882 lecture tour of America, Wilde was invited to visit an artists' studio in San Francisco. As a lark, the artists' wives had dressed up a female portrait dummy, complete with gloves and a fan. This mannequin was dubbed "Miss Piffle." While touring the studio, Wilde bumped into her. Backing up with a bow, he apologized for the mishap. Without missing a beat Wilde proceeded to give Miss Piffle his impressions of America. He related some funny anecdotes, and replied to her imagined comments with clever repartee. "It was a superb performance, a masterpiece of sparkling wit and gaiety," marveled an onlooker. "Never before, or since, have I heard anything that compared to it."

Unlike many a great monologist, Wilde didn't deny others the opportunity to join him in conversation. Few dared. To engage Wilde in a dialogue would have been like playing tennis with Martina Navratilova, or dancing with Fred Astaire. Or perhaps dueling with Cyrano de Bergerac. While courtly and considerate, Wilde could also be cutting. He was a master of the veiled barb. The deftness and subtlety of Wilde's malice made it no less malicious; the sharpness of his stiletto didn't dull the pain of its wound. Wilde's observation that Shaw had no enemies, but none of his friends liked him, was clever, mean, and wrong. So was his contention that an upwardly mobile acquaintance "came to London in hopes of founding a salon and succeeded in opening a saloon." (This quip later showed up in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) The same thing could be said of Oscar Wilde that he wrote about a character in Vera : "He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone."

Like Disraeli, Churchill and so many others renowned for spontaneous wit, Wilde kept carefully crafted quips in his pocket, waiting for the proper moment to launch them into conversation. He couldn't always wait, however, and was notorious for setting conversational traps in which to spring a new epigram. Wilde once asked a friend named Coulson Kernahan about his religious convictions. Kernahan responded in all seriousness. When he had finished, Wilde said with a smile, "You are so evidently, so unmistakably sincere and most of all so truthful, that ... I can't believe a single word you say."

Kernahan later recalled Wilde's countenance in the aftermath of this volley:

... having discharged his missile, Wilde, no longer lolling indolently forward in his seat, pulled himself backwards, and up like a gunner taking a pace to the rear, or the side of his gun the better to see the crash of the shell upon the target, and then, if I may so word it, "smiled all over." He was so openly, so provokingly pleased with himself and with this particular paradox that not to be a party to the gratification of such sinful vanity, instead of complimenting him, as he had expected, on its neatness, I ignored the palpable hit, and inquired:

"Where are you dining tonight, Wilde?"

"At the Duchess of So-and-So's," he answered.

"Precisely. Who is the guest you have marked down, upon whom -- when everybody is listening -- to work off that carefully prepared impromptu wheeze about 'You are so truthful that I can't believe a single word you say,' which you have just fired off on me?"

Wilde sighed deeply and threw out his hands with a gesture of despair, but the ghost of a glint of a smile in the corner of his eye signaled a bull's eye to me.

Those who'd heard Wilde talk found reading his written words disappointing; rather like drinking yesterday's wine. The words were there, but the spirit was missing: the lilt, the sparkle, the daring leaps from one topic to the next. Some of Wilde's best lines occurred only during conversation. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing," for example -- like so many of Wilde's quips -- appears nowhere in his published work. (This one was jotted down by Ada Leverson.)

By mixing the insights in some his essays with the witty dialogue in The Importance of Being Earnest, suggested his friend Adela Schuster, one could get a hint of his conversational prowess. This prowess was built on a foundation of epigrams. "One never left him without carrying away some characteristic mot ," said the poet Richard La Gallienne, "light as thistledown, yet usually pregnant with meaning." Oscar Wilde was the leading aphorist of his era, and among the best of all time. He was well equipped not only with the conviction but with the glibness and audacity that aphorizing calls for. The spirit of brash certainty that is aphorizing's lifeblood can be hard to sustain. Wilde was up to the challenge. Until his final years, he seldom hesitated to be categorical. "I still recall perfect sayings of his," said the painter Will Rothenstein, "as perfect now as on the day when he said them."

By his own choice, Wilde's commentary was more often witty than wise. Many of his epigrams were little more than word play. They suggest a precocious teenager showing off for bemused grownups.

Familiarity breeds consent.

Nothing succeeds like excess.

It is better to be good-looking than to be good.

I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible .

Did Wilde know what he was about? Of course he did. "I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase," Wilde told Arthur Conan Doyle, "and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth."

Because he was so smart, even Wilde's flip remarks imply insight, as if by chewing on their husk long enough one might reach a kernel of wisdom. For all of their verbal hijinks, many of Wilde's observations displayed real perception. Amidst the glitter of his wit lay nuggets of insight.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid of ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature ... to sympathize with a friend's success.

One reason Oscar Wilde so baffled his contemporaries -- as he does us -- was that he freely mingled such wisdom with mere frippery. Reading his work is like touring an art gallery in which works by Red Grooms, Pablo Picasso and Charles Schulz are hung side by side. Like so many brilliant men, Wilde took for granted that his listeners and readers were as able as he was to juggle many perspectives at once. When waxing paradoxical for sheer recreation, he assumed others were in on the joke. Wilde knew that he often just played with words, toyed with ideas, struck poses. He was as charmed as anyone by the performance. "Wilde has been the life and soul of the voyage," said a fellow passenger on his 1882 crossing to New York. "He has showered good stories and bon mots , paradoxes and epigrams upon me all the way, while he certainly has a never failing bonhomie which makes him roar with laughter at his own absurd theories and conceits."

Oscar enjoyed amusing and amazing so much that it wasn't always clear when he was being serious. Nor did he care to say. "To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely," he once wrote a friend, " -- it is not wise to show one's heart to the world -- and as seriousness of manner is the disguise of the fool, folly ... is the robe of the wise man." As part of his outrageous persona, Wilde considered honesty an overrated virtue. He regarded any attempt to pin him down about the veracity of his views as tedious; a sure sign of a limited intellect. During his first trial, when quizzed about a saying he'd written, Wilde said airily, "I think it is an amusing paradox, an amusing play on words." Challenged about the truth of another epigram, he responded, "I rarely think that anything I write is true."

The writer Sir Henry Newbolt once watched Wilde discuss the virtues of some obscure Elizabethan playwrights, with frequent citation of their work. Newbolt was so impressed by Wilde's peroration that he jotted down some of his references in order to look them up later. He could find none of the plays cited. Nor could Newbolt locate any of the "playwrights" Wilde had so learnedly discussed. They existed only in his fertile imagination. "My feeling was chiefly one of almost awed surprise at his wonderful powers," said Newbolt, " -- the imitations were so perfect and so striking in themselves as to be worthy of the forged names he appended to them."

Wilde loved to create verbal works of art. To him, inquiring about their truthfulness was like quizzing a painter about the validity of his reds or blues. Wilde routinely said things he didn't mean because they sounded pretty. Did he really believe that "Men who are dandies and women who are darlings rule the world, at least they should do so"? I doubt it. More likely he was delighted by the resonance of "dandy" and "darling" in such close juxtaposition. Elsewhere, Wilde juxtaposed "kisses and blisses," "scribblers and nibblers," and commended a book for substituting the vice of verbosity for the stupidity of silence."

Friends noted how often Wilde repeated the same phrases, albeit honed, sharpened, polished. Like a standup comedian, he continually recycled good lines. Wilde's sayings moved freely from conversation to essay to fiction to drama. Sometimes they moved freely from other people's conversation. His quip "If one had the money to go to America, one would not go," was based on a friend's earlier question, "Who would go to Australia if he had the money to go with?" Another famous Wildeism -- "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris" -- appeared first in Oliver Wendell Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table . So did "Give me the luxuries, and anyone can have the necessaries," a line later attributed to Wilde.

Wilde borrowed other people's material without apologies. "I appropriate what is already mine," he explained, "for once a thing is published it becomes public property." His sometime friend James Whistler rarely missed an opportunity to accuse Wilde of blatant theft on the high literary seas. After Whistler got off a good line, the painter said Wilde told him, "I wish I'd said that."

"You will, Oscar, you will," Whistler retorted.

Wilde, Whistler concluded, "has the courage of the opinions of others." Wilde responded by using this aphorism without attribution in a subsequent essay.

But aphorisms are a revolving fund. Even as Wilde withdrew, he deposited far more than his share of lasting epigrams. In his play An Ideal Husband Wilde included the thought that "Life is never fair," perhaps inspiring John F. Kennedy's similar observation 70 years later. Wilde's "I can resist everything except temptation," was later attributed to Mark Twain, Mae West and W.C. Fields. In Man and Superman, Shaw wrote, "There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it." A decade earlier, in Lady Windermere's Fan , Wilde observed, "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

A key problem facing any compiler of Oscar Wilde's sayings is selecting the best from an embarrassment of riches. Harvesting aphorisms from Wilde's canon is like fly fishing in a fish farm. Wilde put so many maxims into his writing that we have a wealth of them on the record. His play scripts were basically a bulletin board on which Wilde pinned his best remarks. The comedies in particular featured one quip after another mouthed by characters -- men and women alike -- who were thinly disguised depictions of the playwright's various facets. Scene-setting, character development and plot were essentially filler. The playwright conceded that his characters did very little. Like their creator, he said, they were content to "sit in chairs and chatter."

It may be true that authors shouldn't be held accountable for the views of their characters. But the narcissistic Wilde was not one to create fictional figures distinct from himself. Because Wilde's writing was largely a forum for his own observations, one is usually safe in taking his characters' views as Wilde's. If such views were often inconsistent and contradictory, so was their author.

Details are always vulgar.

Details are the only things that interest.

To be modern is the only thing worth being nowadays.

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern;

one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

The supreme vice is shallowness.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Had such contradictions been tossed in his face, Wilde would have responded with disdain for the tosser. "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative," he said. Wilde claimed an artist's right to propound a point of view and its obverse too. In his introduction to "The Truth of Masks," he advised readers, "Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree ... For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true."

There was always something of the promising undergraduate about Oscar Wilde: bright, charming, outrageous. Yet the man who could display such insight about others was no more perceptive than the average college sophomore when it came to himself. Biographer Hesketh Pearson thought that the fundamental conflict in Wilde's nature was between his precocious intellect and his immature emotions. Even as the boy in him loved to show off, the adult stood to one side amused by the spectacle.

As part of being so young at heart, Wilde took every opportunity to expound the virtues of self-gratification. "I would go to the stake for a sensation," he once admitted. Today we'd call him boredom-phobic. "Life was nothing to Oscar," observed a friend, "unless it was made up of thrills and excitements."

Oscar Wilde's emotional life never progressed much beyond an adolescent's. This could be seen in his lifelong preference for the company of young men. Wilde's unrepentant homosexuality and borderline pederasty challenged the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual attitudes. In Wilde's time and class, the implicit attitude was: do what you like, but be discreet. Don't flaunt. Wilde flaunted. He was by nature a flaunter. So long as Oscar Wilde wasn't too public about his dalliances, fin-de-siecle England was willing to look the other way. Only after he rubbed its nose in his passion for young men -- and, incidentally, risked pulling the bedsheets off thousands more who shared that passion -- did the hammer of British justice fall mercilessly on Wilde's head.

From today's perspective, it's hard to picture how much horror "the love that dare not speak its name" excited in Victorian England. (Had open discussion of the issue been possible, Wilde might have speculated that this was due to the stifled libido of those who were horrified.) Today, Wilde's homosexuality would be a mere peccadillo, no more damning of him than it would later be of Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee. Were he still alive, Wilde would be less condemned for his gayness, but perhaps taken more to task for exploitation of young men by an older celebrity.

Even as he'd reaped its rewards, Wilde eventually paid the price for being over-famous. His flamboyance and self-promotion made him a household name long before he produced work to merit such recognition. As a result, his fall at the end was that much farther, and harder, accompanied by the delighted applause of the many whom he'd offended in his ostentatious rise to fame. But Wilde didn't take the opportunity to segue from brilliance to profundity after leaving prison. Flashes, hints of what he might have become could be seen in his epic Ballad of Reading Gaol and in De Profundis, the petulant, sad, and riveting memoir of his life leading to prison. Within De Profundis Wilde continually repeated "The supreme vice is shallowness," as if trying to convince himself. Alas, after his release, Wilde resumed the life of a boulevardier. Now, however, he had neither the resources nor conviction to do a good job of it. Wilde ended his days as a shabby absinthe-drinker in French cafes, cadging francs off old friends and new acquaintances. He couldn't reconceive himself as anything other than brilliantly witty. Yet the thought of returning to drawing-room drama repelled the chastened ex-convict. "I simply have no heart to write clever comedy," he told a friend.

Although outrageous to the end -- sipping champagne on his deathbed, remarking that he was dying beyond his means -- in later years Wilde did temper his craving to astonish. The post-prison Wilde was in many ways more thoughtful and compassionate than he'd been before his trials. Before, Wilde thought nothing of getting off a good quip at the expense of the destitute. ("If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.") In prison Wilde developed enormous sympathy for the plight of his fellow convicts. He took particular interest in some rabbit-poaching children who were confined to solitary cells for 23 hours of every day. Two letters to a London newspaper denouncing such cruelty were the only pieces of writing Wilde published under his own name during three and a half years between leaving prison and dying.

It's interesting to speculate how Wilde might have matured with age (a concept he would have loathed). But it's hard to conceive of a gray-haired Oscar Wilde. Not the man who'd spent so many years rapping the aged across their wrinkled knuckles. ("The old should neither be seen nor heard." "Those whom the gods hate die old." "Those whom the gods love grow young.") Wilde venerated youth too much. Like Byron, Capote, and Presley, his appeal was based on brashness. He was far better suited to being an enfant terrible than a sage. Oscar Wilde had a good first act and a better second one, but missed the call to his third.

And so we are left with the witty, sometimes wise output of the two productive decades of this writer-raconteur. We all should have such output. It includes not only poetry, fiction, plays and essays but stories, repartee and quips recorded by contemporaries who heard Wilde talk. The challenge facing anyone who compiles Oscar Wilde's work is to try to convey in print the conversational pyrotechnics that captivated his peers. That's the goal of The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde . Because he was such a master of conversation, it incorporates anecdotes that illustrate his verbal flare. Wilde's gift for thrust and parry can is vividly displayed in excerpts from his trial cross examinations. Sections of Wilde's play scripts showcase both his mastery of witty dialogue, and the epigrammatic banter for which Oscar Wilde was famous. The heart of this volume is the best of his sayings; what was known in Wilde's time as "Oscariana." Through his sayings he was known, and through his sayings we shall know him.