Happy Man

OSCAR WILDE: HIS LIFE AND WIT (345 pp.) -- Hesketh Pearson -- Harper ($3.75).

"Genius," Oscar Wilde once said, "is born, not paid." His own limp-lily brand of Irish-Oxonian genius has been paid many times over, which is not necessarily to say overpaid. In the years since his death in 1900 (from cerebral meningitis, probably complicated by syphilis), he has become more & more renowned--a state of affairs which he would doubtless find amusing.

He always attracted a great deal of attention, his admirers ranging in degree from the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) down. But once upon a time respectable people like the Henry Adamses considered it beneath their dignity to speak to him, and Henry James, who knew him, dismissed him as a "tenth-rate cad." Nowadays his tomb in a Paris cemetery is said to draw more pilgrims than Balzac's or Chopin's. His name is as certain of immortality as that of Adams, James or the Venerable Bede.

The latest to tell the story of the pasty, jowly face, the gross, purplish lips, the great wit, great charm and great downfall is British Biographer Hesketh Pearson (Conan Doyle, G.B.S., etc.). "In January 1943 I mentioned to Bernard Shaw," Pearson explains, "that I wished to write a Life of Oscar Wilde." Shaw replied, "My advice is, very decidedly, Don't. . . . There is nothing more to be said." But Pearson went ahead anyhow, having long been interested in the complexities of Wilde's character. Although he had never seen him in the flesh, he knew and had talked to many of his cronies--including Lord Alfred ("Bosie") Douglas, Frank Harris and Robert Sherard, all of whom had written Wilde biographies of their own.

Out of the Fog. Pearson's Wilde is a skillful synthesis of earlier books, amended by such facts and opinions as he was able to gather at firsthand. "No one," he declares, "[has] yet attempted to reconstruct Wilde as a great character.. . . Far too much attention [has] been paid to his tragic story and nothing like enough to his delightful personality. . . . My intention [is] to take him out of the fog of pathology into the light of comedy, to restore the true perspective of his career."

In this he has been only partly successful. To rescue Oscar altogether from the pathological fog is more than he or anybody else can do. Oscar's homosexual tastes and his literary personality are hardly separable, however true it may be that the mere heat of the one does not account for the light of the other. Pearson's explanations explain very little. He thinks that Wilde's emotional nature never developed "beyond adolescence"; hence Wilde always remained "an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate, half boy, half genius." Nevertheless, he adds, Wilde was "very much in love" with Constance Lloyd when they married in 1884, and "delighted" in Cyril and Vyvyan, their two sons, born a few years later.* Wilde, moreover, according to Pearson, did not become a "practicing" homosexual until after the children were born. Constance, for her part, remained "completely unaware" of his tendency until he was arrested in 1895.

Never a Bad Day. Biographer Pearson's portrait of Wilde the conversationalist, critic, playboy and playwright is more convincing, though here too, at points, his admiration carries him away. Oscar, he insists, was an "innately happy" man, who "never experienced a day's unhappiness until he was 40 years old" (1894). Even his last years in exile on the Continent were reasonably happy; the "martyrdom has been made to look much meaner than it really was."

Soprano Dame Nellie Melba said she met Oscar Wilde in the streets of Paris in 1898, shabbily dressed, with a "hunted look in his eyes." Lord Carson, his old schoolmate who cross-examined Wilde at his first trial, is reported to have seen him lying "haggard" and "painted" in a Paris gutter. Pearson laughs such stories off. Oscar, he declares, never painted his face except to edify American audiences during his U.S. lecture tour (1882). As for being shabby, he was "invariably well-dressed, well-shaved, self-assured."

"Anybody," quipped Wilde in his heyday, "can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature . . . to sympathize with a friend's success." Biographer Pearson's sympathy is broad enough to cover both aspects of Wilde's career. He has chosen to stress Wilde the drawing-room wit, the extravagant fop, the brilliant author of comedies as sparkling as any ever written for the English stage.

*Cyril, who became a professional soldier, was killed in France in 1915. Vyvyan, now 60, studied law, lives in London, works for the BBC. In 1943 he married Australian-born Thelma Besant, a great-great niece of Theosophist Annie Besant. They have one son, Christopher Merlin Vyvyan, born in 1945. Says Vyvyan Holland (the Holland surname was adopted by Constance Wilde, under strong pressure from her family, after Oscar's conviction): "I was only nine in 1895, and was not even told of my father's difficulties until I was 20. Everything happened so long ago that I am beginning to wonder if there really has ever been such a person as Oscar Wilde."

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