A Celebrant of Mixed Motives OSCAR WILDE

By Paul Gray

"I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other, I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious." Such heady ambitions are fairly common in the young, but the Oxford undergraduate who uttered these words in 1874 got all of his wishes, and then some. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde not only achieved the most glittering renown of his era but the most abject humiliation as well. He flew higher and fell farther than any of his contemporaries, and his life had become a legend well before his death in a shabby Paris hotel in 1900. He had wrought his fate in only 46 years, but they were, to put it mildly, eventful ones. "Nothing," as a character in one of his plays remarks, "succeeds like excess."

Wilde's story has been told numerous times. He began appearing, scarcely disguised, as a character in novels before he had written anything substantial himself, and the passions aroused by his dizzying ascent and precipitous collapse have stirred memoirists and biographers ever since. Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde will not be the last word on this subject, but it is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive, measured and fascinating account. Ellmann, who died seven months ago of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), was the author of the landmark literary biography James Joyce (1959). In his numerous books and essays he displayed an acute, doctrine-free sensitivity to the many ways that writers such as Yeats, Beckett, Eliot and Auden translate experience into art. In Wilde, Ellmann confronted a somewhat different challenge: an author whose most complex, illustrious accomplishment was the style and content of his own life.

Ellmann's Wilde is neither the corrupt seducer his enemies reviled nor the Orphic martyr enshrined by his champions. He emerges instead as a celebrant of mixed motives, a pioneer in the uncharted terrain of what would much later, and inelegantly, be termed the identity crisis. Except that, for Wilde, there was no crisis. The pampered, brilliant youth from Dublin set out to make his fortune by inspired conversation and the constant reshaping of himself. "My Irish accent was one of the many things I forgot at Oxford," he noted, characteristically telling the truth and a joke at the same moment.

To be noticed, Wilde realized, is to exist; clothes make the man. At various times throughout his life he favored such accessories as lilac shirts and heliotrope neckties, knee breeches, outlandish overcoats that shimmered in the shifting light. He turned the appreciation of beautiful things into a private religion, with distinctly public manifestations. To walk about carrying a single lily in his hand was not simply to throb with pleasure but to be observed doing so. News of Wilde's Oxford eccentricities preceded him in the world at large. When he met a friend outside a theater, he overheard someone say, "There goes that bloody fool Oscar Wilde." Wilde said quickly, "It's extraordinary how soon one gets known in London."

True. Before long, Wilde's mannered dandyism was satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, whose immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic earned the intended butt of the joke an invitation to lecture in the U.S. At that point, in late 1881, Wilde had published one slim volume of poems to generally hostile reviews. No matter. New York City newspapers were so avid for a glimpse of this exotic flower that they hired a launch to ferry reporters out to Wilde's ship the evening before its docking. The press discovered plenty to report: a large (6 ft. 3 in.), broad-shouldered subject who parried their questions adroitly. His response that he had found the ocean voyage uninteresting eventually made its way into a headline: MR. WILDE DISAPPOINTED WITH THE ATLANTIC. And so it went across America for nearly ten months: Wilde preaching art-for-art's-sake to people who had come to gawk at his costumes.

When he returned to England, Wilde set about amplifying his fame. First, to stop rumors about his questionable sexual proclivities, he married and fathered two sons in rapid succession. Only then, at 33, was he seduced by an Oxford undergraduate named Richard Ross in what Ellmann asserts (surprisingly, in view of the Wilde legend) was his first homosexual experience. After that, Wilde's imagination caught fire. He wrote essays (The Decay of Lying, The Soul of Man Under Socialism) and reviews that kept him constantly before the public eye. Lady Windermere's Fan, the first of his plays to be performed in London, was a smash. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, scandalized critics and became the anthem of the decadent fin-de-siecle 1890s. This book was, as Ellmann notes, a "tragedy of aestheticism," a cautionary tale about the perils of unbridled hedonism. But the prose was so alluring that few noticed the message. Wilde ignored it too. Involved in a love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, he actively succumbed to a course of conduct that would destroy him.

Ellmann's account of this lamentable affair is candid and sympathetic. "Bosie" Douglas, 16 years Wilde's junior, had a taste for casual, commercial sex and induced Wilde to follow this lead. The older man was the innocent: "What seems to characterize all Wilde's affairs is that he got to know the boys as individuals, treated them handsomely, allowed them to refuse his attentions without becoming rancorous, and did not corrupt them. They were already prostitutes." That Wilde was careless, selfish and inconsiderate toward his faithful wife and his children is beyond dispute. But he did not deserve being caught and crushed in a murderous struggle between Bosie and his lunatic father. "The impression that has been given of Queensberry is that he was a simple brute," Ellmann writes, and adds, sounding a little like his subject: "In fact he was a complex one." The marquess, mad at Wilde and the world, threw out insults that practically begged for a libel suit. Wilde unwisely started one, lost and as a result was tried for sodomy and indecent behavior; convicted of the lesser charge, he served two years at hard labor.

The end is painful reading: the agonies of prison and then two declining years shambling about the Continent, cadging drinks and watching old friends pass him on the boulevards without acknowledgment. Shortly after Wilde's death, his body literally exploded with pent-up infections dating back to the syphilis he caught during his university days from an Oxford prostitute. Yet Ellmann's retelling of this saga inspires not disgust but awe. Wilde was heroic because he gave his society better than he got; he bestowed wit and humor and at least one imperishable play (The Importance of Being Earnest), and he did not run away from the consequences. Why should he have been punished at all? Ellmann's biography keeps this eternal question -- the responsibilities of the artist set against those of the public at large -- in constant, luminous focus.