There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest.” If it were not for that “my,” you might think this written by some philistine—after all, The Importance of Being Earnest is the wittiest comedy in the English language. To be sure, Oscar Wilde, who was right about a lot of things, could also be wrong about others, such as his involvement with “renters,” young male prostitutes, some of whom testified against him at his fateful trial.
But Nicholas Frankel, author of Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years, is only passingly concerned with Wilde’s pre-trial life; his book is mostly about the three and a half years between Wilde’s release from prison in 1897 and his pitiful, untimely death. Frankel, who previously edited the uncensored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, has done a thorough job of digging through the plethora of material about Wilde that has been committed to paper. His purpose is to refute the traditional view of Wilde ending as a broken martyr, a victim of hypocritical Victorian morality. As explained on the book’s dust jacket, Frankel aims to give us a Wilde who pursues his “post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.” Wilde was not successful in the attempt. As Frankel shows, Wilde was unable to produce new work during these final years—with the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by far his best poem, about his and his fellow prisoners’ reactions to the hanging of a wife-killer.
When you come right down to it, why shouldn’t Wilde have been unrepentant? He had paid heavily for a crime not unpopular in Britain, albeit generally practiced more clandestinely. How it must have rankled that, for example, Lord Rosebery remained free.
Wilde, as he emerges from Frankel’s book, was basically a kindly, warm-hearted chap. He himself, and everyone he encountered, attested to his talk being superior to his writings, delightful as they are. Many people live by their wits, but the exiled Wilde largely lived by his wit alone. No wonder he had several devoted friends, starting with his first gay lover and later literary executor, the Canadian Robbie Ross, who commissioned and is buried in a small compartment of Wilde’s large, heroic funerary monument by Jacob Epstein.
Only at the very last did Wilde become anything less than a charming companion and exquisite conversationalist, when soliciting money from everyone he knew, however slightly. His estranged wife, Constance, provided him an allowance, which continued even after her 1898 death. Ross was another benefactor. So were the American journalist and author Frank Harris and Wilde’s dedicated publisher, Leonard Smithers. Of course there was his one true love, the much younger Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he unsuccessfully tried to set up housekeeping in Naples. Luxury-lovers both, they lived, chiefly in Paris, on what Oscar made from promises of unwritten work and what Douglas could lure from his loving mother.
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Here are familiar anecdotes, such as the poet Ernest Dowson’s enticing Wilde to a Dieppe brothel, which Oscar was to refer to as “like chewing cold mutton.” Or his dying line about the hideous wallpaper: “One of us has to go.” Or, less familiar, the dinners with Ferdinand Esterhazy, whom Wilde dubbed the Commandant—the man who had committed the spying for which Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully sent to Devil’s Island. During one of these dinners, Esterhazy and Wilde debated which of them had suffered most in life, with Wilde reportedly responding to Esterhazy’s claim of innocence:
The “fact of a man being a traitor and a liar,” writes Frankel, “was nothing against his conversation” as far as Wilde was concerned. As he remarked, “If Esterhazy had been innocent I should have had nothing to do with him.”
The emotional leitmotif of Frankel’s book is the Wilde-Douglas love story, one of vacillations and tergiversations, perhaps the most spectacular in the annals of literary history. There were various times when each of the lovers declared he would kill the other, only to rush back into his outstretched arms. After Wilde’s death in 1900, Douglas jumped, Hamlet-like, into Wilde’s open grave. It was only several years after Wilde’s death that Douglas first read the long accusatory letter, known as De Profundis, that Wilde had written him from prison but that had remained unsent.
Very touching, too, is Wilde’s relationship with Jean Dupoirier, his landlord at the inexpensive Hôtel d’Alsace, who did not charge him for his room, redeemed his confiscated clothes, and was one of the mourners at his funeral with a wreath reading simply “A mon locataire” (to my tenant).
While the pages in which Wilde tries to touch for a handout anyone he knew make for painful reading, the rest of Frankel’s history is scintillating enough. The quotes from Wilde’s sayings and writings sparkle, defiantly undimmed. Thus, during a boring visit to Switzerland, Wilde notes that the Swiss were “carved out of wood with a rough knife most of them, [or else] carved out of turnips. . . . Their cattle have more expression.”
Even at the last, he could note that he was “dying above his means,” and Douglas, much after Wilde’s death, wrote that he “held his [café] audience spellbound as he discoursed in his exquisite voice of all things in heaven and earth, now making his hearers rock with laughter and now bringing tears into their eyes.” On his last legs, Wilde still managed expensive clothes. He cadged gold-tipped cigarettes and, dying, requested fresh toiletries and cologne.
Frankel observes that many of Wilde’s friends “later said that his works are but a distant echo of his speech.” Wilde once wrote that “every civilized man and woman ought to feel it is their duty to say something, even when there is hardly anything to be said.” He practiced what he preached.
John Simon is an author and critic in New York.
