Wilde in the Sheets

On Richard Ellmann’s portrait of Oscar Wilde

By Jeremiah Creedon

“I am a socialist,” declared Oscar Wilde, and for once in his life the clever Irishman was playing it straight. Then 31, Wilde had spent a decade outraging London with his wardrobe and ideas about art; now their shock effect had begun to wane. Homosexuality and socialism would soon replace knee breeches and “lily love” as his weapons for assaulting the Victorian status quo. In May 1886, after the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, Wilde was the only other writer in London to sign a petition by George Bernard Shaw supporting the arrested anarchists. “A very handsome thing to do,” Shaw wrote, “Wilde being a snob to the marrow of his being.”

The contradiction between Wilde’s aesthetics and politics, between his love for the common man and his contempt for the common mind, was never resolved. According to the late Richard Ellmann, Wilde’s most recent biographer, this paradox shaped both his “aristocratic socialism” and his legendary wit. The two were often found together, as Wilde revealed on his tour of America in 1882. The conditions inside a Nebraska prison appalled the writer, but when he entered the cell of a convict who was soon to hang and found him reading a popular English novel, Wilde’s social conscience was waggishly eclipsed. “My heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man,” he said, “but if he reads The Heir of Redclyff, it’s perhaps as well to let the law take its course.”

In a way Wilde could not have foreseen, the law did. Fifteen years later, he too would be thrown in jail on grounds that many would consider just as capricious.

Wilde’s lofty purpose in America was to civilize this country with his speeches on beauty and art. He eventually settled for making money. His travels lasted most of a year and took him from coast to coast. The students at Harvard tried to mock him, only to be bested. The miners in Leadville, Colorado, were swayed by his propensity for drink. Walt Whitman embraced him; Henry James called him an “unclean beast.” The press berated him while hanging on his every word. As Ellmann’s masterly portrait suggests, the speaking tour was perhaps the happiest period of Wilde’s life.

Ellmann built his career upon examining the Irish literary character, writing works on Samuel Beckett and William Butler Yeats as well as the acclaimed biography James Joyce. His book on Wilde, finished before his death in 1987, rivals the Joyce study in its empathy and scope. It secures Ellmann a place among the best practitioners of a literary form that more often than not is misapplied. Wilde himself wrote that “it is always Judas who writes the biography.” After a life marked by betrayals, Wilde would be surprised to find Ellmann a most loyal friend.

Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. His father was a doctor and archeologist; his flamboyant mother wrote poems espousing Irish independence. The character that was to shock and titillate English society emerged during his years as a brilliant but irreverent student at Oxford. He quickly became known for his “pre-Raphaelite sympathies, his dandiacal dress, his Hellenic bias, his ambiguous sexuality.” Wilde could turn heads. “That he was the kindest of men,” writes Ellmann, “was not so widely known.”

It was also at Oxford that he adopted the lily as his aesthetic calling card, a symbol borrowed from the writings of his teacher, the social critic John Ruskin. Ruskin was an early influence, but the major forces in Wilde’s life tended to come in pairs. Torn between Ruskin’s moralism and Walter Pater’s homoerotic (if implicit) sensuality, Wilde first experienced the conflict between opposing passions that was to shape his work and his life. The dilemma of dual affinities arose in his flirtations with Roman Catholicism, the mere thought of which horrified his Protestant family. His sexual impulses were also divided. “Initially,” writes Ellmann, “…he tried to resolve his own contradictions and berated himself for being weak and self-deceiving. But gradually while at Oxford he came to see his contradictions as a source of strength rather than of volatility.”

This insight pervaded his work, where he often used his verbal agility to strike a blithe equipoise between contrasting ideas. It infused his witty epigrams with their twists on standard morality, and it charged the dialectical banter in his famous plays. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” Algernon says in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!” Wilde most certainly would have agreed.

His critics most adamantly did not. Wilde’s great fortune was to recognize in his divided nature a truth about Victorian society at large, but the fame he won by sharing his awareness likewise made him a target for official wrath. He amused himself and others by revealing duplicity, while naively trusting that his brilliance was enough to assuage those who otherwise might seek revenge. It was a grave miscalculation – or perhaps an exact reckoning of what it would take to secure the ruin he unconsciously invited. As his own misguided sense of being above the law grew, so did the wrath of those who would finally use the law to bring him down.

Despite a boast of giving Walt Whitman a lush kiss in New Jersey, Wilde did not fully indulge his homosexual desires until several years later, in 1886. By then he had spent time in Paris steeping himself in French decadence (Baudelaire and Huysmans), returned to London with a new coiffure (Neronian curls), married an Irish woman (Constance Lloyd) and fathered two sons (Cyril and Vyvyan).

The next eight years were Wilde’s most productive. Among many other works, he completed an essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” a state of human affairs he rather idiosyncratically endorsed. His view, Ellmann writes, was “based on the paradox that we must not waste energy in sympathizing with those who suffer needlessly, and that only socialism can free us to cultivate our personalities.” Furthermore, “to speak of the dignity of manual labor is wrong when everyone knows that manual labor is degrading.”

This prolific period corresponded with his open homosexuality – open, that is, to the degree that English law would allow. Both his writing and what Ellmann calls the one “berserk passion” of his life culminated during the infamous affair with Lord Alfred Douglas that was to land Wilde in jail. In 1895, with two hit plays on the London stage, he found himself in the middle of a public feud between Douglas and the ill-mannered young man’s equally obnoxious father, the Marquess of Queensbury.

The older man accused Wilde of luring his son (then 24) into a homosexual liaison, whereas in reality Douglas had refined a taste for “brandy, betting and boys” prior to their involvement. The distinction was lost upon the English courts, however, in a series of trials that began when Wilde unwisely sued Queensbury for libel. The system he had long taunted now seized the chance for revenge. Convicted of “indecent behavior with men,” Wilde served two years of hard labor, an ordeal that broke his spirit and health.

After his release, he wandered the continent, impoverished and unrepentant, before dying in a Parisian hotel in 1900. Ellmann maintains the cause of death was the final stage of a syphilis infection he had caught from a female prostitute during his years at Oxford. He was 46.

Ellmann’s well-documented chronicle becomes painful to read as Wilde descends into a ruin at least partially of his own design. The wretched existence of his wife, Constance, is not fully portrayed, but marriage to a man who considered sex with a woman akin to “chewing cold mutton” was clearly hell. Ellmann acknowledges that Wilde’s behavior destroyed her (she died before him, in 1898), but he also displays a tolerance for his subject that some readers, at certain moments, may be unwilling to emulate.

This potential weakness is related to the book’s great strength: the treatment of a man’s life in its full and often troubling complexity. A lesser biography could be ordered upon an argument, a thesis about the factors that determine someone’s triumphs and failures. In such works, the desire to persuade becomes an impulse to select details in keeping with the biographer’s case rather than the subject’s reality. Life defies this artificial coherence – life is messy, mean, mysterious, contradictory and sad – as Ellmann’s life of Wilde so brilliantly demonstrates.

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