“Forgive My Being Silent: After Wilde, I Only Exist A Little.”

So wrote Andre Gide in a letter to Paul Valery in 1891, after meeting Oscar Wilde in Paris.

The effect Wilde had on Gide, a young man of about 20 at the time, was tremendous and could, ultimately, have destroyed Gide. Wilde’s effect was so unbalancing that it took away Gide’s voice. He could not write, he could barely think anymore. He trusted nothing, all of the things he thought were true he now saw were not. He did not know which end was up. He had a nervous breakdown, I suppose, although he eventually recovered (obviously. He won the Nobel Prize in 1947) Gide remained a friend of Wilde – although a distant cautious one – until the end. Whatever his tendencies were already (Gide’s), they were not ‘set’ and neither, of course, were Wilde’s, who delighted in contradictions. To someone who is a bit more rigid, perhaps, or who is looking for the answer – (not to mention living in a society that requires, expressly, that you not be who you really are) to meet someone who “delights in contradictions” can be a ruinous event. It nearly was for Gide.

Oscar Wilde’s epigrams are wonderful, cutting, funny – still surprising – and his plays are still sell-outs over a century after he first wrote them – but I think in many ways we all ‘only exist a little” after Wilde, there is still something so brilliant about him that it is hard to get my mind around it. It’s inconsistent, at times, and there’s some balderdash (the opening paragraph of Dorian Gray for example) – but the body of the work is extraordinary, and the willingness to delve deep into the contradictions of his age (and, of course, of future ages, of our age) and let two things co-exist at the same time STILL strikes me as a bit dangerous. There is STILL something truly subversive about him. (To me, “subversive” is a compliment.) His goal is to upend convention. That’s all fun and good when it means curling your hair when everyone else wears it straight … but how far will one go? How far will society let you take it?

In his contradictions, in the way he closes his epigrams with exactly the OPPOSITE of what you would expect, lies the assumption that all of society’s rules and morals are up for interpretation. You can believe in that crap as “true” if you want, but Wilde will stand there, shrugging his shoulders at you languidly, and go on doing what he wants to do, and that could cause outrage in conventional people – because it wasn’t so much that he flouted convention, it was that he refused to believe in the reality of those conventions in the first place. Subversive stuff. An example of his epigrams and how they start out one way, and set you up – the reader – into thinking, “Oh yes, I know where we’re going” – and then he pulls the rug out, but elegantly, smoothly. Not to mention the fact that the sentiment itself is slightly unbalancing, unsettling …

To win back my youth … there is nothing I wouldn’t do – except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.

If all of society behaved in the way he described here, we would all be lost. But that was part of his point. And that was part of why Gide felt so silenced after meeting him for the first time.

But – on the other hand – there is a kindness in Wilde which cannot be denied. I think people often characterize him as a shallow dandy who was “brought down” into the muck, but I don’t find that to be accurate. Yes, he was the promoter of the aesthetic movement, and counseled people on what books to read and how to dress and interior decorate, but it was always for a deeper purpose. Also, anyone that funny could not be shallow. His kindness is not there so much in his early plays, and certainly not there in Salomé, but as a person – he was generous, patient, and unbelievably strong in the face of relentless viciousness. He handled the insults with good humor, skewering his opponents – until he finally came across someone (the damned 9th Marquess of Queensberry, a pox on his soul) who could not be stopped, who had a chip on his shoulder the size of the entire British Isles, and who was determined to “save” his fairy son from further corruption. (Meanwhile, and this I had not known – one of the Marquess’ OTHER sons had also been caught in a compromising relationship with another male, and had killed himself – right around the time that Queensberry started harassing Oscar Wilde. So. Imagine. This short angry little man – who, I’m sorry, probably had some “tendencies” himself, his response is so vicious, so out of proportion – had two gay sons, both of whom were living in an openly gay manner, in 1895. TWO sons? Unthinkable! It had to have pushed all this guy’s buttons. Not to mention the fact that also right around this time, his second wife had divorced him, claiming publicly that his penis was too small for effective intercourse, and also that he was impotent, that the marriage had remained unconsummated. So. Make of that what you will. His unresolved issues ruined another man’s life – a man whose writing I happen to cherish, so I’ve got zero sympathy for the guy.)

And so Wilde found himself a pawn in a fiery family struggle between father (Marquess of Queensberry) and son (Lord Alfred Douglas). Lord Douglas was no shrinking violet in this, Lord Douglas was the main instigator, pushing Wilde further and further into it, forcing the confrontation, glorying in the fact that his famous lover was “sticking it to dear old Dad”. Wilde, too, who had two pretty extraordinary people as parents (look them up. Amazing people.) just did not approve of how the Douglas family treated one another. Lord Douglas would send telegrams to his father, saying stuff like, “You are a silly stupid man” and Wilde would just shake his head and remark, “You shouldn’t talk to a parent like that.” Imagine the generosity of this. Here he is talking about a man who is threatening to ruin him, who leaves notes under his front door calling him a “sodomite” and every other nasty name in the book, who stages protests outside productions of plays Wilde has written – who is doing everything possible to make Wilde miserable – and here Wilde is, chiding the son for talking to his father in a disrespectful manner. He had class, that’s why.

He, a man of exquisite manners and taste, who loved his parents and remained close to his mother all the days of his life (his father passed away much earlier) found himself embroiled in a brou-haha that would ruin him completely. Fate, doom, whatever you want to call it. Wilde was not an innocent bystander in any way… he had invited Lord Douglas into his life and, therefore, by proxy, invited the Marquess into his life who would ruin everything … but Wilde (unlike Douglas) was not a vindictive person. Wilde knew Douglas could ruin him. Perhaps that was part of the thrill. The beautiful dangerous boy and all that. In reading about Wilde, in reading about all of the literary spats he got into, all of the verbal sparring with current authors of the day – I never feel that he is vindictive. Or cruel. He is clever, and intelligent – and yes, often merciless – but never needlessly cruel.

So to see the cruelty that was heaped upon him at the end … it’s just awful.

It’s very rare that a biography can bring me to tears. Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Montgomery Clift did, but I can’t think of another one. I have wept often when reading the collected letters of so-and-so, or the diary of a famous figure – because it is immediate, visceral, first-person, personal history as it is happening. But a biography has a bit more distance to it. Even if the events are really sad, it usually doesn’t move me to tears.

I just finished Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde and cried pretty much non-stop for the last 30 pages. I had to take breaks, it was just too much.

The last 5 years of Oscar Wilde’s life are horrifying enough to make a person tremble and cross herself in fervent thanks that none of it happened to her, but it is Ellmann’s deep compassion (not to mention intelligent piecing-together of events, through letters and diary entries) that brought it so vividly before my eyes that I found tears streaming down my face. I know the story of his downfall, I know the series of truly unfortunate events, but not to the detailed extent I do now. The court transcripts are included in the book, the letters written from prison.

Ellmann is spectacular (as I already know – since I’ve read his biography of James Joyce, one of the towering literary achievements of the 20th century) – and not just spectacular in putting together all the pieces of this very public (and yet also very duplicitous) life … but spectacular on analyzing Wilde’s development as an artist.

But more than anything right now, I’m left really sad. Sad for the suffering of a fellow human being in 1897, 1898. I cannot even imagine his torment, and I have tears in my eyes now as I type this out.

So forgive my being silent: after Wilde, I only exist a little.