The Books: Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann

Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the Greek; it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and dark house.

— Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”, written in prison, 1897

It was just Oscar Wilde’s birthday this past week so much of what I have to say about the extraordinary man is in that post, although I have devoted much space to him on my site. I came to him first the way I think it is best to come to him: as an actor, who worked on his plays in college. Rather than an English student, encountering him for the first time through Dorian Gray, a rather Gothic hothouse book, I discovered him through seeing his plays, acting in his plays, and laughing so hard I cried at both seeing and reading, etc. Everything else about Oscar Wilde is just gravy, in my opinion. Although, once you start digging into what happened to him, and the world from which he sprung, and his rebellion and final punishment – it is a deep deep pool. There is a stark tragedy in the life of Oscar Wilde, and yet his work itself is the opposite of tragic. He is one of the only playwrights that make me laugh out loud just reading his words on the page (Shakespeare is the other one). To me, his major life’s work was not his own life (although he did try to create an artistic life, an aesthetic life), or his prose works, his essays, his poetry (all formidable stuff) – and neither do I see his major life’s work as his sacrifice at the end, a martyr to future gay people, an example of a dignified man who paid the ultimate price. A hero, essentially. Which I believe he is. All of these things are extremely important, and you cannot understand Oscar Wilde without understanding all of these elements.

But to me, it’s about the plays. That’s the legacy.

Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce is a masterpiece of 20th century biography, and a Joycean biographer has not come along since his book was first published to challenge it. It has the longest shadow imaginable. Ellmann’s biography on Wilde has a similar dominance, although not quite so permanent. Times change, the filters change, especially as the attitudes towards homosexuality change. Ellmann is amazingly even-handed and has real affection for Wilde, and is deeply engrossed in Irish history, of course, which suits the book. Although other more recent biographies have come out on Wilde, Ellmann’s is still the one to read. Because of the tragedy of the end of Wilde’s life, and his persecution for being gay, that can color how we look at the whole of his life. This, to me, seems completely unfair. Examining his Oxford years, for example, or his American lecture tours … there is so much in this life besides his fall from grace (and his homosexuality). Ellmann covers it all in his typically clear and graceful prose. Wilde’s life intersected with many. He was famous in his own day. He knew everyone. Sparred with everyone. Ellmann manages to set up all of these people in their proper context, so that we actually can understand what these sparrings were all about, what philosophies were being fought over, what landscape was being charged. Clashes of the titans. Oscar Wilde truly wrestled with his literary idols, those who came before him, and he never stopped doing so. He wasn’t just a voracious reader – he was looking for a way to live. He was the kind of person who needed to consciously CREATE a fashion of living. This was probably because he was a homosexual, and so he had to live underground for the most part, and structure an above-ground life that wasn’t a complete lie (which he did manage to do: he was married, he loved his wife who was a superb person in her own right, he adored his children, etc.). Not to mention being an Irishman circulating in a purely English world (and he had two Irish patriots for parents). An outsider on both counts. And so Oscar Wilde, inspired by Swinburne and Pater and others, actually wrestled with them in his college papers and essays thereafter. He didn’t just swallow everything whole. He examined things, he threw out what seemed foolish, kept what seemed golden. He was also an evangelist. He needed to share with others what he found. And thankfully he did so in such a witty way, that often his radical views were hidden. Or, at least, people thought: “Well, that’s just a funny quip. He can’t actually be serious, can he?”

He was.

I finished this book at breakneck speed in 2008 because I wanted to be able to talk to my father about it. I have a great affection for Ellmann’s accomplishment.

Here is an excerpt having to do with his triumphant play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. It was the first of the plays he had written that got produced. The Picture of Dorian Gray had just been published and was a complete scandal. Oscar Wilde’s wife admitted that most of her friends stopped speaking to her after the publication of Dorian Gray. It is certainly an amazingly explicit book with blatant homosexual themes, and it is not difficult to imagine why it was seen as so dangerous and decadent. Wilde was already a celebrity when Dorian Gray was published. His reputation hung in the balance. In many ways, the shadow of Dorian Gray did hang over the rest of his life, until the shadows emerged in their full-form and engulfed him completely. But then came Lady Windermere’s Fan and Wilde became the toast of the town again.

Excerpt from Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann

In February 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan went into rehearsal. As with all his plays, Wilde attended every day and was full of suggestions and revisions as he observed the effect of his lines. He did not hesitate to tell Alexander his views, and they often disagreed. Two of his surviving letters to Alexander from the rehearsal period refer to discourtesy and friction. Wilde dictated the finest details of position and inflection. He wanted no word of the dialogue to be lost. At first he rejected Alexander’s suggestion that the audience be allowed to know at the end of Act II that Mrs Erlynne and Lady Windermere are mother and daughter. (After the first night he gave in on this point and rewrote the speeches.) The stress of rehearsal, and of quarreling with Alexander, made Wilde so ill that he said he would have to go away for a rest after the opening night. In fact, his malaise dissipated in euphoria.

The theatre was fully booked for the first performance, on 20 February 1892. Wilde’s old flames Florence Balcombe, now Stoker, and Lillie Langry were there, and so was his wife. He got tickets for friends, though not nearly so many as he wished. One went to Pierre Louys, who came over from France, and one to Edward Shelley, a clerk at the Bodley Head whom Wilde was courting and would take to bed that night at the Albemarle Hotel. He sent one to the young artist Graham Robertson and asked him to participate in a little subplot. Robertson was to buy a green carnation at Goodyear’s in the Royal Arcade – ‘They grow them there,’ said Wilde – and to wear it at the performance. Other friends, such as Robert Ross, were to be similarly adorned, and so was Ben Webster, who played Cecil Grahame (a surname borrowed back from ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’). ‘And what does it mean?’ asked Robertson. Wilde replied, ‘Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.’ The suggestion of a mysterious confraternity enigmatically binding one of the players with some members of the audience, gave Wilde the delight he had found in Masonic signs. The green carnation was to take on some of the suggestiveness of lilies and sunflowers. With a hint of decadence, the painted flower blended art and nature.

But the audience was not composed only of accomplices. The New York Times acknowledged that it was ‘the most brilliant audience that had gathered for years.’ Frank Harris was there and brought with him a writer for the Times, Arthur Walter, in the hope that this paper would praise the play. Unfortunately Walter disliked it. So did Henry James, to whom it was ‘infantine … both in subject and form.’ Harris came down to the foyer at the interval and discovered that most of the critics were against it.¹ A big man named Joseph Knight, whose life of Rossetti Wilde had disparaged in the Pall Mall Gazette, was getting his own back. ‘The humour is mechanical, unreal,’ he said to Harris, who said nothing. ‘What do you think of it?’ ‘That is for your critics to answer,’ said Harris. ‘I might say in Oscar’s way, “Little promise and less performance,”‘ said Knight, laughing uproariously. ‘That’s the exact opposite of Oscar’s way,’ said Harris; ‘it is the listeners who laugh at his humour.’ ‘Come now, really,’ said Knight, ‘you cannot think much of the play?’ Harris at last allowed himself to be drawn: ‘I have not seen the whole play. I was not at any of the rehearsals. But so far it is surely the best comedy in English, the most brilliant, is it not?’ And, ignoring hoots of derision, he added, ‘I can only compare it to the best of Congreve, and I think it’s better.’ Bernard Shaw also admired it, and on sending Wilde his own first play, Widowers’ Houses, which was produced later the same year, hoped he would find it ‘tolerable amusing, considering that it is a farcical comedy. Unfortunately,’ he added with some deference, ‘I have no power of producing beauty; my genius is the genius of intellect.’

Most of the audience agreed with Harris and Shaw. By the second interval, Wilde was already feeling jubilant. He was standing drinks for his friends in the bar when he caught sight of Le Gallienne and his ‘poem’ (otherwise woman friend), to whom he had sent tickets with the words ‘Come, and bring your poem to sit beside you.’ ‘My dear Richard, where have you been?’ he asked. ‘It seems as if we hadn’t met for years. Now tell me what you have been doing? Ah I remember … Yes … You have pained me deeply, Richard.’ ‘I pained you!~ How?’ ‘You have brought out a new book since I saw you last.’ ‘Well, what of it?’ ‘You have treated me very badly in your book, Richard.’ ‘I treated you badly? You must be confusing my book with somebody else’s. My last book was The Religion of a Literary Man. You must be dreaming, man. Why, I never so much as mentioned you in it.’ ‘Ah, Richard! that was just it!’ In soberer mood he went on to ask what else Le Gallienne had been writing. ‘On loving one’s enemies,’ said Le Gallienne. ‘That’s a great theme,’ said Wilde. ‘I should like to write on that, too. For do you know, all my life I have been looking for twelve men who didn’t believe in me … and so far I have only found eleven.’

After the final curtain the applause was long and hearty, and Wilde came forward from the wings in response to cries of ‘Author!’ He knew how he wished to look, and what he wanted to say. In his mauve-gloved hand was a cigarette (‘out of nervousness,’ according to Mrs Jopling), and in his buttonhole a green carnation. The ‘delightful and immortal speech’ (as he himself described it in a letter to the St James’s Gazette) was accentuated, according to Alexander, in this way: ‘Ladies and gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.’²

The conservative critics, his old friend Clement Scott for one, found the cigarette even more outrageous than the egotism. Henry James wrote to Henrietta Reubell, his friend and Wilde’s, that ‘the unspeakable one had responded to curtain calls by appearing with a metallic blue carnation in his buttonhole and a cigarette in his fingers.’ (The color was green-blue, verdigris.) Wilde’s speech he considered inadequate. ‘Ce monsieu gives at last on one’s nerves,’ James confided. Robert Ross, in an interview with Wilde in the St James’s Gazette of 18 January 1895, asked whether Wilde recognized that people found fault with his curtain speeches. Wilde replied, ‘Yes, the old-fashioned idea was that the dramatist should appear and merely thank his kind friends for their patronage and presence. I am glad to say I have altered all that. The artist cannot be degraded into the servant of the public. While I have always recognised the cultural appreciation that actors and audience have shown for my work, I have equally recognised that humility is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent. Assertion is at once the duty and privilege of the artist.’

The crowds came. The Prince of Wales approved. And Alexander noticed that the pit and galleries were as full as the stalls and boxes. ‘My dear Alexander,’ said Wilde, ‘the answer is easy. Servants listen to conversations in drawing rooms and dining rooms. They hear people discussing my play, their curiosity is aroused, and so they fill your theatre. I can see they are servants by their perfect manners.’ Lady Wilde wrote to her son on 24 February, ‘You have had a brilliant success! and I am so happy.’ The play ran from February until 29 July, toured the provinces, and was back on the boards on 31 October. It has held the stage since, just as Dorian Gray has kept its public, because it is better than it seems to be. A kind of poetical glamour pervades it, as Shaw noticed. The audience cannot bear to be inattentive. The characters and plot may be implausible, but the tension of conflicting impulses is expertly sustained, the wit pungent, and the central transvaluation of values, by which the bad woman appears in a good light, the good woman in a bad one, and society in the worst light of all, is cunning.

After the performances, Wilde sometimes went to the Crown, a public house off Charing Cross Road, where Symons, Dowson, Beardsley, Beerbohm, Johnson, and their friends used to congregate, meeting in a little room away from the bar, drinking hot port until half past twelve and till later outside. There was much talk about his play. On 26 May, Wilde spoke at a meeting of the Royal General Theatrical Fund, with his friend George Alexander in the chair. An alderman named Routledge had praised Wilde for calling a spade a spade and for lashing vice in Lady Windermere’s Fan. Wilde disavowed both intentions. ‘I would like to protest against the statement that I have ever called a spade a spade. The man who did so should be condemned to use one. I have also been accused of lashing vice, but I can assure you that nothing was further from my intentions. Those who have seen Lady Windermere’s Fan will see that if there is one particular doctrine contained in it, it is that of sheer individualism. It is not for anyone to censure what anyone else does, and everyone should go his own way, to whatever place he chooses, in exactly the way that he chooses. It is said that literature should be considered an adjunct to the drama, but I am entirely at variance with every intelligent man to whom I have spoken on the subject. Whatever form of literature is created, the stage will be ready to embody it, and to give it a wonderful visible colour and presentation of life. But if we are to have a real drama in England, I feel quite sure it will only be on condition that we wean ourselves from the trammelling conventions which have always been a peril to the theatre. I do not think it makes the smallest difference what a play is if an actor has genius and power. Nor do I consider the British public to be of the slightest importance.’

¹Wilde commented that the criticism displayed ‘in its crudest form the extraordinary Boeotianism of a country that has produced some Athenians, and in which other Athenians have come to dwell.’

² Jean-Joseph Renaud said that Wilde began by saying, after taking a pull on his cigarette, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s perhaps not very proper to smoke in front of you, but … it’s not very proper to disturb me when I am smoking.’
The Boston Evening Transcript for 10 March 1892 carried an article by Marie de Mensiaux in which she reported Wilde’s speech in what appears to be a more accurate, if less spectacular, version than Alexander’s. According to her, Wilde said:

I believe it is the privilege of an author to allow his works to be reproduced by others while he himself remains silent. But as you seem to wish to hear me speak, I accept the honor you are kind enough to confer upon me. The more especially am I pleased to do this as your goodness gives me the opportunity of thanking all who have been instrumental in securing the success that has crowned this evening’s entertainment. And to express my gratification at your so well appreciating the merits of the play. My acknowledgements are due in the first instance to Mr. Alexander, who has placed my play upon the stage with the admirable completeness that has characterized all the productions at the St. James’s Theatre during the time it has been under his management. If I praised all I wish to praise in the interpretation of the piece, I would have to read to you the entire cast as it appears upon the programme. But I have to thank the company, not only for repeating the words I have set down for them to speak, but also for entering, as it were, into the atmosphere of the world I have endeavored to reproduce before you. I have to thank them, one and all, for the infinite care they have taken to fill in every detail, until my sketch has become a finished picture. I think that you have enjoyed the performance as much as I have, and I am pleased to believe that you like the piece almost as much as I do myself.