The Books: Oscar’s Books, by Thomas Wright

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, by Thomas Wright

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

— Oscar Wilde

This book has a story behind it. On September 25, 2008, I read a review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde, by Thomas Wright, called Oscar’s Books and wrote a feverishly excited piece about it and how excited I was to read it. The date is important although I rarely write personally on my blog. (It seems like I do, but it’s pretty much all trompe l’oeil. Important events occur, life-changing events, that are never mentioned here. It’s that way by design.) My father was very ill at that time (and had been for over a year – he got the diagnosis in early 2007). He would die on January 2, 2009. I never wrote about it here. (Although I did here. I felt safer there.) My sister got married on September 20, 2008 – 5 days before I wrote that Oscar piece, and my father – who had had his arm amputated only a couple of days before her wedding, got out of the hospital for one day to walk her down the aisle. It was a day of burning burning light, a day anyone who was there feels blessed to have witnessed. (Classic moment: Cousin Mike flew in from Los Angeles on a red eye to come to the wedding. He flew in to Logan, rented a car, drove down to Rhode Island, attended the wedding and reception, then drove back to Boston to fly back out the following early morning. He talked to my dad a bit before the wedding ceremony. My dad, who had just had his arm amputated days before and was still supposed to be in the hospital, said to my cousin Mike approvingly, “You always make such an effort.” Meaning: if he can, Mike will come to everything. Later, Mike said to me, “I’m lookin’ at the guy, in his suit, with his amputation, he’s been driven down from the hospital, and I’m thinking – I make an effort? I do, Uncle Bill???”) If he hadn’t chose to get his arm amputated, he would have died on September 12, 13. But the amputation still wouldn’t save his life, ultimately – he knew that going into it. The man was heroic. He walked my sister down the aisle. I am convinced that is why he chose to have the amputation. I have never written about any of this.

One of my father’s deepest bonds with his family was our shared love of books.

My dad and me

He was a scholar, book collector, and encyclopedic in his knowledge of literature – mainly Irish literature, his specialty – but literature, in general. When I read the review of Thomas Wright’s book, Oscar’s Books, I was in a FEVER to get my hands on it, and FAST, because it sounded like just the book that I could talk about with my father. Oscar Wilde? Irish? Genius writer? Someone my father knew and loved intimately? Plus a book devoted entirely to Oscar Wilde’s library, and his marginalia, and the books he read? I needed to have it. NOW. But it was being published in England first (it had a change of title once it was published in the States much later), and although I put it on pre-order, I still had a doomed sense that I wouldn’t get it in time. That entire fall was a waiting game. We sat at my parents’ house and kept vigil.

If you go to that original post I wrote and scroll down the comments you will see that the author himself, Thomas Wright, showed up on October 12, 2008, and left a beautiful comment, offering to send me a copy. I emailed him immediately, so excited, and said, Yes, please (not telling him why I needed it so urgently). I think I gave my parents’ address since I was basically living at home by that point. Again, I didn’t write about any of this on the site. But I figured I would honor it now. I did not hear back from Thomas Wright. The autumn passed. I forgot about the book. I forgot about everything except what was going on in my family. My father began to move off to where he needed to go. I was writing my first book at that time, and was obsessed with finishing it before my dad passed. I at least wanted him to know it was finished. By the time I finished the manuscript, he could no longer read, but he was able to hold the manuscript in his hand. This is too painful for me to write about.

Suddenly, in mid-December, 2008, a package arrived at my parents’ house for me. I didn’t recognize the return address or anything about it, but I opened it, and there was a brand-new copy of Oscar’s Books, with a note from the author inside. He hadn’t emailed me to say the book was on the way. But he had followed through. It was so incredible to me that in this dismaying world of broken promises and cruelty, a total stranger could be so kind and full of integrity. (I was being harassed by a couple of crackpot hate mailers at that time because my site was intermittently updated and purposefully opaque – a couple of persistent crazy people started sending me emails about how ugly I was, how dramatic, no wonder I was single, etc. – they had no idea what was happening with me at that time, but they despised that there was a mystery about what was going on in my real life, something I alluded to but did not elaborate upon on the site, and they let me know repeatedly what they felt about me. I never responded or anything like that, but during that fall and following winter, after my dad passed, when I was in the first flush of grieving, I was getting hate mail on a regular basis. There is evil on this planet, I call it by its true name.) I hadn’t given Thomas Wright or his book one moment of thought since October when I emailed him saying I’d love a copy. I just had too much else going on. But quietly, on the other end of that communication, Thomas Wright kept his word. Had the publisher send me the book. Took the time to sign it. I was deeply moved. On so many levels. When I opened the book, I felt like my whole head was on fire.

The book wasn’t for me. It was for my dad. It had arrived too late for him to look at it, read it, or anything. But I sat with him and told him the whole story, about the review, and Oscar’s books, and Thomas Wright, and I showed him the marbled paper that made up the end pages. Maybe it’s wrong to say it came too late. If it had arrived on January 3, 2009, I would have had a very different response to its arrival. I wouldn’t have cared about it at all. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it, it would have been a symbol of things happening “too late”. But in mid-December, it meant EVERYTHING. Dad was still here when it showed up on the doorstep.

I never told Thomas Wright any of this, although I did consider sending him an email filling him in. But then that seemed a bit insane, so I didn’t.

Who knows, maybe he will come across this post some day and know how much his integrity meant to me at that fragile time. To quote my favorite line in all of Shakespeare, and I can say that with certainty:

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

I finally read the book during my lonely beautiful sojourn out on Block Island in January of 2010. I had asked my mother what I should do with the book. Did she want it? It was really Dad’s. And she said no, no, it was mine, mine and Dad’s, I should keep it.

I read it, and it’s a beautiful little volume, but that’s really all I want to say about it.

That’s enough writing for today.

Excerpt from Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, by Thomas Wright

It was during Michaelmas term of 1874 that Wilde first opened Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a collection of art essays penned by the Oxford Classics don Walter Pater in 1873. Wilde’s beautiful first edition of the book had an unusual green cloth binding and was printed in generously spaced type on ‘mock-ribbed’ paper, which gives a pleasant tingling sensation as you move your fingers over it.

The volume contains essays on philosophers, poets and artists of the Renaissance such as Leonardo, Botticelli and Michelangelo. Pater’s relationship to the past is personal and passionate. Through years spent adoring and, as it were, living with, the artworks and writings of the period, he absorbed its spirit. This enabled him to divine, by instinct, much about the Renaissance that was inaccessible to more scrupulous scholars.

Pater enters into a work of art imaginatively, elucidating, in a series of baroque prose poems, the impression it makes on him, and defining its special character. He calls this the ‘true truth’ about an artwork, next to which the facts concerning its production and history are insignificant. After gazing long and lovingly at the mysterious face of the Mona Lisa, set against the dreamy green landscape of water and stone, he writes, as if in a trance, ‘The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which “the ends of the world are come”, and the eyelids are a little weary . . . She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave . . . and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes . . . ‘

Wilde hailed this passage as the quintessential piece of ‘creative criticism’. Its unashamed subjectivity and its ornate, impressionistic style were, to him, causes for celebration. Pater had deepened the mystery of the painting by enriching it with a new interpretation, and his criticism could itself stand as an independent work of art. ‘Who . . . cares,’ he wrote, ‘whether Mr Pater has put into the portrait of the Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of?’

When Pater contemplates a work of art from a more objective viewpoint he focuses, almost exclusively, on its stylistic attributes, rather than on its ‘meaning’ or ‘message’. A work’s style should, he argues, so perfectly embody the artist’s ‘ideas’ and ‘intentions’ as to be indistinguishable from them. All arts thus aspire to the condition of music, because in music form and content are inseparable.

Pater suggests that art does not appeal primarily to the intellect, but rather to that instinct for form, beauty and harmony which might be called the aesthetic sense. Those endowed with this sense engage with art in an imaginative, emotional, and even physical fashion. In the conclusion to the Renaissance Pater describes the ‘aesthetic’ experience as overwhelming. Art affords us the opportunity of ecstasy, he says, coming to us without an intellectual programme or a moral purpose and ‘proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to [our] moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’. It offers the possibility of heightened pleasure, placing us ‘at the focus where the greatest number of [life’s] vital forces unite in their purest energy’. The aim of existence is the enjoyment and multiplication of such intense experiences. ‘To burn always,’ as Pater put it, ‘with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy is success in life.’

Pater’s conclusion signalled his allegiance to the Aesthetic movement, a loose affiliation of artists, intellectuals and critics of various cultures, linked by their adherence to several key doctrines regarding art. They believed that the style of an artwork is more important than its content, and that formal beauty is paramount. They also held that the creation of beauty is the common aim of all the arts, and that art is entirely separate from the ‘real’ world.

The origins of Aestheticism lay in the writings of Kant, who defined art as ‘purposiveness without purpose’, and as something entirely separate from the spheres of morality and action. His ideas were refined and elaborated in the mid-nineteenth century by French authors such as Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier. In the celebrated preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier declared that all art is quite useless.

Swinburne introduced English readers to these French theories. Art’s business, he declared, ‘is not to do good on [moral] grounds, but to do good on her own . . . Art for Art’s sake first of all.’ ‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau [nothing is true except the beautiful],’ he argued. ‘La beaute est parfaite [Beauty is perfect].’ Swinburne, along with Rossetti, attempted to realise the aesthetic ideal in poetry that aimed at formal perfection and offered the reader little in the way of a message or a moral.

Wilde had been introduced to Kant’s aesthetics at Trinity by Mahaffy, whose own position on literature and art seems to have been partly derived from the German philosopher: ‘he took,’ Wilde commented with approval, ‘the deliberately artistic standpoint towards everything.’

Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin was probably among the French novels Wilde devoured in his youth, and he knew the writings of Rossetti and Swinburne practically by heart. He was famous at Trinity for being their ardent disciple, and for echoing their Aesthetic views. His association with the movement was also indicated by his devotion to the works of Symonds, another ‘aesthete’, as well as by his extravagant aesthetic attire, which included a pair of ‘Umbrian’ trousers that excited much laughter in the quads. Wilde was fashioning the aesthete’s persona he would perfect at Oxford, where he dressed flamboyantly, ostentatiously littered his room with beautiful objects, and coined the celebrated phrase: ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’

Wilde had therefore been thoroughly prepared for the Renaissance by his earlier reading. Before he came across Pater, as he put it later, he had already gone ‘more than half-way’ to meeting him. Yet if the don offered him little that was original in theoretical terms, his book was probably the most intellectually stimulating and stylistically seductive expression of the Aesthetic creed that Wilde had ever read.