The statement was probably true of everything except Earnest. Even at Oxford, where he showed extraordinary promise as a Classics student, it was clear that Wilde saw his intellectual gifts as a passport to celebrity; that he happened to be brilliant enough to earn fame in any number of honorable ways was merely a means to an end. “God knows,” the young Magdalen graduate replied, when asked what he wanted to do after university. “I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, notorious.”
He got everything he hoped for. Like many Victorian youths who had a literary bent and a restless nature, Wilde set out to be a poet. His early efforts were not without some success: he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize at Oxford with a poem called “Ravenna.” Yet for all their surface dazzle and facility, and despite a patent eagerness to shock with “decadent” material—in “Charmides,” a youth makes love to a statue of Athena, who takes predictably humorless revenge—Wilde’s verse was always studied, and now seems dated, lacking the epigrammatic crispness and fluency of his prose, which by contrast seems surprisingly modern. (Punch dismissed his first volume of poems as “Swinburne and water.”) Pater had sensed early on that Wilde’s real voice was the sound of speech, not song: “Why do you always write poetry?” he chided Wilde. “Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.” One reason was that it was as a poet that the young Wilde thought he could garner the most attention; his early career strongly suggests that he loved posing as a littérateur as much as he loved writing itself. “Pour écrire il me faut du satin jaune,” he announced. He insisted on writing the draft of his early play The Duchess of Padua on fabulously expensive stationery.
It was in prose that Wilde found his real voice, which was clearly that of a critic. The provocative titles of some of the essays—“The Truth of Masks,” “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist”—suggest, in ovo, the scope and character of his future artistic and philosophical project, which Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann succinctly characterized as “conducting, in the most civilized way, an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration of its ethics.” The most ambitious prose vehicle for that project was The Picture of Dorian Gray, which, for all its haphazard construction, still suggests—with its almost prurient and (whatever his post facto demurs) never quite unadmiring portrait of beauty wholly divorced from morals—why Gide could have thought of Wilde as “the most dangerous product of modern civilization.” That judgment may seem excessive to our modern ears, but in the wake of Dorian—and of Wilde’s French-language drama Salomé, written at the same time and characterized by the same self-conscious desire to shock by means of decadent sexuality—it would have seemed quite justifiable. “Since Oscar wrote Dorian Gray,” Constance Wilde sighed in 1890, when her husband’s novel was being denounced as decadent and immoral, “no one will speak to us.”
Five years later, people weren’t only speaking to Wilde, they were begging for him. By then, it was evident that even Dorian Gray, with its famous inversions of substance and reflection, of life and art, hadn’t been the ideal vehicle for his gifts; Wilde himself knew perfectly well he wasn’t really a novelist. “I am afraid it is rather like my own life—all conversation and no action,” he said of Dorian Gray. But what is a weakness in a novel can be a strength in a play. Helen Modjeska had been prescient: Wilde was, at bottom, a great Irish talker, and his true métier, as the course of his career would soon demonstrate, was dialogue—real dialogue, rather than the rococo verses he’d put in the mouths of his early characters. It’s the voice of Wilde the brilliant talker—amusing, incisive, economical, wicked, feeling, fresh, contemporary, right—that you hear in the plays. (And in the letters, too, which have the same quality of intellectual vivaciousness and delightfulness of expression that his best dialogue has.) It wasn’t until he allowed that real-life voice to be heard in his work that Wilde achieved true distinction in art as well as life, however briefly. “Talk itself is a sort of spiritualised action,” he declared in May 1887, at a time when he’d begun writing down narratives and dialogues as a kind of training for his mature dramatic work, of which Earnest—with its razor-like epigrams and perfect inversions of the natural and the artificial, of life and art, of babies and books—was the most exquisite, and devastating, expression.
Typically, the creative breakthrough marked by Wilde’s great comedy was deeply entwined with another, personal watershed: his authentic artistic self emerged into view at the same time that his authentic emotional self was being revealed. After being initiated into homosexual sex by the precocious Robbie Ross in 1886—Ross was seventeen, Wilde thirty-one—Wilde became increasingly involved in enacting the Greek love to which he’d always enjoyed alluding, even when he didn’t actually practice it. (He’d scandalized his fellow Oxford undergraduates by observing, of a school athlete, that “his left leg is a Greek poem”; but back then he really was all talk.) Wilde’s marriage had begun to unravel after his wife’s second pregnancy, which left him physically repelled: “I…forced myself to touch and kiss her…I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse my lips in the open air.” By the late Eighties and early Nineties, he was spending his free time first with Ross, and then, after their fateful 1891 meeting, with the pale-skinned, fair-haired Lord Alfred Douglas—“Bosie.” And, soon after, with the telegraph boys and rent boys and other lower-class youths of the homosexual demimonde, whose company gave Wilde—the gay among straights, the Irishman among Englishmen—the delicious, gratifying thrill of danger: “like feasting with panthers.”
Wilde’s consummation of his Hellenic urges, after such a long courtship, put an end to all kinds of unresolved tensions. The art/life dialectic that Wilde made the basis of so many of his on-and offstage pronouncements was just one of many that structured his life and work; temperamentally, he preferred to hesitate between such poles rather than commit to either one. Just as he had hovered endlessly on the verge of conversion to Catholicism as an undergraduate, just as he could never quite choose between Ruskin’s moralistic aesthetics and Pater’s pagan “gem-like flame,” he had vacillated, from his earliest youth, between the classical and the medieval, the Greek and the Gothic. Between, that is to say, the form, the style, the profane “sanity” of his beloved Greeks, on the one hand, and religious feeling combined with Romantic exaltation, on the other. One of the things that “Ravenna” is about, indeed, is the keenly felt tension between the Hellenic and the Gothic. Its narrator wobbles between ecstatic apostrophes of Greece (“O Salamis! O lone Plataean plain!”) and invocations of Gaston de Foix and “hugelimbed Theodoric, the Gothic king.” “To be Greek one should have no clothes: to be mediaeval one should have no body: to be modern one should have no soul,” he wrote. But it was to the Greeks that he eventually returned.
It is tempting to read Wilde’s “anatomy of his society”—his “radical reconsideration of its ethics” by means of a playful reordering, even deconstruction, of key terms—as the product of his Greek rather than his Gothic side: Hellenism was the rubric under which his intellectual and emotional passions could, for once, coexist in peace. In an essay he wrote at twenty-five for the Oxford Chancellor’s Prize, he entwines style, illicit sexuality, and the classical exaltation of form above all things:
The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to meaning and melody to reality, which gave to the later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history.
Wilde identified the Greek aesthetic as “essentially modern,” and inasmuch as he, in his Greek mode, became the first popular modern writer to attempt to divorce aesthetics from morality, he was accurate. The Wilde we love, the Wilde of the epigrammatic wit, the Wilde who so devastatingly skewers puffed-up convention by turning his fictive worlds inside out, is the pagan, the Greek Wilde. The fo
rms with which we identify him today—epigram, satire, the conventionalized situational comedy—are classical forms. The Romantic Wilde, the deeply nineteenth-century Wilde, the Wilde of the cloying sonnets and the highly perfumed blank verse of early plays like Véra, or The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua, we tend to ignore. It was—significantly—only after his disgrace, in the bitter, belated paroxysm that was eventually published as De Profundis, that Wilde (who’d once remarked that the chief argument against Christianity was the style of Saint Paul) championed spirituality in its traditional “medieval” forms, emphatically rejecting his erstwhile allegiance to classical style, to
the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael’s frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Pope’s poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it.
Indeed, even in the Wilde that we do treasure, particularly the three English-language plays that precede Earnest—Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1895)—it’s clear that the author belonged as much to the dying century as he did to the one that lay ahead. The spirit of these works, which seek to subvert stuffy conventions, may look forward to the twentieth century, but the plays themselves are, essentially, clanking nineteenth-century melodramas, with their illegitimate births suddenly revealed, their plots that hinge on stolen jewels and letters, their eleventh-hour revelations. Even Wilde’s contemporaries were able to see this. After attending a 1907 revival of A Woman of No Importance, Lytton Strachey described the play to Duncan Grant as “a complete mass of epigrams, with occasional whiffs of grotesque melodrama and driveling sentiment…. Epigrams engulf it like the sea.” In almost every dramatic work but Earnest, we feel the two Wildes—the sentimental, “Gothic” Wilde, and the crisp, classical Wilde—at war. It was only in Earnest, with its architectural symmetries, its self-consciously toy-like, artificial characters, its bejeweled style, that he achieved the ideal “Greek” harmony in which form and content were entirely at one.
Still, if Earnest is a perfect vehicle for the expression of Wilde’s intellectual and aesthetic concerns, it can also be read as an allegory for the writer’s life—one that was torn between a hunger for acceptance and a flair for subversion. (“Le bourgeois malgré lui” was Whistler’s canny description of his onetime friend.) Like the drama of his life, much of the drama that Wilde wrote was concerned with the tension between the public masks we wear and the messy private impulses that they often hide; with sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute recognitions; with true natures—and true identities—ruefully revealed at the last minute. This is particularly true of the two works whose debuts early in 1895 marked the apogee of his professional life and the onset of his personal disintegration: An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. The former premièred to delirious reviews in January 1895; the latter, on Valentine’s Day of the same year. Four days later, the marquess of Queensberry, Bosie’s father, left his famously misspelled calling card, which referred to Wilde as a “somdomite”; two months later, Wilde had been condemned for “gross indecencies.”
Unsurprisingly, both plays use the same structural devices (switched identities, long-buried secrets) and both treat identical themes (the catastrophic tensions between public and private selves), and yet they are radically different in tone, temperament, and style. An Ideal Husband seems, indeed, to belong to the nineteenth century, and looks backward to what we may call the “Gothic” Wilde. Its interest lies, if anywhere, in its imperfections: the famous epigrams (“To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance”) sparkle brightly, but are at odds with the melodramatic structure and patent sentimentality—and with overwrought passages in which the playwright seems to be using his characters as mouthpieces for personal concerns. When the play’s tortured main character, a man revealed to have a terrible secret in his past, addresses a series of lengthy, impassioned, and nakedly illogical pleas for sympathy to his wife—a woman whom he goes on to chastise for having insufficient sympathy for his flaws—it is impossible not to think of Wilde himself.
Earnest, on the other hand, has the high aesthetic elegance and irrefutable mechanical efficiency of a theorem: in this case, a theorem about art and society. Here, significantly, all emotion, all feeling—all real “life”—have been purposefully pared away. With its nihilistic inversions of surface and content, attitude and meaning, triviality and seriousness, the play flashes and gleams dangerously like the scalpel it was meant to be, the instrument with which Wilde dissected Victorian ethics, thereby making twentieth-century aesthetics—an aesthetics divorced from false sentiment—possible.
The story of the paradoxical process by which Wilde evolved from a poseur who put life before art into a real artist, from the composer of florid poems on ostentatiously lofty themes into the author of comedies whose flippancy concealed a serious intellectual and critical purpose, is a fascinating one. So it is a great irony that Wilde’s life story has come to overshadow his work in a way that has blunted our understanding of just what it is that made him an interesting artist. Today we think of Wilde as an icon of martyrdom in the cause of sexual freedom; and yet our seeming familiarity with him—our sometimes too-hasty sense that we know what he’s about, which happens to be something we’re interested in today—has dulled our appreciation of his creations. This is nowhere more apparent than in the recent film version of The Importance of Being Earnest. It was directed by the Englishman Oliver Parker, who also directed the 1999 film version of An Ideal Husband; in both films, a knowing familiarity with Wilde the icon has all too frequently transformed his artistic creations into the opposites of what they were intended to be.
To get The Importance of Being Earnest right—to convey the danger, as well as the delight, inherent in those artfully constructed double lives; danger and delight that Wilde himself knew so well, and which ultimately destroyed him—you need to maintain its artificiality, the self-conscious conventionality of form that the playwright uses to highlight his ideas about the artificiality of social and moral conventions. In Anthony Asquith’s flawless 1952 film version of the play, the director emphasizes the theatrical nature of his material: the movie opens with an image of people being seated at the theater, followed by the appearance of a title card reading, “Act 1. Scene 1. Ernest Worthing’s Room in the Albany.” The performances themselves—particularly those of the incomparable Joan Greenwood as Gwendolen and Dorothy Tutin as Cecily—are shaped to be as robotic as possible. The young women tinkle their slyly nonsensical lines (“Mamma, whose views on education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely short-sighted”) like the windup toys they are.
In his new film version of Earnest, by contrast, Oliver Parker does what many filmmakers do when translating plays onto celluloid, which is to attempt to “open out” the work. This allows him to present many splendid images: of the grotesquely ornate residence in which Lord and Lady Bracknell live; of Jack’s impressive country seat, where Algy arrives by means of a hot-air balloon; and of Lady Bracknell’s awesome hats, which appear to have decimated more than one aviary. But film’s inherent tendency to naturalize what it shows us works, if anything, against the grain of the play—as does the inevitable tendency of film to translate into images motifs and ideas that are conveyed onstage by means of words. The latter is particularly unfortunate when treating the work of a great talker; the visual temptations of film make nonsense of some of Wilde’s sharpest and best-known lines. “I never travel without my diary,” Gwendolen famously says with glacial sweetness on meeting Cecily at Jack’s country house. “One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” Parker’s film makes you wonder just when she gets to read that famous document, since in this version she prefers to motor down from London in a clanking automobile which she can barely keep on the road. This makes for visual interest, but d
estroys the comic point.
It may be that the purpose of showing Gwendolen’s perilous drive is to demonstrate her independence of mind. (Parker writes in a scene in which we see her having the name “Ernest” tattooed on her derrière—a vulgar and otiose intrusion.) But, of course, Wilde’s Gwendolen has no “mind,” or at least not in the sense Parker thinks she does. The most salient aspect of Gwendolen’s character is, if anything, her artificiality of mind: it is her and Cecily’s inane, lifelong yearning to marry men named “Ernest” that drives the perverse action of the play, forcing both Jack and Algy to maintain their elaborate double lives as Ernests. Indeed, Parker’s eagerness to give his characters inner lives often means that his direction is at odds with the directions Wilde provides. Like all of Earnest’s females, young Cecily is as tough as nails beneath an elaborate, doll-like politesse; this is part of Wilde’s satire of contemporary expectations that high-born girls be hothouse flowers. Jack understands his creator’s important point, and goes so far as to articulate it—one of the rare moments in the play when a character says, and means, something that happens to be true: “Cecily is not a silly, romantic girl, I am glad to say. She has got a capital appetite, goes on long walks, and pays no attention at all to her lessons.” Parker, however, has ideas of his own. His Cecily is the opposite of Wilde’s—a dreamy young thing who, during long, beautifully photographed fantasy sequences, imagines herself as a misty Burne-Jones heroine, decked out in medieval gowns while tied to a tree awaiting rescue by hunky knights. Wilde’s point is that contemporary artistic fantasies of young maidenhood run counter to some tough natural truths; Parker’s joke is that—well, there is no joke.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 26
