Oscar Wilde and Posterity

Merlin Holland (ed.), Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: the Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, London and New York, 2003; xliii + 340 pp., £18.99. ISBN 0-00-715418-6.

Merlin Holland (ed.), Oscar Wilde: a Life in Letters, Fourth Estate, London and New York, 2003; xv + 384 pp., £20.00. ISBN 0-00-716103-4.

Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, Century, London, 2003; xiv + 535 pp., £20.00. ISBN 0-7126-6986-8.

John Sloan, Oscar Wilde, Oxford World's Classics 'Authors in Context', Oxford University Press, 2003; xii + 225 pp., £6.99. ISBN 0-19-284064-9.

Oscar Wilde turns one hundred and fifty on 16 October 2004. On that occasion he will be spared the fate he outlined in a typically generous and inspiriting letter of 1888 to W. E. Henley, whose new book had just been given a rather bumpy ride by the critics:

I pity that book on which critics are agreed. It must be a very obvious and shallow production. Congratulate yourself on the diversity of contemporary tongues. The worst of posterity is that it has but one voice.¹

And it is scarcely likely that Wilde at 150 could be the object of critical agreement. Across the years, as the diversity of tongues in Wilde's day gave way to a Babel-ish discord of critical approaches in the late twentieth century, the 'worst of posterity' has been a misfortune sidestepped with ever greater dexterity by the ghost of Oscar. Posterity will have to wait many years before it does its worst, before Wilde condescends to join that murky underworld of writers of whom everybody has heard and whom nobody has read. (Is such a fate, indeed, even imaginable?)

There is a pleasing appropriateness to this posthumous evasion of critical agreement. Richard Ellmann's great 1987 biography emphasizes, through its very structure, the astonishing theatricality of Wilde's life—a theatricality rounded off with exquisite pathos at his death in 1900. 'Wilde had to live his life twice over,' Ellmann writes, 'first in slow motion, then at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat.'² Between these two lives came Wilde's catastrophic legal action against the Marquess of Queensberry (who had accused him, in 1895, of 'posing as a sodomite'), his imprisonment and his Dantean experience of purgatory and spiritual renewal. Confronted with such a life, and such a fall, posterity has been made to dance to Oscar's tune: there was simply never any chance that it would be able to deal with Wilde in a lacklustre way, inviting lazy critical unanimity or indifference. Like the hero of his story 'The Remarkable Rocket', Wilde always knew that he would 'create a great sensation'.

By foregrounding his personality so assiduously in life, by saturating his work with it, and by experiencing so tragic a fall, Wilde refused to surrender posterity to those who might try to turn him into dry historical fact. 'To talk about Wilde's fiction', writes Jerusha McCormack, 'is to talk about everything, for Oscar Wilde was his own best work of art.'³ We have to respond to that living, knowing, amused quality within Wilde—this is posterity not as a row of books, or as a system of abstract thought, but as a long curtain call. Wilde was not one to allow bodily extinction to interfere with well-laid plans. We know that he was in for the long game where fame was concerned. In 1892, for example, he chastised a drama critic for attempting 'to falsify one of the most important facts in the History of Art': the critic had wrongly suggested that 'John' was one of Wilde's middle names.⁴

How, though, did Wilde want to be remembered? Was it as the martyr who deliberately sacrificed himself for the love that dare not speak its name? Was it as the Irish nationalist, or as the socialist, or...