Ellmann's Oscar Wilde

Book Reviews ELLMANN'S OSCAR WILDE Richard Ellmann. Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. $24.95 Richard Ellmann completed the fifth or sixth, and last, draft of this massive biography (620 pages odd) early in 1986. He was afflicted already by the motorneurone disease from which he died in May of 1987. Oscar Wilde had been more than a decade in the making and the poignant circumstances of its final drafting elevate the text to the dignity of a testament; a valediction to those Anglo-Irish studies that its author pursued with such brilliance and industry. Ellmann believed, and the book fully justifies this belief, that Wilde was indeed a figure as considerable as those whom he had earlier illuminated, Yeats and Joyce. The creative genius is to be found in Intentions, in Dorian Gray (in spite of its uneven quality) and The Importance of Being Earnest but inadiates also such works as "The Soul of Man Under Socialsim," Salome, the first symbolist drama in our literature, the De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. And unlike Yeats or Joyce, Wilde is a classic by popular acclaim . The reasons for this are various: his status as a martyr of gaydom; his wit; the drama of his life and, paradoxically, the sense that this heresiarch of the artifice is also a moralist, one who succeeds in imparting general truths about our nature and manages to do so without boring us: "so generous, so amusing, so right," that comment of Borges, quoted by Ellmann as the last sentence of his biography, is itself so right: subject and author are altogether worthy of one another. The biographer of Wilde faces signal problems. Wilde as man and artist demands explaining but not explaining away. And he has been in life and in death altogether too public, too international for his own good. He has been translated into many languages (perhaps into Esperanto and Eskimo). Wasn't it Housman who remarked that for the French (as probably for many other cultures) English literature consisted of three authors: "Jagspeere, Bearon and Oscar Veelde"? So there was a proliferation of potted biographies, all with the same anecdotes, the same illustrations. Ellmann has surmounted both these difficulties and indeed one of his illustrations does not merely surmount, it goes over the top. Nothing less than Oscar in drag as, naturally, Salome. This surely must be a joke, though rather a good one. The biographer of Wilde has to pick his arduous way among the numerous memoirs. A sure way of spicing one's own pallid memories or stiffening a biography was to tell a tale of Oscar along the lines of "I soon realised the moral morass that underlay the charm," or "his skin like his manner was oily and though I was unable to avoid being in his company on several occasions, I was never taken in by the cheap paradoxes by which he enthralled a certain class of young man." And the conclusion would be a final glimpse through the inferno that was fin-de-siècle Paris of an ungain309 31:3 Book Reviews Iy, drunken, grossly befarded figure staggering in the gutter to which he had been so manifestly destined. One memorialist even claimed to have found the obscure French journalist whom Wilde had paid to compose Salome. But friends and non-media persons could also barely resist this so highly symbolic figure, finding ironies and omens in an episode or a conversation. The histories written by friends and enemies, by lovers and lovers turned enemies, continued, and it was not until the years after 1945 that the life and work began to be studied with any attempt at detachment. The mention of Autos A. Ojala; of Sir Rupert Hart-Davis and Montgomery Hyde sufficiently marks the peripeteia of Oscar's posthumous fortunes. Ellmann's image of Wilde as tragic hero, an image already established by Yeats in the "Tragic Generation" sector of his Autobiographies, provides the structure of the present volume. This can be dangerous. As hero of his own tragedy , Wilde is the disastrously privileged man and consequently in the last analysis solitary and virtually unknowable. Yet it is...