The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People by Oscar Wilde (review)

Book Reviews atmosphere of the first half of The Plough and the Stars" (p. 45) - the heady verbiage offstage and the increasing comic drunkenness onstage contributing towards the intoxicated emotionalism which denies the "holiness" ofthe revolutionary action. The ironies, Smith would seem to argue, move beyond vision militating against verisimilitude to create something like a Brechtian "defamiliarising" effect where each element in the dramatic suucture comments on and is in tum qualified by the other. And so the positive essence of the play then shifts away from visionary abstractions to the small heroic gesturesofmoral courage and charity perfonned by ordinary men and women in the face of death and carnage. Smith's O'Casey is an Ethical Humanist for whom poetry is the power to inspire people to committed action, and a satirist whose pUIpOse is "to establish a meaningful social order in lieu of the 'chassis' perpetrated by the stupidity of men" (p. 15)· The familiar O'Caseyan dichotomy remains an essential pan of Professor Smith's argument: the positive and negative poles of a satiric vision. Both destructive and curative, that sees things as they are and as they ought to be, that uses laughter as a weapon against evil and an affirmation of joy. It is an immensely attractive image of O'Casey that emerges from the discussion. Professor Smith has stripped away the accretions of sentimentality that often blur O'Casey's idealism - his "love for mankind" and his "enthusiastic optimism" - by pointing to a bleak acknowledgement, in many of the plays, of the incorrigible condition that must at times prevail. Nor is there anything politically naIve in O'Casey's vision of a Golden Age. Eschewing all creeds and codes, whether Marxist or Christian, he finally knows that "the miracles wrought are wrought by man acting, not by man talking and not by man waiting" (p. 9); and it is this combination of existential toughness, exuberant joy, and independent intelligence that informs Professor Smith's analysis ofO'Casey's satiric vision. I am not entirely convinced that Q'Casey was, as Professor Smith argues, "a satirist from first to last." He was at first the greatest tragicomedian since Chekhov, at last an Existentialist in his own unique conception of responsible action, and more or less satirical along the way. But whether one agrees with the specific emphasis in this book on O'Casey's vision, the vision - moral. humane, and realistic - is eloquently articulated and assuages whatever fears I might earlier have expressed about O'Casey's incipient Romanticism. This is Professor Smith's comment on one of O'Casey's central metaphors in the later plays: To go to the fair is to escape from reality; O 'Casey's answer is to make life itself a perperual fair so that the young may never experience the desolation and drab loneliness endured by the old people ... , so that blue ribbons can be worn and enjoyed while they are bright and new, so that the youngonce they become old - will have something other than fear and chastity to remember. (p. 168) ERROL DURBACH, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA OSCAR WILDE. The Importance ojBeing Earnest: A Trivial ComedyJor Serious People. Edited by Russell Jackson. London: Ernest Benn; New York: W. W. Norton 1980. Pp. xlvii, 128. GWENDOLINE Ernest! I felt from the first that you could have no other name. JACK Gwendoline, at last! CHASUBLE Letitia, at last! MISS PRISM Frederick, at last! ALGY Cecily, at last! GWENOOLlNE My own Ernest. Book Reviews (Together) Tableau CURTAIN 237 Only last year I obtained from a weU-known New York retailer oftheatre books acopy of French's "Standard Library Edition" of The Imporlance ofBeing Earnest and found this ending, to my astonishment, still in print. Fortunately - despite the evidence ofFrench's "Library" text - the standard ending for years has included Lady Bracknell's observation that her nephew is "displaying signs oftriviality" and Jack's play-capping response, "On the contrary. Aunt Augusta, I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest." All the same, the perfect phrasing of this ending was something Wilde achieved only by degrees, The text of the first...