Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius, and: Oscar and Bosie: A Fatal Passion, and: Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde's True Love (review)

After all the trials, gaol, and exile, Oscar Wilde still remained a vivid subject for a portrait. Not yet forty-five, a shabby, down-at-heel poseur, penurious and pathetic on the pavements of Paris and Rome, the playwright was reduced to an embarrassing figure to his friends, living as an "out" homosexual and claiming a beautiful boy every day—Guiseppe, Armando, or Omero, "slim, dandy-like, elegant, and without a single great curve" (Fryer 159)—his still rampant desire in sharp contrast to his physical state and dwindling talent. The last photographs—taken with his latest toy, a Kodak camera—show Wilde as he entered the twentieth century: corpulent, fleshly, invested with his own excess, for all the two years he had spent in hard labour at a series of Victorian gaols. Far from the dandified aesthete who arrived in New York in 1882 to be immortalised by Napoleon Sarony in silk breeches and floor-length fur coat, Wilde now resembled some rotund businessman— one of T. S. Eliot's undone, perhaps; while what we read into his face and figure is the apotheosis of a painful, self-mythic process. "I will never live out the century," Wilde had declared. "The English people would not stand for it" (Belford 304).

Barbara Belford's biography of Wilde is written, like all others since 1987, in the wake of Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde. But where Ellman's book seemed retentive on the subject of Wilde's emotional and sexual lives, Belford's less comprehensive work is a more empathetic and frank portrayal. From the infant Oscar in his baby dress—to protect him from faerie abduction—to the broken man whose very imagination has been exhausted, in Pater's words, by the ecstasy of burning "with a hard gem-like flame" (40), Belford gives us Wilde's life in short, epigrammatic, and satisfyingly dramatic scenes, as if she were restaging the playwright's biography.

As Belford shows, Ireland soon ceded to England as the arena for the Dublin-born writer and his succession of self-inventions: "Oxford was where he wrote the script for Oscar Wilde posing as an Englishman, where he became a stereotype inside a real person," Belford writes (47). She accepts Wilde's own estimation of his life as a series of masks, such that the final acceptance of a homosexual identity was just another stereotype among many. In an age in which mesmerism—as explored by Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney and their Society for Psychical Research—revealed the notion of the "subliminal self," a sense of multiple layers of human consciousness, Wilde, who himself dabbled in the esoteric arts of spiritualism and animal magnetism, seemed to see his own personae in such a fractured manner. Belford quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) in which Dorian asks, "Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities" (48).

Wilde was ever aware of the impact of those personae. Belford quotes Wilde's well-aired dictum, "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art"—adding, in her own words, "But after one becomes a work of art, lies and masks are necessary" (58). She sees Wilde as a shape-shifter, a scion of that faerie-child Irish ancestry. The theatre, with its social fluidities, allowed one form of metamorphosis as an acknowledged means of moving between classes for both men and women. Belford's concentration on Wilde's dramatic work, and its reception, is refreshing and vigorous. "It was passion, not politics, that interested him...