The Last Days of Oscar Wilde by John Vanderslice (review)

Oscar Wilde's life was so dramatic—beginning in comedy and ending in tragedy—that it comes as no surprise that it has been used by many writers as the basis for various sorts of novels and plays. The English poet Jeremy Reed wrote a sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray, and others have used Wilde's only novel for their own fictional purposes. Gyles Brandreth, who was briefly a Conservative politician in England in the 1990s, published a series of crime novels in which Wilde features as a detective, working with Sherlock Holmes (among others). In 1930, a Polish writer published a novel about Wilde entitled "King of Life," and an Argentinian novelist fictionalized Wilde's final meeting with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, in a book that appeared in 1997, the title of which means something like "The Con Man at Dusk." Wilde figures as a character in Tom Stoppard's well-known play The Invention of Love from the same year, and David Hare and Moises Kaufman also produced plays based on Wilde's life and career.

John Vanderslice is a professor and writer who lives in Arkansas, so it is no surprise that the American visitor to Paris who is the focus of the prelude to his Wildean novel is an "Arkansawyer" named Armstrong. We never do learn Mr. Armstrong's first name, nor do we hear anything further about him after this opening section, dated 20 October 1899 (just days after Wilde's forty-fifth birthday, and a little more than a year before his death), in which he meets Wilde by accident at a Paris café when the Irish writer offers him a light for his cigar. Armstrong has just finished a magnificent "déjeuner" at the Café de la Régence and wishes to indulge in the fine cigar he has brought with him all the way from Hot Springs. A stranger assists him and they fall into conversation, until another stranger drops a piece of paper into the American's lap informing him that his interlocutor is the much reviled Oscar Wilde, and Wilde leaves. It's an interesting scene with no roots in Wilde's life story, but it is puzzling that, once over, it is never again referred to by the author.

With Chapter One we jump back a little, to October of 1898, and then proceed by steps through the last two years of Wilde's life, which he spent mainly in Paris after being released from prison. Vanderslice depends largely on Richard Ellman's standard biography of Wilde and Frank Harris's Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, a much less reliable source of biographical information, but a good source of local color. In a non-fiction novel based on the life of a well-documented literary figure, the challenge is not so much to create a story—the story is a given—as to bring the characters to life and to make them talk in a convincing way in a convincing setting. Apart from Wilde himself, the main characters in the novel are Robert Ross (Wilde's first male lover and eventually his literary executor who rescued Wilde as a literary figure from obloquy and returned the Wilde estate to solvency), Reggie Turner (a close friend and journalist), and of course Lord Alfred Douglas, the beautiful young aristocrat at whose urging Wilde sued Queensbury, Douglas's father, leading to the later trial at which Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency and imprisoned for two years. Other, more minor persons, include such figures as the doctors who attended Wilde in his final illness and death, a Catholic priest who converted him to the Church of Rome and performed extreme unction as he lay dying, and a few others. All of these characters, or real life persons, have been extensively discussed and described in Wilde scholarship. Vanderslice's imagination provides details to help to make them seem authentic, though they are all by definition authentic. Flashbacks are embodied in italics, but do...