Oscar

Oscar Wilde published “The Decay of Lying: An Observation,” in his 1891 collection of essays, “Intentions,” and in that beautiful, arch, and sometimes misguided piece of writing, Wilde, who wasn’t yet forty, presented, as a kind of Socratic dialogue, this argument: art wasn’t meant to reflect nature but it’s own means, which is to say artifice; the natural world had nothing to do with artistic production. And the two young men who have this delightful conversation in “The Decay of Lying,”–Vivian and Charles–were not too far in spirit from a relationship I used to have with a man I don’t see anymore but I see in my heart, I loved him in the way that Vivian and Charles love one another, Charles and Vivian being another of Wilde’s complex male characters, they talk but they never talk of love, and yet they are together, usually bonded by ideas and something else, Oscar Wilde could not have one male character say to another in nineteenth century London I love you, which is a theme he struggled with in his 1890 novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” another treatise about appearances, and is it any wonder given that Wilde had to treat the love that interested him–love between men–as just another metaphor about doubling given the times but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854; he was the much beloved son of Irish intellectuals with an aristocratic bent–his mother was a famous feminist–and his class didn’t hurt in terms of his access to education, he studied Latin and Greek and was an utterly brilliant student, one of those astonishing people instructors love to hate, knowing he would surpass them, he was a born star, and he was, and that was part of the problem later on, he had been treated like a star from the time he was born, and was lead to believe he could get away with anything, having gotten away with so much by the time he published “The Decay of Lying,” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a book I have always found rather difficult to be around let alone read, Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations don’t hurt, but aside from that what disturbs me most about that book is Wilde’s coldness–the sentimental or spoiled are almost always cold at heart; they can only think of their own pleasures and have little tolerance for the needs and comforts of other people, unless it will lead to their further comfort or degradation, as in the case of Wilde and Bosie and that whole trip–and Wilde’s periodic coldness comes through in his depiction of Sybil, the actress in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” who gives everything up for love, only to suffer for it, Wilde’s sometimes spiteful interest in women was so strange to me, he wanted them to be some version of the grotesque (i.e. “Salome”) or dead, with Miss Prism in-between. In any case, Sibyl is ultimately just a plot point in that book, she represents the status quo that Wilde’s male characters turn their backs on so they can get on with their story of love that’s perverted by circumstances, just as Wilde’s own love was perverted by circumstances, I much prefer “De Profoundis,” to his narrative fiction, it being a self-portrait that’s without metaphor, self-pity, or tears, and had he lived it shows us how he would have moved on from what the law said he could and could not do in the privacy of his own bed, his own bed, had he lived I’m sure he would have realized his true self without mirrors, without the hard glaze of self-protecting irony, without misogynistic impulses, a lover of men who, being free in his love, learned to love the world.