Here are some pieces of an article called "
Oscar Wilde, Queer Addict: Biography and De Profundis" written Aug. this year by Clifdon Snider, who is a poet, queer critic etc at California State University. It's a fairly no-nonsense and detailed, sometimes even clinical, examination, as sympathetic as it is largely realistic, of why Wilde may have behaved as he did.
- Although there have always been brave scholarly and creative souls who have dared write about him, Wilde's literary reputation did not begin to rise until about the middle of the twentieth century. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is an academic industry devoted to Wilde, augmented by the popularity of Queer Studies, one of the most current trends in literary criticism. Commentators as disparate as Arnold Bennett, a fine though seldom-read early-twentieth-century novelist, and W. H. Auden, a giant of twentieth-century poetry, have agreed that
The Importance of Being Earnest is his "best work" (Bennett 418), "perhaps the only pure verbal opera in English" (Auden 322). Bennett was completely wrong in his opinion that "Wilde's popular vogue is over" (417), and Auden, right in so many of his opinions on Wilde, was completely wrong to call
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. "shy-making" and
The Picture of Dorian Gray a "bore" (322). However, reviewing the Rupert Hart-Davis edition of
The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962), Auden is right on the mark when he observes that after prison, Wilde "turned to the only consolations readily available--drink and boys" (319).
Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, gives an excellent summary of the history of Wilde as a subject of biography in his article, "
Biography and the Art of Lying," published in
The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997), and supplemented by his richly-illustrated but brief biography,
The Wilde Album (1997). The early recollections by those who knew Wilde were "fragmentary, even impressionistic, and books for the most part alluded to his downfall in veiled terms"
("Biography" 5). Even the indispensable biography by Richard Ellmann contains errors, such as the photo of Wilde in drag as Salomé, which is actually the "Hungarian opera singer Alice Guszalewicz as Salome, Cologne, 1906" ("
Biography" 11). Basing his judgment on the latest medical findings, Holland also believes Ellmann is wrong about Wilde having suffered from syphilis (12-13), and I agree with Holland's assessment. As Holland says, "The French doctor who attended Wilde [on his deathbed] and signed the diagnosis, Paul Claisse, had previously written papers on skin disorders, meningitis and tertiary syphilis, all conditions which are alleged to have contributed to his [Wilde's] death" (13). Had Wilde suffered from tertiary syphilis, surely Claisse would have discovered the fact.
Despite the weighty attention Wilde and his work have received, I agree with John Lahr's assertion: "None of Wilde's biographers offer
an interpretation of his self-destructiveness [. . .]". Lahr adds, "for that one has to read between the lines of Wilde's wit" (xxxix). Yet, although Lahr cites a few lines of that famous wit, he doesn't begin to analyze Wilde's self-destructiveness. This I intend to do. I suspect biographers and critics have shied away from the subject for a number of reasons: personal friendship with Wilde, self-protection (here the prime example is Lord Alfred Douglas), other aims, lack of knowledge and evidence, and political correctness. Queer critics in particular may not want to sully the reputation of one who is, after all, a gay icon.1 As a queer critic myself, I have no intention of tarring Wilde's reputation in the least. What I intend to do is to uncover some of the reasons for Wilde's self-destructiveness, recognizing, as Wilde says in Intentions, the full truth is "unattainable" (405)...
...But why did Wilde continually take Bosie back after all kinds of scenes, lies, extravagant outlays of Wilde's money, and interruptions of Wilde's creative time? Why did he not end their "fatal friendship" (693 and 770)? Repeatedly, Wilde accuses Bosie of a "lack of imagination," his "one really fatal defect of . . . character" (709) and berates him for having "the supreme vice, shallowness" (715). Had Wilde refused to see Bosie after his release from prison, one might believe all this vituperation. However, just as he had accepted Bosie back approximately every three months, as he says in De Profundis, so he returned to live with him in Naples after his release and with the certainty of losing his income from his wife for doing so. Clearly we are dealing with an addiction here, but not a sexual addiction (for Wilde and Bosie sex was never an important part of their relationship), and not a relationship addiction, for both sought other sexual partners and never took the time really to become intimate with each other. The addiction was romance, and for Wilde it was as fatal as any drug.
Within five months after his release from prison (September 1897), Wilde was living with Bosie in Naples. In defense of his decision, he writes to Turner:
- Much that you say in your letter is right, but still you leave out of consideration the great love I have for Bosie. I love him, and have always loved him. He ruined my life, and for that reason I seem forced to love him more: and I think that now I shall do lovely work . . . whatever my life may have been ethically, it has always been romantic, and Bosie is my romance. My romance is a tragedy of course, but it is none the less a romance, and he loves me very dearly, more than he loves or can love anyone else, and without him my life was dreary. (948, emphasis Wilde's)
Wilde adds: "So stick up for us, Reggie, and be nice." We know in retrospect that Wilde did not do "lovely work" living with Bosie. Apart from finishing "The Ballad of Reading Goal" in Naples, he added nothing to his creative oeuvre. The key words in this letter are "seem forced" and "without him my life was dreary": the romance addict without his fix is compelled to find it again. Others intervened to break them apart, but doubtless they would have broken up in time, for the old pattern had reasserted itself. Bosie was again spending Wilde's meager funds as if he were entitled to them (Ellmann 555). It was the same fatal process Wilde had wailed about in De Profundis. Disease is no respecter of people, time, or place.
Schaef describes four levels of romance addiction. The first two fit Wilde well. The first level "is the person who practices his or her addiction almost completely in fantasy," and in the second level "romance addicts act out their fantasies" (62). Third level addicts act out "in such a way that it is harmful to themselves and others and may even verge upon or be illegal" (64, emphasis Schaef's). This level also applies to Wilde given the fact that were it not for him Alfred Taylor, the person through whom Wilde met his rent-boys, would not have been tried and convicted, never mind the harm Wilde did himself through his romantic addiction to Bosie. As for the illegal actions, the applicable laws no longer apply (and of course never should have been on the books).7...
...Despite the obvious delight with which Wilde describes his "tricks," to use a modern word, he felt equivocal about them. He says in a letter to Ross from Rome (14 May 1900):
- In the moral sphere I have fallen in and out of love, and fluttered hawks and doves alike. How evil it is to buy Love, and how evil to sell it! And yet what purple hours one can snatch from that grey slowly-moving thing we call Time! My mouth is twisted with kissing, and I feed on fevers. The Cloister or the Café--there is my future. I tried the Hearth, but it was a failure. (1187)
...Schaef writes that "romance addiction keeps individuals . . . immature" (72). And some fifty years ago one of Wilde's biographers noted Wilde's "emotional life . . . never reached maturity" (Pearson 285). Worse than that, his addictions, whatever their causes (and homosexuality was not one of them), led him on a path of inevitable self-destruction. His final illness can not have been helped by his drinking and smoking cigarettes nearly to the end. Nevertheless, during his last years perhaps the drinking and the romancing ironically alleviated some of the pain caused by those very addictions and by his loneliness and the routine rejections of those who used to honor him. Wilde's work remains. By now it has passed the "test of time." As a gay icon he remains both a positive and a negative example to all sexual minorities just as he remains one of the best as well as one of the most popular writers from the late nineteenth-century. From - http://www.csulb.edu/~csnider/wilde.queer.addict.html
Even when someone's own flaws contributed to their casting-out from the pack, if a unique talent bloomed to delight the masses amidst the squalour and an earnestness of spirit remained, then Morrissey seems to be inclined to champion such artists. Jobriath is another example. Morrissey does not like to inter the good with the bones; he honours the memory of the gift. In Wilde's case, the bequest is large.