ELLMANN,
Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin Books, 1987.
We can
but highly recommend a magnificent biography of Oscar Wilde by the author of
other excellent biographies, such as Joyce’s: Oscar Wilde,
by Richard Ellmann. Ellmann offers us his profound knowledge of Wilde with the
utmost credibility, unaffected by his obvious devotion towards the writer and
the person. The riches and precision of the vocabulary that he employs and the
vast array of facts about Wilde’s work and life give the reader a sensation of
following Wilde and even being an observer of his contradictions, delights,
afflictions, and, what’s more important, of his development as a human being.
Ellmann starts every
chapter with a quotation of Wilde’s words and after that provides us with a
thorough display of details of his writings, life, relations, joys, and
misfortunes. Under this light we confirm what we could glimpse when reading
every one of his books, that Wilde was pure excess, just like life, and he
could not be stopped by morals, even though these could (and did) crush him.
“Though he offered himself as an apostle of pleasure, his created work contains
much pain” (p. xiv).
[Oscar Wilde. Picture taken from http://www.quotezuki.com/author/oscar-wilde/page3]
He was the best
company, witty and an unequalled conversationalist, always generous with his
guests and acquaintances, lovers or even strangers. He didn’t receive the same
token when he was accused of immorality and sent to prison. Most of his friends
abandoned him and refused to help, and the few years he lived after being in
jail he was ruined. He died in exile accompanied only by a couple of friends,
Reggie Turner and especially Robert Ross, who never left him. His personality
and his intelligence were not fit for the times, which were but rigid and hypocritical,
and nothing was more alien to Wilde, whose passion for life was endless and
could not possibly be hidden.
Life or art, what comes
first? Both were irresistible for Wilde, but there can be no doubt when knowing
him in such depth as Ellmann does: Life is generosity and splendor, but it
comes second, as it can only imitate art, and only the latter can come near
perfection and is a mirror to life. Art is the true creator, and only creators
can shape life. This explains why Wilde was so careful with every detail, every
word he chose, every garment he wore, his hair, his surroundings, his home and
its decoration, etc. Everything had to be perfect, a work of art, for life
deserves no less. Morality is only a constraint and limits the creator. Only
intelligence and taste can prevail. That’s why he never confined himself to one
specific faith or group (he played with the idea of becoming a Christian and
joined masonry at the same time!). Why not taste them all? He had to be sent to
prison by the society that he had exposed to put limits to his passion for
life, and that killed him. We can imagine the suffering of such sensibility
imprisoned. No blue china, no champagne, no books, no words, no air. A man of
his delicacy could not survive the lack of beauty and the fetid air of jail.
His purity was suicidal.
“Essentially Wilde was
conducting, in the most civilized way, an anatomy of his society, and a radical
reconsideration of its ethics. He knew all the secrets and could expose all the
pretense. Along with Blake and Nietzsche, he was proposing that good and evil
are not what they seem, that moral tabs cannot cope with the complexity of
behavior. His greatness as a writer is partly the result of the enlargement of
sympathy which he demanded for society’s victims” (p. xiv). “We inherit his
struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social
change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is
eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a
morality of severity by one of sympathy” (p. 553).
Wilde, we dare add,
couldn’t possibly have had a more appropriate name and definitely honoured it,
as Ellmann’s biography depicts with such precision and elegance.
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