Books: My Own Boy …

THE LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE (958 pp.)—Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis—Harcourt, Brace & World ($15).

The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art; I altered the minds of men and the colors of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder . . . I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

So wrote the unhappy prisoner of Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas in the long, bitter, loving letter that is the core of this collection and that must be the basis of any attempt to understand Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s favorite paradox was: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” But there are rare crises when the mask is torn away and truth spills from the naked soul. The mask of England’s sharpest wit and most industrious idler fell away in Reading Gaol, after the decade’s most scandalous trial had resulted in his conviction for pederasty. The Wilde of this epistolary confession, here published for the first time in full (though it has been published previously in heavily edited versions as De Profundis), is anything but a philosophical trifler who can dismiss all existence in an epigram.

Until Editor Hart-Davis made this exhaustive collection, few of Wilde’s letters were available, and of those in print, many had been bowdlerized. For Wilde’s trials left British society with a sense of collective embarrassment that lingered for decades. The author’s son Vyvyan lived a life of “concealment and repression” under the name Holland. In 1946, when Hesketh Pearson published what is still the only good biography of Wilde, the playwright was still a forbidden subject among many who had known him. and much material necessary to a biographer simply was not available.

Greek & Graceful. The letters show Wilde as something far more than the talented fop of his own self-caricature. The collection begins with fond early letters from Wilde to his friends at Magdalen College, Oxford. Their nicknames are “Kitten,” “Bouncer” and “Puss” (Wilde’s was “Hosky”). Wilde’s active homosexualism is not thought to have begun until years later; nothing is to be inferred from cute nicknames or cuddly phrases beyond the surrogate sexuality common to young upper-class British males in Victorian times. The public-school youth of those years lived a womanless life from the time he left the nursery till he was ready to marry, and Wilde was merely one side of the Victorian coin whose obverse was that ascetic, womanless hero, General Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon.

The reader observes Wilde’s polite overtures to literary elders (“I take the liberty of sending you a short monograph. . . . It is little more than a stray sheet from a boy’s diary”), watches with tolerance as the young wit, in an endless series of newspaper debates, carefully builds his reputation for outrageousness, and follows the unpredictable triumph of his American lecture tour, as the 27-year-old aesthete, dressed in velvet doublet and knee breeches, lectures enthusiastic Leadville miners on Italian art (Pearson’s biography helps explain the Leadville success: it seems that Wilde wowed the miners by drinking them under the table). Wilde wrote back from Missouri: “Outside my window about a quarter of a mile to the west there stands a little yellow house, with a green paling, and a crowd of people pulling it all down. It is the house of the great train-robber and murderer, Jesse James, who was shot by his pal last week, and the people are relic-hunters. The Americans are certainly great hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”

The Supreme Vice. Wilde was a talker, one of the best who ever lived, and perhaps because he needed the stimulus of conversation, his letters were not so witty as his talk. Rather, the letters confirm Pearson’s estimate of Wilde as a man utterly without meanness of spirit, the kindest and most gracious of egomaniacs. Constantly he is seen doing a kindness, praising another author, gracefully laughing off an insult. His own wit, unlike that of his artist friend Whistler, almost never dealt in insults (except when he was insulting Whistler; Wilde observed in one letter that Whistler’s only really original artistic opinions were those in which he claimed superiority to other artists).

The long dalliance with the fretful young fop Douglas begins with besotted love notes (“My Own Boy, it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses”) and reaches its most wretched state in the 87-page De Profundis letter. Here Wilde, having come to terms with remorse, attempted to scourge the consistently childish Douglas into an adult assessment of his own character. The passages of confession are moving and wise; for perhaps the only time in his life, Wilde looked at himself clearly and steadily. He wrote, at one point in the letter, that the supreme vice is shallowness. The great talker had that vice; he had also, though he spent a lifetime trying to conceal it, the painful virtue of depth.