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A review by harveymcfly
Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann
5.0
This took my breath away. So many different emotions and feelings while exploring the life of Oscar Wilde. I had no idea of his brilliance and Victorian academic prowess. A trenchant observer of the human condition, he was by means incisive, pithy, seductive, loyal, overbearing, generous, egocentric, extravagant, profligate, loving and small-mindedly unkind.
He was charmingly eccentric, gracious while devastating and an agent provocateur.
By midway through this biography I was persuaded he was a repellant human. His arrogance, verbal cruelty and provocative exhibitionism in the name of a solipsistic claim to "art" pushed me away. Enamored so of the aesthetic he nonetheless turned it and himself into caricatures of beauty rendered perverse. He was wildly extravagant and subsumed by his own superior sense of entitlement. His unquestioning self-belief rendered him above prosaic morals and allowed an exploration of evil as a rhetorical exercise. In many ways Dorian Gray was the picture book of Oscar Wilde. Living art and the art of living became one and the pursuit of pleasure, distinct from happiness, became the goal and morality an artless and disposable convention.
In his own words, "I have a duty to myself to amuse myself frightfully...Not happiness. Above all not happiness. Pleasure! You must always aim at the most tragic."
As he fell hopelessly under the spell of Alfred Douglas, Dorian Gray in the flesh, Wilde was lost. Lost to his family, his friends, his art, his reason. As he became totally subsumed by his affair his oft-predicted doom was writ and he was never to recover. As if a bad horror movie, one watched the unfolding libel trial while pleading with him to stop. To no avail. Wilde was his own speeding train plummeting into the abyss. Had he been just a bit less, he would have had so much more.
He was a man totally undone by the self-sabotage of dreadful judgement. He had so many loyal and loving friends but was drawn moth-like to the immolating flame of Douglas who would decimate him to ashes. He would end up eviscerating himself in the pursuit of fleeting ecstasy, "...nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know the good in anything till you have torn the heart of it by excess." And pursue excess they did.
The prison years were heartbreaking. Yet as he claimed after, he did find his soul. All the repellency I felt fell away as I sorrowed for the inhumanity he suffered. And of course the aftermath was nothing more than a drawn out death waltz.
The master of the epigram could never be so neatly summed up. Such a complex and over-large man both literally and in his heart and soul.
Ellman, imbued with the spirit of his elusive and epigrammatic subject, is no mean phrase-turner. This is a tour de force biography only slightly brushed by the inevitable hagiography that is the biographer's curse.
"He was a man waiting for something, perhaps a miracle, only to find that it is death."
"What he regarded as his weaknesses were his inability to choose the greater pleasure over the lesser and to avoid
giving way to the most trifling of temptations. In him hubris had taken this seemingly innocuous form. He knew himself to be generous, sympathetic to the poor, the thwarted, the excluded and his self-esteem valorized his guilt."
In college I took a course on Tragedy in Literature. The premise was based upon the Greek concept of hamartia, "missing the mark", the fatal flaw in the tragic character. Most often in literature, as in life, it was hubris.
Wilde as tragedy is greater than any creation of literature.
He was charmingly eccentric, gracious while devastating and an agent provocateur.
By midway through this biography I was persuaded he was a repellant human. His arrogance, verbal cruelty and provocative exhibitionism in the name of a solipsistic claim to "art" pushed me away. Enamored so of the aesthetic he nonetheless turned it and himself into caricatures of beauty rendered perverse. He was wildly extravagant and subsumed by his own superior sense of entitlement. His unquestioning self-belief rendered him above prosaic morals and allowed an exploration of evil as a rhetorical exercise. In many ways Dorian Gray was the picture book of Oscar Wilde. Living art and the art of living became one and the pursuit of pleasure, distinct from happiness, became the goal and morality an artless and disposable convention.
In his own words, "I have a duty to myself to amuse myself frightfully...Not happiness. Above all not happiness. Pleasure! You must always aim at the most tragic."
As he fell hopelessly under the spell of Alfred Douglas, Dorian Gray in the flesh, Wilde was lost. Lost to his family, his friends, his art, his reason. As he became totally subsumed by his affair his oft-predicted doom was writ and he was never to recover. As if a bad horror movie, one watched the unfolding libel trial while pleading with him to stop. To no avail. Wilde was his own speeding train plummeting into the abyss. Had he been just a bit less, he would have had so much more.
He was a man totally undone by the self-sabotage of dreadful judgement. He had so many loyal and loving friends but was drawn moth-like to the immolating flame of Douglas who would decimate him to ashes. He would end up eviscerating himself in the pursuit of fleeting ecstasy, "...nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know the good in anything till you have torn the heart of it by excess." And pursue excess they did.
The prison years were heartbreaking. Yet as he claimed after, he did find his soul. All the repellency I felt fell away as I sorrowed for the inhumanity he suffered. And of course the aftermath was nothing more than a drawn out death waltz.
The master of the epigram could never be so neatly summed up. Such a complex and over-large man both literally and in his heart and soul.
Ellman, imbued with the spirit of his elusive and epigrammatic subject, is no mean phrase-turner. This is a tour de force biography only slightly brushed by the inevitable hagiography that is the biographer's curse.
"He was a man waiting for something, perhaps a miracle, only to find that it is death."
"What he regarded as his weaknesses were his inability to choose the greater pleasure over the lesser and to avoid
giving way to the most trifling of temptations. In him hubris had taken this seemingly innocuous form. He knew himself to be generous, sympathetic to the poor, the thwarted, the excluded and his self-esteem valorized his guilt."
In college I took a course on Tragedy in Literature. The premise was based upon the Greek concept of hamartia, "missing the mark", the fatal flaw in the tragic character. Most often in literature, as in life, it was hubris.
Wilde as tragedy is greater than any creation of literature.