"Oscar Wilde" by Richard Elliman

 A definitive biography.

I wanted to read it after watching The Happy Prince, the 2018 film starring Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde, Colin Morgan as Bosie and Edwin Thomas as Robbie Ross. A great film, with much that is fictional and much that is authentic.

One of the things about biographies is how many celebrated connections a celebrity always seems to have. Wilde's ancestors included Revd Charles Maturin author of Melmoth the Wanderer. His father was a celebrated surgeon; the mastoid is known as ‘Wilde’s incision’. His father's friends included Maria Edgeworth. At Oxford Wilde knew John Ruskin and Walter Pater. A later girlfriend married Bram Stoker. He knew Whistler and Walter Sickert. He helped Lily Langtry enter London society. He met Yeats at the house of William Ernest Henley and Proust in Paris. Even in exile in Paris, after his disgrace, he still rubbed shoulders with Esterhazy, the man who actually did the spying which Dreyfus went to Devil’s Island for.

Much of this biography traces the development of Wilde's art: he went from poetry to novels and then top plays.

• “Though both Ruskin and Pater welcomed beauty, for Ruskin it had to be allied with good, with Pater it might have just a touch of evil. ... Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism, as if for him religion became bearable only when it overflowed into excess. Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination. Ruskin invoked disciplined restraint, Pater allowed for a pleasant drift. What Ruskin reviled as vice, Pater caressed as wantonness.” (Ch 2)
• “Pater argued that just as physical life was now known to be a concurrence of forces rather than a group of objects, so the mind must be regarded as a fluid process rather than an adhesion to fixities and definites. William James and Henri Bergson were soon to depict consciousness as a river or stream; for Pater it is, more intensely, a whirlpool. There is nothing ‘but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought’.” (Ch 5)
• “Wilde lingers like Keats over sweets, and like Swinburne over sours.” (Ch 5)
• “His insincerity was the result of his representing difficult hesitations instead of pleasantly easy certainties. His indecency was a calculated risk, to portray his sensuality as frankly he could.” (Ch 5)
• “Wilde said later that he had made literature out of brilliant triviality, but it was triviality of a special kind, subversive of established modes ... destructive of hypocrisy.” (400)

A compelling feature of the Wilde tale is the classic tragedy in which a man, at the height of his success, flies too close to the sun and is destroyed. Wilde first experienced homosexual intercourse when he was 31, seduced by a 17 year old Robbie Ross. “He was not attracted to anal coition, so Ross presumably introduced him to the oral and intercrural intercourse he practised later.” (259) Wilde was already married with two sons. But having first tasted those fruits, Wilde went wild. He began to explore the delights of young rent boys, who often doubled as blackmailers. He and Lord Allfred 'Bosie' Douglas, youngest son of the Marquess of Queensberry, fell in love, though it was never a sexually exclusive relationship and one might wonder whether the utterly selfish Bosie had any real concept of what love involved. “What Douglas called love was the opposite of wishing the beloved well.” (460) When Queensberry became outraged and insulted Wilde, Wilde sued him for libel (the QC against him was Edward Carson with whom he had played on the beach in Ireland when they were little bots). Wilde lost that case, was put on trial for gross indecency twice (because the first trial resulted in a hung jury) and went to jail. He had to live the rest of his life in disgraced exile in France and Italy. 

Wilde was a master of succinctly putting over a point of view:

• Education: “Children should not be drilled in that calendar of infamy, European history, but learn in a workshop how art might offer a new history of the world.” (Ch 6)
• “The essence of good dialogue is interruption.” (Ch 9)
• “A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we feel compelled to alter it every six months.” (Ch 10)
• “Mr Whistler always spelt art, and I believe still spells it, with a capital ‘I’.” (Ch 11)

Other memorable moments included:

• “Man makes an end for himself out of himself: no mend is imposed by external considerations, he must realize his true nature, must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.” (Ch 3)
• “Wilde acknowledged a division in himself ... it might be thought that he had a double nature, but he actually claimed to have a triple one” (Ch 5) Catholic, pagan and Freemason.
• “The mitre and the rose come together; Catholicism blends with paganism in the same sense of mutual suffering and sin, with the promise [page break] of eventual unity of being, when opposites will be joined. Insofar as Wilde had a creed, this was it.” (Ch 5)
• “The claims of action over art were challenged by the idea that artistic creation, related to that contemplative life celebrated by Plato, was the highest form of action.” (Ch 12)
• “There was news about the Queensberrys. The Marquess was dying in January 1900 ... his son, Percy, heir to the title, came to see his father, who gathered himself to spit at him.” (542)

This is a thorough and well-written biography; I found it fascinating. If you think Oscar Wilde's story is just about the homosexuality, think again. 

January 2021; 554 pages

This review was written
by the author of 
Motherdarling

"Conan Doyle" by Hesketh Pearson

This biography of the creator of Sherlock Holmes was first published in 1943 so it reflects its time. Despite this, or because of this, it is a well-told story of a man who was larger than life. It doesn't pretend that C-D was a great writer; it fully appreciates his flaws. Nevertheless, he was a hugely prolific author who created an immortal character. "Any coal-heaver, docker, charwoman, or publican would recognise what was meant on hearing someone described as 'a reg'lar Romeo' or 'a blasted Shylock' or 'a blinkin' Robinson Crusoe' or 'a bleedin' Sherlock Holmes'." (p 86)

Pearson is particularly good at making asides:

• CD was very poor as a medical student so he sought part-time work as a medical assistant. "Knowing very little, and wishing to gain experience, he started by offering himself for nothing; but the first doctor who took him on valued his assistance at less than nothing" (p 14)
• Of a book in which the hero, a soldier, kills a Buddhist holy man and "spends the rest of his life fleeing and hiding from the other holy men who are on his track ... The chronicler is not in a position to inform us whether the soldier's last regrets were that he failed to make a clean sweep of holy men while serving in the East." (p 82 - 83)
• "An appalling outbreak of enteric among the troops was caused by the simple fact that Lord Roberts has failed to take the waterworks ... he felt that the troops required rest after their exertions; so they drank water from the old wells of Bloemfontein and rested there, some 5000 of them for ever." (p 128)

He makes interesting comments about how Doyle wrote and how good it was. For example, his historical books sometimes had too much detail. "To the end of his life it never occurred to him that the accumulation of detail, however accurate or picturesque, does not vivify ... but nullifies." (p 80) "He wrote history with the pen of Holmes, who preferred a scientific treatise to an exciting story; but he chronicled Holmes with the pen of Watson, who preferred an exciting story to a scientific treatise." (p 91). When he was writing the Holmes stories he was cavalier about details:

• "Doyle himself was singularly unobservant: he gave the lodgings a bow-window; and the distinguishing feature of Baker Street is that there is not a bow-window from one end of it to the other."  (p 87)
• "Doyle made dozens of ... slips ...Holmes disappears on May 4th, 1891, and returns on March 31st, 1894; yet the adventure of 'Wisteria Lodge' occurs in March 1892, when Holmes must have been travelling incognito in Tibet and was thought to be dead by Dr Watson." (p 87)

But he took his writing seriously:

• "He never stopped reading because he thought it 'a great mistake to start putting out cargo when you have hardly stowed any on board'." (p 76)
• "He worked from breakfast to lunch and from five to eight in the evening, averaging three thousand words a day." (p 95)

Pearson distinguishes between the imaginative (such as Shakespeare) and the fanciful (such as Doyle, Poe and Dickens): "Doyle ... mistook the fanciful for the imaginative, whereas the diagnostic of the truly imaginative man is a sense of reality. The imagination wrestles with life and is intuitive; the fancy plays around life and is inventive. ... The imaginative type ... deals with everyday life and only occasionally with the bizarre. The fanciful type ... revels in the weird and only touches reality in flashes." (p 152 - 153; page break comes after deals with)

But Doyle understood dialogue: "Why should we write a duet each saying the same thing?" (p 64)

Other great comments:

• CD said of his youthful experiences of reading boys' adventure stories: "It was all more real than the reality" (p 3)
• "Once he had to choose between compromising a woman or damaging himself. Without hesitating a second he chose the latter and hurled himself out of a third-floor window" (p 21)
• "The return journey ... was enlivened by the ship catching fire. For the first two or three days they did not take it seriously, but when the smoke turned into a blaze they did." (p 26)
• "Why the devil should we [doctors] do all the good? ... A butcher would do good to the race. would he not, if he served his chops out gratis through the window? ... Take the case of a doctor who devotes himself to sanitary science. He flushes out drains, and keeps down infection. You call himn a philanthropist! Well, I call him a traitor. ... Did you ever hear of a congress of lawyers for simplifying the law and discouraging litigation? ... If I had half the funds which the [Medical] Association has, I should spend part of them in drain-blocking, and the rest in the cultivation of disease germs, and the contamination of drinking water." (p 48)
• "'Your rooms are quite clean? ... No vermin?' 'The officers of the garrision come sometimes'." (p 58)
• His first novel was lost in the post. He commented later "my shock at its disappearance would be nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again" (p 75)
• "Their faces wearing that pained and anxious expression which the British countenance naturally assumes when dancing, giving the impression that the legs have suddenly burst forth in a festive mood, and have dragged the rest of the body into it very much against its will." (p 75)
• CD had a chequered medical career. "As he was uninterrupted by the arrival of a single patient throughout the whole of his time as an eye specialist, he spent his days writing ... 'My rooms ... consisted of a waiting-room and a consulting-room, where I waited in the consulting-room and no one waited in the waited-room." (p 93)
• "All unimaginative folk love the fanciful, the horrible, and the uncanny, which for them add a relish to life, just as people without sensitive palates love curry." (p 152)
• "We have discovered that nothing sub-human, super-human, pre-human, or preter-human could possibly surpass in horror the primitive doings of ordinary humanity." (p 163)
• "When a man searches desperately for a faith he is bound to find what he is looking for sooner or later, and what he is looking for will be, for him, the Truth." (p 172)
• "The world of matter is the world we know by means of our five senses; the spirit-world cannot be so known. ... The phenomena observed at seances do not prove the existence of a spirit-world, which, if its existence could be proved by the five senses, would cease to be the world of the spirit." (p 173)
• "No woman is ugly. Every woman is beautiful. But some are more beautiful than others." (p 183)
• "The business of every legislative body in history has been to practise a succession of complicated frauds on the community." (p 188)

A very enjoyable and page-turning biography. October 2018; 188 pages

"Charles Dickens, a life" by Claire Tomalin

This is a full scale biography of Dickens, warts and all. As well as the traditional story of his rise from rags to riches, from working in the blacking factory with a father imprisoned for debt, ashamed, his intelligence and ambition seemingly frustrated, to national institution, Tomalin shows how his boundless drive led him to dominate his family, to destroy his marriage and tempted him into bitter enmities with those he once had loved.

It is also the story of his books. He published serials, often writing the next installment only days before the deadline, sometimes writing two at once. Because of this he could not reflect upon the work and revise it. He was stuck with where he'd got to. Perhaps because of this, each book is flawed. His plots are (necessarily because of the need to keep people purchasing the next installment) very complicated and usually flawed. Most of them veer close to melodrama. When he is sentimental he can go over the top, certainly by the standards of today but even for some of the contemporary critics.His characters are often caricatures. But his energy is overpowering and the wonderful grotesques and the sense of place and the comic dialogue and the rampant fight for the common man. As Tomalin points out, he writes about ordinary people as if they are important. Dwarfs and cripples are not always villains; villains are often villains for a reason. Although no book is unflawed and his heroines are often soppy, every book has moments of brilliance.

Unlike many of his contemporary authors, such as Wilkie Collins who kept two mistresses by one of whom he fathered children but who never married, Dickens attempted respectability. It was only after his poor wife,   never really loved and grown enormous after ten pregnancies, was ditched in favour of Ellen Ternan that Dickens flouted convention and even then he kept Nelly hidden and secret and was never open about her. Even in the famous railway disaster when he was travelling with Nelly and her mum (back from the continent where Nelly had given birth to and lost his child) Dickens ensured that they were away from the scene before  rendering the help for which he took a hero's credit.

But Dickens was remarkable simply because of his industry. A monthly novel required him to write 7,500 words each month. Some novels, such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, overlapped so he was writing 15,000 words per month then. He also did journalism, edited magazines and read aloud on public tours. He worked because he was so afraid of poverty: these were the days before and social welfare safety net. Later, when he had enough money for himself, he wrote because he needed to pay for an ever-larger army of dependents, from his extravagant father to his feckless sons, his unmarried daughters, his brothers and sisters and their broods once orphaned, his mistress and her family etc. At the same time he organised charitable funds for friends and acquaintances who had fallen upon hard times. He was a driven whirlwind.

This book pays a remarkable tribute to a remarkable man. May 2013; 417 pages.