BOOK REVIEW
Title: DECLARING HIS GENIUS, Oscar Wilde in North America
Author: Roy Morris, Junior.
Published by: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2013
Price: USD 26.95
A Late Blooming Sunflower for Oscar Wilde
There are some people who are not only attractive but substantially ahead
of their time. Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch post-impressionist master, was one
such. He famously sold just one painting in his lifetime, only to have his
works become most admired and colossally expensive, a century, more or less,
after his death.
Van Gogh’s
contemporary, the Oxford educated six feet four inches tall Irishman Oscar
Wilde, is the subject of this book by Mr. Roy Morris Junior. Mr. Morris,
writing recently, seems to accompany Oscar Wilde on his travels across America
in 1882, with a lightness of touch and texture that his subject would have
approved of.
Oscar Wilde was fragrantly
gay in a time when it was illegal, and it landed him eventually in jail. But
before that, throughout his adult life, Wilde challenged the manners, mores and
morals of his considerable audience on both sides of the Atlantic, and planted
a proud flag for aesthetics and art in all things.
Wilde believed Art
was worthwhile for its own sake rather than as an embellishment to something
else. And this, in time, greatly influenced the thirst for culture, state
policy with regard to it, and its budget allocations ever since. No one had
quite articulated the value and necessity of aesthetics, art and beauty quite
as masterfully before him; nor given such things a tangible relevance to the
progress of civilisation.
Wilde made an
extraordinary impact in his stature, flamboyant dress sense, the Sunflowers and
Lillies he favoured. He had a natural celebrity’s temperament and was famous
for being famous. So much so, that the Prince of Wales felt it necessary to
know him rather than the other way around. He was gifted in the art of self-
promotion, notwithstanding his considerable talent.
Oscar Wilde,
poet, playwright, personality at large, made good copy and was much reported
on, and seemed to speak only in extraordinarily spontaneous witticisms and
aphorisms. His quotations have survived in legendary proportions to this day,
prolific, topical, thought provoking, challenging of the common boundaries.
But Oscar Wilde
was misunderstood and disapproved of by the establishment almost in equal
measure. He was, to many conservative Victorians, quirky, outrageous and
bizarre. He was frequently and heatedly questioned for his departures from the
norm. As was Van Gogh, for his intense post-impressionism, much before it
acquired a label.
Some liked Oscar
Wilde for breaking ranks with convention, and others were amused by his
curiousity value. But that is the notoriety of the freak and it is not a
pleasant sensation to be its subject.
Van Gogh, of
course, never really got any appreciation for his genius during his lifetime,
and it drove him to despair and suicide. Being mocked, laughed and jeered at
took a toll on the brave Mr. Wilde too, and it is not just a coincidence that
he went into self-imposed exile and died young abroad. He is buried in Paris
and not London or Dublin, but fittingly he has been claimed by the world of
style and substance.
But as this
account of a country-wide lecture tour of America, undertaken over 11 months
when he was just 27 years old shows, Wilde was a pathfinder already. He
delivered 140 lectures, travelling 15,000 miles. Armed with a bushel of letters
of introduction from prominent members of London society, Oscar Wilde was
received by the Who’s Who. And while many did not take to him enthusiastically,
none refused to be charmed somewhat by his efforts.
Wilde spent a lot
of his time trying to arrange for his early plays to be produced with American
support but his best work, as poet, dramatist and visionary was still in the
future. His personality and world view was, as always, a work in progress. This
book reads pleasantly enough as a society chronicle of the times with many
famous post- Civil War Americans populating its pages. But almost all of them
pass swiftly, like ships in the night; rather like Elvis meeting the Beatles
eighty odd years later.
The Americans
were often uplifted by their encounter with the brilliant Oscar Wilde of “the
first period” with his stage costume of knee breeches, black silk stockings,
satin smoking jacket and Byronic peasant shirt accompanied by long hair and
sunflowers.
One of Wilde’s
several biographers, Richard Ellmann, dubbed this sojourn of 1882: “the most
sustained attack upon materialistic vulgarity that America has seen”. But the Americans were gracious, happy to lap
up Oscar’s metro-sexual charm as he promoted beauty and art to an audience that
had been deeply traumatised by the ravages of the Civil War. Oscar Wilde
noticed the vastness of the country he visited in more senses than one.
“America” he said, “is not a country; it is a world”. He was affected by
America enough to promptly reinvent himself.
(802 words)
19th January 2013
Gautam Mukherjee
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