In the week of this years gay pride march, we look at the significance of queer icon Oscar Wilde, and debate the problems surrounding the Johannesburg parade
Peter Conrad
Ignominy effaced Oscar Wilde as soon as he was hauled off to prison in 1895. His name was summarily blacked out on theatre marquees in Londons West End, so that overnight The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband became anonymous. Even after his death in 1901, he could not be mentioned.
Author Nancy Mitfords father fulminated against him as that sewer, and when the precious, precocious Beverley Nichols flaunted a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, his father slapped the boys face, smeared the text with spittle, then chewed the abominable pages like a rabid dog. The disingenuous Beverley asked what Wilde had done to provoke such a frenzy. His father wrote down in Latin the words he forbore to utter, Illum crimen horribile quod non nominandum est the gross indecency with which Wilde had been charged was made decent by the obscurity of a dead language.
Wilde and his acts vanished into an ominous silence. Shyly recognising his own homosexuality, the hero of EM Forsters self-suppressed novel Maurice can only confide that he is an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.
Now the love that dared not speak its name chants slogans in the streets, and Wilde has been confidently appropriated as our contemporary. But his appeal extends beyond sexual sectarianism. Wilde is one of us, declared the obdurately heterosexual Richard Ellmann in his monumental 1987 biography. We inherit his struggle.
The liberal agenda of that struggle was to create a modern society in which Victorian severity yielded to humane sympathy, and also to invent a modern, autonomous kind of art, banishing moral concerns in order to elaborate supreme fictions. Released from the decadent, expiring 1890s, Wilde became the progenitor of a new cult in which he managed to live for only a few months.
Prophets and saviours cannot be allowed to stay in their graves, and in 1918 Wildes corpse was (metaphorically at least) exhumed to be kicked around a bit. In his new book, Wildes Last Stand, Philip Hoare describes a libel trial in which Wilde was pilloried all over again.
The bigoted politician Pemberton Billing, convinced that the British war effort was being undermined by a conspiracy of sexual fifth-columnists, accused the dancer Maud Allan of treason when she performed Wildes Salome, in which a rapacious teenager sates herself by executing Christs ambassador, John the Baptist. Implicitly denouncing Allan as a lesbian, Billing accused her of establishing a cult of the clitoris.
Wilde remained a byword for unmentionable vices and occluded body parts. The Marquess of Queensberry, in the letter which prompted Wildes own hubristic libel action, got into a muddle over the spelling of sodomy, and in his harrumphing orthography absurdly accused Wilde of posting as a somdomite.
Billings assault on Allan likewise misfired because no one had ever heard of that pert bud of flesh which (on the advice of his family doctor, who helpfully spelt the word out over the telephone) he targeted. In court, there were mystified queries from the bench about where the clitoris lurked, and what its intentions were. Learned counsel euphemistically defined it as a superficial organ. Wasnt it Wilde who said, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that all art is both surface and symbol, and warned that those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril?
The peril of the clitoris chauvinistically explained at the trial as the womans sorry remnant of the mans more upright, hydraulic rig was its yearning for grandiose delights, which had caused it to be retributively miniaturised. An exaggerated clitoris, frothed one of Billings collaborators, might even drive a woman to an elephant.
In the absence of anatomical details, there were those who assumed that the clitoris must be some sort of greasy foreigner. During the trial, Lord Albemarle asked his colleagues at the Turf Club about this Greek chap Clitoris whose doings were on everyones lips. There was further befuddlement when a witness alleged that Wildes Salome, amorously biting the mouth of the Baptists severed head, had experienced an orgasm. The prosecuting council wondered what this might be: another unnatural vice? No, he was delicately informed, it is a function of the body.
Words, as Wilde well knew, precede and create things. Once these bodily parts and functions were named, they officially existed. More, thanks to his posthumous intervention, would soon be heard from them.
Despite the polite embargo on saying Wildes name, others continued his cheeky, dissident work. Hoare nominates Nol Coward with his drawling languor and his limply angled cigarette holders, his floppily tasselled dressing gowns and his stealthy suede shoes as the Wilde of his era, who argued in plays such as Easy Virtue that amoral escapades should be forgiven, providing of course that the sexual experimentalist behaved exquisitely.
In the Twenties, Wildean vice dwindled to harmless, sumptuary hedonism. Lytton Strachey asked Vanessa Bell if a spot on her dress might possibly be a gobbet of semen, and cocaine was served up in salt cellars at fashionable dinner parties. By the Sixties, the legal prohibitions on self-indulgence seemed fatuous, and Wilde was invited to the decades psychedelic carnival. In a BBCtelevision profile of him, writer Michael Bracewell unearths an act of homage by Mick Jagger at the time of his conviction for smoking dope. In a promotional film for the Rolling Stones song We Love You, Jagger played a slinky, pantherish Wilde, with Marianne Faithfull equally androgynous as his lover, Bosie.
After that, Bracewell outs some more unwitting avatars of Oscar, transforming him into a pop star. As Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie cast himself as a transvestite dandy, while Cliff Richard and Michael Jackson, eternally and enigmatically juvenile, have become sanitised versions of Dorian Gray. Sir Cliff, of course, has no need of an incriminating portrait upstairs: God, not the devil, has kept him fresh. Jacko relies on cosmetic surgery to dispose of the physiological evidence, and maintains a complexion of vanilla-coloured cleanliness by altering the pigmentation of his skin.
In the BBC profile, Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys remarks that Wilde the liberator presided over the birth of the modern world. As it happened, the modern revolution went astray, and the soul of man did not flourish (as Wilde hoped it would) under socialism. During his own fin de sicle, Wilde wearily foresaw the fin du monde, and now that the 20th century is itself moribund, his misgivings are confirmed.
In Brian Gilberts forthcoming film Wilde, Stephen Fry plays the plump, woebegone wit in decline. Though the set-dressers and costume-makers have meticulously recreated the 1890s, Gilberts Wilde is a parable for the 1990s. It even demonises the gutter press, which exulted in the heros misery: a pack of reporters harries Wildes mother after the trial, demanding a statement on her sons disgrace.
Ellmann, paying tribute to Wildes premature modernity, saw him as an evangelist of truth. But Wilde was more interested in lying, which he saw as one of the fine arts, and he did his work of dissimulation so well that we no longer know whether there is any such thing as the truth. The Wilde of the new film is a post- modern poseur, a virtuoso faker. In Julian Mitchells screenplay, his mother explains that The Picture of Dorian Gray is about the masks we wear as faces, and the faces we wear as masks. Bending the genders, Wilde did not merely discover our innate and elastic bisexuality. He began to suspect that identity is an optional, reversible costume. The mask, Mitchell hints, conceals emptiness.
Seeking to undo a judicial wrong, we have legitimised the infidel and outlaw. In the coda to his biography, Ellmann salutes Wilde for being so generous, so amusing, and so right. Its a somewhat depressing fate for a man so pledged to effrontery and (in his refusal to escape before the arresting officer arrived at the Cadogan Hotel) intransigence. Wilde saw himself as an imp of contradiction, and would, I fancy, sooner have been a martyr than a saint.
In any case, just how right was he? Alan Sinfield worries over his legacy in The Wilde Century, a study of the ideological fashion which has replaced Wildes effeteness and teasing effeminacy with the militancy and gym-boosted machismo of the queer movement. Sinfield approves of Wildes camp antics because they served to relativise the binary division of the sexes so stringently policed by the Victorians; he made it possible for Virginia Woolf to argue in 1928 that the stereotypes of masculine and feminine were as fickle and whimsical as psychological moods, and like Wilde speculating about the master- mistress addressed in the sonnets to praise Shakespeare as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind.
Wildes affectation of indolence also seems politically correct, despite its reliance on a private income: Sinfield considers that he was mocking the dreary productive regime of Victorian industry. It is awfully hard work doing nothing, sighs Algate in The Importance of Being Earnest. How cruelly apt that Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour which meant toiling pointlessly on a treadmill in Reading jail.
Wilde revered beauty because it was useless. This was in itself a political gesture, a conscientious objection to Victorian values. A starchy matron in Gilberts Wilde comments that: The Empire was not built by men like Bosie Douglas. If you disapprove of empires, that is enough to vindicate the lazy, decorative Bosie.
Sinfield longs to read the same-sex subculture of the gay cruising-ground as a solvent of class distinctions. Wilde antagonised society by recruiting partners from the urban proletariat. At his trial, he presented this ecumenism as proof of his social sympathies. But did he really value those street-arabs and valets for their conversation? To suborn social inferiors might be seen as imperialism by other means. Christopher Isherwood, on the prowl in the Berlin boy bars during the Thirties, likened himself to a trader in the jungle, with his nubile prey as the natives. At least he had the tact, unlike Wilde, to handicap himself and to decolonise the savages: as a foreigner, he was at a disadvantage in this metropolitan wilderness, and the mercenary lads on sale were better than he was at haggling.
Wilde made homosexuality visible. The sodomite, as Michel Foucault put it in his History of Sexuality, had been a temporary aberration; now the homosexual emerged as a species, the possessor like Maud Allen with her trumpeting proboscis of an indiscreet anatomy. How creditable a specimen of the species he helped define was Wilde? Stephen Frys arch and tortuous preface to Mitchells Wilde screenplay suggests some troubling answers. Fry grimaces that his pudgy body disqualifies him from playing Hamlet or James Bond. Long before he was cast in the film, he knew that Oscar Wilde was one of the few major parts I might be lucky enough to be offered.
Sinfield concedes that it is hard to be queer without a model. Wilde, however, is not the most reassuring of exemplars, and Frys commentary enlists him as a pretext for the actors own unease and self- dislike. It doesnt help matters that Fry himself flunked the moral test set for Wilde in the film. Wildes Irish mother orders him not to abscond to France before his arrest, which would be the English thing to do; she emboldens him to stay and fight the Philistines. Fry, with one more self-disgusted wince, recalls that he did the English thing when he walked out of Simon Grays play Cell Mates and disappeared to Belgium. His disgrace, he admits, was farcical, not tragic like Wildes.
On the cover of Sinfields book, Wilde sheds his aesthetic attire velvet jackets with cambric ruffs, mauve gloves clasping bouquets of green carnations and dons instead a plain white OutRage T-shirt which informs passers-by that he is queer as fuck. He doesnt look happy in his new uniform, and his pursed lips might be dissociating him from the unembarrassed blatancy of the message.
Erotically, Wilde now seems wanly antiquated. In the film, he studies Bosies inviolate bum while reciting Salomes rhapsodic address to the body of the Baptist, white like the snows that lie on the mountains safely out of reach, and chillingly anti-aphrodisiac. Wilde attempted to platonise and idealise his addictive relationship with Bosie, but his efforts to separate the worshipful spirit from the grubby, needy body reveal how little he understood what Georges Bataille the surrealist who acclaimed the ribald, dangerous force of sex, which helps us to shed the genteel decorum of humanism called the deep seated unity of our nature.
The sexual avantgardists who came after Wilde rejected his fond quest for true love. The pimply Piccadilly Circus hookers who blackmailed him are contemptible creatures, shamed in the film by Frys ironic nonchalance. Jean Genet, however, admired the disdainful separatism of the criminal underworld, in which thieves and murderers, like Nietzschean apostates, organise a forbidden universe. That secret realm became the gay ghetto, a pornographic Arcady closed down by the Aids epidemic.
In New York, the Continental Baths were awash with Jungs oceanic feeling of merger and submergence, even though no one bathed (except perhaps post-coitally), while downtown in the meat-packing district the customers of a club called the Mineshaft groped through dark tunnels of a carnal catacomb.
Gilberts film, incidentally, begins with Wildes descent into a real mineshaft, during his lecture tour in Colorado in 1882. It is not an experience he relishes: he likens it to a tour of hell, and it prefigures his later downfall.
Wilde fantasised about ephebic slim things, white-skinned and golden-haired like angels. What would he have thought of Allen Ginsbergs request in 1956 to be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists or skewered by the sword of a blonde angel on the sweaty mattress of a bath-house? Wilde lacked the physique, and the personality, for a leather jacket.
A sphinx carved by Jacob Epstein rears over Wildes grave in the Pre Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Wilde described a poker-faced servant in one of his plays as a sphinx without a secret. Epsteins heraldic monster does have a secret: its rampant penis, standing to attention. From time to time, pilgrims chop off the organ and carry it away as a fetish, a symbolic souvenir of Wildes own body. (Likewise, the tabloids gloatingly claimed that Stephen Frys runaway member had to be taped to his tummy during love scenes, for fear that its nuzzlings might incommode Jude Law, who plays Bosie.)
Poor Wilde might have smiled acidly to find himself the subject of a phallic cult. He was no satyr. He sentimentalised Greek love but flinched from what the contact ads refer to as the Greek mode of love-making, and made do with intercrural [sic] intercourse (which, if you ask me, is neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat). In the film, he looks on disconsolately while the more vigorous Bosie fucks a pick- up, then serves them champagne.
While in Paris acolytes steal successive versions of Wildes willy, in Britain he has been gelded in another, even more disabling way. In 1995, he acquired his own stained-glass window in Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey. Now Gilberts lavish, handsome film mummifies Wilde by presenting his life as a costume drama, enacted on the streets of a London whose tarmac has been muffled by a skin of ersatz rubber cobblestones. The British heritage industry has finally deemed him respectable. That is the deadliest emasculation of all.
— Peter Conrad teaches at Oxford University. He is the author of Imagining America