The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
by Neil McKenna
(Century)
Irish novelist Colm TóibÃÂn recently published a non-fiction book called Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar, in which he profiles and examines a variety of gay writers and artists, kicking off, naturally, with Oscar Wilde. But TóibÃÂn, a gay writer who only began to include gay themes in his fiction with his third novel, is ambivalent about seeing such people as primarily defined by their sexuality. Love in a Dark Time, he says, is ”about gay figures for whom being gay seemed to come second in their public lives … But in their private lives, in their own spirit, the laws of desire changed everything and made all the difference.”
For Wilde, of course, the private became notoriously public, and for another of TóibÃÂn’s subjects, Roger Casement, his ”private” life led to his death. The state, in both cases, was not concerned with issues of private vs public; in fact, the definiton of private vs public is one constructed at the state’s convenience. The ”laws of desire” do not float freely above the strictures of the state.
It is clear, in any case, that making a false division between Wilde’s private and public lives makes a nonsense of both. Jonathan Dollimore certainly saw this in his Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, which demonstrates convincingly how Wilde’s personal ”inversion” (an old name for homosexuals) informed his perverse sense of humour and the witty inversions of values upon which he based his epigrammatic style.
One of the chief virtues of Neil McKenna’s book, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, is that it shows, in factual biographical terms, how utterly Wilde was shaped by his sexuality. Even Richard Ellmann’s great biography skates over Wilde’s sex life and rather downplays its driving force in Wilde’s often puzzling actions.
Why, for instance, when it became clear that the tide was turning against him in his series of trials, and that he faced imprisonment, did he not flee England? He could easily have done so, but remained to become a martyr. Ellmann sees this decision as primarily political, and it was, but he does not see, as McKenna so clearly does, that it was a question of sexual politics. Wilde viewed persecution for one’s sexual tastes as inherently political; he was consciously a martyr for ”the Cause”, as he and others called it, of sexual freedom. (McKenna is also able to tell us why Wilde, who was suprisingly open about his sexual activities, objected to being called a sodomite.)
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde draws on information hitherto unavailable or ignored by writers on Wilde, including the personal diaries of associates and the recently rediscovered records of the trials of Wilde and the young men he had sex with — and there were so many of them! One would have had no idea from Ellmann, for instance, that Wilde and his troublesome beloved Lord Alfred Douglas (who coined the phrase ”the Love that dare not speak its name”), enjoyed quite so rich, varied and busy a sex life. Or that, after his release from prison into exile, Wilde continued avidly to pursue young men, and caught so many.
McKenna is clearly an excellent researcher, and the book is marred only by an annoying tendency to refer to Wilde as ”Oscar”, which sounds condescending and overly familiar, and by an unfortunate proclivity for cliché — on the first page of the foreword, for example, we are told that ”Oscar’s odyssey to find his true sexual self” was ”a journey of self-discovery with more than its fair share of love and lust, joy and despair, comedy and tragedy”. That’s five clichés in one sentence, by my count.
But if one believes that to ignore the sexual and thus inner emotional life of a biographical subject is to provide an incomplete picture of that person, McKenna has certainly corrected the omissions that have fragmented portraits of Wilde. With this book, one feels, we at last see the whole man.