Literary Giants Literary Catholics (47 page)

     The feet, that lately ran so fast

     To meet desire, are soothly sealed;

     The eyes, that were so often cast

     On vanity, are touched and healed.

49

_____

A Century after His Death, Is the Real Oscar Wilde Finally Emerging from the Shadows
?

A
CYNIC, WROTE OSCAR WILDE
, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Today, more than a hundred years after Wilde’s death on 30 November 1900, the cynics are having a field day. An article in the business section of the
Daily Telegraph
announced solemnly that paying huge sums for Wilde memorabilia was a “sensible investment”. It cited the recent sale of a catalog of Wilde’s household possessions, printed in the wake of the bankruptcy proceedings following his imprisonment in 1895, which had been sold at this year’s London Book Fair for £15,000. The same item, auctioned at Christie’s in 1981, had fetched only £2,500. Any letter of Wilde’s, however trivial the contents, will sell for at least £1,000, and many change hands for between £10,000 and £20,000. A printed copy of Wilde’s early play
Vera
, with extensive handwritten notes penned by Wilde as he watched an early rehearsal, sold for a staggering £50,000 at the London Book Fair. And the list continues. A questionnaire filled in by Wilde when he was at Oxford sold for £23,000; an inscribed cigarette case allegedly given to Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas sold for £14,000 despite its doubtful authenticity; and two letters from Wilde to Philip Griffiths, described as one of his lovers, reached £16,000 at Christie’s. The letters to Griffiths were themselves innocuous, and there is no evidence that Wilde ever had a sexual relationship with him, but the letters sold nonetheless. Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, is exasperated by the growing cult surrounding his grandfather, but he adds philosophically that he could “appreciate the humor of questionable pieces of memorabilia from Saint Oscar the Sinner being offered to a credulous public at absurd prices and be proud of my ancestor’s ability to take his revenge a century later.”

A spokesman for the booksellers who sold the catalog for £15,000 believed that purchasers of Wilde memorabilia were motivated by “Wilde’s magic” and believed that the “more they spend, the closer they get” to its source.

One wonders what Wilde himself, the subject of all this idolatry, would have made of it all. It is likely, if his own words are to be believed, that he would have been horrified by the way in which the value of his art had been debased by the sordid cult that has risen from the ashes of the scandal surrounding his private life. “You knew what my Art was to me,” Wilde wrote from Reading jail to Lord Alfred Douglas, “the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh-water to red wine”. Clearly, Wilde believed that his true self, his true value, was to be found in his art. By contrast, many of his modern admirers, Judaslike, have betrayed their master with a kiss and have sold his art for the thirty pieces of silver with which they are purchasing the endless ephemera. According to Wilde’s own criteria, those who believe that they are closer to his “magic” when they clutch a cigarette case of dubious origin instead of opening the pages of one of his books have succeeded only in changing the finest of red wine into the foulest of marsh water. With “friends” like these, the ghost of Wilde could be tempted to mutter plaintively, who needs enemies?

A century after his death, Wilde is still caught between the prurient and the puritan. To the prurient he is a war cry; to the puritan he is a warning. One betrays him with a kiss, the other with a curse. Now, as ever, Wilde is faced with an unwelcome choice between Judas and the Pharisee. George Bernard Shaw, in his preface to the 1938 edition of Frank Harris’ biography of Wilde, admitted that he had “somewhat Pharisaically” summed up Wilde’s last days in Paris as those of “an unprofitable drunkard and swindler”. Yet, he argued, those of Wilde’s admirers who had objected to this description of their hero had forgotten “that Wilde’s permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to the police news.”

Sadly, the cult surrounding Wilde’s “transient notoriety” has a lingering persistence. Happily, however, there are a growing band of Wilde’s admirers who are seeking him where he wishes to be sought—in his art.

John Burrows, artistic director of the Bare and Ragged Theatre, based at Stratford-upon-Avon, organized a Festival of Wilde at the Edinburgh Fringe. Apart from the stage dramatization of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, which the Bare and Ragged Theatre had staged for the past six years, always to sellout crowds, a specially devised play, entitled
Out of the Depths
, was also performed. This was an “impressionistic celebration of Wilde’s art”, concentrating on Wilde’s literary genius while downplaying the “transient notoriety” of the court case, which is only “vaguely mentioned”.

The best-selling author Adrian Plass, writing in the
Christian Her
ald, compared Wilde to G. K. Chesterton. “I think my own fascination with these writers . . . is something to do with sensing that there is a deep desire to be good and lovable beneath the public displays of personal style and crackling paradox.” Although Plass admits that “this is much more clearly evident in the case of Chesterton”, he emphasizes “the conventional morality at the heart of Wilde’s art, even in such pieces as
Salome
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, both vilified as obscene and decadent in his lifetime.” Plass continues in words that closely parallel those of Shaw:

The soul of Oscar Wilde, continually reaching for and retreating from the Catholic church, is to be found in its purest form in his prose, his poetry and his plays, rather than in those things which ambushed the pursuit of his deepest instincts.

Wilde’s deepest instincts, those that invariably triumphed in his art even when “ambushed” in his life, were profoundly spiritual, not carnal. This spiritual dimension was emphasized by another writer, Mary Kenny. Commenting on Wilde’s reception into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, Kenny drew parallels with other leading Decadent writers in England and France who “took refuge in Catholicism”. It seems that for Wilde, as for so many of his circle, the way of Decadence became the Way of the Cross.

A further twist to the Catholic dimension in Wilde’s art emerged from deep within the very heart of Rome. A report in the
Irish Independent
stated that the Vatican had “rehabilitated Oscar Wilde on the eve of the centenary of his death, praising the turn to spiritual values and ‘understanding of God’s love’ that followed Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading gaol.” Writing in
La Civilta Cattolica
, a Vatican-backed Jesuit quarterly, Father Antonio Spadaro said that Wilde had seen into the depths of his own soul after a lifetime of “degradation, vanity and frivolity”. In his last works, such as
De Profundis
and
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, he had made “an implicit journey of faith”, wrote Father Spadaro.

Father Spadaro could have added that the same implicit affirmation of faith is present in many of Wilde’s earlier works, such as his fairy stories, his controversial novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and many of his plays, particularly in the challenging symbolism of
Salome
.

Perhaps the last word should belong to Wilde himself. “We are all in the gutter,” says Lord Darlington in
Lady Windermere’s Fan
, “but some of us are looking at the stars.” To look for Wilde in the gutter, whether to wallow with him in the “marsh-water” or to point the finger of self-righteous scorn, is to miss the point. Those wishing a deeper understanding of this most enigmatic of men should not look
at
him in the gutter but
with
him at the stars.

50

_____

Unmasking Oscar Wilde’s Opposition to “Pathological” Gay Marriage

I
T’S FUNNY HOW URBAN MYTHS
can mask reality. Take, for instance, the peculiar case of Oscar Wilde. Ask the average modern intellectual what he knows about Wilde, and he will probably tell you that he was a brilliant artist who was persecuted for his homosexuality and deserves to be remembered as a martyr for the cause of sexual liberation who was sacrificed on the altar of puritanical Victorian values. Ask a homosexual intellectual, and he might even go so far as to describe Wilde as a “gay icon”, a poster child for the homosexual movement who has inspired many young men to “come out of the closet”. Such is the myth. The reality is very different.

If we take the trouble to unmask the myths surrounding Wilde, we discover a man who is very different from the one imagined by our self-deluded moderns. We find, in fact, a brilliant artist (the moderns get that part of the story right, at least) who was never at peace with his homosexuality, who never managed to “come out of the closet” and who, when at last faced with the reality of his situation, described his homosexual predilections as his “pathology”.

Let’s play the daring game of removing the masks of self-deception. Let’s dare to look reality in the eye, however unpleasant, ugly—or beautiful—it might be. Let’s declare ourselves liberated from outmoded forms of repressed truthfulness. Let’s whisper the truth that dare not speak its name. In short, let’s face facts.

The first thing we must know about Wilde is that he was at war with himself. Wilde the would-be saint and Wilde the woeful sinner were in deadly conflict, one with the other. In this he was no different from the rest of us. Throughout his life, even at those times when he was at his most “decadent”, he retained a deep love for the Person of Christ and a lasting reverence for the Catholic Church. In this, indeed, he differs from many, if not most, of us. Certainly he differs in this from most of those active homosexuals who seek to claim Wilde as one of their own.

Wilde almost converted to Catholicism as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Dublin; he almost converted as an undergraduate at Oxford. There were no doctrinal differences preventing him from being received into the Church. He believed everything the Church believed and even spoke eloquently and wittily in defense of Catholic dogmas such as the Immaculate Conception. The only reason he failed to follow the logic of his Catholic convictions was a fear of being disinherited by his father if he did so. Years later, after his fall from favor following the scandal surrounding his homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, he spoke wistfully of his reluctant decision to turn his back on the Church. “Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic”, he confided to a journalist. “The artistic side of the Church would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long.” Wilde would be received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, an event that not only meant that his particular “fairy story” would end happily ever after but that, through the healing power of the Last Rites, would finally cure him of his “degeneracies”.

In truth, however, Wilde never completely turned his back on the Church. Throughout his life, and particularly through the medium of his art, he continued to reveal his love for Christ and the Catholic Church. His poetry exhibits either a selfless love for Christ or, at its darkest, a deep self-loathing in the face of the ugliness of his own sinfulness. His short stories are almost always animated by a deep Christian morality, with “The Selfish Giant” deserving a timeless accolade as one of the finest Christian fairy stories ever written. His plays are more than merely comedies or tragedies; they are morality plays in which virtue is vindicated and vice vanquished. His only novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, is a masterpiece of Victorian fiction, the overriding moral of which is that to kill the conscience is to kill the soul.

“You knew what my Art was to me,” Wilde wrote plaintively to Lord Alfred Douglas, “the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as mere marsh-water to red wine”. These words, written from prison to the man who was largely responsible for the scandal that caused his downfall, show the extent to which Wilde knew that the Christianity expressed through his art was far more important than the sinful passions of the flesh to which he had succumbed. In the same letter to Douglas, he also referred to the homosexuality that had been the bane of his life during the 1890s as his “pathology”, his sickness.

Is this the voice of a “sexual liberator”? Hardly. It is the voice of one who had finally freed himself from the slavery of sin. Far from being a sexual liberator, Wilde’s life climaxed with a liberation from his sexuality or, at least, a liberation from the slavish addiction to the lustful manifestation of his sexuality.

Would Wilde have supported “gay marriage”? Hardly. He would not have considered it either “gay” or a “marriage”. He would have called it what it is: a “pathology”.

51

_____

A
S WITH MOST THINGS
that claim to be modern, science fiction is not really modern at all. It is as old as mythology. Take, for example, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. It has all the ingredients of science fiction. Two men, a father and son, develop new technology that enables them to fly. The older and wiser man, Daedalus, cautions his young and impetuous son against taking the technology too far. Icarus ignores the warning. Putting too much faith in technology, he falls to his death.

Similarly, science fiction is not so much postmodern as postmedieval. One need look no further than Saint Thomas More’s
Utopia
for a vision of a strange world, unknown to man, where alien people do things very differently from the way things are done in our world. Two hundred years later, in
Gulliver’s Travels
, Jonathan Swift wrote about an intrepid aquanaut who journeys to strange microscopic and macroscopic worlds, who encounters weird horselike creatures enamored of platonic philosophy and who visits strange islands that float above the world. A hundred years after Swift, Mary Shelley gave us
Frankenstein
, a tale in which modern science meets ancient necromancy in a chilling embrace. Again, however, Shelley’s tale owes an unpayable debt to the past. Dr. Frankenstein could, after all, have been called Dr. Faustenstein.