Oscar Wilde's Collected Letters - reading lots of Wilde

Recently, I finished off a jolly year-long project of reading not all of Oscar Wilde’s writing but most of it, the largest proportion, 1,200 pages – big pages – on The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (2000, eds. Merlin Holland – Wilde’s grandson! – and Rupert Hart-Davis).

Two little books of what he called fairy tales and a similarly short collection of comic stories, including “The Canterville Ghost.”  Salomé (1892) and the four great comedies (1892-5) written at the height of Wilde’s fame, but not a pair of early verse* plays which sound unreadable (“The Duchess is unfit for publication – the only one of my works that comes under that category” writes Wilde in 1898, p. 1,091 of Letters).  The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ricard Ellmann, a huge help for understanding his period, even if his ideas are not much other than watery Walter Pater – but funnier, crucially funnier.  Almost no early poems.  The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) for the third time, which honestly might be enough for a lifetime.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), by contrast, still seems endlessly rereadable.  I had the luck this year to see the touring company of the American Shakespeare Center perform it, too, young actors throwing themselves into Wilde’s nonsense.  It is the purest distillation of Wilde’s personality into literary form, with the stage business and social commentary of the earlier plays eliminated, replaced with pure Wilde, somehow distilled into a half dozen separate characters.

I had assumed that Wilde’s tragic crash, his legal troubles and imprisonment soon after the play opened, cut off the creation of more like it, so it was fascinating to read – between the lines – that Wilde did not really know where the play had come from and had no plans to write another like it, but rather more in the mode of The Ideal Husband (1895) and A Woman of No Importance (1893).

Who knows what might have happened.  Wilde’s creativity was destroyed by his farcical imprisonment for homosexuality, along with his social standing, income, family, and health.  Who knows what works Lord Alfred Douglas, the odious, sponging “Bosie,” and his idiotic feud with his repulsive father, cost Wilde.

Although he barely published after his imprisonment, Wilde did not stop writing - letters, I mean.  Fully half of the surviving Collected Letters are from after the trial, from prison – including the long self-explanation De Profundis (1905) – and then from the Normandy coast, or Paris, or Naples, or Switzerland, where Wilde finds himself trapped with the “tedious and unbearable” Harold Mellor, who is rich and pays for everything, but is also a miser.  “In the evening he reads The Times, or sleeps – both audibly” (1899, p. 1,134).  Someone should write a play about Wilde and Mellor.

This last half of Letters reads, as they say, like a novel.  It has terrific tragicomic narrative drive.  Wilde himself is comic; everything else is tragic.  Wilde struggles with his writing, money, depression.  He becomes a sponge, preferring the indignities of constantly begging for money to those of living on a budget.  Once in a while, he goes back to Bosie – oh no, don’t do it Oscar – he’ll break your heart again.  And he does.  Poor Oscar Wilde.

Anyway, this was all well worth reading, regardless of how little I have to say about it.

* Oops, one is verse - see comments.

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him - looking for Wilde in Dorian Gray

My problem with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) had been that one major character, Lord Henry Wotton, speaks in the voice of Oscar Wilde, the voice that Wilde would soon use so effectively in his great comedies, the voice of Wilde the celebrity.  Jokes and paradoxes.

“A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”

“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details.  Details are always vulgar.”

That stuff.  Sometimes really funny, sometimes chaff.  I fell into the trap of taking Wilde’s voice as representative of Wilde the author, the persona as the artist.

In A Woman of No Importance (1893), the single most Wilde-like man is openly a rake, and the villain of the play.  His name is Lord Illingworth, for pity’s sake.  Wilde sometimes pairs him with a different kind of comic figure, a woman who has no idea what he talking about.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

LADY HUNSTANTON. Ah! That quite does for me.  I haven’t a word to say.  You and I, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot, are behind the age.  We can’t follow Lord Illingworth.  Too much care was taken with our education, I am afraid.  Too have been well brought up is a great drawback now-a-days.  It shuts one out from so much.  (Act III)

Wilde repeats this joke several times, always after an especially empty quip of Illingworth’s, every one of which is, I will bet, a line that Wilde himself used at parties.  He is puncturing his own persona.

In Dorian Gray, he does it in a couple of different ways.  After the horror story gets going, Lord Wotton reappears after a long absence, and is given a long stretch of bantering with a new character.  What was fresh and lively in the first chapter is sour and tedious, and out of place, after the murder and sordidness of the book’s middle.  Now this seems like a deliberate effect of Wilde’s.  But even earlier, right from the beginning, he was doing something that makes me curious.  The line up above about the natural pose is followed closely by:

The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves.  In the grass, white daisies were tremulous.  (Ch. 1)

Similarly:

“I am quite sure I shall understand it,” he replied, gazing intently at the little golden white-feathered disk, “and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.”

The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air.

Perhaps the narrator is introducing a pause while the reader laughs.  Or the narrator’s attention turns to the flowers, away from the vapid line.  The overcooked lyricism of the lines (“tremulous”) is suspicious.  If the details are always vulgar, well, what about these?

Now I am more inclined to find Wilde in the painter Basil Hallward, earnest, thoughtful, so in love with Dorian Gray’s beauty that he magically preserves it, a pure artist:

“Art is always more abstract than we fancy.  Form and colour tell us of form and colour – that is all.  It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.”  (Ch. 9)

Which could itself be a paradox or misdirection.  It survives for other reasons, but this is a novel about aesthetics.

What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows.

When The Picture of Dorian Gray was serialized, it was widely and snarkily reviewed.  Wilde engaged, with a couple of the reviewers, leading to exchanges of letters that are worth reading.  I mean Wilde’s – come to think of it, maybe I should read the other side, but only Wilde’s letters are included in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (ed. Richard Ellmann, 1969).

The publicity was obviously good for all parties involved.

The letters contain a number of Wilde’s aesthetic principles, cleanly stated.  “The supreme pleasure in literature is to realise the non-existent,” that sort of thing (p. 240).

Dorian Gray magically acquires eternal youth and beauty, and thus enters into a life of sensuality and vice.  Setting aside the homemade perfumes and stamp collecting and so on, many readers, including this one, have been puzzled by the vagueness of Dorian’s vices, at least before we watch him commit a murder. 

It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.  His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret. (Ch. 11)

Brothels and opium would be the usual candidates, but in his response to the Scots Observer, Wilde is clear:

To keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story.  I claim, sir, that he has succeeded.  Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.  What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows.  He who finds them has brought them.  (248)

So the novel is different for each reader.  In my case, that “low den” is a apparently a fried chicken shack, or a taqueria, or maybe a barbecue stand.  Dorian gets to eat and eat and it only his picture that suffers, while I have to be virtuous.  Wilde to the newspaper:

But, alas! they will find that it is a story with a moral.  And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.  (240)

So true.  Other readers, other renunciations, or excesses.

The reason the exact nature of the vice does not matter, and why there is all that stuff about perfumes and tapestries, is that the moral of the novel is not really what Wilde claims here, but is rather a warning about living an over-aestheticized life, just like in his earlier fairy tales, where birds and statues martyred themselves for a beauty that was ignored or obliterated.  Dorian’s first crime, early in the novel, is cruelty to Sibyl Vane, a young Shakespearean actress, who he wants to marry when he thinks she is good but dumps when he discovers she is bad.  He is in love with Juliet, not the actual person.

“The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.  Mourn for Ophelia, if you like.  Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled…  But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane.  She was less real than they are.”

There was a silence.  The evening darkened in the room.  Noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden.  The colours faded wearily out of things.  (Ch. 8)

Even though it is written in Wilde’s own voice, Wilde thinks this idea, especially the end of the dialogue, is monstrous, aesthetics as crime.  The curious thing is the authorial commentary that immediately follows.  I will try to follow that thread tomorrow.

Then he turned his attention to embroideries - the collage of The Picture of Dorian Gray

With some new context, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) for the third time.  Three times is a lot for me, especially for a second-rate books like Wilde’s only novel, or collage fiction, or whatever it is.  But I had new information to bring to the book – Wilde’s criticism, his letters, especially some amusing sparring with newspaper reviewers which is instantly identifiable as what some of us now call “clickbait,” and finally J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), a novel that is alluded to at tedious length.

The book does look quite a bit different to me now, so I suppose this exercise has been a success.

The parts of the collage are as follows:

1. The two page “Preface,” a prose poem in aphorism form.  “All art is quite useless,” etc.  I used to think the Preface was meant sincerely, an error on my part.

2. A penny dreadful horror story, a good one, with a murder and so on.

3. Passages stolen pretty cleanly from Huysmans, mostly in the hilarious Chapter 11, declared unreadable by many good readers, in which young, beautiful Dorian, given license to live a life of pure, consequence-free pleasure, vice and evil, spends his time as follows:

And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the East…

At another time, he devoted himself to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts  in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass, and charmed, or feigned to charm, great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders…

Then he turned his attention to embroideries…

And so on.  “Then he became obsessed with quilting, and won several ribbons at the county fair.  Next, it was canning, especially spicy bread-and-butter pickles.”  Terrifying, the depths of Dorian Gray’s evil.

4. Prose versions of the paradox and banter that will soon, beginning with Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), form the core of an extraordinary series of plays.  Although often hilarious in the novel, this kind of dialogue is set free in the plays.  Wilde frequently loots his own novel, stealing the best jokes, and also some other jokes, and distributing them among the plays.  E.g. from Dorian Gray,

“Men have educated us.”

“But not explained you.”

“Describe us as a sex,” was her challenge.

“Sphinxes without secrets.”  (Ch. 17)

And from A Woman of No Importance (1893):

Lord Illingworth: What do you call a bad man?

Mrs. Allonby: The sort of man who admires innocence.

Lord Illingworth:  And a bad woman?

Mrs. Allonby:  Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets tired of.

Lord Illingworth:  You are severe – on yourself.

Mrs. Allonby:  Define us as a sex.

Lord Illingworth:  Sphinxes without secrets.  (Act I)

Apparently that line is so good it counts as a scored point in the banter duel.

It is to Wilde’s credit that he recognized that #4 was his great innovation but belonged in another form.  A couple of years later, the plays would make Wilde rich and (even more) famous.  A couple of years later than that, he was breaking rocks in prison.

As he is no longer beautiful, he is no longer useful, said the Art Professor - Oscar Wilde's fairy tales

Simpler Pastimes runs her Classic Children’s Literature event in April.  That’s today!

I have read or am reading several books that could count.  The two I will poke at today are Oscar Wilde’s two little books of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891).

The earlier book is shorter, sweeter, and written at a lower reading level.  The model for the fairy tales is Hans Christian Andersen, not the Grimms or other folklorists, so the tone is light but sad, oh so sad.  “The Happy Prince,” in particular, about a statue – it’s really a statue of a prince – and a swallow who sacrifice themselves for others hits the Andersen model perfectly.

The stories are mostly about selfishness and sacrifice.  They are perhaps a little monotonous.  Do good for others (“The Happy Prince,” “The Selfish Giant”), but be careful about, for example, committing suicide in the name of beauty (“The Nightingale and the Rose”) or being selfless in the service of a blowhard parasite (“The Devoted Friend”).  The final story, “The Remarkable Rocket,” is also about a blowhard, who is ironically a firework who fizzles.  Two stories  in a row about chatty blowhards – maybe one too many, although Wilde’s pompous asses are funny, as if Wilde is practicing towards his greater works, which he is.

“Idleness is a great sin, and I certainly don’t like any of my friends to be idle or sluggish...  Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain.”  (“The Devoted Friend,” 75)

Both lines could be dropped into The Importance of Being Earnest without much work.  Similarly, from the Rocket:

“What right have you to be happy?  You should be thinking about others.  in fact, you should be thinking about me.  I am always thinking about myself, and I expect everybody else to do the same.  That is what is called sympathy.  It is a beautiful virtue, and I possess it in a high degree.”  (“The Remarkable Rocket,” 98-9)

Good stuff, but “The Happy Prince” doesn’t need it to succeed as a fairy tale.

The later book, A House of Pomegranates, is a stranger, darker thing.  Wilde seems to have decided that what fairy tales mostly lacked was long, elaborate descriptions.  I am a fan of such things, and Wilde’s are mostly quite good, but structurally, boy is he wrong.  The longest story, “The Fisherman and His Soul,” particularly suffers from a too-muchness, plus it is just a hodgepodge of other stories – “The Little Mermaid” mashed with Peter Schlemihl and other stories.

“The Birthday of the Infanta” is more successful in this regard.  The long descriptions of the princess’s birthday party, or rooms and gardens  in the Spanish palace, or a woodland idyll, are part of the beauty / ugliness contrast that is the heart of the story.

The purple butterflies fluttered about with gold dust on their wings, visiting each flower in turn; the little lizards crept out of the crevices of the wall, and lay basking in the white glare, and the pomegranates split and cracked with the heat, and showed their bleeding red hearts.  Even the pale yellow lemons, that hung in such profusion from the mouldering trellis and along the dim arcades, seemed to have caught a richer colour form the wonderful sunlight, and the magnolia trees opened their great globe-like blossoms of folded ivory, and filled the air with a sweet heavy perfume.  (“The Birthday of the Infanta,” 31-2).

Imagine more of this, more colors, more perfumes, a lot more.  Maybe too much.  It’s like the much-loathed Chapter 11 of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Huysmans parody, compressed into a fairy tale.

Both this story and “The Young King” surprised me by their critique of beauty along social and ethical grounds, some of which I believe is borrowed from William Morris, although there is plenty of that in the earlier book, too.  “’As he is no longer beautiful, he is no longer useful,’ said the Art Professor at the University” (“The Happy Prince,” 23).  Both books of fairy tales are moral books, and also well written.

It was quite unbearable - an Oscar Wilde ghost and some other stuff

Alongside whatever else I have been doing, I have been reading Oscar Wilde, both The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde and The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, but in snatches, as the mood strikes me, so the books never seem to move to my “Currently Reading” list.  I read a book review or a couple of months of letters and set the books aside.  The pace seems to suit the subject.

I am at October 1888, roughly, a strange period for my received idea of Wilde.  He is married, has two infant children at home, and is the editor of a magazine titled Woman’s World.  Most of his letters are requests for contributions – how about 4,000 words on Concord, Massachusetts, with photos, or 2,500 on Goethe’s house, with photos?  Woman’s World sounds terrific.

Wilde’s wife, Constance Lloyd, sounds terrific, too.  “[A] grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her” (Letter to Lillie Langtry, Jan. 22, 1884).

Just before the possibility of the editorship arose, Wilde had begin publishing comic fiction, just four stories that I know of.  All were originally published in 1887 but not collected into a book until 1891 as Lord Savile’s Crime & Other Stories, I presume as a quick cash-in on the success of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).  The two shortest stories seemed like trivia, but “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” is a good bit of vicious fun, and “The Canterville Ghost” is something more than that, a parody of ghost stories so forceful and thorough that I am surprised people still continued to write them.

This is Lady Windermere, a minor character in “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.”  “She looked wonderfully beautiful with her grand ivory throat, her large blue forget-me-not-eyes, and her heavy coils of golden hair.”  Kinda funny given that letter.  Great artists are masters of recycling.

In “The Canterville Ghost,” an American minister and his family move into an English haunted house.  The Americans are either firm in their beliefs, or gross materialists, or both.  The first encounter with a haunting, a recurring blood-stain:

‘This is all nonsense,’ cried Washington Otis; ‘Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time,’ and before the terrified housekeeper could interfere he had fallen upon his knees, and was rapidly scouring the floor with a small stick of what looked like a black cosmetic.  In a few moments, no trace of the blood-stain could be seen.

‘I knew Pinkerton would do it,’ he exclaimed triumphantly…

Cold Comfort Farm owes a lot to “The Canterville Ghost.”  The great moment in the story, though, is when the point of view switches from the Americans to the poor, confounded ghost, who first feels “grossly insulted,” then frustrated, and finally openly terrified of these horrible modern people.  The ghost is an artist; the descriptions of his greatest hauntings are high points of the story:

With the enthusiastic egotism of the true artist he went over his most celebrated performances, and smiled bitterly to himself as he recalled to mind his last appearance as ‘Red Reuben, or the Strangled Babe,’ his début as ‘Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor,’ and the furore he had excited one lovely June evening merely by playing ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground.  And after all this, some wretched modern Americans were to come and offer him the Rising Sun Lubricator, and throw pillows at his head!  It was quite unbearable.

I wish I had read “The Canterville Ghost” twenty-five years ago and feel resentment towards every short story anthologist who failed to include it in whatever short story anthologies I happened to read.

Oh, what precious nonsense! - reading Gilbert and Sullivan

The one thing I knew about W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operetta Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride (1881) is that its central character, Reginald Bunthorne the Fleshly Poet, was a caricature of young Oscar Wilde.  So the one thing I knew was half wrong.

The flock of women in love with Bunthorne ask that he read his new poem.

BUNTHORNE.  Shall I?

ALL THE DRAGOONS.  No!

[The Dragoons are 1) in love  with the women enraptured by the poet and 2) per a song a few pages earlier, a mixture of Bismarck, Fielding, Thackeray, Thomas Aquinas and Trollope, so sensible prosy fellows]

…

BUN.  It is a wild, weird, fleshly thing; yet very tender, very yearning, very precious.  It is called, “Oh, Hollow! Hollow! Hollow!”

PATIENCE.  Is it a hunting song?  [a joke nearly lost now]

BUN.  A hunting song?  No, it is not a hunting song.  It is the wail of the poet’s heart on discovering that everything is commonplace.  To understand it, cling passionately to one another and think of faint lilies.  (Act I)

So if half wrong, also half right.  Other details clearly identify Bunthorne as if not specifically Dante Gabriel Rossetti at least a paid-in-full pre-Raphaelite, obsessed with phony baloney medievalisms.  But the women “play on lutes, mandolins, etc.” (pre-Raphaelite) but are also “dressed in aesthetic draperies” (rather more Wildean) and think the uniform of the Dragoons should be “made Florentine fourteenth-century” but then “surmounted with something Japanese.”  A little of this, a little of that.

PATIENCE.  Well, it seems to me to be nonsense.

LADY SAPHIR.  Nonsense, yes, perhaps – but, oh, what precious nonsense!

A little self-description there by W. S. Gilbert.  If anyone is wondering why I am reading Patience – and not just that one, but H. M. S. Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879) – which tends to be a little hard on the contribution of Arthur Sullivan, the reason is first that in a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan I only catch about half of the words and second I can linger over the jokes. 

SERGEANT.  No matter; our course is clear.  We must do our best to capture these pirates alone.  It is most distressing to us to be the agents whereby our erring fellow-creatures are deprived of that liberty which is so dear to us all – but we should have thought of that before we joined the Force.

ALL POLICE.  We should!

SERGEANT.  It is too late now!

ALL.  It is!   (The Pirates of Penzance, Act II)

Awfully funny performed, but similarly funny on the page, funny enough to reread immediately.

In other words, I read the plays to read  them.  In practice, they are a pleasure to read.  They are basically forty-page Bab Ballads, illustrations and all.  Sorry, Arthur.

the ennui of not having set the world quite on fire as yet - Wilde becomes Wilde

The Wilde letters I read, running through his 1882 American tour, are before The Importance of Being Earnest, before The Picture of Dorian Gray, before his fairy tales, before his critical essays, before almost everything.  In 1881 Wilde published his first book, Poems, which is, to be polite, and accurate, very much of its time.  He had written his first play, Vera; or, the Nihilists, “a drama on modern Russia” (Letters, p. 96) which, if it had been written by the Wilde of the 1890s would be a great comic masterpiece but was instead written by the Wilde of 1880, a fellow who was still, to be polite, exploring his talents, and is thus dreary twaddle.  The play reached the stage in 1883, where it remained for one week.

A number of Wilde’s letters are to actresses and producers, badgering on about this awful play.  I assume there will be plenty more of this stuff in the Letters, simultaneously tedious and fascinating, when Wilde is at his peak.

Wilde achieved some celebrity, for his talk, his wit, as an Oxford undergraduate.  He was incidentally a first-rate classicist.  Early letters are about cramming, and then about celebrating his First in Greats.  His wit is only lightly present in his letter to his friends.  But of course he is not performing for them the way he would in public.  He is “kill[ing] time and pheasants and the ennui of not having set the world quite on fire as yet” (28 November 1879, 84).  (Young Wilde avidly hunted and fished).

It is amusing, and also a little dull, to watch Wilde hustle.  His obsequious letters  to Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold* accompanying dedication copies of Poems mask what was simultaneously happening at London salons.  Wilde was becoming famous for his jokes and paradoxes, not his mediocre poems, so famous that the London audience for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881) assumed that the Fleshly Poet protagonist was a parody of Wilde, even though he is obviously Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  Gilbert had made an error – the character should have been Wilde, and the audience (and soon enough the director and actor) behaved accordingly.  Wilde was 26.

Soon Wilde is working arm in arm with the Patience producer, on his way to America to simultaneously promote the operetta and himself, performing offstage as a British aesthete and dandy, dragging “a hat-box, a secretary, a dressing-case, a trunk, a portmanteau, and a valet” – “I can’t travel without Balzac and Gautier” (6 July 1882, 175) – all over the United States and Canada.  Thus the lectures on aesthetics to Colorado silver miners.  Thus he finds himself trapped in Topeka, Kansas:

The local poet has just called on me with his masterpiece, a sanguinary lyric of 3000 lines on the Civil War.  The most impassioned part begins thus:
‘Here Mayor Simpson battled bravely with his Fifteenth Kansas Cavalry.’
What am I to do?  (21 April 1882, 165)

In America the Wilde I knew begins to appear in his letters.  The next four hundred pages of letters promise a lot of pleasure.

* And Gladstone!  Do British poets still send their first books to the Prime Minister? “[T]o one who has always loved what is noble and beautiful and true in life and art” blah blah blah yuck (20 July 1881, 113).

Young Oscar Wilde tells jokes

Algernon Swinburne’s letters have been so much fun that I thought I would try out Oscar Wilde’s, which should be even more fun, or at least funnier.  Well, not yet, not quite.  I am reading The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (2000), ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, a book that has 1,230 pages of letters.  I am up to page 192 at this point, when Wilde returns to England from his 1882 American lecture tour, which felt like a good spot for a break.  Wilde’s letters are just beginning to be really funny.  The trip to America practically turned him into Mark Twain.

In England Wilde gave a lecture titled “Impressions of America” (1883) – it is in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde – that is pretty close to stand up comedy.

I had to descend a mine in a rickety bucket in which it was impossible to be graceful.  Having got into the heart of the mountain I had supper, the first course being whisky, the second whisky and the third whisky.

That joke appears in two more versions in the letters, where Wilde was polishing it.

Is this next one even Wilde’s joke?  It feels kind of moldy:

So infinitesimal did I find the  knowledge of Art, west of the Rocky Mountains, that an art patron – one who in his day had been a miner – actually sued the railroad company for damages because the plaster cast of Venus de Milo, which he had imported from Paris, had been delivered minus the arms.  And, what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the damages.

Now this one is pure Wilde:

I was disappointed with Niagara – most people must be disappointed with Niagara.  Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous water fall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life…  To appreciate it really one has to see it from underneath the fall, and to do that it is necessary to be dressed in a yellow oil-skin, which is as ugly as a mackintosh – and I hope none of you ever wear one.

Wilde’s tour was comprehensive.  Griggsville, Illinois.  Leadville, Colorado.  That’s where Wilde went down into the silver mine with the miners who attended his lecture on “the Ethics of Art.”

I read them passages from the autobiography  of Benvenuto Cellini and they seemed much delighted.  I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me.  I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the inquiry “Who shot him”?

Twain at this point would have tightened up the joke, or maybe spread it out, but he of course had twenty years of additional humoristic experience.  Wilde was only 28, 29 when he was in America, lecturing the silver miners and amateur painters on aesthetics and dandyism and the art of the English Renaissance.  Wilde gets funnier later.

Heck of a job I have done writing about Wilde’s letters.

Swinburne dries out - the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type and other edifying subjects

Let’s check in with Algernon Swinburne, the fourth of six volumes of his Letters (1960, ed. Cecil Lang), covering 1877 through 1882.  I have run into a selfish problem.  With two volumes of letters to go, I fear that the bulk of the best ones might be behind me.

Swinburne begins the book as an out of control alcoholic, constantly ill, on the verge of death either from internal complaints or a drunken accident.  His friends and mother conspire against him to move him into the house of his lawyer, agent, nurse, and number one fan Theodore Watts, in order to not just dry Swinburne out but to keep him away from bottles.  A seven month gap in the letters is the only indication of the difficulty of the task of keeping Swinburne alive.  His friends succeed, and Swinburne lives, and writes, for another thirty years.

Afterwards, though, Swinburne is not quite as interesting in his letters.  But he is a lot more interesting than if he were dead.

Some highlights:

Swinburne’s repeated attacks on “that brute beast” Zola’s L’assommoir, a “damnable dunghill of a book” (letter 866, June 8, 1877), “the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type” (942, July 11, 1879).  He singles out not the novel’s alcoholism, which would be too ironic, but the child abuse and filth.  Later (1020, July 3, 1880), Swinburne declares Humphrey Clinker “all but utterly unreadable to me” because of its scatology, at which point I find myself baffled by Swinburne’s Victorian fastidiousness.  All of this from the great champion of Sade’s Justine! “[D]e Sade at his foulest was to Zola at his purest ‘as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine’ in the faculty of horrifying and nauseating the human stomach and the human soul” (942).  Some of this must be class, the aristocrat clubbing the bourgeois upstart with a Marquis.

Celebrity sightings, several before the fact, such as a letter from an 1882 letter by a young Oscar Wilde on behalf of an old Walt Whitman.  Wilde, at this point, had published a single book of poems and was touring America as a celebrity aesthete.  Writes Swinburne, “I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody, and had no notion he was the sort of man to play the mountebank as he seems to have been doing” (1132, Aug. 4, 1882).

And here is John Davidson, at this point a pale aesthete in training, a decade from writing good poetry, declaring Swinburne “the greatest poet since Shakespere” (912, March 28, 1878).  Impressive how Davidson was eventually able to purge all trace of this early worship from his poems.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Swinburne gets into a pointless feud with Robert Browning, the figurehead president of the New Shakespeare Society, over an insult from another member of that organization.  More snobbery: “no person who remains in any way or in any degree associated with the writer of that pamphlet is fit to hold any intercourse or keep up any acquaintance with me” (1065, Feb. 20, 1881).  Good riddance, Browning must have thought, sitting on his balcony in Florence.

Near the end of the book, Swinburne finally meets his hero Victor Hugo.  The episode is a triumph – a triumph of staying alive.  The breathless letter describing the encounter (1193, Nov. 26, 1882) is, charmingly, to his mother.

His white hair is as thick as his dark eyebrows, and his eyes are as bright and clear as a little child’s.  After dinner, he drank my health with a little speech, of which – tho’ I sat just opposite him – my accursed deafness prevented my hearing a single word.

During these years, Swinburne wrote numerous articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica, a verse play, and enough poetry for an astonishing four books – three published in 1880 alone.  There are two great poems in that mass, two I know of.  Tomorrow for those.

Nobody reads it. - Henry Esmond, Thackeray's best book - a survey of opinion

Kind-hearted commenters have directed me to many other writers who have expressed their high opinion of The History of Henry Esmond.  Virginia Woolf thought it was Thackeray’s best novel, as did Anthony Trollope.

Walter Pater, in Appreciations (1889) calls it “a perfect fiction” (Newman’s Idea of a University is, in the same sentence, “the perfect handling of a theory”, and the Mallomar is “the perfect marshmallow-filled cookie”) – “Thackeray’s Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its interests.”  By its what, now?  Pater often loses me somewhere along the way.

Oscar Wilde declares that “Esmond is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.”*  That “because” should make a fellow nervous.  I refer readers to the not-so-brief quotation from Henry Esmond I posted yesterday, and would be delighted to read a defense of its “beauty.”  Not what he meant; I know.

What all of these writers, even Trollope, a true follower of Thackeray, have in common is a particular interest in style, in writerly tricks and effects, in difficulty, what John Crowley calls “a skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction.”  Other writers, and critics like me, are delighted with the “how” of the book, while the “what” slips into the background.

Henry Esmond is, after all, filled with duels and deathbed confessions and kings in disguise, the usual melodramatic claptrap.  Am I supposed to take all of that seriously?  I do, actually, but that’s because of Thackeray’s writerly skill – all that fuss seems surprisingly natural.

Trollope, again, in Thackeray (1879):

I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much the best, that there was none second to it.  “That was what I intended,” he said, “but I have failed.  Nobody reads it. After all, what does it matter?” he went on after awhile.  “If they like anything, one ought to be satisfied.  After all Esmond was a prig.”  Then he laughed and changed the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. (Ch. V, 124)

Gee, poor Thackeray.  Trollope, as I mentioned yesterday, was impressed by the difficulty of Thackeray’s task, his simulation of the language of the early 18th century, of Addison and Steele and Swift, all of whom are actually characters in the novel.  Trollope suspects that the feat was so difficult that it actually damaged Thackeray’s later books – once he had mastered this new hybrid style, he was never able to free himself from it.

I will never know, because I am never going to read those later novels.  Who are we kidding?  I’m just glad I somehow was convinced to read Henry Esmond.  It’s a bit like Melville’s Clarel – it’s hardly an injustice that it is read less, even a lot less, than Vanity Fair.  Esmond is a prig, and his story has no Becky Sharp.  It’s a specialized novel.  Modernists and postmodernists should all read it carefully, even if it damages their sense that they invented everything valuable in literature.

I had sort of planned to move back to Hawthorne tomorrow.  No one will complain is I spend one more day on Henry Esmond, will they?  After all, blog posts are awfully easy to skip.

* "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891) in The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1968, p. 280.

I, I have made enamels and cameos - Théophile Gautier's beautiful, useless poems

"When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page of the book. It was Gautier's Émaux et Camées, Charpentier's Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates... As he turned over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand 'du supplice encore mal laveé,' with its downy red hairs and its 'doigts de faune.' He glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:"

And at this point Oscar Wilde (we're in Chapter XIV of The Picture of Dorian Gray) inserts three stanzas of a Gautier poem, from the second of four short verses on the subject of Venice. In the novel, the stanzas are in French. I'll get a dictionary and ma femme and try to translate a stanza very literally (please feel free to correct me), the one Dorian finds particularly evocative of Venice:


The skiff lands and disembarks me,
Throwing its rope around the pillar,
In front of a pink facade,
On the marble stairs.

L'esquif aborde et me dépose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une façade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier.

Delicate, not too complex looking, not too exciting in English. Hard to see what Dorian is getting from them, exactly. The joke, such as it is, is that he has just murdered a friend, and is looking for distraction from Gautier's volume of exquisitely crafted miniatures, the enamels and cameos of the title. Dorian is finding a use for the useless. In the first poem, the "Préface," Gautier says he is like Goethe, who wrote his East-West Divan against the noise of the cannons; without worrying about the hurricane that whipped his windows shut, "I, I have made Enamels and Cameos," decorative, useless things.

About that hand of Lacenaire. Gautier wrote two "Studies of Hands," the first about a clay woman's hand, a sculptor's model - Gautier has this, let's call it a thing, about preferring sculptures of women to actual women - the second, "Pour contraste," about the severed hand of a murderer, still unwashed:


Mummified and all yellow,
Like the hand of a pharaoh,
It stretched its animal-like fingers
Frozen by temptation.

So I see why Dorian did not want to linger over this poem.

The problem is that Gautier's poems are too lyrical, too simple-seeming (but not actually simple) - whatever magic they might have is ineffable. All of Gautier's poems are like this. Here we have a complete Englishing of Émaux et Camées from 1903 which I have read in its entirety, and which, I have concluded, is basically terrible (the 1903 New York Times agrees!). The insertions of extraneous matter, the bizarre choices of rhyme words, the occasional total abandonment of English grammar, what a mess. It's the only complete Enamels and Cameos I have found. I need to find a better translation. These poems can't be harder to translate than Charles Baudelaire, and the Richard Howard Flowers of Evil I'm reading is fantastic.

And here, by the way, is the lovely 1887 Émaux et Camées, the source of the images, yours for free.

No, fools, no, goitrous cretins that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup - but what, M. Gautier, about books of gelatine soup recipes?

I mean, I know the book does not actually make the soup, but having the recipe* helps, non?

Mademoiselle de Maupin begins with a long preface, in which Théophile Gautier stabs, hacks, batters, and mocks every critic ("eunuchs," "lice") in France, to really fine effect. The preface is better than the novel, and more influential, too.

On the prurient critics, for example: "If there is any nakedness in a picture or a book they go straight to it, like swine to the mire, without troubling themselves about the full-blown flowers, or the beautiful golden fruit which hang in every direction." Gautier has special praise for a virtuous theater critic "who has pushed this morality so far as to say 'I will not go to see his drama with my mistress.'"

To the extent Gautier makes an argument here, it is that the critics are self-serving hypocrites, and that the novels and plays of his day are no smuttier or bloodier than Voltaire or Molière, "where the husband is duly deceived in the fifth act, fortunate if he has not been so from the first."

In a preface to a moderately smutty novel, this preface might itself seem too self-interested, but, as with almost every aspect of Mademoiselle de Maupin, the arguments for immorality are misdirection. Gautier's real argument is aesthetic. He's practically John Milton, arguing for the absolute freedom of the writer. The moralists are worth a laugh, but it's the utilitarians who are the real problem (long, but worth it):

"No, fools, no, goitrous cretins that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet, a syringe with a continuous jet; or a drama, a railway - all things which are essentially civilising and adapted to advance humanity on its path of progress...

A novel has two uses - one material and the other spiritual - if we may employ such an expression in reference to a novel. Its material use means first of all some thousands of francs which find their way into the author's pocket, and ballast him in such a fashion that neither devil nor wind can carry him off; to the bookseller, it means a fine thoroughbred horse, pawing and prancing with its cabriolet of steel, as Figaro says; to the paper maker, another mill beside some stream or other, and often means the spoiling of a fine site; to the printers, some tons of logwood for the weekly staining of their throats; to the circulating library, some piles of pence covered with very proletarian verdigris, and a quantity of fat which, it if were properly collected and utilised, would render whale-fishing superfluous. Its spiritual use is that when reading novels we sleep, and do not read useful, virtuous, and progressive journals, or other similarly indigestible and stupefying drugs."

Worth it, yes? Those horrible, greasy pennies, the early eco-criticism, the conversion of paper into wine. I've read Mademoiselle for Maupin twice, although not for a couple of years, but I recently read a couple of his other books. I reread the M. de M. preface this morning, and think it's the best thing he ever wrote. I haven't even mentioned Gautier's five-act tragedy, in which the hero "throws himself into the water-closet," or the fulsome praise for Charles Fourier, "a madman, a great genius, an idiot, a divine poet far above Lamartine, Hugo, and Byron." The novel is almost superfluous, a mechanical working-out of his ideas with some spicy seasoning mixed in.

If any of this sounds suspiciously like the one page preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), where "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written," and "All art is quite useless," that's because Oscar Wilde's preface is directly summarizing the preface of Mademoiselle de Maupin. Except for the thing about Caliban looking in the mirror; that's not Gautier. The Picture of Dorian Gray has numerous direct references to Gautier, because it, too, is in part a novelistic demonstration of an aesthetic theory.

So I'm wrong, the theory is insufficient. Gautier had to create the beautiful, ridiculous, useless thing itself. Gautier actually worked as a journalist and critic for the remaining forty years of his life, intermittently creating beautiful, useless things. Over the next two days, I'll spend some time with a few of them.

* In the same book, be sure to see, at the very least, Ch. XIV, "Count Rumford's Cookery and Cheap Dinners," and Ch. XV, "Count Rumford's Substitute for Tea and Coffee." As the Trollope heroine says, "Yummo!"

The Count of Monte Cristo - clichés, 1,462 pages, and jelly on the side

I'm not such a bad reader of literature. I pay attention to what the text says. I read each sentence. I store away the details. If the writer is good, they’ll show up later. When I hear someone say that he didn’t appreciate this or that book because he “reads too fast”, my sympathy is limited. Slow down, dude. Or get the plot out of the way, and then read it again for the good parts.

With a book like Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-5), though, I’m the one reading it wrong. This is not a well-written novel. It’s a compilation of clichés - clichés of characterization, clichés of expression. Individual sentences, or dialogues, or, in mercifully few cases, entire chapters (see Ch. 52, “Pyramus and Thisbe”), are teeth-grindingly bad. It’s the skimmers who are reading The Count of Monte Cristo correctly. Speed up, pal, speed up. No, don’t stick around to the end of that sentence. It’s not getting any better.

In the Modern Library edition, which reprints an anonymous 1846 English version, presumably done in haste and packed with grotesque translation errors, that momentum-killing Chapter 52 (two young lovers deliver expostion to each other through a hole in a wall, like Pyramus and Thisbe, ain't that cute) begins on page 686. Good Lord, that's not even the halfway point -there are 1,462 pages total.

If the novel is so bad (which it isn't, quite), and so long, why is it one of the most popular stories ever written? I had to wrestle with this for a while, I admit. My tolerance for clichés - other people's clichés, at least, ha ha - is low. My interest in plot - incident, really - is minimal. What did readers like Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino see in this ridiculous book?

Oscar Wilde argued, or asserted, or anyway wrote, that we should divide books into three classes: Books to read, Books to re-read, and Books not to read at all (for example, “all books that try to prove anything”).*

The Count of Monte Cristo is definitely worth reading. I’m not so sure it’s worth re-reading, at least not for the reasons one re-reads, to pick some contemporaries of Dumas, Balzac or Hugo . I’ll spend this week grumbling about Monte Cristo’s defects, enjoying its virtues, and eating deep-fried sandwiches.

* The Artist as Critic: The Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman, p. 27

Charles Dickens and The Old Curiosity Shop - a place to live and learn to die in

The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was Dickens' fourth novel, and his fourth straight bestseller. It's reputation is not high now. Oscar Wilde's quip - "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing" - did its damage. This book is Exhibit A in the case against Dickens the sentimentalist.

Part I of the story: Little Nell, thirteen years old, lives in an antique shop with her elderly, senescent grandfather, who is, unfortunately, a gambling addict, in debt to a malignant, insane loan shark. The loan shark forecloses, and Nell and her grandfather wander off into the English countryside.

Then, in alternating sections, Part II A: Nell and her grandfather have a series of - not adventures, exactly - encounters in their search for an idyllic new home, which, with the help of kind strangers, they eventually find. The world, however, has been too much for poor Nell.

And Part II B: Sprightly young fellow Kit and lazy young idiot Dick Swiveller have a series of run-ins with the insane loan shark and his sycophantic attorney. All’s well that end’s well.

Kit was the errand boy of the grandfather. Swiveller was a friend of Nell’s older brother. The connection between II B and the rest of the book is tenuous, sometimes less than tenuous, although it’s stitched together in the end. In Dicken’s notes for the end of the book: “Keep the child in view”. He had to remind himself.

The structure is a mess. But so is that of The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby. That's not the problem. This is:

This is, literally, the end of the book. Edgar Allan Poe in his review of the novel: "In conclusion, we must enter our solemn protest against the final page full of little angels in smock frocks, or dimity chemises." The Old Curiosity Shop is a purposeful novel, meant to provide comfort to people who have lost a child, meant to provoke tears.* Many readers have grown suspicious of this sort of thing; those who have not seek out the effect in more current books and movies.

My own heart, it turns out, is made of stone, since rather than laugh, I was moved by Nell's death and her grandfather's grieving, despite the fact that neither character is especially interesting and both are, of course, imaginary. But Dickens was affected by her death, or convinced me that he was. My sympathy was with him.

The Old Curiosity Shop is Minor Dickens. The rest of the week at Wuthering Expectations: the great pleasures of Minor Dickens.


* 'A peaceful place to live in, don't you think so?' said her friend.

'Oh yes,' rejoined the child, clasping her hands earnestly. 'A quiet, happy place--a place to live and learn to die in!' She would have said more, but that the energy of her thoughts caused her voice to falter, and come in trembling whispers from her lips. Ch. 52.

Balzac and Oscar Wilde

I mentioned that I could imagine a reader who really loved A Harlot High and Low. Here’s one:

“One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”

This is Oscar Wilde. Yes, the same person who said:

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.''

These supposed cynics are often themselves the worst sentimentalists, aren’t they? Little Nell perishes in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), which I will read post-haste, in order to gauge the hardness of my heart. The death of Lucien in Harlot wasn’t laugh out loud funny, but it was still a pretty good joke.