Oscar Wilde certainly would be in his glory if he could see the immense spectacle that has sprung up around the centennial of his death.
After all, wasn’t he the man who once declared: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about?”
In Britain, his smirking countenance has been plastered everywhere. The 100th anniversary of the dramatist’s demise last Thursday was marked first by an elaborate ceremony at Westminster Abbey, the opening of exhibits in his honor at the British Library and two other London museums, and a week-long revival of his plays at the Royal National Theatre.
Then there are the hordes of new books that chronicle every aspect of Oscar: a sweeping new biography; a 1,400-page tome of his complete letters edited by his only surviving grandson; countless coffee table books on his trials, his sexuality, his pearls of wit, even his taste in art.
And no place is taking the event more seriously than Ireland, the country where Wilde was born and honed his talent.
His works will be reproduced incessantly here for the next month on television and radio. The government is issuing commemorative Oscar Wilde stamps. His poems are being showcased in each railway car in Dublin, and every one of his plays are being produced in the city’s theaters.
Not to be outdone, academia has weighed in big time. Wilde’s alma mater, Trinity College, which houses its creative writing center at his birthplace, hosted an international symposium last weekend to discuss his genius and the legacy he leaves for the generations. At the outset of the conference, the scholars were able to agree on at least one fact: Even Wilde himself would be surprised at his reception in the year 2000.
It was a different scene altogether 100 years ago, when Wilde died disgraced and bankrupt in a shabby Paris hotel room, reportedly telling a friend, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.”
His coffin wound solitarilythrough the streets of the Left Bank, to be buried in a pauper’s grave.
His plays, his poetry, his very name were not to be spoken of for years in Britain and Ireland.
The reason for this ostracism seems unfathomable today. In 1895, at the height of his critical success, Wilde found himself thrown into prison for “gross indecency” after his homosexual romance with Lord Alfred Douglas came to light in court in what was then the biggest scandal of its time.
For decades afterward, his severely tarnished name fell into partial obscurity and his works were universally censored. Shortly before his death, he implored his friend and literary executor, Robert Ross, to rescue his reputation for the sake of his family, and because “I’m not prepared to sit in the grotesque gallery they’ve put me into for all time.”
Somehow, Ross succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, for the modern era in the end has come to view Wilde as some kind of secular saint.
His is now the face most likely to be found on the overpriced Barnes & Noble coffee mug, the literary equivalent of John Lennon.
He has been hailed as everything from a brave gay martyr to a brilliant prophet of the modern world — even the unlikely champion of Irish nationalism, some speakers at Trinity argued.
“Because of his popular British high-society plays, people have come to think of him as this Englishman. But he is the most Irish of Englishmen, you might even say a secret agent,” said Declan Kiberd, a professor of English at University College Dublin.
“In works like `The Importance of Being Earnest’ and `A Woman of No Importance,’ he satirized the shallowness and hypocrisy of Victorian society so subtly, so scorchingly, that it took most people 15 minutes before they realized they were insulted.
“Only an outsider like Wilde, never fully accepted by Britain’s elite, could have caricatured them so beautifully,” he said. “It was his way of witty revenge, what George Bernard Shaw once called Wilde’s `extravagant Celtic crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity.'”
However, others at the conference disagreed. Wilde was quintessentially an Englishman, they said, and a snobby one at that.
Dublin playwright Thomas Kilroy said that Wilde was “arguably pop culture’s first international celebrity,” paving the way for such later fame icons as Jim Morrison and Madonna.
“No one was able to cultivate a personality better than Wilde,” Kilroy said. “He was a pioneer in using the media to amplify his legend. Today, we see his personality imitated across Hollywood.”
In his day, Wilde reveled in fashioning a flamboyantly over-the-top image — “creating beautiful lies,” is how he put it. He at once charmed the world with his dazzling conversation and shocked it with his long hair, knee breeches, theatrical velvet cloaks, buttonholes of lilies and self-proclaimed love of “beautiful boys.”
Shock jocks and fame peddlers across the land now use his techniques.
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats once said of him, “I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labor, and yet all spontaneous.”
Modern artists pore through those mountains of witticisms to use them as their own. His comment, “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” is coincidentally the title of the new Fatboy Slim album.
But Wilde’s still numerous critics insist he was simply a wit and nothing more, and they argue that this hero-worship has gone way too far.
“Yes, he was a gifted playwright and raconteur, but that hardly makes him a titan of literature,” said Irish columnist Leo McKinstry.
“If he weren’t imprisoned, he would have taken a relatively obscure place in history.
“But the reason for his adulation is simple. Even though he was born in the middle of the 19th Century, Oscar Wilde is a truly modern figure,” he said. “With his gift for self-publicity and contempt for morality, his obsessions with fame and fashion, he is far more in tune with the seedy values of our age than his own.
“As for his literary work, the majority of it was nicely decorated drivel.”
However, many at the Trinity gathering, in their final judgment of the man, believed that those last years of dishonor and loneliness helped to create a more genuine and profound writer.
Wilde’s jailhouse letter to Lord Douglas, “De Profundis,” is roundly acclaimed.
And his “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” about a fellow inmate condemned to death, shows Wilde at his best, free at last of selfishness and frivolity.
“The loftiest place is that seat of grace
For which all worldlings try:
But who would stand in hempen band
Upon a scaffold high,
And through a murderer’s collar take
His last look at the sky?”
In many ways, those last works, just before his death, redeemed him as one of the most brilliant writers of his time.
