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Oscar Wilde's lost letters on display in Manhattan

By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY
,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Friday, May 29, 2009, 9:17 AM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 6:11 PM

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Oscar Wilde's lost letters on display in Manhattan | Entertainment in Ireland and Around the World | IrishCentral




Read more: Oscar Wilde, Edward Carson, Jane Wilde, United States, Alfred Douglas, United Kingdom, Manhattan, New York City, Algernon Moncrieff, Augusta Bracknell
The iconic Irishman Oscar Wilde
The iconic Irishman Oscar Wilde

It’s harder from our own standpoint in time to remember this, but Wilde’s improbable affair with the English upper crust was once thoroughly requited. Physically exotic to look at (one observer once compared him an Aztec), hailing from an unfashionable colonial backwater and yet somehow a better speaker than all of his contemporaries, Wilde had an emigrant’s skill of beating the locals at their own game. An outsider who became the ultimate insider, he dined with royalty and male prostitutes in the same evening, until Victorian society asked him to choose, and when he refused to, they pounced.

But Wilde was modern in a way that London society had never seen. He made the Prince of Wales laugh, he delighted rent boys; he knew every palace and quite a few of the back alleys of Victorian London and he saw no distinction between them. “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad,” he once wrote. “People are either charming or tedious.” That was precisely the sort of crack calculated to enrage the moral scolds who had disapproved of him going all the way back to his college days in Oxford. But it also betrayed Wilde’s democratic spirit, because for all his social climbing, he was never a snob.

In a marvelous letter on display in the current exhibition Wilde writes to one admiring reader, a Mr. Bernulf Clegg, who has asked him to outline his philosophy of art. Wilde’s answer is so indulgent and delightful you can almost hear him responding in his own voice:

“My Dear Sir, art is useless because its aim is only to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct or to influence action in any way. A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blooms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that there is to be said about our relation to flowers.”

Like James Joyce, who understood Wilde’s challenge to his contemporaries much better than most, Wilde held his own (brightly polished) mirror up to the cruelty lurking behind the throne of the British Empire, frequently enraging the people he most wanted to court. And the greatest tragedy of his all too short life is that Wilde was not given time to reconcile his own warring impulses in his art.

For proof of his conflicted attitude toward the Victorians you just have to look at the larger-than-life names he gave most of his characters: Algernon Moncrieff, Gwendolyn Fairfax, Miss Laetitia Prism, Lady Augusta Bracknell, Lord Henry Wotton, Basil Hallward, Dorian Gray. This is the writer-as-costume-maker, because for Wilde the lords and ladies of English society were as unreal and exotic as the caliphs of Baghdad. His gently mocking stage names are part of a consistent pattern in his art, a satirical undermusic, a Celtic note that is rarely remarked upon, because like so many of his best jokes they only register with those who can actually hear them.

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Oscar Wilde's lost letters on display in Manhattan | Entertainment in Ireland and Around the World | IrishCentral


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