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Oscar Wilde pp 1–34Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Biographer

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Part of the book series: Literary Lives ((LL))

Abstract

In “The Critic as Artist,” Oscar Wilde details his understanding of the contemplative life: “the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming” (Wilde. The Critic as Artist. In Criticism. Vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Josephine M. Guy, 123–206, 178. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Seen this way, the mind constitutes a site of movement, transformation, and even contradiction. Yet if intellectual life is characterized by motion rather than resolution, then memorializing such a life presents special challenges for the biographer. Commencing with Wilde’s examination of life writing in his critical essays and reviews, this chapter presents a rationale for an intellectual biography of Wilde that resists a coherent and linear narrative, focusing instead on the shifting movements of a mind that was not always decided in its course.

It is always Judas who writes the biography.

Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 123–206, 178.

  2. 2.

    Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 189.

  3. 3.

    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 21.

  4. 4.

    Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 25.

  5. 5.

    William Wilde, Memoir of Gabriel Beranger: And His Labours in the Cause of Irish Art and Antiquities (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1880), 1. The passage in question was first published in the Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland 1 (1870/1871): 33–64, 33.

  6. 6.

    Like Simon Reader, I recognize that Wilde was fascinated by empiricism and at times demonstrates a greater investment in fact than has sometimes been supposed. What I mean to suggest here is that Wilde resisted the value of facts alone as the foundation for historical knowledge. See Simon Reader, “Wilde at Oxford: A Truce with Facts,” Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 9–28.

  7. 7.

    Wilde, Dorian Gray, 265.

  8. 8.

    Oscar Wilde, “To Read or Not to Read,” in Journalism I, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 62–63.

  9. 9.

    The references to these works can be found in the reviews listed here, respectively: Oscar Wilde, “Some Literary Notes,” In Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013):175–84, 183–4, 181–2; “Literary and Other Notes,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 56–65, 61–2, 58–60, 62–3; “Literary and Other Notes,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 22–33, 25–6; “Some Literary Notes,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 138–49.

  10. 10.

    See Oscar Wilde, “Ben Johnson on English Worthies,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 92–5; “M. Caro on George Sand,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 82–4.

  11. 11.

    “The Literature and Language of the Age,” The Edinburgh Review 169.346 (April 1889): 328–50, 329.

  12. 12.

    Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  13. 13.

    Oscar Wilde, “A Cheap Edition of a Great Man,” in Journalism I, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 146–49, 146.

  14. 14.

    Wilde, Dorian Gray, 22,184.

  15. 15.

    Wilde, “A Cheap Edition,” 147.

  16. 16.

    Wilde, “A Cheap Edition,” 148.

  17. 17.

    Wilde, “Two Biographies of Keats,” in Journalism I, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 187–89, 187.

  18. 18.

    John Keats’s concept of “negative capability” was first articulated in his Letter to George and Thomas Keats (22 December, 1817) in The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, ed. Horace E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1899): 276–277, 277.

  19. 19.

    Wilde, “Two Biographies of Keats,” 187.

  20. 20.

    Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (New York: Palgrave, 1984), 6.

  21. 21.

    Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 127.

  22. 22.

    Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 126.

  23. 23.

    Oscar Wilde, “Great Writers by Little Men,” in Journalism I, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 134–37, 136.

  24. 24.

    Wilde, Dorian Gray, 167.

  25. 25.

    Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, 17.

  26. 26.

    Edmund Gosse, “The Custom of Biography,” Anglo-Saxon Review 8 (March 1901):195–208, 195.

  27. 27.

    Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918), vi–vii.

  28. 28.

    Strachey, vi.

  29. 29.

    Josephine M. Guy suggests that Wilde was familiar with Heroes and Hero-worship, pointing to his invocation of Carlyle in “Pen, Pencil, and Poison” as evidence of the fact. See Josephine M. Guy, ed. Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 574n.

  30. 30.

    Thomas Carlyle, “Biography,” Fraser’s Magazine 5. 27 (April 1832): 253–60, 253.

  31. 31.

    Carlyle, “Biography,” 253.

  32. 32.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 126.

  33. 33.

    Wilde wryly referred to The French Revolution (1837), for instance, as “one of the most fascinating historical novels ever written.” Though the remark might seem to be derogatory, Carlyle’s objective in that volume had been to interweave historical fact and the imagination, thus reaching beyond the documentary to access a higher truth about the past. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 72–103, 87.

  34. 34.

    Wilde seems to have relished Sartor Resartus, despite what he describes in “The Truth of Masks” as its “grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing metaphysics.” See Oscar Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 208–28, 213. A fictional biography of a fictional German philosopher—one who reflects at length upon the power of clothing, symbols, and fiction itself—Sartor Resartus is a work that would have natural appeal to a writer known for blurring the distinction between life and art. Wilde would refer directly to his reading of Sartor Resartus in an 1899 letter to Frank Harris (Complete Letters, 1162), but allusions to Carlyle also abound in his letters and published writings, as several scholars have noted. See for instance: Rebecca Mitchell, “‘Cultivated Idleness’: Carlyle, Wilde, and Victorian representations of Creative Labour,” Word and Image 32.1 (2016): 104–115; Marylu Hill, “A Tale of a Table: Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and the Legacy of Thomas Carlyle,” Carlyle Studies Annual 29 (2013): 137–154. See also Giles Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum: The Truth of Masks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 149–53.

  35. 35.

    Wilde, “Great Writers,” 136. Wilde must have encountered this in Richard Garnett’s 1887 biography of Carlyle, the only known source for the anecdote. It too was issued by Walter Scott. See Richard Garnett, Life of Thomas Carlyle (London: Walter Scott, 1887), 103.

  36. 36.

    Wilde, “Great Writers,” 136.

  37. 37.

    James Eli Adams, “Pater’s Imaginary Portraits,” English Literature in Transition 59.1 (2016): 105–108, 106.

  38. 38.

    Oscar Wilde, “Mr Pater’s Imaginary Portraits,” in Journalism I, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 178–80, 178–79.

  39. 39.

    Wilde, “Mr Pater’s Imaginary Portraits,” 243.

  40. 40.

    Guy and Small provide a scrupulous analysis of early Wilde biographies in Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism, and Myth (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2006), 13–20.

  41. 41.

    See especially Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde and Myself (New York: Duffield and Company, 1914) and Oscar Wilde: A Summing-Up (London: Duckworth, 1940).

  42. 42.

    Douglas, Oscar Wilde and Myself, 5.

  43. 43.

    Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 10. An echo of this sentiment famously appears in Wilde’s “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” in which we are told of the poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright: “Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgement about him. It is impossible not to be feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.” Oscar Wilde, “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 104–122, 121.

  44. 44.

    Ransome, 10.

  45. 45.

    Ransome, 12–13.

  46. 46.

    Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 90.

  47. 47.

    Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 6.

  48. 48.

    See Regina Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986); Michèle Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  49. 49.

    Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 95.

  50. 50.

    Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar and Other Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

  51. 51.

    See Christopher Nassar, Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late Victorian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar (New York: Dutton, 1994).

  52. 52.

    See Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 2013); Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

  53. 53.

    See Melissa Knox, Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Emer O’Sullivan, The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and his Family (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).

  54. 54.

    Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). One might regard this caution against mythologizing the author in light of Wilde’s “Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” in which Erskine is misled by a forged portrait to endorse the theory that Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for a boy, Willie Hughes. Erskin’s friend, Cecil Graham, refuses to abandon the theory and shoots himself in order to prove its validity. Later, the narrator hears of Erskine’s death and presumes that he too has committed suicide. In fact, Erskine has been ill for some time and dies of natural causes. To this extent, the narrator finds that he too has been seduced by the prospect of a coherent and romantic life story.

  55. 55.

    Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde (New York: New Directions, 1986), 5.

  56. 56.

    Thomas Wright, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 5.

  57. 57.

    Wright, 5–6.

  58. 58.

    Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); Barbara Belford, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (New York: Random House, 2000).

  59. 59.

    C. George Sandulescu, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde (Gerrards Cross: C. Smyth, 1994), 196. It has by now been well-established that Richard Ellmann’s volume contains several documentary errors, though it remains the most comprehensive volume available and continues to be of inestimable value to readers of Wilde. Readers of Ellmann’s volume may wish to consult the revised edition of Horst Schroder’s Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (Braunschweig: H. Schroeder, 2002).

  60. 60.

    Joel Whitebook, Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 1–16, 16.

  61. 61.

    Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), 5.

  62. 62.

    Avrom Fleischman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ix.

  63. 63.

    Fleischman, ix.

  64. 64.

    Michael Benton notes that the intersection of fiction and nonfiction has been a concern in literary biography almost from its inception: “The concurrent rise of the novel and biography meant that fictions incorporated quasi-documentary items like letters and diary entries more commonly found in biographies, whereas biographies presented scenes and people with the creative eye of the novelist.” Michael Benton, Literary Biography (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009, 5). See also Elinor Shaffer, “Shaping Victorian Biography,” in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St. Clair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 115–34.

  65. 65.

    Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 142–48.

  66. 66.

    Benton, 2.

  67. 67.

    Malachi Hacohen, “Rediscovering Intellectual Biography—and Its Limits,” History of Political Economy 39 (2007): 9–29. 17.

  68. 68.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 178.

  69. 69.

    Fleischman, x.

  70. 70.

    Hacohen, 22.

  71. 71.

    John R. Gibbons, “‘Old Studies and New’: The Organisation of Knowledge in University Curriculum,” in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 235–62, 235.

  72. 72.

    Stephen Arata, “Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ,” in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003): 254–72, 263–4.

  73. 73.

    Guy and Small, Studying Oscar Wilde, 54.

  74. 74.

    Guy and Small, Studying Oscar Wilde, 74.

  75. 75.

    One of the more detailed considerations of William Wilde’s written work appears in Iain Ross’s Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2012), though the volume’s focus on Hellenism perforce restricts his treatment of William Wilde to select works, omitting his writings on medicine, religion, and philosophy. See Ross, 9–18.

  76. 76.

    Hacohen, 27.

  77. 77.

    See for instance: Martin Daunton, ed., The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  78. 78.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 178.

  79. 79.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 179. According to Aristotle: “[…] the activity of God being preeminently blissful will be speculative, and if so then the human activity which is most nearly related to it will be most capable of happiness […] for while the whole life of the Gods is fortunate or blessed, the life of men is blessed in so far as it possesses a certain resemblance to their speculative activity.” Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown (New York: Oxford, 2009), 10.8.341.

  80. 80.

    Plotinus, The Essence of Plotinus: Extracts from the Six Enneads and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 114.

  81. 81.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 205.

  82. 82.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 176.

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    Kimberly J. Stern

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Stern, K.J. (2019). The Biographer. In: Oscar Wilde. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24604-4_1

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