THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 67
BOOKS
SPLIT VERDICT
The triumphs and trials of Oscar Wilde.
BY CLARE BUCKNELL
O
scar Wilde was in the dock when
he observed himself becoming two
people. It was a Saturday in May, 1895,
the final day of his trial for “gross in-
decency,” and the solicitor general, Frank
Lockwood, was in the midst of a clos-
ing address for the prosecution. His cat-
alogue of accusations, shot through with
moral disgust, struck Wilde as an “ap-
palling denunciation”—“like a thing out
of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante,” as
he wrote two years later. He was “sick-
ened with horror” at what he heard. But
the sensation was short-lived: “Suddenly
it occurred to me, How splendid it would
be, if I was saying all this about myself.
I saw then at once that what is said of
a man is nothing. The point is, who says
it.” At the critical moment, he was able
to transform the drama in his imagina-
tion by taking both roles, substituting
the real Lockwood with an alternative
Wilde, one who could control the court-
room and its narrative.
Martyrs don’t usually admit to feel-
ing “sickened” by accounts of their own
behavior, and any ambiguities or con-
tradictions in their personalities tend to
be glossed over by their hagiographers.
Among Wilde’s modern biographers,
faced with a subject whose life has been
flattened out for exemplary purposes by
various communities (gay, Irish, Cath-
olic, socialist), it’s axiomatic to acknowl-
edge his multidimensionality, his slip-
periness. “Oscar Wilde lived more lives
than one, and no single biography can
ever compass his rich and extraordinary
life,” Neil McKenna tells us at the be-
ginning of “The Secret Life of Oscar
Wilde” (2005), before choosing just one
of those lives to tell—Wilde’s sexual
and emotional history. Biographers who
do aim to “compass” the whole story, as
Hesketh Pearson (1946), H. Montgom-
ery Hyde (1975), Richard Ellmann (1988),
and now Matthew Sturgis have sought
to do, are obliged not only to recognize
the many Wildes but to do something
about them.
Ellmann’s method in his “Oscar
Wilde,” a sympathetic humanist treat-
ment long seen as the canonical one, is
to frame Wilde’s life as a Greek trag-
edy and his self-contradictions as inte-
gral to the scale and the complexity of
his heroism. His star rose, Ellmann ar-
gues, because he was capable of play-
ing many parts; it fell because he de-
fied a doctrinaire age and refused to
relinquish the power to choose among
those parts. What made him singular
was his multiplicity. On trial, where oth-
ers might have been cowed by the so-
licitor general’s attack, Wilde dodged it
through what Ellmann calls a “triumph”
of imaginative displacement. There’s a
self-conscious literariness to this read-
ing. The writer who “thought of the self
as having multiple possibilities,” Ell-
mann suggests, was drawn in his work
to motifs of duplication and duplicity:
mirrors, portraits, doubles, dialogues.
Sturgis, a British critic whose prev-
ious work includes a biography of
Wilde’s contemporary Aubrey Beards-
ley, sees Ellmann’s literary approach as
having a “warping effect” on the facts.
As a redress, he sets out to trace “con-
tingency” rather than design, present-
ing Wilde’s self-divisions as the prod-
uct of contextual necessities, not of
liberated choice. Where Ellmann con-
siders Wilde’s decision to remain in
London rather than flee his arrest to be
the sign of a hero’s preference for suf-
fering, Sturgis, while granting Wilde “a
touch of defiance,” argues that “inertia
probably played a greater part.”
Sturgis’s “Oscar Wilde” (Knopf )
should be commended for resisting its
subject’s self-mythologizing; it’s exactly
For Wilde, acts of duplicity generated daring new forms of artistic expression. the kind of account that Wilde would
ILLUSTRATION BY ANJA SLIBAR
