68 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
have been least likely to compose. But
by minimizing discussion of Wilde’s
work, and the patterns of thought the
work reveals, Sturgis underplays one of
the most important means that Wilde
possessed for organizing the contradic-
tions of his personality. The refracted
versions of self that appear in his writ-
ing allowed him to test out real-life
modes of being; in turn, the acts of du-
plicity he practiced in his life generated
daring new forms of artistic self-expres-
sion. Threatened with blackmail in 1893,
over a stolen letter that he had written
to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde
responded by having its contents trans-
lated into French and published as a
sonnet—an altered version of the real
text, but perhaps no less authentic for
being so.
W
ilde grew up surrounded by com-
plex, performative personalities.
His father, Sir William Wilde, was a
surgeon, a polymath, and a philanthro-
pist whose terrific energy masked pri-
vate bouts of depression. His mother,
Lady Jane Wilde, was an Irish-nation-
alist poet who wrote under the pseud-
onym Speranza (“hope,” in Italian). She
liked to claim that she was descended
from Dante and had been an eagle in a
previous life. Both parents were dazzling
talkers; Wilde became one, too. As a
schoolboy in Enniskillen, he amused
classmates with his powers of exagger-
ation, and discovered the pleasure of
having a willing audience. At Trinity
College, in Dublin, he learned how to
subvert expectation through the alchemy
of paradox—to make “the Verities be-
come acrobats,” as he later put it. Finish-
ing his studies at Oxford, he held court
at boozy Sunday-evening gatherings,
“pouring out a f lood of...untenable
propositions,” according to one fellow-
undergraduate. He showed promise as
a poet, publishing in various literary mag-
azines. When one of his poems was
awarded Oxford’s prestigious Newdi-
gate Prize, the university’s Professor of
Poetry did him the customary honor of
suggesting amendments to the text be-
fore it was published; Wilde listened po-litely and had it printed exactly as it was.
Already remarkable-looking—too
tall, ungainly, with an unfashionably
clean-shaven face—Wilde made his
image into a performance. Closely fol-
lowing Aesthetic trends, he acquired
ruby champagne tumblers and green
Romanian claret decanters for his stu-
dent rooms. He considered painting the
ceiling gold. He cultivated an obsession
with flowers, surrounding himself with
lilies and declaring to a friend that he
had once “lived upon daffodils for a
fortnight.” (Not yet possessing, as Sturgis
writes, “the full courage of his absurdi-
ties,” he had to backtrack: “I don’t mean
I ate them.”)
As a young man in London, Wilde
worked harder on his individuality than
on his poems. At a costume ball given
by the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
he alone showed up unmasked. For the
opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, in
1877, the subject of his first piece of art
criticism, he made himself, as Ellmann
writes, “part of the spectacle,” sporting
a coat cut to resemble the outline of a
cello, whose shape he said had come to
him in a dream. In 1880, when a cari-
cature of a typical Aesthete was pub-
lished in Punch, Wilde saw an oppor-
tunity to raise his profile: though he
hardly resembled the slender figure in
the drawing, he put it about that he was
the cartoonist’s model. Those who won-
dered why he merited increasingly fre-
quent mentions in the society columns
(“What has he done, this young man,
that one meets him everywhere?” the
actress Helena Modjeska asked) missed
the point: Wilde’s early success was in
being, rather than in doing.
His literary career advanced slowly.
Early dramatic projects failed or stalled.
“Vera; or The Nihilists,” a melodrama
set in Russia, was met with what Sturgis
calls a “chorus of indifference” in Lon-
don, and was panned after its première
in New York, in 1883. To make ends meet,
Wilde found work as a reviewer for the
Pall Mall Gazette and as the editor of a
society monthly, The Lady’s World. Suc-
cess came when he developed a style
that fused personal and literary forms
of experimentation. “All art is to a cer-
tain degree a mode of acting,” the un-
named narrator of his short story “The
Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889) argues. It
is “an attempt to realise one’s own per-“Wait, the Grail is a cup? We’re looking for a cup?”