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Wilde's story has been told numerous times. He began appearing, scarcely disguised, as a character in novels before he had written anything substantial himself, and the passions aroused by his dizzying ascent and precipitous collapse have stirred memoirists and biographers ever since. Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde will not be the last word on this subject, but it is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive, measured and fascinating account. Ellmann, who died seven months ago of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), was the author of the landmark literary biography James Joyce (1959). In his numerous books...
...Ellmann's Wilde is neither the corrupt seducer his enemies reviled nor the Orphic martyr enshrined by his champions. He emerges instead as a celebrant of mixed motives, a pioneer in the uncharted terrain of what would much later, and inelegantly, be termed the identity crisis. Except that, for Wilde, there was no crisis. The pampered, brilliant youth from Dublin set out to make his fortune by inspired conversation and the constant reshaping of himself. "My Irish accent was one of the many things I forgot at Oxford," he noted, characteristically telling the truth and a joke at the same...
When he returned to England, Wilde set about amplifying his fame. First, to stop rumors about his questionable sexual proclivities, he married and fathered two sons in rapid succession. Only then, at 33, was he seduced by an Oxford undergraduate named Richard Ross in what Ellmann asserts (surprisingly, in view of the Wilde legend) was his first homosexual experience. After that, Wilde's imagination caught fire. He wrote essays (The Decay of Lying, The Soul of Man Under Socialism) and reviews that kept him constantly before the public eye. Lady Windermere's Fan, the first of his plays...
...Ellmann's account of this lamentable affair is candid and sympathetic. "Bosie" Douglas, 16 years Wilde's junior, had a taste for casual, commercial sex and induced Wilde to follow this lead. The older man was the innocent: "What seems to characterize all Wilde's affairs is that he got to know the boys as individuals, treated them handsomely, allowed them to refuse his attentions without becoming rancorous, and did not corrupt them. They were already prostitutes." That Wilde was careless, selfish and inconsiderate toward his faithful wife and his children is beyond dispute. But he did not deserve being...
Oscar Wilde' s wit, pain and, yes, heroism shine through Richard Ellmann' s fine biography. -- The top fiction and nonfiction of the year...