Guardian Review
This is a fuller and in some ways more reliable biography than Richard Ellman's. The final stages of the story remain as gripping as they are grim Oscar Wilde's stock has never been higher. Once, only The Importance of Being Earnest was regularly performed, but now his other three comedies are frequently staged. In university English departments, his writing is solemnly analysed for its prescient sexual dissidence. The Picture of Dorian Gray, in its own day regarded by some as poisonous (WH Smith refused to stock it), is an A-level set text. Rupert Everett's recent incarnation of him in the biopic The Happy Prince, which he also wrote and directed, is yet another confirmation of his status. At the opening of his compendious new biography of Wilde, Matthew Sturgis, dazzled by his author's continuing celebrity, declares: "Among British writers he stands with Shakespeare and Jane Austen." Not exactly. Wilde's literary status is complicated, and is entangled with the story of his life. His trial and imprisonment for "gross indecency" in 1895 have made him a secular martyr, publicly humiliated and savagely punished for the sin of his homosexuality. (He died, destitute in Paris, aged 46.) His life is part of his work. Thus it was in his own day, when his conversation at society gatherings was a kind of performance art. So it is impossible to think about Wilde's work without biography, and there is room for a new one. Richard Ellmann, author of magisterial lives of WB Yeats and James Joyce, died before he could revise thoroughly his life of Wilde, published in 1987. Though better written than competing works, it is necessarily unsatisfactory. Sturgis's account is fuller and in some ways more reliable. Wilde fans will have to be patient through the long chapters about his privileged Irish upbringing and academic prowess. His father was a liberal-minded Dublin surgeon ; his literary mother presided over "conversaziones" where clever talk was all. At Trinity College Dublin he excelled at Greek before moving to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his academic success continued and he won the Newdigate prize for poetry. Sturgis is readier than most to admire his poetry. At Oxford, Wilde attended Ruskin's lectures and rapidly learned to revere early Italian Renaissance art, inspiration to the pre-Raphaelites. Soon, instructed by Ruskin, he was off to tour Italy. His next inspiration was Walter Pater, aesthete supreme. Aestheticism became his creed. What is remarkable is how, after leaving Oxford for London, Wilde managed to make himself known for his professions of this creed, for his flamboyance and for his brilliance at parties. And for his extraordinary clothes. When, in 1881, he was mocked in the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience through the character of Bunthorne, he knew he was going places. Its producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, duly offered him a contract to lecture in the US. Lecturing gave him a way of turning personality into income. He crisscrossed America for almost a year, speaking on the English Renaissance and decorative arts, bringing his high camp performance to the most unlikely venues in the mid-west and Rockies. On tour, he indulged new sartorial fancies: tight-fitting velvet coats with "large flowered sleeves and little ruffs of cambric coming up from under the collar"; black velvet evening suits with lace. On a later lecture tour of Britain he caused a stir with a pleated red-bronze coat fashioned "to suggest the form of a violincello". Soon after his return from the US he became engaged to Constance Lloyd, daughter of an Irish barrister. During the early years of their marriage, her modest inheritance kept him afloat. Soon, the couple had two sons. (Sturgis follows others in believing that, at this stage, all Wilde's sexual experiences were heterosexual.) Constance's thoughts and feelings remain a mystery in this book. Sturgis is confident that, even later when she was to meet some of the young men with whom her husband was having sex, Constance remained "entirely ignorant about Oscar's homosexual relations". Readers will wonder about this, but in vain. Here, her character is simply absent. Bosie introduced Wilde to a thrilling London demi-monde of promiscuous and readily available young men Wilde's literary celebrity was assured by The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890. He became a sought-after performer not just in London salons, but in some of the stately homes of England. He visited Paris, where he fascinated Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and André Gide, and wrote Salomé, the first draft in a single day, he claimed. Critics may not have liked his first stage comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan, but the fashionable first-night audience loved it. Henry James, who was present, noted how successfully it flattered "pit and gallery" into thinking themselves clever enough to catch the bons mots. At the final curtain, Wilde took to the stage to bask in the applause. Three years later, poor James would take refuge from the disastrous opening night of his own play Guy Domville by attending the triumphant opening night of Wilde's An Ideal Husband, and wonder at the "crude" and "vulgar" tricks by which an audience could be delighted. The success of Lady Windermere's Fan made Wilde financially buoyant. He sealed a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, an Oxford undergraduate he knew slightly, by paying off blackmailers on his behalf. (It remains unclear exactly what they were blackmailing him about.) Soon the relationship was consummated and Douglas ("Bosie") was introducing Wilde to a thrilling London demi-monde of candidly promiscuous and readily available young men. Sturgis emphasises the delirious recklessness of this new life. Before long, Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was harrying Wilde, turning up at restaurants and theatres to demand that he end his relationship with his son. Shortly after The Importance of Being Earnest was first staged in February 1895, Wilde found a scrawled note delivered to his club accusing him of being a "Somdomite" (sic). He decided to take legal action, thinking this would rid him of Queensberry's persecution (Douglas seems to have hoped that his irritating father might get sent to a lunatic asylum). Foolishly, Wilde imagined that the accusations against him would be founded on the supposed immorality of some of his writing. It was a shock to discover that private investigators had compiled a long list of Wilde's liaisons, along with evidence from servants and rent boys. Sturgis's account of the hearing at the Old Bailey is as gripping as it is grim, with Wilde entertainingly witty when interrogated on his writings, but increasingly rattled when pressed on his relationship with a teenage servant. With testimonies looming from male prostitutes, he took his counsel's advice to drop the case. Queensberry's vengefulness was not to be deflected. Soon, his solicitor was demanding a prosecution. Constance urged her husband to flee abroad, but Sturgis believes he was too stunned to take the escape route that most in the establishment would have preferred. He was arrested and, the next day, committal proceedings began against him and Alfred Taylor, in whose rented rooms many of his sexual encounters had taken place. The last phases of Wilde's life story are still painful to read: his conviction and sentencing to two years' imprisonment with hard labour; the collapse of his health in Reading prison; the composition of De Profundis, his self-condemnatory "letter" to Bosie. He never saw his sons again: Constance took them to live with her brother in Switzerland, changing her and their name to Holland. Ailing from a spine injury after a fall, she died in 1898. On his release, Wilde travelled to Dieppe and later to Italy, where he was reunited with Douglas. He ended up in Paris, supported by Robert Ross, who had been his first male lover, and who emerges as the only hero of the story. - John Mullan.