JAMES LEAF
LECTURES ON OSCAR WILDE
[Delivered without notes; transcribed by Peggy Ellsberg]
April 16, 2012
Barnard College
Wilde was an Irishman in English prisons.
Born in Ireland 16 October, 1854; killed by the English penal system--he developed cerebral meningitis from an untreated ear infection—30 November, 1900 [he was 46].
At Trinity College, Dublin, he won the Gold Medal for writing Greek comedy.
He was influenced by Pater and Ruskin, with their philhellenic and homoerotic subtexts:
“To burn with a hard and gemlike flame.”
“We are all under a sentence of death, though with an indefinite reprieve. “
“Desire beauty and savor the moment—love art for its own sake.”
“We live only to discover beauty; all else is a form of waiting.”
Though Wilde commented when Pater died, “Was he ever alive?”
And in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote: “All art is quite useless.”
In 1879, at the age of 24, Wilde began to teach Aestheticism in London. When he visited America to lecture on Aestheticism in 1882, he is said to have told the Customs Officer, “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
Wilde advocated socialism and anarchism. He was also a pacifist: “When liberty comes dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.”
He was married and had two sons.
Though obviously bisexual, Wilde identified with the Greek pederastic tradition. He had sex with very young male prostitutes. He referred to these sexual encounters as “feasting with panthers.” He had relationships with one woman [his wife] and two men before falling in love with Lord Alfred Douglas—an Oxford undergrad known as Bosie. Bosie, his courtesan and sugarbaby, was extremely demanding.
For homosexuality—“acts of gross indecency”—he underwent the famous “trials of Oscar Wilde”--and did two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol.
His best-known and most performed play remains The Importance of BeingEarnest: “written by a butterfly for butterflies.” Jack is a dandy, dazzling and hilarious; he wears velveteen trousers and a sunflower or carnation in his lapel. “Earnestness”=Victorian propriety and duty. Yet for Wilde, style trumps substance.
Lady Bracknell mocks society without actually challenging it. This is not Beckett:
“Do you smoke? I am glad to hear it; a gentleman should have an occupation of some sort.”
Wilde survives in quotations:
“Only shallow people do not judge by appearances.”
“The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”
“I am dying beyond my means [drinking champagne].”
“Either that wallpaper goes or I do [on his deathbed].”
“Art is supreme reality and life is a form of fiction.”
Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
While Bosie and Wilde were on holiday in Monte Carlo, Bosie’s uncle, the Marquess of Queensberry, left his calling card at Wilde’s club, with a scrawled note calling him “a somdomite” [thus in text].
Bosie testified at the end of his life that he and Wilde had never actually committed sodomy, but had been rather like two schoolboys “from Winchester.”
Wilde went to prison. While there he was at first denied pen and paper, but eventually the prison guards relented. Wilde wrote a 50,000 word letter to Bosie which, four years after Wilde’s death, was published as De Profundis. It was finally published in its entirety in 1962, in The Letters of Oscar Wilde.
On his deathbed Wilde was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He is buried at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
***
Prison affected his poetry.
He has become both a literary and a gay icon.
It all came down to the vernacular rhythm of his verse.
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is a BALLAD, not a sestina or a Canto—he was the Harp of Erin, the Troubadour, the Minstrel.
“The Old Triangle”—“And that old triangle/Did go jingle jangle/All along the banks/of the Royal Canal.”
[James sings:]
Oh a hungry feelin' came over me stealin'
and the mice were squeeling in my prison cell
and the ould triange went jingle jangle
all along the banks of the Royal Canal
To begin the mornin the warden bawling
"get out of bed and clean up your cell"
and the ould triange went jingle jangle
all along the banks of the Royal Canal
On a fine spring evening the lag lay dreaming
the seagulls wheeling high above the wall
and the ould triange went jingle jangle
all along the banks of the Royal Canal
the screw was peeping and the lag was sleeping
while he lay weeping for his old gal Sal
and the ould triange went jingle jangle
all along the banks of the Royal Canal
The wind was rising and the day declining
as I lay pining in my prison cell
and the ould triange went jingle jangle
all along the banks of the Royal Canal
The day was dying and the wind was sighing
As I lay crying in my prison cell
and the ould triange went jingle jangle
all along the banks of the Royal Canal
In the female prison there was seventy women
I wish I was with them that I did well
and the ould triange went jingle jangle
all along the banks of the Royal Canal
See Brendan Behan’s “The Quair Fellow”—queer because he was about to be hanged at Mountjoy Prison.
***
Oscar Wilde’s Katabasis:
What we dream about in prison: Bosie
Food
Booze
My gal Sal
75 women in the female prison
full sky
“That little patch of blue which prisoners call the sky.”
April 28, 2014
Barnard College
Plato’s Symposium:
“I went downto the Pereus [redlight district; the docks] with Glauco the son of Ariston.”
The glitterati of gay London identified with the Greek pagan classical texts.
Sodomy was punishable by death till 1870; after that by life imprisonment.
Wilde was actually convicted not of sodomy but of criminal indecency.
Bosie’s father, John Douglas, Lord Queensberry, was the author of TheBoxing Rules.
He accuses Wilde of “somdomy”—his spelling.
Robert Ross, Wilde’s first boyfriend, lifelong loyal friend, and the executor of Wilde’s estate, begs Wilde to move to France.
Wilde’s mother tells him to stay in London and fight like a man.
Earnest [the feeling] and Ernest [the man’s name] and the Height of the Champagne and Strawberries drama—a cross between a sitcom and a Shakespeare comedy—opens in London.
On opening night John Douglas shows up at the theatre with rotten vegetables to throw.
“Earnest”=neither tongue-in-cheek nor half-assed.
Wilde’s letter to Bosie from prison, which will eventually be titled De Profundis, is VERY FAMOUS:
“I spent too much of my life in the sunny part of the garden, eating only nice fruits—Now I experience the pain and shame of prison.”
Fruits of bitterness and sorrow—
Anybody who has not stayed up all night crying and praying for the dawn, DOES NOT KNOW who the powers of heaven are.
Wilde eventually underwent a major conversion, described in De Profundis:
“I had my illusions—I thought life would be a brilliant comedy, and that you would be one of the many bright figures in it… weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided life.”
In prison, the Quaire Fellow, the condemned man, becomes an allegorical figure for all.
Anagogical—a ladder into divine truth.
“The man had killed the thing he loved/And so he had to die.”
A Merry Masquerade
Opening Night at the Old Vic
Everybody decked out in Fakery
Transforms into Hell
Dantesque circles of Inferno
Entering the Whirlpool [Odysseus’s Charybdis]
Wilde’s tomb in Paris at Pere Lachaise is to this day a pilgrimage site for outcastes.
“Outcastes always mourn.”
***
KATABASIS is the descent.
From the Height of Fame and Fun and Beauty, COMING DOWN to the Ashes of Sorrow==De Profundis.
“The most beautiful event of my life was Robert Ross doffing his hat to me as I moved from gaol to gaol. Men have gone to heaven for less.”
Socrates went down to the docks of Athens—katabasis.
Descent from the High to the Low.
Xenophon, the military genius, from Upper Citadel to Lower Sea.
Descent into the Underworld.
Odysseus katabased—if that’s a word—to HADES.
Developing the soul through shame, pain, and hardship….
Heracles—the gods killed his family and drove him to madness.
It happens to Wilde at the moment of his crowning achievement—TheImportance of Being Earnest—1895—and suddenly his life turns to shit.
CATHARSIS==MITHRADISM==PHARMACOS
Catharsis makes one defecate—removes poison from the system;
Mythradism—the King takes small bits of poison to immunize himself;
Pharmacos—the unhappy one who retains toxic energy; but he LEAVES Jack in Shakespeare.
The fruit of the garden that grows in the shade=somewhat bitter, but prepares you—
Why does Wilde still matter?
-martyr of gay liberation
-style—was he a dandy? Bisexual performance piece.
-as a playwright he prefigures Ionesco and Beckett with his absurd comedies of manners.
He becomes more of a feminist as he grows less “interested” in women.
Gay liberation has been EXCELLENT for straight women.
We are obsessed with the Victorian ethic and aesthetic, esp “repressed’ Victorian sexuality with its tight collars and corsets.
The Penny Dreadful.
“The love that dares not speak its name”=poetic defense of Greek love.
Michel Foucault—suppression creates excitement.
Adonis, on a boar hunt, is gorged and bleeds to death.
But Odysseus is gored and survives, because he is with other men.
Odysseus had been a fleet runner; after the boar hunt he is scarred and has slowed down. At a slower pace, he can strategize better.
Wilde is parallel to Adonis:
Born in Ireland to rich dilettantes, he speaks five languages fluently. From age 20-28 he is at Oxford; he wrote incessantly on the classics.
Gilbert and Sullivan got Wilde to go to America because he TALKED so beautifully. They called him a Hornswaggle.
He married Constance—they published Women’s World—he wrote fairy tales—meanwhile Robert Ross was his 17-year-old boyfriend.
The Picture of Dorian Gray concerns a beautiful young man.
Alfred, Lord Douglas is a spoiled PHILISTINE.
Marquess of Queensberry, John Douglas [Alfred’s father] calls Wilde “somdomite” and purposely misspells it—so he cannot be sued for libel. He writes it on the back of his business card and leaves it at Wilde’s club.
Like Socrates, Wilde corrupts the younger generation.
De Profundis—Wilde’s very long letter to Bosie, written in prison—demonstrates that Wilde is morbidly, suicidally, physically HOOKED on Alfred Lord Douglas.
Wilde is charged and imprisoned for “criminal indecency.”
Prison broke him totally.
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is his greatest work of poetics, about a man who will be executed.
April 21, 2016
Wilde models the archetype of the Fantastical Gay Queen—homosexuality becomes performative.
In “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” the upper class salon devolves.
Difference between Culture [of which Wilde is a King] and Civilization.
Edward Albee: “Culture lights the fire to burn the heretic; civilization glares out of the heretic’s eyes.”
Housman: “we read literature to save our own lives.” Like taking bits of poison to build up our tolerance.
De Profundis is a scathing love letter.
The Importance of Being Earnest is ALL SPIRIT, NO SOUL.
After it, Bosie destroys him.
Wilde begins as a star, age 20, with Anabasis—goes from Dublin to Oxford, wins every prize, utterly brilliant.
In 1895, everything turns downward, Katabasis.
Died at age 46 of a ruptured eardrum.
Courage: its spirit is BOLDNESS [the Athenians]; its soul is ENDURANCE [the Stoics].
Oscar Wilde placed Plato second to Jesus.
The First Line of Plato’s Republic: “I went down…”.
He went down to the vale of soul-making.
Kataben—I went down—SOUL.
Anabasis—going up—Spirit, AUDACITY.
At the end, Wilde embraced the peasant Irish Catholicism of his homeland.
Knick knack paddy whack give a dog a bone.
Hickory dickory dock.
Aesthetic: What’s beautiful: waiting quietly for the sun to rise.
Romantic: What’s sublime: a sudden bonfire in the blackness.
Wilde is NOT romantic, he is aesthetic; but after 1895, truth is no longer identical to beauty. Aestheticism makes INDIFFERENCE critically important.
After Wilde gets married, he meets Robert Ross, who is 17; Ross proves good and very loyal till the end.
With his wife Constance, he runs Women’s World, about home décor and fashion and child-rearing.
1890—Picture of Dorian Gray.
1890—Salome written in French; stars Sarah Bernhardt.
1891—Meets Bosie—who is BIG TIME BAD NEWS. Leads Wilde to boy prostitutes.
Lady Windemere’s Fan is a smash success.
1895—The Importance of Being Earnest. Clever and without substance.
The Marquess of Queensberry attempts to attend with rotten turnips.
The Good Fool: detached; not hurt; OR hurt and then/thus detached.
Sentimental—wanting rich emotion without having to pay.
Sensitive—innocent.
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is his greatest masterpiece.
April 22, 2013
Died from hard labor.
The psychic life of a prisoner is revealed in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” unsigned. The Ballad, the Ditty, the Lay—NOT classical verse.
The Debtors’ Yard is where they walked round and round in circles, as in Dante’s hell.
All of Wilde’s stuff=stripped away; as Lear put it, he became an “unaccomodated man”
English Irish
Pagan Catholic
Aristocrat Wretched of the Earth
Bedlam=Bethlehem
Maudlin=Magdalen
Spirit: head, fingers, genitals, feet.
Souyl: in the guts—in the swampy places which endure.
See or read “The Quair Fellow” by Brendan Behan; listen to “The Royal Canal.”
The opening night of Importance=Wilde’s eventual downgoing as a man.
Jack: “I’m sick to death of cleverness; couldn’t we have just one fool left?”
Mithroditic resistance—King Mithrodites eats a bit of poison each day to confer immunity on himself.
Gay eros of Greek Things: Plato’s Symposiumbegins “I went down….”
Bosie=an absolutely wretched excuse for a human being.
His father Lord Queensberry wrote The Rules of Boxing—boxing is like dueling.
Industrial London=EVIL; its gods were not Zeus and Hera, but Moloch and Mammon. [Moloch is a golden Phoenician god—molten gold—required the killing of newborns].
De Profundis=the rock bottom of Katabasis.
Wilde defends sexless homoeroticism as providing all the Golden Touchstones of Western Civilization.
Love=synonymous with the force that gives clarity to the artist and can produce greatness in a work of art.
American BEATS: empty clichéd crapola; beatification through beating.
Nothing like soul-making.
Three Types of Comedy: Old, New, Divine:
Old: Athens, Aristophanes, “South Park,” satire, the polis.
New: conquest of Athenian city states, growth of Empire, Rome, need of a commercial medium for Ephesus, Spain, comedia del arte, comic archetypes, “Friends.”
Divine: affirmation of life through travail, “The Tempest,” Providence confirming the Good but allowing pain.
The Importance of Being Earnest: sparkling lives supported by the cruel deaths of the poor—tremendous hypocrisy.
Wilde as Political: after prison protested the British Penal System.
Along with GBS entered the English Fabian Society.
Gloucester via The Iliad—as flies to wonton boys are we to the gods….
The Catholic Church at first denies Wilde’s request for communion; on his deathbed he squeezes Ross’s and a priest’s hand indicating his repentance and conversion.