FOR A 19TH-CENTURY author, Oscar Wilde is astonishingly present in today’s culture—far more mentioned and quoted than even a perennial favorite like Mark Twain. This, I believe, is due to a combination of factors. Wilde was an important artist who had a dramatic life, and his personal drama and his writing are intertwined in ways that seem to illuminate each other. Indeed, while Wilde famously said (or was quoted as saying) that he put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, I would argue that the two together can be seen as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, with many thematic connections between Wilde’s self-creation and his artistic creations. Add to this Wilde’s ambiguousness on many points—his nationality (Irish or English), his religion (Catholic, Protestant, or “Pagan”), his politics (socialist or not), his sexuality, and so on, and the result is a many-faceted and elusive subject. Consequently, there is never a year without new books about Wilde, each generally emphasizing (or over-emphasizing) the importance of one of his many aspects. Last year was no exception. Two books came out that attempted to encompass the whole of Wilde’s story: Matthew Sturgis’Oscar Wilde (which appeared three years earlier in the UK) and Nicholas Frankel’s The Invention of Oscar Wilde. Both Sturgis and Frankel are distinguished writers, Sturgis as a biographer of fin-de-siècle artistic figures (in particular Aubrey Beardsley) and Frankel as a Wilde scholar. Sturgis’ book is explicitly framed as a response to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 Oscar Wilde, the book that set off the modern wave of Wilde scholarship and still profoundly informs most people’s (and scholars’) view of Wilde. Ellmann’s book was completed during his terminal illness and undoubtedly for that reason contains many small factual errors. Sturgis aims to correct these and to incorporate into a cohesive biography the large amount of Wilde scholarship that has appeared since Ellmann, and the new evidence that it has unearthed. Sturgis also objects to Ellmann’s intermingling of biography and literary commentary; he aims to tell Wilde’s story without seeing it as a literary work—the story of a fate foretold in Wilde’s writings—but rather as a historical narrative, a series of factual events each of which might have turned out differently and led to a different story. The result is an extremely detailed and cautious work, as monumental (and monumentally long) as Ellmann’s. It contains a large amount of information that was not previously available to the lay public. This is especially true with respect to Wilde’s trials, but the book contains countless details that will fascinate Wilde Up Close and Far Away fact not to scare away potential readers, but to signal that an occasional trip to a dictionary may be necessary. He is also not at all shy about referencing pop culture icons, including the Beach Boys, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Radiohead, and Joni Mitchell. He is delightfully unabashed in his enthusiasm for and amazement at certain classical composers. And he humbly admits when some of the musical miracles he writes about “remain impossible to describe.” Nor does he draw back from looking candidly at his own career as a composer and a queer artist. Having majored in literature at Harvard, Aucoin devotes an entire chapter to his love affair with Walt Whitman (“more operatic than opera itself”), whose life and poetry became the basis for his 2015 opera Crossing. He loves Whitman’s fanatical optimism, his awareness of “the blazing sacredness of all things,” even as he confesses to disliking “the sheer badness” of some of Whitman’s poetry. He’s also refreshingly forthright about the deficiencies of Crossing, calling it “an embarrassingly obvious self-portrait.” One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the attention that Aucoin pays to librettists, the dramatists who write the book upon which an opera is based. He notes that the “precarious journey from speech to song” that every opera composer undertakes is a collaboration that, as composer John Adams once said, is “next to double murder-suicide.” His chapter on Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress pays homage to its principal librettist W. H. Auden, whose “Houdini-esque dexterity” Aucoin praises. Franco Maria Piave, who selflessly collaborated with Verdi on ten operas, is also singled out. The book includes an interesting verbatim conversation with Sarah Ruhl, the librettist for Aucoin’s opera Eurydice. The Impossible Art ends with a magnificent examination of Mozart’s masterpiece Le nozze di Figaro, which Aucoin deems a work capable of transcending opera’s impossibility, indeed a work that “achieves an aerial view of the human soul.” That chapter, “Music as Forgiveness,” the shortest in the book, left me full of gratitude—to Aucoin for writing so beautifully and to Mozart for writing so heartbreakingly. ANDREWLEAR OSCAR WILDE: A Life by Matthew Sturgis Knopf. 864 pages, $40. THE INVENTION OF OSCARWILDE by Nicholas Frankel Reaktion Books. 272 pages, $25. Andrew Lear is the founder of Oscar Wilde Tours and We Were There, a nonprofit organization focused on LGBT history. 32 The G&LR That night in East Lansing carved my dad’s initials on my right arm Alex’s deeper on my left. Not that I loved Alex more I’m right-handed. CRAIGCOTTER
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTk3MQ==