WILDE NOW: Performance, Celebrity and Intermediality in Oscar Wilde 303130425X, 9783031304255

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MUSIC AND LITERATURE

WILDE NOW Performance, Celebrity and Intermediality in Oscar Wilde Pierpaolo Martino

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

Series Editors Paul Lumsden, City Centre Campus, MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada Marco Katz Montiel, Facultad de Letras, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile

This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical connection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series, both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in novels and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies of interactions with sound. Editorial Advisory Board Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Humboldt State University, US Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Japan Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, US Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia

Pierpaolo Martino

WILDE NOW Performance, Celebrity and Intermediality in Oscar Wilde

Pierpaolo Martino University of Bari Aldo Moro Bari, Italy

ISSN 2946-5133 ISSN 2946-5141 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ISBN 978-3-031-30425-5 ISBN 978-3-031-30426-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

“The world is made by the singer for the dreamer” Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

WILDE NOW tries to answer a number of questions. Why is it that contemporary culture takes up Wilde and not someone else? Why is it that Wilde, more perhaps than any other Victorian or Modern thinker, spoke and continues to speak to our most pressing cultural concerns? What was so right about his vision? While contemporaries or near contemporaries of Wilde, like Twain and Joyce, have had comparable afterlives, neither has hit quite the same, transnational, intermedial, and cross-class horde. What is it about Wilde that so easily crosses these borders as well as the border between high and popular culture? Today many studies insist, indeed, on, or at least point to, Wilde as “our contemporary” (as Kott famously defined Shakespeare), on how we see and perceive the world through his eyes and yet, it is also important to investigate how the contemporary world sees and represents Wilde. In this sense, the present monograph stands as both a personal tribute to Oscar and a critical study aimed at reading Wilde through our now; more specifically, through a contemporary sensibility (and approach), in which popular culture and literature speak to each other constantly redefining themselves and in this process, interrogating key concepts and categories such as performance, celebrity, intermediality and consumerism.

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This volume is not only about reading, but also, most importantly, about rewriting and performing Wilde—in our now—in the fields of cinema, music and literature. In this sense, if many studies on Wilde focus on his legacy in contemporary popular culture, confining the analysis of films, songs, works of art inspired by Wilde to marginal spaces within the studies themselves, the main effort at the heart of this study is to prove the centrality of these target texts in the very process of reading Wilde’s life and work, something which allows us to answer many of the questions we were asking ourselves. In this perspective, if in Richard Ellmann’s seminal 1987 biography on Wilde each section is introduced by a quotation from Wilde, here chapters are introduced (and interrogated) by references to contemporary rewritings of Wilde’s works in cinema, music and literature, which, as we will see, cast a fresh light on Wilde’s personal and literary performances. In short, latest Wildean figures, performances, figurations and refigurations can actually help us to read or re-read Wilde and his work and develop fascinating, possibly new understandings of them. In Chapter 1—after pointing to the relevance of intermediality in the investigation of the link between Wilde and contemporary popular culture—I focus on Wilde and performance, in a process in which theory, in particular his critical writings included in Intentions (more specifically “The Truth of Masks,” “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist”) and practice, his early performances in Dublin, Oxford and London illuminate each other. The chapter includes a systematic description of the set of ideas that Wilde advances in his essays, ideas that will be taken up by postmodern theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. We will also discover, in this and in the following chapters—through Terry Eagleton and his play Saint Oscar (1987)—how, in a way, Wilde’s Irishness is intrinsic to his postmodernism. In Chapter 2, I approach Wilde in terms of the first proper celebrity and icon of the modern era through an analysis of his American tour and of his impact on postmodern American celebrities such as Andy Warhol and Al Pacino. In his 2011 docufilm Wilde-Salomé, Al Pacino documents, indeed, a period in which he performed in a production of Salomé in Los Angeles while also making a movie documenting the mounting of the show, and shooting a narrative film version of the play. The film is, for the American director, and of course for the audience, a journey and, most importantly, a process in which he performs /re-writes not only the play but also his “love affair” with Oscar Wilde. As we will see, both the

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concepts of performance and celebrity define not only Wilde’s experiences but also the efforts of a multiplicity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists to self-fashion their own identity through, and in relation to, Wilde. We are of course investigating a dialogical process; our reading of Wilde as a global celebrity during his 1882 tour of the United States is, indeed, informed by the very idea that many contemporary pop stars, in order to become proper celebrities, had first to be big in America. As it is known, the precious opportunity was given to Wilde by Richard D’Oyly Carte, the producer of Gilbert and Sullivan’s successful operetta, Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride (1881), which focused on the look and manner of the aesthete in the character of Bunthorne; D’Oyly Carte offered Wilde a series of promotional lectures to provide American audiences with the chance to see a real-life aesthete. Wilde’s lecture tour was, in short, the equivalent of contemporary pop stars’ concert tours. In this chapter, I also focus on the link between Wilde and American pop artist and icon Andy Warhol who like Wilde treated trivial things as the most important of things and vice versa. A major concern for both Wilde and Warhol was of course fame itself. Significantly, Warhol transformed his famous magazine Interview into a monthly about fame. Wilde himself sat for many interviews during his American tour and his image could be found (even though in some sort of caricature) on the cover of several magazines. During the tour, hundreds of photographs were shot of the aesthete in his poses, like the famous Sarony photos which perfectly capture Wilde’s look and capacity for self-promotion. Wilde’s interest in consumerism and self-promotion and his complex approach to the arts in a consumerist age are at the centre of my analysis in Chapter 3. I start by drawing parallels between the fin de siècle and the late 1990s fascination for English heritage, through a brief reading of Gilbert’s 1997 biopic Wilde in which Stephen Fry plays Wilde in a performance which exceeded the screen to become a kind of visual reincarnation of Wilde for the late Nineties; interestingly, besides the physical resemblance, Fry—in the process of marketing his image—also shared Wilde’s eclectic approach to art: writing novels, plays and autobiography, and working for television and cinema. In his own time, Wilde seemed to embrace opposite and irreconcilable approaches to consumer culture, as it is witnessed by such works as The Picture of Dorian Gray, on the one side, and Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband, on the other. Focusing on The Picture, I will point to how the novel shows the modality in which an individual fully embracing materialism and consumerism can experience

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self-destruction; yet a play like Lady Windermere’s Fan, written only an year later, seems to legitimate that very culture standing as Wilde’s first big commercial success, capable of attracting a vast audience. In truth, as we will see, Wilde’s consumerist project in Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband had its “political” implications; in these plays, the author’s intention was to present his consumerist aesthetics in terms of discourses of the irrational and the oriental, capable, as we will see with Fortuato, of decentring the rationalist, masculinist, Western subject. I then investigate—through a reading of The Importance of Being Earnest, introduced by a brief analysis of The Importance of Being Oscar, the famous one-man show written and performed by actor Micheál Mac Liammóir—Wilde’s complex performance of gender. The chapter ends with a detailed analysis of Wilde’s relationship with listening, sound and most importantly music (introduced by a brief introduction to word and music studies); music stands as a form art often used as a form of commodity in Wilde’s discourse, which, however, will prove capable of exceeding the imperative of the marketplace to define a new semiotics (a new process of signifiance 1 as Barthes would have put it) through which to approach and listen to—that is, musically respond to—Wilde’s life and art. In Chapter 4, I focus on how De Profundis stands today not only as a confessional letter but most importantly as a complex exercise of selfconstruction, in which Wilde is self-consciously fashioning a version of his life for posterity, and, in a way, trying to control the shape of subsequent narratives about him. In this perspective, I also analyse some very interesting contemporary texts and performances that have rewritten Wilde’s last years, such as Patti Smith’s reading of the epistola at Reading Gaol in 2016—for Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison, an intermedial series featuring exhibitions and readings—Thomas Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997), David Hare’s The Judas Kiss (1998), Rupert Everett’s 2018 film The Happy Prince and Gyles Brandreth’s novel Oscar Wilde and The Murders at Reading Gaol (2012), one of the most successful titles in Brandreth’s ongoing series on Wilde. Everett 2018 film The Happy Prince (2018) narrates Wilde’s magnificent fall, focusing on his last “gutter” days as a pariah and exile, first in France and then in Italy, rewriting Wilde starting from the very years and experiences which

1 See Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning. Research notes on some Eisenstein stills” in Image-Music-Text, ed. S. Heath (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 52–68.

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are usually left outside conventional narratives on the Irish writer. Interestingly, in the film, Everett is both director and main actor of Wilde’s drama; Everett can also be defined an outsider in the world of cinema, who suffered discrimination because of his homosexuality. In this sense, the film establishes a fascinating dialogue between two artists and actors who have always lived as outsiders. It is important here to stress how Wilde must necessarily be approached in terms of difference and multiplicity; his novel, his stories, poems, essays and plays give access—as Mark Ravenhill, author of the fascinating 1998 Wildean play Handbag, points out2 —to completely different dimensions. This, in a way, allows us to read and rewrite his life and his writings using two languages which have become central in order to de-fine our now, namely cinema and music. It is also worth stressing that Wilde himself was a man who used different discourse modes simultaneously, often translating between them: journalism, fashion, novel and most importantly drama. In this perspective, these pages are a critical study but also, in a way, a play in five acts, with the last two acts defining respectively late Wilde’s dramatic moments and his magnificent resurrection (and reincarnation) in the world of pop culture and in particular pop music, a space of resistance and defence of the very idea of outsideness, a space of remits and echoes of Wilde’s voice. If pop is all about the now, then Wilde—the pop star ante-litteram—becomes a paradigm to perform in our now and a perspective from which to read and deconstruct our own age. In this sense, the many direct quotations from Wilde’s texts define an attempt to think a book on Wilde in terms of a music album, that is, as a succession of melodies, rhythms and harmonies in which Wilde’s voices or better his multiple masks interrogate and are interrogated by critical, but also filmic, literary and musical voices inhabiting our time. Starting from an analysis of one of the most fascinating documentary films on Wilde, the 1997 Oscar (BBC, Omnibus Series) with Michael Bracewell as director and main actor, in Chapter 5 I focus on pop and rock musicians who have performed Wilde in complex, fascinating and unpredictable ways. In the Sixties, a proto-prog band names itself The Wilde Flowers; its 2 Mark Ravenhill, Handbag , (London: Bloomsbury 2015). We are referring here to Mark Ravenhill “An appreciation. Oscar Wilde: the art of the somdomite” in Oscar Wilde in Context, eds Kerry Powell, Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–3.

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members Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Richard Sinclair would have formed in future years seminal prog bands such as Soft Machine, Caravan, Matching Mole and Hatfield and The North. In the same years, and more specifically in 1967, the image of Wilde can be found on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely-Hearts Club Band by Pop artist Peter Blake, in which, significantly, Wilde stands very close to John Lennon, who besides being the Beatle who asked for the inclusion of the iconic writer will variously invoke Wilde during his career. In the same year, The Rolling Stones paid a more direct homage to Wilde through the video of their song ‘We Love You,’ which besides featuring footage from recording sessions also includes sequences that re-enacted the 1895 trials of Wilde with Mick Jagger, Richards and Marianne Faithfull respectively playing the roles Wilde, Queensberry and Bosie. In the Seventies, an artist representing contemporary culture as a rich and complex expression of a performative self—that is David Bowie—will act as the ultimate type of Wilde in his ability to take Wilde’s transformations of self and construct a career that is based completely on staging this performative paradigm. If, as already said, in Chapter 1 I introduce Wilde through a film, Todd Haynes’s 1998 Velvet Goldmine—featuring two kinds of Wildean performance: the character of Oscar Wilde, as well as a number of other male characters, moving within the world of 1970s’ British glam culture, interested like Bowie in artifice, gender bending and “self-invention”—in this last chapter of the book I go back to and I expand my analysis of the film, insisting on the impact of Wilde on Bowie and on glam and investigating key moments in Bowie’s career which see Bowie rewriting Wilde: from the video of ‘Look Back in Anger’ in which he rewrites Dorian Gray to the creation, in 2016, of his last character Lazarus/Button Eyes. A singer considered by many as the late twentieth/early twenty-firstcentury Wilde is Morrissey, solo artist and leader of Eighties seminal band The Smiths, the band which, as we will see, introduced me to Wilde. Morrissey, like Wilde, put all his genius into his life and only his talent into his work; indeed, the singer, especially in his Smiths years, made a considerable effort in the construction of his persona, often using resources provided by Wilde. Besides sharing Wilde’s love of flowers, many of the interviews he gave in the Eighties featured a number of Wildean epigrams and paradoxes, while many of his early songs (like The Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’) were nourished by a Wildean imagery. A meditation on the darker and more decadent sides of Wilde’s life and oeuvre informs instead the work of Nick Cave who in the 1987 published

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a rewriting of Wilde’s Salomé in five short acts and the work of the Irish artist and singer Gavin Friday, who in 1989 released on the Island label a concept album dedicated to Wilde entitled Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves, from a line taken from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” I conclude the chapter focusing on two fascinating Wilde personalities, namely Neil Tennant funding member of the Pet Shop Boys, the ultraclever pop group capable of establishing a fascinating dialogue between seriousness and lightness, drama and comedy (in a fashion which recalls Wilde himself) and solo artist and Libertines/Babyshambles founder Pete Doherty who, besides writing a song entitled ‘Salomé,’ embraced Wilde’s art of the pose and was fascinated by excesses of any kind, constructing a dissonant/noisy/disturbing image of himself and his band. In the very last section of the chapter, I refer to songs featuring Wilde as main protagonist by artists such as Elton John and Company of Thieves. After the bibliography, I have included a Wilde Adaptations section which, besides the plays, novels and films cited and analysed in the book, features a pretty exhaustive list of songs inspired to, or standing as adaptations of, Wilde’s life and works. Setting the geographical parameters of the present study, I have decided to focus on English-language material and more specifically on British, Irish and American authors, musicians and directors, making also reference to some Italian iconic filmic rewritings of Wilde such as Carmelo Bene’s 1972 film Salomé and to recent songs by songwriter Vinicio Capossela and alternative rock band Marlene Kuntz. The book that has had the most enduring influence on my life is probably a collection of Oscar Wilde’s fairy-tales published by the Italian publisher Rizzoli in 1982, entitled Racconti, which I bought in early 1991. That very book gave me access not only to Wilde, but also to a multiplicity of worlds which powerfully connected with him; it included an introduction by James Joyce—the other great Irish writer I was to love in future years—and it featured images and ideas which in my mind were inextricably linked with the music of a band I very much appreciated in those years (and still do), namely The Smiths. It was through a Smiths’ song—‘Cemetry Gates,’ which featured Wilde as one of the main characters of the narrative, along with John Keats and William Butler Yeats—that I started thinking about Wilde as an outsider and an icon and, most importantly, as a pop star. I was really impressed when— watching Todd Haynes’s 1998 film Velvet Goldmine—I discovered that the American director had approached Wilde in terms of the father of

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pop and in particular of glam rock and of its icon David Bowie. In later years, I wrote a book on Wilde and Bowie, entitled La filosofia di David Bowie. Wilde, Kemp e la musica come teatro (2016) and, in 2018, found, with three colleagues, Gino Scatasta, Laura Giovannelli and Elisa Bizzotto, the Italian Oscar Wilde Society (IOWS) with whom we organized two Wildean conferences in Italy and edited two collections of essays by Italian and international scholars entitled: Oscar Wilde in the Third Millennium: Approaches, Directions, Re-evaluations 3 (a special issue of the Italian review Textus. English Studies in Italy) and Wilde World. Una tavola rotonda su Oscar Wilde 4 , both published in 2022. Going back to the little book I bought in 1991, I can now see how what I have learned from Wilde and his multiple masks and voices—in particular from his happy prince and selfish giant —is the importance of irony, critical distance but also of love and compassion in a dehumanized age. Reading and performing Wilde means not only crossing, but also inhabiting borders and thresholds, opening one’s self to the charm and the unpredictability of the multiple forms of otherness surrounding and inhabiting us. Bari, Italy

Pierpaolo Martino

3 Textus. English Studies in Italy, 2, 2022 (Culture) Oscar Wilde in the Third Millennium: Approaches, Directions, Re-evaluations, eds, Stefano Evangelista, Laura Giovannelli, Pierpaolo Martino and Gino Scatasta. 4 Laura Giovannelli, Pierpaolo Martino (eds), Wilde World. Una tavola rotonda su Oscar Wilde (Pisa: ETS 2022).

Acknowledgements

A number of readers, writers, scholars and performers – actors and fellow musicians with whom I have staged readings and productions on Wilde – have helped me and offered precious insights to approach a subject which has the shape and meaning of a dialogue between dialogues. I would like to thank Silvia Albertazzi and Eileen Mulligan, for their attentive, responsive and enthusiastic reading of the manuscript; Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio for their precious suggestions and for offering me, with Iain Chambers and Franco Fabbri, vital resources to read Wilde in intermedial and intersemiotic terms. Many thanks to my colleagues Gino Scatasta, Laura Giovannelli and Elisa Bizzotto, of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society, for our stimulating and enriching discussions on Oscar; together we organized Wildean conferences and seminars which offered our society the chance to establish a fertile dialogue with Wilde scholars Stefano Evangelista, Michael Davis and Neil Sammells. I thank Neil for his pioneering work on Wilde and pop culture and for his profound appreciation of the manuscript, and Lisa Manosperti for giving voice to Oscar in our musical project On the Wilde Side. I wish to acknowledge my particular thanks to Graham Price, for the endorsement he wrote for this book, and to everyone at Palgrave: Eileen Srebernik, Lynnie Sharon – for her invaluable help and support—to Raju Jayalakshmi at Springer and to the editors of the Palgrave Studies in Music

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

and Literature series Paul Lumsden, Marco Katz Montiel who offered me the opportunity to publish Wilde Now in their series. This book is dedicated to Fanny and Sveva, who support me with their constant love and precious listening.

Contents

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Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetics of Masks and Early Performances: Dublin, Oxford, London 1.1 Wilde, Intermediality and Contemporary Popular Culture 1.2 Wilde’s Aesthetics of Masks 1.3 Becoming “Oscar Wilde:” The Dublin Days 1.4 Performing the Oxonian: Oxford to London 1.5 Reading Wilde

1 10 18 23 27

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Genius and Celebrity: Oscar Wilde in America 2.1 Wilde-Salomé by Al Pacino: An American Portrait 2.2 Wilde’s Iconicity 2.3 Becoming a Global Celebrity

33 33 39 46

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Wilde Consumerism and the Arts 3.1 Oscar at the End of Two Centuries: Stephen Fry’s Wilde 3.2 The Picture of Dorian Gray: Beauty, Desire, Consumerism and Dissonance 3.3 Lady Windermere’s Fan and an Ideal Husband: Consumerism, Style, Scandal and the Arts 3.4 The Importance of Being ( Earnest): Queering Wild(ean) Performances 3.5 Consumerism and Beyond: Music, Sound and Listening in Wilde’s Discourse

61 61

1

66 73 78 86 xv

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CONTENTS

Performing De Profundis 4.1 De Profundis Now 4.2 The Happy Prince by Rupert Everett 4.3 Wilde, Prison and Crime: Gyles Brandreth and the Murders at Reading Gaol On the Wilde Side: Oscar Wilde in Contemporary Pop Culture 5.1 Pop Wilde 5.2 From Velvet Goldmine to ‘Lazarus’: David Bowie and Oscar Wilde 5.3 The Importance of Being Morrissey: Wilde, the Smiths and (Steven Patrick) Morrissey 5.4 Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves: Nick Cave’s Salomé and Gavin Friday’s Ballad of the Reading Gaol 5.5 Wilde Personalities: From the Pet Shop Boys to Pete Doherty

111 111 131 136 143 143 150 164 179 191

Coda

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Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetics of Masks and Early Performances: Dublin, Oxford, London

1.1 Wilde, Intermediality and Contemporary Popular Culture Oscar Wilde seems nowadays to be considered the most iconic of the English-language writers. The secret of his contemporary success arguably lies in the artist’s capacity to translate his life into a form of writing, and his writing into a vital gesture in which a complex critique of late nineteenth-century British society resonates, for it is through this route that our own time can be interpreted and criticized, too. Wilde’s life and works (but also his extraordinary afterlife) have proved that a cultural icon can be read as a sort of hypertext,1 as a living text where different signs, belonging to a variety of discursive modes—literature, art, music, 1 An idea of the hypertextual quality of Wilde’s life and work is conveyed by the Wildean section of George Landow’s seminal web-site entitled The Victorian Web, http://www. victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/index.html. It is interesting to note how, in an article entitled “Oscar Wilde: Caught in the Web,” David C. Rose, pointing to the 17,500,000 results given, on 25 October 2008, by an AlltheWeb search for “Oscar Wilde,” sees his vast popularity on the web as a form of fame exceeding the one Wilde himself imagined when he told David Huter Blair about his intention to be famous. Rose also surveys different forms of engagement with Wilde on the Web: Wilde Works, Discussion Groups, Official Wilde Sites, Scholarly Wilde, Societies, etc. David C. Rose “Oscar Wilde: Caught in the Web,” in Oscar Wilde, ed. Jarlath Killeen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), 183–196. In 2023, Wilde’s impact and presence on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok) represent a very fascinating area of enquiry.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2_1

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and cinema—can meet and eventually generate complex meanings. This occurs through extensive dialogicity, which requires an active response on the part of the reader. Reading Wilde’s life and writings allows us, among other things, to read Shakespeare,2 to access the many complexities of Romanticism, both literary and musical, and to immerse ourselves in the seductions of Aestheticism and Decadence. Embracing Wilde also means accessing a privileged perspective, an important point of view, through which to interpret many of the cultural developments of the twentieth century, from Modernism3 to contemporary popular culture. Wilde fostered the cult of celebrity4 and through his involvement in performance (both theoretical and practical) proved himself to be a pop icon before the rise of pop music; this explains why many performers and songwriters (from Mick Jagger, to David Bowie to Morrissey) have variously recognized their debt to the Anglo-Irish author. As Joseph Bristow observes: Although [Wilde] expired a month before the beginning of the century that eagerly embraced his controversial legacy, Wilde’s achievements – ones that regularly unsettled some of his more conservative-minded contemporaries – would prove to be sources of inspiration for such diverse developments as franker depiction of marital discord on the English stage, campaigns for homosexual rights, the emergence of the culture of celebrity, critical methodologies that champion “the birth of the reader,” and modern obsessions with the figure of the beautiful, though, fatal young man.5

2 In The Portrait of Mr W.H., Wilde investigates the escaping identity of Mr W.H. to whom Shakespeare dedicated his Sonnets. Many references to Shakespeare’s works are included in Wilde’s oeuvre, as those to Romeo and Juliet we find in The Picture of Dorian Gray and those to Hamlet we find in De Profundis . 3 According to Gillespie, Wilde was a proto-modernist. See Michael P. Gillespie “Preface,” in O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London and New York: Norton, 2007), ix–xiii. 4 On this aspect, see Louis Cucullu, “Adolescent Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde’s ProtoPicture of Modernist Celebrity,” in Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture, eds Jonathan Goldman, Aaron Jaffe (Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2010), 19–36. 5 Joseph, Bristow (ed.), Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture. The Making of a Legend (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), xii. Elsewhere Bristow insists on Wilde as a myth and legend in his own and in our time affirming: “By any account, Oscar Wilde experienced – one might say endured – a legendary life. Countless biographies, memoirs, and

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Oscar Wilde acknowledged the truth and relevance of masks not only in art but also (and most importantly) in everyday life. Wilde’s was a theatrical approach to life, which famously turned his existence into a work of art. This idea has emerged in a number of films produced in the two last decades which focus on Wilde’s many different masks and which we will analyse in the next chapters: from Gilbert’s Wilde (1997) that presents him as brilliant lecturer during his American tour and as a family man conducting a double life, to Al Pacino’s Wilde Salome (2011) which approaches him not only as a legend but also as a man of the theatre; from Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine (1998) that salutes Wilde’s birth in terms of the advent of the first British pop star of history, to Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince (2018) which focuses on Wilde’s last years as Sebastian Melmoth, an exile and a pariah who found a new world to perform to, where the stars were rent boys, petty thieves and street urchins. In short, in our Now, the strength of Wilde’s life and work resides in its capacity to easily translate into non-literary media and in particular: cinema, music and the visual arts; hence the centrality of intermediality, and more specifically of medial transposition, in any contemporary approach on him. Any discourse by and on Wilde, as we will see, must necessarily be thought as intermedial; at once, displaying and problematizing the very categories intermediality implies. Intermediality is, indeed, a complex category which refers to “the relationships between media and is hence used to describe a huge range of cultural phenomena which involve more than one medium”6 ; in other words, it is interested in the dialogue between different media taking place at many different levels. We refer for instance today to intermedial literary texts, to define those literary works which exceed their own medial boundary—the written word—in many creative ways by including

critical books have for more than a century sustained a good deal of mythmaking about his literary success and his scandalous sexuality. The legend continues to capture the imaginations of thousands of general readers, theatergoers, movie-buffs, university students, and college professors. Nowadays it would not be unfair to imagine that any reasonably educated person with an interest in the arts had heard some of the more absorbing stories about how and why Wilde commanded the attention of an adoring audience only to transmogrify into its most contemptible pariah.” Joseph Bristow, “Biographies,” in Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 6. 6 Gabriele Rippl, “Introduction,” in Id (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality. Literature, Image, Sound, Music (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 1.

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pictures and illustrations or by referring to absent (static and moving, analog and digital) pictures, by imitating filmic modes or by mimicking musical structures and themes. Books by Wilde published during his lifetime often included pictures and especially commissioned paintings (as The Happy Prince or Salomé); at the same time, many contemporary books and collections on Wilde juxtapose his written works, with oral accounts on him and, of course, photos, caricatures and other visual works of art. We will focus on the complex relationship between Wilde’s writing and music in chapter three. Rippl points to the relevance of the work of Werner Wolf and Irina Rajewsky in the extremely rich and articulated theoretical landscape represented by intermediality studies.7 If, according to Werner Wolf, intermediality applies again in its broadest sense “to any transgression of boundaries between media and thus is concerned with ‘heteromedial’ relations between different semiotic complexes or between different parts of a semiotic complex,”8 our contemporary perception of Wilde— especially for the many filmic and musical adaptations of his life and works—must necessarily be thought as “intermedial.” Wilde’s approach to the arts in his own time can also be considered as intermedial not only for the author’s capacity of reading (especially in his criticism) one artistic language (painting or music) through the eyes of another (literature), but also for his tendency of conceiving his own artistic discourse as intermedial in two different ways. His writing has indeed, as we will discover, much of the visual and of the musical (nourished, as it is, by synesthetic associations); at the same time, in his lifetime, he used different discourses: theatre, prose, lectures and fashion (almost simultaneously) in order to perform his many roles and stage his aesthetics, conscious of the potential of the specific materiality of each medium. On the other hand, as Rajewsky observes, if in our Now, that is, in the digital era,

7 Rippl, “Introduction,” in Id (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality. 8 Werner Wolf, “Intermediality,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds

David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005): 252. See also Márta Minier, Maddalena Pennacchia, Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).

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“those phenomena that […] take place between media”9 have considerably increased, they have always existed in the history of Western culture, and in particular in the age of Wilde, whose mentor Walter Pater referred in his writings to “a partial alienation [of a form of art] from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place to each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.”10 In short, the “inter-” as threshold, as a non-territory and as an imaginary geography and liminal space—that is intermediality approached as the “between the between”11 and as a critical category—is what best defines Wilde and, again, any discourse on him. Today Wilde’s multiplicity and complexity have been investigated and performed in a number of cultural texts capable of establishing a complex and fascinating dialogue with the past, that is with Wilde as an extraordinary artist and multifaceted social actor in his own time. As Shelton Waldrep brilliantly puts it, in his pioneering study The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Wilde’s […] trajectory was not toward some ultimate being – some essential or irreducible self – but the beginning in earnest of a system of becoming, of transformations of self that left any belief that there could be a natural, stable Oscar Wilde in doubt. Wilde’s legacy as both a writer and a literary figure of social, political, and cultural significance is such that Wilde the man cannot be readily separate from Wilde the careerist. His roles, as aesthete, lecturer, businessman, family man, poet, editor, playwright, seducer, prisoner and exile are part of a broader role of writer as performer that he used self-consciously in an attempt to destroy the binary opposition, separating art and life.12

The deconstruction of binary oppositions is, according to Hutcheon, one of the defining aspects of postmodernism and is based on displaying 9 Irina Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation. A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités/Intermediality 6 (2005): 43–64, http://cri.histart. umontreal.ca/cri/fr/intermedialites/p6/pdfs/p6_rajewsky_text.pdf. 10 Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in Id. The Renaissance. 1873. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 85. 11 Bernd Herzogenrtah quoted in Rippl, “Introduction,” in Id (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality, 10. 12 Shelton Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention. Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xi.

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a “both/and”—instead of an “either/or”13 —kind of logic nourished by a fascinating dialogue between High and Low art, avant-garde and pop, theory and practice; many postmodern writers and artists were indeed also theorists (from David Lodge to Umberto Eco) and “critics” became themselves “artists” conceiving their writing in creative, often musical way, as Roland Barthes himself. As we anticipated, the complex aesthetics of Wilde—who famously wrote an essay entitled “The Critic as Artist”— is nourished by a number of traits which are at the core of postmodern theory. In his seminal study entitled Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson identifies the emergence of postmodernism with “some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s”14 defined by a sense of the end namely “the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state.”15 Jameson reads or better writes the advent of postmodernism in terms of multiplicity, of a multiplicity of artistic forms in which he juxtaposes Warhol, Godard, Burroughs and Talking Heads, some of these figures interestingly connect, as we will discover in the next pages, with Wilde. An important trait of postmodernism is, as Jameson puts it, “the effacement […] of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis […] to the Frankfurt School.” For Jameson: The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer

13 Linda Hutcheon, “Postmodernism,” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, eds Simon Malpas and Paul Wake (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 116. 14 Fredric, Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1992), 1. 15 Jameson, Postmodernism, 1.

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simply “quote”; as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.16

Another trait identified by Jameson is a new sense of depthlessness that is the postmodern rejection of the belief that one can ever fully move beyond the surface appearances of ideology or “false consciousness” to some deeper truth; we are left instead, as in Wilde, with “multiple surfaces.” Most importantly for Jameson, postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which “culture” has become a veritable “second nature.” The postmodern self is not seen as a coherent whole but as always inhabited by the other(s); in this sense, it can be approached in terms of a theatrical space defined by a complex dialogue involving multiple performances. In this connection, Todd Haynes’s 1998 Velvet Goldmine features two kinds of Wildean performance or reproduction: the character of Oscar Wilde, as well as a number of other male characters, moving within the world of 1970s’ British glam culture, who because of their interest in artifice, gender bending and “self-invention” can be considered, quoting the E.M. Foster of Maurice, “of the Oscar Wilde sort.”17 In the film,18 the infant Wilde is brought to earth on a luminous green spaceship that moves like a shooting star, for Haynes considered Wilde’s genius to be so otherworldly that it could only be extra-terrestrial. Significantly, in the following scene set in a Victorian school, each boy announces what he wants to be when he grows up: among avowals such as “I want to be a doctor” and “I want to be a barrister,” the young Wilde stands out when he declares, “I want to be a Pop Idol.” Then, the film jumps a hundred years forward to investigate the mysterious disappearance of glam rock star Brian Slade, a fictional equivalent of 1970s’ icon David Bowie. I will focus on Bowie and on Wilde’s legacy in the realm of popular music in the last chapter of the present volume; what seems particularly interesting here in young Wilde’s enunciation is his

16 Jameson, Postmodernism, 2–3. 17 Edward Morgan Forster, Maurice (London: Hodder Arnold, 1971). 18 Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine. A Screenplay by Todd Haynes (New York: Miramax-

Hyperion, 1998), 3.

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desire/determination of constructing himself “as a ‘pop idol’ that is to stage a specific persona.”19 In the heritage-obsessed 1990s, Todd Haynes’s film celebrated Wilde’s outsideness in relation to Victorian culture, rewriting him as the first pop idol of British history.20 Velvet Goldmine is an extremely complex film— recalling Citizen Kane by Orson Wells—which focuses on three (main) male characters: journalist Arthur Stuart, who in the early Eighties, doing some research for an article commissioned by his newspaper, finds himself investigating the abrupt and mysterious retirement of a glam rock star; singer Brian Slade (whose life is investigated by Stuart); and American rock icon Curt Wild (who initiates to homosexual love both Slade and Stuart). With Curt Wild, Haynes pays a tribute to Iggy Pop (an influential figure for UK glam culture) and of course to Wilde himself. As we will see in the present study, Oscar Wilde’s brilliant conversation, love for beauty and dandyish pose turned him into a very special actor within London’s society; in this sense, Wilde was undoubtedly a forerunner of pop as an artistic space in which the artist’s image is absolutely central for the construction of his success. As, indeed, George Melly puts it in his seminal study Revolt into Style, “pop culture came about as a result of a deliberate search for objects, clothes, music, heroes and attitudes which could help to define a stance”21 ; Wilde’s world—inhabited by rare objects, elegant clothes, precious works of arts and the iconic celebrities he worshipped (Bernhardt, Langtry)—helped him define his very peculiar stance. Interestingly, John Beynon—as Todd Haynes and Michael Bracewell— identifies a very strong link between Wilde and glam culture, when he notes that, in conceiving masculinity as enactment, it must be remembered that “those who do not perform their masculinity in a culturally approved manner are liable to be ostracized, even punished. For example, in the nineteenth century avant-garde artists and bohemians like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley contradicted, eugenistic definitions of masculinity.” Similarly, for Beynon, “the rock stars of the 1960s 19 See Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 20 See Michael Bracewell, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie (London: HarperCollins, 1997). 21 George Melly, Revolt into Style. The Pop Arts (London: Faber &Faber, 2008), (1970), 1.

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and 1970s (from the androgynous David Bowie to the butch Gary Glitter) repeatedly challenged accepted notions of ‘the masculine’.”22 This very link and “challenge” powerfully emerges in Velvet Goldmine and is signalled through a cinematic choice which seems interestingly to connect with the world of Wilde’s fairy-tales. In the film, indeed, we find a magical object which possesses extraordinary powers; it is the large, glowing green brooch which is pinned to infant Wilde’s swaddling clothes. After the sequence in which a very young Oscar gives voice to his desire to become a pop idol, the film jumps to the mid-twentieth century where another young schoolboy— Jack Fairy, who in the film stands as homosexuality incarnate—finds Wilde’s green brooch half buried in a playground. Wilde’s magical object is then stolen from Fairy by Brian Slade, who gives it to his lover Curt Wild (who wears the jewel on the collar of his beat-up leather jacket) who in turn at the end of the film passes it on to the journalist himself. As Coppa observes, all of these male characters are “in their way, incarnations, or should we say productions of the alien sensibility that first fell to earth with Wilde.”23 Another sign of Wilde’s centrality in the film is represented by the inclusion of a number of his epigrams in the script. In one of the most grotesques scenes of the film—which, in a way, also stands as a reproduction of Wilde’s trials—Brian Slade wearing a shiny gold top hat is cross-examined by a number of journalists, one of them asks him a question about his musical alter-ego Maxwell Demon, an alien and a rock messiah who is killed by his own success. Slade answers him quoting a famous epigram included in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”24 Not only Velvet Goldmine, but the whole glam epopee is, in truth a story of masks, of artificial identities, constructed that is performed—both at the visual level (through the use of ironic make-up,

22 John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002), 11. 23 Francesca Coppa, “Performance Theory and Performativity,” in Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 90. On Wilde and performance see also Heather Marcowitch, The Art of the Pose. Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 90. 24 Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1142.

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glittery clothes, platform shoes) and at the musical one through the reintroduction of irony and musical transvestitism—in order to question any rigid and exclusivist approaches to art and gender in culture, in a modality which powerfully connects with Wilde’s aesthetics of masks. We will return to Velvet Goldmine and Wilde’s influence on contemporary popular music in the last chapter of the present study. What here seems particularly interesting is that Haynes’ film shows how in Wilde’s discourse, theory and practice illuminate each other; in this sense, his critical studies represent a bridge between life and writing, a space in which art defines the supreme modality to see and deconstruct reality and in which life itself becomes “theatre.”

1.2

Wilde’s Aesthetics of Masks

In the introductory notes to the collection Oscar Wilde and Philosophy, Michael Y. Bennett insists, like Waldrep, on the author’s doubleness and multiplicity, making reference to a key work in Wilde’s corpus, namely his important essay entitled “The Truth of Masks” which according to Bennett tells us something of Wilde’s own “self-awareness of the many masks and faces of truth and self-presentation.”25 In this essay— which was first published in 1885 in The Nineteenth Century review with

25 According to Bennett, “it is always difficult to make a definitive statement about Oscar Wilde and/or his work. Wilde’s seemingly limitless wit, both in his personal dandyism, in his decadence, and in his writings, always has the scholar feeling the need to hedge one’s bets. He might be this (or saying this), or/ but maybe, he might be, instead, that (or saying that). Wilde’s dialectical and dialectically written “The Truth of Masks” confirms something of his own self-awareness of the many masks and faces of truth and self-presentation. Therefore, our knowledge of his self-aware knowledge sends us in a circular tailspin: Was Wilde a serious thinker who wore the mask of a witty aesthete? Or is it the reverse, was Wilde a witty aesthete wearing the mask of a serious thinker? But then, there are also two further possibilities: Was Wilde a serious aesthete who wore the mask of a witty thinker? Or the reverse of that, was Wilde a witty thinker who wore the mask of a serious aesthete? Knowing Wilde—and feeling like his brilliance and wit always keep him one step ahead of everyone else, especially those trying to pin him down—all four of these statements are probably simultaneously utterly true and utterly false. Even a hundred-plus years later, Wilde scholars, theatregoers, and casual readers are still constantly in awe of Oscar Wilde’s ‘A Wilde Mind.’”—Michael Y. Bennett, “Introduction: A Wilde Mind: The Witty Aesthete and Serious Thinker, or the Witty Thinker and Serious Aesthete?,” in Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–2. Wilde the thinker/philosopher is also at the centre of a very recent study by Kimberly Stern entitled Oscar Wilde. A Literary Afterlife (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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the title Shakespeare and Stage Costume and later included in a collection significantly entitled Intentions (1891)26 along with “The Decay of Lying” (1889), “Pen, Pencil and Poison” (1889) and “The Critic as Artist” (1890)—Oscar Wilde, responding to an article by Lord Lytton in which he “laid it down as a dogma of art that archaeology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any Shakespeare’s plays,” stresses the relevance of costumes and other visual elements in Shakespearean productions, affirming: “the point […] which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing certain dramatic effects.”27 It is interesting to note how the brief Wildean study—besides pointing to notes on costumes and other visual aspects in the stage directions and in other sections of the Shakespearean corpus—puts a particular 26 Wilde’s aesthetics finds a critical systematization in his six major essays: “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (a 1889 long narrative on forgery) “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1890) and in the four essays included in Intentions (1891). An overview of the subjects developed by Wilde in these essays can be found in two short essays: Longxi (1988) and Becker-Leckrone (2002). Longxi articulates a defence of Wilde’s position as a serious Late-Victorian thinker, creating a link between Wilde’s “creative criticism,” his praise of “lying” in art and more recent theoretical currents. Becker-Leckrone, besides pointing to Wilde’s ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray as a distillation of the paradoxical, equivocal theoretical framework the essays collectively establish, stresses how Wilde’s use of paradox and other verbal complexities do not represent a funny camouflage for serious ideas, but performative demonstrations of them. As we will see, in Wilde’s discourse, form and content very often coincide, according to a profoundly musical stance. Danson (1997) concentrates, in an extremely rich text, on “the artist in his criticism” with a special focus on the 1891 collection. He sets Wilde’s criticism in context and shows how the Anglo-Irish writer sought to create a new ideal culture by elevating lies above history, almost erasing the distinction between artist and critic, and ending the sway of nature over human desire. Wilde’s criticism is also at the centre of a 1997 study by Brown in which the author attempts to define Wilde’s conceptions of what art is and what it is not and of what the experience of art means in the modern world, tracing the experimental character of Wilde’s thought from its resonance in his own life through its development within the tradition of aesthetic philosophy. See Zhang Longxi, “The Critical Legacy of Oscar Wilde,” Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 1988, 87–103; Megan Becker-Leckrone, “Oscar Wilde (1854–1900): Aesthetics and Criticism,” in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory, eds Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins, Kenneth Womack (New York: Continuum Press, 2002), 658–665 and Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions. The Artist in his Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon 1997). 27 Oscar Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), 1156.

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emphasis on the care with which historical facts and cultural elements were presented in the productions of the Bard during the Elizabethan age. And yet Wilde later writes: “of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare’s plays does not, in the slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure.”28 “The Truth of Masks” is hence nourished by an aesthetics29 of dissonance and contradiction which questions the very concept of truth in literature. In the closing remarks of the 1891 version of the essay, Wilde even questions the reliability and coherence of any critical reading; in short, the essay turns in a mise en scene, a performance in which, in a postmodern stance, the voice of the author/actor distances itself from any critical reading which aims at being reassuring and definitive: Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in artcriticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.30

This passage seems to project towards postmodern theory, and in particular, it seems to connect with Derrida’s thinking, with the French

28 Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” 1166. 29 Wilde’s aesthetics seems, in truth, to exceed the author’s intentions to embrace,

as we will see, on the one side what Fortunato (2007) defines in terms of “modernist aesthetics” and on the other what Waldrep (2004) has addressed in terms of “aesthetics of self-invention” which, deriving from Wilde’s interest in masks and appearance, stands as a critical space to access the postmodern fascination with performance. It is here also worth mentioning Volume IV of the OET critical edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (2007) edited by Josephine Guy which includes Intentions and Historical Criticism (1879) and offers invaluable commentary and notes, giving details of where phrases, arguments and sources similar to those of the essays are used in other works in Wilde’s oeuvre. Once again, Wilde’s aesthetics emerges as something which can hardly be limited to theoretical formulations; in Wilde theory and practice, art and life always coincide, there is no space for purity, and his aesthetics is a process not a product, which exceeds spatial and temporal boundaries and asks for an active response by the reader. 30 Wilde, “The Truth of Masks”, 1173.

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philosopher’s emphasis on difference rather than identity, and on his deconstruction of binaries, in particular the binary Truth/False, something which significantly (in a Derridean fashion) seems to emerge in a “marginal,”31 textual space. Wilde’s own emphasis on the very modality of his critical enunciation, on the “How” more than the “What,” on a writing which is never reassuring, seems also to anticipate Derrida’s playful, literary style. “The Truth of Masks” is included in Intentions (1891) which features three more studies that are “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” which investigate, as we will see, different and yet complementary aspects of what we might define an aesthetics of masks, in which for Wilde the mask becomes both a discursive resource—that is an instrument for his enunciations—and a subject, that is the central aspect of his philosophy, investigated through similar concepts such as artifice and performance. It is interesting to note how the two shorter essays “The Truth of Masks” and “Pen, Pencil and Poison”—the latter, as we will see in chapter four, being an essay in which Wilde articulates a eulogy of the notorious Victorian writer, painter and poisoner, Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, insisting on the separation between art and morality—are written in the first person, while the two remaining essays stage a dialogue between two characters. What here seems particularly relevant is the very modality of the critical enunciation, which through Wilde’s emphasis on the dialogic dimension stands as an attempt to record an argumentation in the making. Hence the idea and the practice of writing as a space of uncertainty, an exercise in multiplicity and difference around the complexity of the subjects analysed, which seems to voice different masks and poses32 by Wilde himself. In this sense, more than investigating the meaning and function of his pseudonyms (that is, C 33 or Sebastian Melmoth, to which we will return in chapter four), we will try again to record—and somehow to respond to—the voices of some key characters in his critical and literary production, discovering how these masks are themselves involved in a fascinating dialogue with the many poses and performances staged by Wilde (the man) in everyday life.

31 See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Prentice Hall, 1982). 32 See Heather Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose. Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

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If we focus on Intentions, we can note how the first of the studies included in the collection, that is “The Decay of Lying,” proposes a very interesting subtitle, an observation, and stages a dialogue between two characters Cyril and Vivian, named after Wilde’s two sons; in a way, the text seems to refer to Wilde’s complex paternity of a eulogy of lying which is voiced by Vivian in response to Cyril’s scepticism. One of Vivian’s first observations concerns the concept of mask and indeed, at the end of a very long answer to a question asked by Cyril he affirms: In point of fact what is interesting about people in good society [...] is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. [...] Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like.33

Here, Wilde’s aesthetics of masks moves towards a possible definition of lying, that is of art as a powerful exercise in abstraction, as a form of writing capable of exceeding any pretence towards naturalistic representation: Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms.34

One of Wilde’s most famous formulations concerns the idea that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Art provides us with a sensibility, with a temper which allows us to read life; art is necessarily artifice, creation, writing, a construction but also a deconstruction of reality in which life is invested of new meanings. Later in the text Vivian affirms: Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that 33 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), 1075–1076. 34 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”, 1078.

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no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds [...]. Hers are the ‘forms more real than living man,’ and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies.35

In short, in this essay, Wilde, anticipating one of the main theoretical concerns of Jacques Lacan, points to the primacy of the “signifier,” whose contingent “truth” is the only truly reliable. In Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan provides a fascinating discussion of visual arts, poetry and theatre. Similarly to Wilde, Lacan not only “accords a privileged role to art, but resists the idea that art needs to reflect faithfully, or serve, the existing social and intellectual norms.”36 We already noted how central in Wilde’s discourse is the modality of the critical enunciation; it is useful in this sense to focus on the relevance of the epigram in Wilde. Epigrams are of course the best and most powerful expression of Wilde’s wit; they imply the idea of laughing “at” more than “with” others, asserting “the speakers’ intellectual superiority over their peers.”37 Terry Eagleton considers the Wildean epigram “a piece of linguistic perversity, which seizes upon some English commonplace and rips it inside out, deconstructs it, stands it on its head.”38 Wilde’s epigrams stand for—and literally contain—a pause, an interruption and a critical hiatus in relation to the order of discourse, capable of generating a short-circuit in verbal communication. Wilde—as a man and artist fully immersed in consumer culture and a model, as we will see, for artists embracing seriality such as Andy Warhol—used to recycle his epigrams in plays, essays and everyday conversation, especially those about subjects he particularly cared about. In this sense, Intentions features several exercises in epigrammatic reformulation. One of Wilde’s bestknown epigrams is found at the very incipit of a collection of aphorisms entitled “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (1894) and 35 Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 1082. 36 See Helena Gurfinkel, “The Ethics of the Signifier: Wilde and Lacan.” symplok¯ e, 24,

no. 1, 2016, 265. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: 7 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 37 Jure Gantar, The Evolution of Wilde’s Wit (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5. On Wilde’s aphorisms, see also Umberto Eco, “Paradox Vs Aphorism”, in The Importance of Being Misunderstood, eds Giovanna Franci; Giovanna Silvani, (Bologna: Patron, 2003), 115–132. 38 Terry Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde,” in The Wildean, Vol. 19, 2001,

4.

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reads: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.”39 Besides its perfect form— articulating a parody of the Victorian sense of duty—it is interesting to note how one of the most famous epigrams included in “The Critic as Artist,” enunciated by Gilbert during an exchange with Earnest, refers to the very idea of artificiality in relation to the arts: “Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort.”40 For Wilde all great art is self-consciousness, it is pure artifice; we already referred to Wilde’s idea of society as a “play of masks,” Bakhtin himself underlined how language is never neutral but always oriented, that is connoted. Wilde’s critical efforts also project towards Roland Barthes and his critique of the processes of naturalization at the cultural, linguistic and semiotic levels; we refer, of course, to his seminal work Mythologies.41 Wilde’s aesthetics of masks enables us to read society as a theatrical space. One of Wilde’s most iconic and quoted epigrams—which we have already mentioned introducing Velvet Goldmine—is enunciated by Gilbert as a remark to some observations on the relationship between Shakespeare, life and his dramatic masks, such as Romeo or Hamlet, which, according to Wilde, Shakespeare created, that is constructed “out of his passion” and in relation to reality: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”42 If in his essay Wilde speaks about Shakespearean masks in relation to some of the Bard’s main characters, in Wilde’s specific case it is possible to investigate the concept of mask not only in relation to some of the characters inhabiting his essays, and more in general his works, but also and most importantly in relation to the multiple selves and roles he performed during his lifetime. In Wilde, art and life are not confronted in abstract terms, but in their fascinating dialogue they compose what we might define “a theatre of everyday life,” life as an unpredictable process of self-writing.

39 Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1244. 40 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1118. 41 Roland Barthes Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972). 42 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1142.

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As we have seen with Waldrep, Wilde’s was “a system of becoming, that left any belief that there could be a natural, stable Oscar Wilde in doubt.”43 In this perspective, in recent years, Wilde’s life and art have been very often approached through the theoretical frames offered by such disciplines as performance and, as we will see in the next chapter, celebrity studies. According to Coppa: Performance studies recognizes that behaviour, as well as speech, is a language that has rules and is structured by a grammar, and, as with any other language, comprehension depends on re-cognition or knowing something again when we see it. Both the pleasures of Wilde’s work and the problems of Wilde’s life can be understood in precisely these performative terms. The pleasures of Wilde’s writing are tied up in (insider) knowledge and recognition of a variety of (theatrical, comedic, aristocratic, linguistic) behaviors; in particular, Wilde offers us the chance to take pleasure in recognizing the displayed rituals of leisured English culture, and to appreciate the utter constructedness of “modern” human beings and their behaviors. Similarly, the problems of Wilde’s life stemmed from society’s sudden recognition, and swift repudiation, of the decadent philosophies embodied in the public performance of “Oscar Wilde.”44

In short, performing doesn’t simply mean doing, but showing-doing, that is staging behaviour. All human behaviour is learned and then put on some sort of display. Wilde’s processes of self-construction or selffashioning were also, and most importantly, aimed at questioning any pretence of authenticity in the social context and deconstructing whatever might appear as normal or normative. In this regard, Heather Marcovitch notes how, according to Wilde, “the poetics of the performance of the self […] are disarmingly simple: assume and always be conscious of one’s inherent fragmentary nature, cultivate each fragment to the best of its artistic possibilities and do so under the rubric of a secular morality that stresses compassion and community with others.”45 As we will see in chapter three, Wilde’s very approach to gender is defined by a performativity which in many ways seems to anticipate Judith

43 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, xi. 44 Coppa, “Performance Theory and Performativity,” 73. 45 Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose, 13.

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Butler’s philosophy46 and more specifically the idea that “gender is not the cultural meaning of a pregiven sex” but always “performatively constituted,” hence the possibility to open up categories (such as “woman” or “man”) and question normative approaches to identity. Wilde’s capacity for self-fashioning and marketing—in complex and often unpredictable ways—his identities owes much to his very peculiar background, in which a key role is played by his childhood in Dublin, his Oxford/early London years, his tour of the United States (to which we will return in the next chapter) and by the successful, productive season starting with The Picture of Dorian Gray which includes the composition (and the first performances) of his major theatrical works. In the present chapter, we will focus on the process of “shaping Oscar Wilde” from his early years in Dublin to his debut on the London scene.

1.3

Becoming “Oscar Wilde:” The Dublin Days

In the opening section of a study on Wilde’s “Irish Word-play,” McCormack points to Wilde’s “queer” Irishness, to his liminality and to his capacity of inhabiting thresholds between different identities, seeing this trait as strictly connected with his relationship with his parents and his early days in Dublin.47 In this perspective—in the very first pages of her recent monograph entitled Making Oscar Wilde, whose main focus is, however, Wilde’s US tour—Mendelssohn stresses how “from his family,

46 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). 47 McCormack points to how “ironically, until a few decades ago, Oscar Wilde was known as a British playwright. With all the arrogance of Empire, England claimed him as one of its sons, with a clear if unconscious disregard for his own preferences, not to say the facts of the case. In any case, Wilde himself suffered from a confusion typical of those native to colonies, a complication of identity that expressed itself as double— and self-contradictory. Born into the leading class known as Anglo-Irish, Wilde created himself by living on both sides of the hyphen. If in Ireland, his family had been a queer kind of English people—at once upholders of the embattled British regime and, at the same time, more Irish than the Irish themselves—in England, Wilde became a queer kind of Irishman.”—Jerusha McCormack, “Wit in Earnest: Wilde’s Irish Word-Play,” in Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15. On Wilde’s Irishness see also Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason. Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Richard 1996) and Jerusha McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

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Oscar Wilde inherited two gifts: a love of adventure and a talent for reinvention”48 (the former mostly from his father, the latter, as we will see, from his beloved mother). Wilde was very proud of his parents’ achievements and fascinating personalities,49 as witnessed also by a section of De Profundis in which—making reference to his mother’s death—he blames himself, and of course Lord Alfred Douglas, for disgracing their names for posterity. Wilde’s father was, indeed, at the time of his marriage to Jane, one of the most eminent ophthalmic surgeons in Ireland50 (he was knighted in 1864); at the same time, he was an adventurer who in his youth had travelled for almost a year on a boat across the Mediterranean as the personal physician of an invalid gentleman. He was also a very clever and original researcher and scientist able to bridge the world of the modern and the premodern and who tried to prove: “the value of legendary, mythic and folk material by showing how it can be mapped against the historical and archaeological record, attempting to give value and dignity to the ‘primitive’ oral culture of the peasants at the very moment when science threatens to discard all such knowledge.”51 Young Oscar’s interest in orality and folklore—which powerfully emerges in (and nourishes) his short stories—can be explained in these terms; his fascination with sound and musicality also derives from his family and their Irishness. But Wilde’s father was a man of many loves and an unfaithful husband, who had seduced some of his patients, in particular, a woman called Mary Travers who won a libel case against him in December 1864. As Ryder observes, “William Wilde’s hidden life led to a conjunction of sex,

48 Michèle Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018),

11. 49 Sean Ryder, “Son and Parents: Speranza and Sir William Wilde,” in Oscar Wilde in Context, eds Kerry Powell and Peter Ruby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7. 50 Wilde’s father was the author of an important scientific study entitled Practical Observations on Aural Surgery and the Nature and Treatment of Diseases of the Ear (Philadelphia: Blanchard & Lea, 1853). Interestingly, a discourse on Wilde and on sound as science seems to enframe Wilde’s life from the publication of his father’s seminal research on the ear (that is, his book published just one year before Oscar’s birth in 1854) to Oscar’s very death because of an ear infection. We will focus on the complexity of the relationship between Wilde, music and listening in Chapter 3 of the present study. 51 Ryder, “Son and Parents,” 10.

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celebrity and courtroom that uncannily prefigured Oscar’s own traumatic experiences years afterwards.”52 Focusing on Wilde’s mother, Eleanor Fitzsimons, in her book entitled Wilde’s Women, notes how “Jane Wilde was deeply unconventional and determined to shine bight,” in this sense, “Oscar admired her brilliance and her appetite for life, and it was she who taught him that a woman could be as intuitive and inventive as any man.”53 As we will see in chapter three, Wilde—besides being a friend and a fan of iconic female actresses such as Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt—also became the editor of a successful magazine called Women’s World. It is important to note that Wilde inherited his mother’s tendency to romantic selfinvention. As Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann observes: “Lady Wilde had a sense of being destined for greatness, and imparted it […]. She had always been uneasy about her first name, which was Jane, and had modified her second name almost certainly Frances into Francesca, regarding the new name as a brilliant vestige of the Elgee family’s origins in Italy, where […] they had been called Algiati”54 which to her ears sounded as a corruption of Alighieri. It must also be stressed how young Oscar had access to Lady Speranza’s discussions—Speranza being Lady Wilde’s correspondence forename—with her guests at tea time; even though he would not speak, he became acquainted with the art of conversation, which was to prove of paramount importance in the construction of his Oxford and London personae and in the development of his “sonorous and effective phrases.”55 He was practically watching, listening and studying what later he would be seen “showing-doing.”56 It is important to stress how Wilde’s particular brand of Irishness is defined, as we have seen, more by his fecund relationship with his parents than by his education in Irish institutions. As Jarlath Killeen observes: 52 Ryder, “Son and Parents,” 13. 53 Eleanor Fitzsimons, Wilde’s Women. How Oscar Wilde was Shaped by the Women he

Knew (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2015), ix. 54 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1987), 5. 55 Tiffany Perala, “‘Oscar Wilde and Music’: A Lecture by Merlin Holland at the

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 14 October 2007,” The Oscholars, 42 (October– November 2007), http://www.oscholarship.com/TO/Archive/Forty-two/And_I/AND% 20I.2.htm. 56 Coppa, “Performance Theory and Performativity”, 73.

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The irony of Wilde’s case is that although educated into a system which counselled its students in ignorance of the country of which they were the ostensible ruling class, he was being simultaneously immersed in Irish history and mythology by his parents, whose naming of him as Oscar Fingal singled him out as a possible contributor to the mythology of the land himself, a name his mother claimed was ‘grand, misty and Ossianic.’57

Interestingly, James Joyce himself wrote an article in Italian—which was published on 24 March 1909 by Il Piccolo della Sera—entitled ‘Oscar Wilde: il poeta di “Salomé”’ [Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome], where he referred to Wilde’s full Irish name noting how this very name “Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde” was indeed totally appropriate, considering that the original Oscar, son of Ossian in Celtic mythology, had been “treacherously killed by the hand of his host as he sat at table.” As Joyce writes, Wilde too died “in the flower of his years as he sat at table, crowned with false vine leaves and discussing Plato.” Most importantly, he notes how “in the tradition of the Irish writers of comedy that runs from the days of Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw, Wilde became like them, court jester to the English.”58 As Walton writes, discussing the references to Wilde—as H.C.E.—in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Wilde the aesthete was in some ways a forerunner of Joyce.”59 Both writers were to become exiles: Joyce first in Trieste and then in France and Zurich, and Wilde first in France and then in Italy (and back to Paris) after leaving Reading goal, even though in leaving Dublin for Oxford, and later for London, Wilde defined a complex strategy of selfconstruction which problematized the very idea of a (reliable) national 57 Jarlath Killeen, “Introduction. Wilde’s Aphoristic Imagination” in Oscar Wilde, ed. J. Killeen (Dublin, Irish Academic Press 2001), 16. 58 James Joyce, “Oscar Wilde: il poeta di “Salomé” [Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé],

Il Piccolo della Sera, 24 March 1909. The article is also included in Oscar Wilde, Racconti (Milano: Rizzoli, 1991). Joyce’s words seem to be inhabited by a sense of closeness and profound fascination for Wilde as both a great artist and an outsider. 59 Franklin Walton, “Wilde at the Wake,” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 13, 300. Franklin notes how Wilde “took being an artist quite consciously and seriously; he was a poet, a dramatist and a prose writer, and was often accused of plagiarism. Wilde loved people of all kinds, enjoyed being a host and entertaining people, and was something of a sentimentalist. He was an undisguised egotist, his works were censored, and he was popularly considered to be an immoral man who produced immoral literature which resulted in a highly emotionally charged and ambivalent relationship with his public. Many of these factors pertained to Joyce as well.” Walton, “Wilde at the Wake,” 300.

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identity. Both authors will become celebrities, but while Joyce’s fame in his own time was due to his pioneering work, Wilde’s celebrity, as we will see in the next chapter, was strictly connected to his life (as work of art). Most importantly, both authors often conceived their writing intersemiotically, that is through the lens of other art forms, such as music and the visual arts. Wilde’s only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man since their very titles invite us to think of the literary in visual terms. And yet in both works pictures and portraits (even though in Joyce’s novel— differently from Wilde’s—we are never dealing with a proper pictorial element) escape a static, fixed dimension to embrace a liquidity, a dynamical approach to representation as process and transformation that in many ways connects, as we will see, with music. Besides, in both Joyce and Wilde, the very idea of Irishness helps us defining their interest in folklore first of all as orality, in literature as sound and music, something which powerfully emerges in Wilde’s short stories and in Joyce’s novels. At a different level, very often the two writers de-fine their literary works in terms of music: from Wilde’s poems (“Chanson,” “Love Song,” “Nocturne,” “Serenade,” “Symphony in Yellow”) to Joyce’s collection Chamber Music, from Wilde’s “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a title coming from a well-known Irish folk song. As anticipated, we will focus on the relationship between Wilde and music in chapter three. In his Irish days as a student at Enniskillen’s Portora Royal School, young Oscar stood out “because of his tremendous memory, advanced reading skills and prodigious intellect”60 ; in 1871, he began a threeyear classics course at Trinity College Dublin, where he was “academically successful but socially unremarkable,”61 he very rarely had guests, and he was not yet the charming figure who would fascinate people in England and abroad in the decades to come, and yet, at Trinity, young Oscar won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek and established him as an extraordinary classics scholar, projecting him towards his successes in Oxford and London.

60 Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde, 13. 61 Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde, 15.

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Performing the Oxonian: Oxford to London

Oscar progressively turned into the excellent performer known as “Oscar Wilde” during his stay in Oxford; as Marcovitch points out, “Wilde managed to create a personality at Oxford that was so memorable that, over twenty years later, the image of Wilde the outrageous aesthete superseded his work as a writer and the changes he made to his public persona.”62 The young Irish student made a very good impression at Oxford with his striking figure,63 elegance of manners and brilliant conversation. At Oxford, he performed the role of the Englishman; as Sloan observes, “Wilde’s lifelong performance was actually that of an Oxonian, which meant a distinct feeling of cultural superiority to the rest of society.” Wilde adopted an Oxford accent, developing “his own languid, melodic version, of the intonations of his Oxford friends.”64 This transformation at the prosodic level was also accompanied by fascinating visual developments. Besides adopting a dandified look and way of dressing, with long hair and velvet suits, Wilde started decorating his Magdalen rooms with blue vases filled with lilies, the recognized symbol of the then fashionable Pre-Raphaelites. As we will see, practices such as these are particularly significant and illuminating in relation to Wilde’s commitment to consumer culture and project towards the aesthetics that nourish his mature works from Dorian Gray to An Ideal Husband. In line with Marcovitch (and Schechner), the art of Wilde’s pose was “an act of the performance of everyday life,” an act of “environmental theatre,” which implied a revisioning of one’s surroundings “as a

62 Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose, 25. 63 Interestingly, as Sturgis observes “although Wilde was slightly older than the other

freshmen of his year (matriculating on 17 October 1974, the day after his twentieth birthday), his fresh-faced youthfulness disguised the fact.” Matthew Sturgis, Oscar: A Life (London: Head of Zeus, 2019), 62. At six feet plus, he looked conspicuous, much taller than most of his friends and yet he progressively turned his initial “ungainly air” in the fascinating image many of his colleagues refer to in their accounts. 64 John Sloan, Oscar Wilde (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2003), 6. And yet as McCormack puts it: “Arriving from Dublin (after a distinguished undergraduate career at Trinity College) in 1876, Wilde himself claimed he lost his Irish accent at Oxford. What he never lost was the off-center slant at which all things British were viewed.” McCormack, “Wit in Earnest,” 16.

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makeshift theatre” and the re-inscribing of “one’s behaviour as a performance.” In short, “since the environment of everyday life is not scripted and therefore always carries with it a degree of unpredictability, process, not end product, is also the point of Wilde’s performance,”65 especially in his Oxford years.66 What emerges is the image of Wilde as a great improviser, capable of exceeding scripts and pre-written narratives to turn life into a form of writing, that is, in what Lotman and Uspensky define “modelling system.”67 Wilde matriculated at Magdalen College in 1874 where he undertook a course for a BA in Literae Humaniores, which beside educating him in modern thought and Hellenism became, as Smith observes, “a nodal site connecting him to many of the most important thinkers, books, idea, emotions and relationships that were to shape his way of being in the world.”68 Of particular interest is Wilde’s stance on education during his Oxford years; Kimbelry J. Stern stresses how for Wilde, “the lessons of the classroom can never rival the wisdom acquired through experience;” as he wrote in “The Critic as Artist,” “nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”69 and yet “Wilde seems to have taken genuine pleasure in his formal academic success”70 winning prizes and earning “a rare double

65 Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose, 26–27. Here, Marcovitch makes reference to Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater (New York: Applause, 1994). 66 Thomas Wright, in his charming book on Wilde’s readings, making reference to

the memories of his Oxford contemporaries, speaks of the Oxonian Wilde as of the “fully formed character we know and love” and adds “He swaggers through their pages, supremely self-assured in manner, intellectually intrepid and precocious, with his striking dandified dress and towering physique, scattering epigrams and poems in his wake. Temperamentally romantic and mercurial, he is irreverent towards all form of authority; he is also possessed of an irrepressible energy. That energy manifested itself in flamboyant speeches and an addiction to nonsense and fun.” Thomas Wright, Built of Books. How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 75. 67 Yuri Lotman, Boris, A. Uspensky “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture”, New Literary History, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1978, 211–232. 68 Philip E. Smith II, “Oxford, Hellenism, Male Friendship” in Oscar Wilde in Context, eds Kerry Powell and Peter Ruby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28. 69 Wilde, The Critic as Artist . 70 Kimberly J. Stern, Oscar Wilde. A Literary Life (London and New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2019), 35–36.

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first in Greek.” Most importantly, in his university years, he met two great Masters. At Oxford, he became, indeed, a disciple of both John Ruskin and Walter Pater; once more, Wilde was faced with a logic of dissonance and contradiction. As Ellmann brilliantly summarizes in his biography of the author of “Ravenna”—the poem with which Wilde won the prestigious Newdigate Prize, at Oxford in 1878—“Wilde […] was being offered not only two different doctrines, but two different vocabularies,” indeed, Though both Ruskin and Pater welcomed beauty, for Ruskin it had to be allied with good, for Pater it might had just the touch of evil. Pater rather liked the Borgias, for example. Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism, as it for him religion became bearable only when it overflowed into excess. Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination. Ruskin invoked disciplined restraint, Pater allowed for a pleasant drift. What Ruskin reviled as vice, Pater caressed as wantonness.71

If Pater was clearly the most lasting influence, to the extent that, as we will see in chapter three, much of Wilde’s oeuvre can be conceived as a dialogue with, and development of Paterian aesthetics, Ruskin and Pater had also something in common, both were indeed Oxford celebrities and undoubtedly this was an aspect which was to enormously attract the young Irish student, whose main aim in life was to achieve fame and universal recognition.72 When Wilde came down from Oxford to London in 1879, he was living, as Ruth Robbins notes, on the relatively modest private means 71 Ellman, Oscar Wilde, 47. 72 In a fascinating study entitled The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar

Wilde, Salamensky, perfectly captures the complexity of the position of Wilde in his own time, and in particular in Late Victorian England: “the late nineteenth century was an epoch of sharply accelerated social shift. Against a backdrop of increasing industrialization, technologization, urbanization, and speculation, as well as a weakening aristocracy, chaotic class mixing, and unprecedented media influence, traditional structures appeared to be disintegrating. These factors provoked widespread anxieties over the nature of identity and the location of cultural power in the encroaching modern age. Explicitly tied to these anxieties was the fear that dangerous, otherwise disempowered elements of society would act, pretend, counterfeit, or otherwise perform their way, in a “modern” fashion, into undue privilege and influence. Wilde, with his extraordinary, unique engagements with culture and lifestyle, came to stand as the central emblem of this trend.” I. Shelley Salamensky, The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–2.

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from property rents in Ireland that he had inherited on his father’s death in 1876; for this reason, he decided to make himself known in the capital partly by “self-publicizing gestures (for example he dramatically cast lilies at the feet of the actress Sarah Bernhardt as she landed from the boat-train in 1879 for a English tour […], partly by making himself known to the London society via his mother’s soirées (now relocated in London) and by becoming a much sought-after guest at metropolitan dinner parties.”73 In this sense, even though, as Gagnier observes, “he was temperamentally a traditional man of letters”—and “traditional man of letters […] was not only an ‘amateur’ but in danger of being unemployable”—“when he came down to London in 1878 he understood his time well enough to know that he needed a profession and a speciality: hence the ‘Professor of Aesthetics,’”74 as he self-designated himself on his visiting cards. Wilde had, in short, not only to reinvent himself but to make his way in what Gagnier herself defined “Victorian Marketplace.” In this world, the press played a crucial role; as Sloan observes, “the production and underconsumption of new commodities initiated the modern techniques of advertising. The process also absorbed and assimilated the artist turning the earlier image of the artist as hero and critic of society into the commodified image of the artist as colorful personality.”75 Wilde used the new methods of advertising “in order to oppose the culture in which they were taking root.” Indeed, Wilde knew that culture quite well and was able to inhabit it as an inside-outsider. As Gagnier observes: The astonishing thing about his wit is not that he could always and so quickly find the right word to substitute for the key term of the platitude, but rather that he knew the platitudes so well to begin with. His mind was stocked with commonplaces, and these seem to have been there for the sole purpose of their subversion. This situation is one in which an outsider has to a stunning degree taken upon himself the reflective apparatus of the

73 Ruth Robbins, Oscar Wilde (London: Continuum, 2011), 9–10. On Oscar Wilde and London see Wolf Von Eckardt, Sander L. Gilman, J. Edward, Chamberlain, Oscar Wilde’s London (London: Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 1988). 74 Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace. Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar, 1986), 13–14. 75 Sloan, Oscar Wilde, 10.

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dominant group and then used this apparatus to mock the group on, and with, its own terms.76

This of course was of paramount importance both for his writing (especially for the theatre) and for his acting in everyday life. At the same time, Wilde was also taking advantage of London’s ability to mix higher and middle classes which offered opportunities for mobility. In this sense, as we have seen, his visibility increased by the capacity of being everywhere offering his precious epigrams and observations and mixing, as we have mentioned, with celebrities such as Lillie Langtry and, indeed, his beloved Sarah Bernhardt.

1.5

Reading Wilde

These brief references to Wilde’s early performances in Dublin, Oxford and London invite us to approach his entire life as an open, dynamic text which has no real “conclusion,” in other words as an attempt to translate into practice his aesthetic theory. The game of masks played, that is performed by Wilde, responds perfectly, in this sense, to the portrait of the “critic as artist” presented in the longest of the essays included in Intentions: The new critic [...] will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find his true unity [...] What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.77

This is an aesthetics nourished by processes of change and becoming which, as we will see in the last chapter of the present study, was to be highly influential on postmodern icons such as David Bowie (who entitled his 1971 song Changes ) and Morrissey (leader of 1980s iconic band The Smiths). Wilde’s aesthetics embraces and gives value to the very concept of contradiction, on the other hand, Wilde himself often quoted from Walt Whitman who, as we will see in the next chapter, in Leaves of Grass (1855) affirmed that to contradict oneself means containing multitudes. 76 Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 7–8. 77 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1144–1145.

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Wilde inhabited the threshold between different possibilities, trying in this way to question the very notion of identity conceived in terms of a predictable and reassuring space. Wilde’s polyphonic identity was, indeed, inhabited by a multiplicity of selves. Wilde becomes a novel or better a play, in the making, to be read and performed. In the “The Critic as Artist,” the author offers a complex and fascinating portrait of the reader as critic characterized by incredible creative powers and extraordinary associative skills which interestingly connect with Roland Barthes’ ideas in his famous essay “The Death of the Author.”78 At the very core of Wilde’s essay, there is an emphasis on the centrality of form within any reading by a critic who should respond to a work of art in affective and synesthetic terms, embracing an aesthetics deeply influenced by Walter Pater, according to whom, as we will see in chapter three of the present study, “each art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” that is, to the perfect con-fusion of form and meaning. Wilde exercised a powerful influence on postmodern music, which responded to Wilde’s enunciations in complex and often unpredictable ways. Pop artists such as Bowie and Morrissey can be read, in this sense—in our now—as creative and transgressive readers of Wilde. In short, Wilde stages a multimodal approach to literature, in which the literary word is conceived not so much in terms of representation, as in terms of “depiction.”79 We are faced with an aesthetics which projects the artwork, amplified through listening and textual performance, into a dimension which in the language of Bakhtin80 may be described as literary polyphony. Here, in a Wildean stance, the poet and the singer become a single entity and at once resound each for singularity and creative uniqueness. The eulogy of art performed by Wilde in his long essay propels him to affirm that the aim of art is simply that of creating a mood, a modality of feeling, reading and perceiving the world which he defines unpractical to convey the idea of lack of practicality as positive value, as precious 78 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text, ed. by S. Heath

(London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 142–148. 79 See Susan, Petrilli; Augusto Ponzio, Views in Literary Semiotics (New York, Ottawa, Toronto: Legas, 2003) and Susan Petrilli, Augusto Ponzio, La raffigurazione letteraria (Milano: Mimesis, 2006). 80 See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1981.

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unfunctionality, defining in these terms a completely different ideo-logic from Victorian utilitarianism. This is, of course, a charmingly contradictory position if considered in connection, as we will see in chapter three, with Wilde’s position in the Victorian (literary) marketplace. Ideas very similar to those voiced by Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist”— especially in relation to the uselessness of art—are expressed by one of Wilde’s most famous masks, that is Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). We are here in a very complex textual space in which the three protagonists seem to reflect three aspects of Wilde himself; indeed, in a letter to Ralph Payne, Wilde declared: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages perhaps.”81 We will focus on the three main characters of the novel and on their dialogic relationship with Wilde’s complex identity in chapter three. Wilde’s aesthetics of the artifice led him to construct some of his most successful comedies around a paradigm of masculinity which was perceived as powerfully destabilizing in relation to the Victorian imperatives based on an imperial, that is, normal and normative, idea of masculinity. We are of course referring to Lord Goring’s dandyism in An Ideal Husband (1895) and to the “queerness ”82 of Jack and Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). According to some readings,83 Wilde distanced himself from his masks only during his prison years and more specifically in the very process of writing De Profundis , and yet, as we will see in chapter four, more recent studies have shown how Wilde’s famous epistola is based on a certain degree of artificiality and on a complex exercise of self-construction.84 Here, Wilde is self-consciously fashioning a version of his life for posterity. Even before writing the epistola, the very choice of not leaving the Cadogan Hotel, on the day he was then arrested, was informed by the

81 Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. By M. Holland and R. HartDavis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 585. 82 See Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment, (London: Cassell, 1994). We will focus on Wilde’s queerness in Chapter 3. 83 See Colm Tóibín, “Introduction,” in Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín (London: Penguin, 2013), xi–xxvii. 84 Josephine Guy, Ian Small, “Reading De Profundis.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, Vol. 49, No. 2, 2006, 123–149.

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artist’s awareness of acting in that specific moment on the perception of his persona and of his work in the history of English literature and culture. As we will discover in chapter four, the last masks used by Wilde that is C.3.3—the number of his cell in Reading Gaol, a pseudonym he adopted to publish “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” (1898)—and, most importantly, Sebastian Melmoth have a functional value connected to everyday needs and appear, in this sense, as profoundly distant from the deepest sense of Wilde’s epopee. In the case of his chosen mask Sebastian Melmoth—with its reference to Saint Sebastian and to Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a novel written by his great uncle Charles Maturin— more than what he wrote, this pseudonym recounts us a fascinating story. As Frankel notes, “if Sebastian suggests Wilde’s willingness to cast himself in the role of the martyr, Melmoth hints at the fundamentally transgressive nature of his life and art.”85 Interestingly, in 1904, four years after Wilde’s death, the publisher Humphreys published a volume entitled Sebastian Melmoth, which, besides including Wilde’s most political and contradictory essay “The Soul of a Man under Socialism” (1891), stands as a collection of epigrams. What we are asked here—as with future similar collections—is to read or better to perform Wilde’s epigrams, wearing a mask, at once verbal and musical, able, through its condensation and intelligence, and through the iconoclastic value of its truth, to question even for a single moment the ideo-logic and the very order of discourse, then as now. Wilde’s aesthetics of masks is, in short, what best defines his contemporary success. As Stefano Evangelista perfectly summarizes in his introductory notes to The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, echoing the notes by Bristow with which we opened our discussion: The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst have inaugurated a new phase in Wilde’s international success, […] The collapse of modernist ideology, which had always viewed Wilde’s aestheticism with suspicion, has brought Wilde closer to the sensibilities of contemporary readers, who can find in his writings the foreshadowings of 85 Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde. The Unrepented Years (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 2017), 7. Frankel stresses how “Maturin’s Faust-like protagonist, half hero and half villain, sells his soul to the devil in exchange for an extended, permanently youthful life and, when death finally draws near, wanders the earth in vain, haunting the dreams of men while hoping that one of them will absolve him of his pact.” Frankel, Oscar Wilde, 7.

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post-modern irony, moral relativism, late capitalist materialism, postcolonial rewriting and, of course, ‘queer’ identity politics and sexual liberation.86

We will see in the next chapter how through his masks, style and unsettling truths—and through his astonishing performance of the dandy—Wilde conquered America, turning himself into a global celebrity.

86 Evangelista insists on how “readers trained in deconstruction feel they understand the ambiguity and contradictory intellectual allegiances of works such as The Portrait of Mr WH and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which stubbornly resist fixed or univocal interpretations. Wilde holds a particular appeal to sophisticated readers interested in the duplicitous nature of language: as his well-known aphorisms demonstrate, Wilde shows that words are always unsettlingly close in meaning to their semantic opposites; his texts contain their own negations in the form of irony, self-parody and the continuous rejection of the obvious and the dominant. But Wilde is also, importantly, a popular author. His transgressions have always managed to seduce bourgeois readers. Above all, Wilde is a brilliant popularizer who translated complex and radical ideas into pleasurable works that […] have had an immediate impact and a lasting legacy on the heterogeneous community of European readers, authors, artists, directors, composers and actors.”—Stefano Evangelista, “Oscar Wilde: European by Sympathy,” in Id. (ed), The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (London: Continuum, 2010), 19. A recent and fascinating work on Wilde’s reception in Europe and more specifically in the German-speaking world is Sandra Mayer’s Oscar Wilde in Vienna: Pleasing and Teasing the Audience (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2018). Here, Mayer, among other things, interestingly shows how since the 1930s the “Viennese” approach to Wilde’s works has always been filtered through journalistic sensationalism and “biographical myth-making;” in Mayer’s book, the appropriation of Wilde’s plays is placed against the background of political crises and social transformations. Within an environment positioned—like Wilde himself—at the crossroads of centre and periphery, tradition and modernity, Mayer cleverly unravels the mechanisms of cultural transfer and canonization.

CHAPTER 2

Genius and Celebrity: Oscar Wilde in America

2.1 Wilde-Salome´ by Al Pacino: An American Portrait American director and actor Al Pacino’s 2011 celebrated docufilm WildeSalomé documents a period in which Pacino performed in a production of Salomé directed by actress and theatre director Estelle Parson at Los Angeles’ Wadsworth Theatre—with him performing the role of Herod and Jessica Chastain in the role of Salomé—while he was also making a movie documenting the mounting of the show and shooting a narrative film version of the play. The Los Angeles performance was actually a staged-reading in modern dress, with no music, a choice which surprised both audience and critics, but which—as Al Pacino explains in the film— allowed the audience to become entranced by Wilde’s words, by their “magic;” indeed, as we will see in chapter three, Salomé is possibly the most sonorous and musical of Wilde’s works. The film is for Al Pacino, and of course for the audience, a journey, and, most importantly, a process —as the actor/director confesses in the opening sequences—in which Pacino rewrites not only the play but Wilde himself. The film stages, indeed, Pacino’s “love affair with Oscar Wilde”— an author he loves, “for his fragile power”—and his desire to explore Wilde’s legacy in contemporary culture. In a fashion which recalls his approach to rewriting Shakespeare in his 1996 documentary Looking for

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2_2

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Richard, Pacino visits different world capitals (London, Dublin, Paris, New York) to enlighten himself—and the viewers—about the world of Oscar Wilde and gain a deeper understanding of how Salomé was conceived. In a way, the sequences about Wilde and his world seem to compose a film within the film, a biopic within the larger frame provided by the Los Angeles’s rehearsals and performance footage. In order to investigate Wilde’s complexity and multiplicity, Al Pacino stages fascinating dialogues with several writers and celebrities linked, in different and at times unpredictable ways, to Wilde’s world. Besides Oscar’s nephew Merlin Holland providing biographical details and acute observations about Wilde as an uncomfortable figure within Victorian society, we have Gore Vidal referring to Wilde—who according to Vidal is the author of the first ever play “on nothing,” namely The Importance of Being Earnest —in terms of one of the early socialist and a very good political thinker, something which explains why he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol; as Vidal insists, the English government “feared him not for sex but feared him for his ideas.” The film also features a precious contribution by Tom Stoppard,1 who, besides providing details about Wilde being accused of posing as a sodomite on the infamous card written by Queensberry, sees in his decision not to fly abroad during the famous afternoon at the Cadogan Hotel, his determination to become a martyr for posterity. On the other hand, Irish global celebrity Bono,2 singer of U2, focuses on Wilde’s universal appeal not just for gay people, but for anyone who feels that their part in their society is being marginalized. Interestingly, Bono—who, in the interview, speaks of Wilde as the only writer who 1 Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties interestingly focuses on Wilde’s, The Importance of Being Earnest . 2 On Wilde and Bono, see: Lynn Ramert, “A Century Apart: The Personality Performances of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and U2’s Bono in the 1990s,” Popular Music and Society, Vol. 32, No. 4, October 2009, 447–460. As Ramert observes in the concluding remarks of his essay: “One element that links these men is that they put themselves out in front of the world for the sake of their art. […] Oscar Wilde paved the way for modern artists to insist on ambiguity in both life and art and on the active performance and enjoyment of life. Artists such as Bono and U2 carry on the tradition of a unique Irish spin on personality performance and the creation of thought-provoking, deeply felt, and yet also often thoroughly entertaining works of art” (457–458). We will focus on Wilde’s legacy in the world of pop in the last chapter of the present study; it is worth mentioning here the 1991 song by U2 entitled ‘Salomé’ a B-side from the Achtung Baby sessions in

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can take on Shakespeare—also points to Salomé’s destructive power of sexuality, projecting towards Wilde’s own destiny and fall. The most fascinating sequences of the Wilde’s narrative are, however, those in which Pacino himself stages phases of Wilde’s life. If in Dublin we see him visiting Wilde’s birthplace and the National Gallery of Ireland (featuring paintings of both Salomé and John the Baptist), saluting Wilde’s memorial sculpture in Merrion Square, saying “we love you for everything you’ve given us and we will continue to,” some minutes later we watch him performing Wilde in London’s Cadogan Hotel room, with two actors from his company in the roles of Ross and Bosie. Then—after watching him visiting Wilde’s house in Tite Street, and other Wilde-related locations—we have Pacino reading passages from De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” affirming how the real irony is that the prison informs the two works which are considered his best. Interestingly, the prison section of the film hosts a number of sequences from Gilbert’s famous 1997 biopic Wilde, staging a form of intertextuality which points to Wilde’s complex intermedial position within contemporary popular culture. One of the most fascinating and to an extent moving sequences of the film is the one in which Pacino acknowledges his debt to Wilde; in a way “you marry,” he says, “your favourite writer,” and you become “half of each other;” in the final part of the docufilm, we see Pacino on a train, a sequence which, besides perfectly translating the idea of his film as a journey, becomes particularly relevant for the association of Salomé’s symphonic and yet dramatic ending and Wilde’s iconic lines from “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol,” that is “Each man kills the thing he loves,” which the actor reads with extraordinary intensity. In the very last scene of the film, we have Pacino in a desert, giving voice to Wilde himself through the famous lines from De Profundis in which the writer affirms that “All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death”—iconic lines on which we will return in chapter four.

which Bono quotes from Wilde’s play the famous imperative “dance for me,” sung on a hypnotic, danceable bass line, with the effect of turning the song into a mini-play, into a musical/theatrical adaptation of Salomé. Another song from Achtung Baby, namely the single ‘Mysterious Ways’, represents a further tribute to Wilde’s play by Bono and his band-mates with the title making reference to the ways in which the female protagonist dances.

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The film, which premiered at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, sadly had very limited distribution; nevertheless, in 2014, it was published by Universal in a special box set double DVD, an edition which perfectly responds to Wilde’s intermedial potential. The DVD3 can be considered not only a media resource but also a space to investigate the fascinating dialogic relationship involving image, music and literature. In this sense, if, according to Brummett, “a text is a set of signs related to each other insofar as their meanings all contribute to the same set of effects or functions,”4 then the DVD, and in particular Wilde’s Salome, stands as a “multimodal text”5 (Kress, van Leeuwen 2001), one where the visual, the musical and the literary are engaged in a fascinating dialogue which allows them to constantly redefine themselves. In this sense, the DVD

3 As McDonald notes: “ Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc (DVD) […] introduced in the consumer market in 1996 […] introduced a new media object. Videocassettes had always remained a linear medium, working along the single plane of record, play, rewind and fast-forward. DVD, however, provided access to many different sources of content via menus. DVDs increased the storage capacity of video software units, providing space for the inclusion of other types of content beyond the main programme. By multiplying textual content, DVD has raised questions over whether there is a core or essence to the video commodity.” Paul McDonald, Video and DVD Industries (London: BFI, 2007), 1. The DVD has also posed new challenges for scholars in the field and for literary scholars forcing them to keep pace with the ongoing transformation of the landscape of media and culture industries. As Sebok observes: “ The fact that the DVD entered into and helped define a shift in technology and culture from ‘analog’ to ‘digital’ is of paramount importance to the processes involved in making DVD meaningful. ‘Digital’ suggests a massive shift in culture and industry, away from a particular understanding of technology and technology-user interface into an age of instant, random access to information and entertainment.” Bryan Sebok, Convergent Hollywood; DVD, and the Transformation of the Home Entertainment Industries (Austin: University of Texas, 2007), 227. Many commentators have pointed to the analogy between DVDs and the Internet, not only for the hypertextual structure of their interface—allowing each user to freely, creatively (and vertically) construct his/her reading of the text—but also for the encyclopaedic access to knowledge they both offer. We witness, in short, a shift from a critical discourse on the text, offering contents strictly related to the film or series (as we see in critical para-texts) to a larger public discourse about the text which expands its context. See Mariagrazia Franchi, “Il vecchio e il nuovo. Il DVD e l’ambivalenza della comunicazione in epoca digitale,” in Leonardo Quaresima, Valentina Re (a cura di), Play the Movie. Il DVD e le nuove forme dell’esperienza audiovisiva (Torino: Kaplan, 2010), 16–31. 4 Barry Brummett, The Rhetoric of Popular Culture, Second Edition (London and New Delhi, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 34. 5 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (London: Arnold, 2001).

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edition features two discs suggesting the image of two films—the WildeSalomé Documentary in disc 1 and the Salomé narrative film, plus a Q&A at London’s BFI with Pacino, Chastain, Stephen Fry in disc 2— interrogating and mirroring each other, with the reader/viewer invited to negotiate and create his/her own space within the cinematic process of construction of Wilde and his play. One of most experimental and iconic filmic versions6 of Wilde’s play is Carmelo Bene’s 1972 Salomé, a psychedelic rewriting characterized by extremely fast cutting, obsessive/repetitive dialogues and an intelligent satire. For the iconic Italian actor and director, Salomé represents the impossibility of martyrdom in a current, no longer barbaric, but exclusively stupid world.7 Interestingly, when asked to describe his work, at the 6 One of the first filmic adaptations of Salomé is the 1923 silent version directed by Charles Bryant, considered one of the first art films to be made in the history of cinema. Here, the highly stylized costumes, exaggerated acting, minimal sets and absence of all but the most necessary props created a screen image much more focused on atmosphere and on conveying a sense of the characters’ individual heightened desires than on conventional plot development. The film was shot completely in black and white, matching the illustrations done by Aubrey Beardsley in the printed edition of Wilde’s play, which as it is known Wilde was not particularly fond of. The author objected to the artwork because much of it—The Woman in the Moon, A Platonic Lament, Eyes of Herod, Enter Herodias —included grotesque and obscene caricatures of himself. “They are cruel and evil” Wilde said “and so like dear Aubrey, who has a face like a silver hatchet, with grass-green hair […] They are all too Japanese, while my play is Byzantine. My Herod is like the Herod of Gustave Moreau – wrapped in jewels and sorrows. My Salomé is mystic, the sister of Salambo, a Sainte Therese who worships the moon; dear Aubrey’s designs are like naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copybook” (Raymond Ricketts “Oscar Wilde, Recollections,” 51–52). The film centered on Russianborn stage and film actress Nazimova who also wrote the script under the pseudonym of Peter M Winters and who, legend says, employed only homosexual actors as a homage to Wilde. As David Weir points out, what seems particularly fascinating about the film is Nazimova’s attempt “to incorporate multiple arts (poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, etc.) into the filmic representation of Wilde’s play. Wilde himself participates in the decadentsymbolist tradition of one art crossing over into the domain of another when he describes Salomé as ‘coloured’ and ‘musical’. Colour and music were, of course, unavailable to Nazimova in 1922, working in the medium of silent, black-and-white film. Hence her efforts to produce an ‘art film’ (the term did not really exist until the 1960s) were handicapped from the start. Nonetheless, as writer, director and producer of the film, aided by Natacha Rambova, her production designer, Nazimova very nearly succeeded in creating a Gesamtkunstwerk, a ‘total work of art’ that had once had the operas of Richard Wagner as principal exemplar.” David Weir, “Salomé on the Screen, or, The Dance of the Seven Arts” in Wilde World, eds Giovannelli, Martino, 43. 7 See Carmelo Bene and Giancarlo Dotto, Vita di Carmelo Bene (Milano: Bompiani, 1998).

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1972 Venice Film Festival, he used the word degenerate; in Bene’s experimental and profoundly grotesque vision, we have close-ups of peeling skin and of female buttocks spanked with feathers, while an actor speaks as he lustily eats grapes from a woman’s body; in a Last Supper scene, Christ appears with vampire fangs, while, in the second half of the movie, a Christ-like figure tries to crucify himself. The film also features beautiful and evocative sequences in which human faces interrogate and are interrogated by the moon and a use of cutting and of colours which seem to anticipate Derek Jarman’s aesthetics. One of the most fascinating features of Salomé is Bene’s extraordinary auctorial and more specifically vocal performance; as Bachmann puts it in his 1972 Film Quarterly review: “Bene is on the screen (in the part of Herod) practically the whole time,” and he also notes how “his favourite form of delivery is to slobber the words across dripping lips, not always intelligibly, to repeat them, to have a second voice speak them simultaneously and to writhe pitifully the while, in close-up before up,”8 in what we perceive as a very clever and respondent tribute to Wilde’s extraordinary musical approach to language in the play. Interestingly, in the film—which also features a bald and naked actress Verushka wearing only colourful jewels and which powerfully recalls the Living Theatre—Salomé was played by the black American model Donyale Luna who had worked with the American pop artist Andy Warhol, on whom we will focus in the next section. In another iconic filmic version of the play, that is, British director Ken Russell’s controversial Salomé’s Last Dance (1987)—which like Bene’s work is defined by an experimental approach to Wilde’s text—we also find something similar to Pacino’s effort of creating an adaptation in which characters are at once inside and outside the play. In Russell, we have Wilde and Bosie watch, on 5 November 1892, in a Victorian male brothel run by Alfred Taylor—the man who procured rent boys for Wilde (and Douglas) and who “was convicted of gross indecency alongside him in 1895”—a private performance of Salomé, performances of which had, as it is known, just been banned in England by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. In the play, all the roles are played by prostitutes or their clients, and each actor plays two roles, one in the brothel and the other in the play, with Bosie playing the role of John the Baptist. According to Weir, “the play-within-the-film device is one means of realizing the pop-culture 8 Gideon Bachmann, “Salomé”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1972, 20–23. Quoted in Robert Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen (London: Metheun, 1999), 173.

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appeal of Wilde himself, who was after all, something of a pop-culture celebrity in his own day.”9 One has the impression, nevertheless, that where Salome’s Last Dance seems to be an extremely intellectual/cerebral work, in Al Pacino, we can perceive a degree of urgency and directness in approaching and narrating Wilde as a pop icon and celebrity. What we have in Wilde Salomé is, indeed, a postmodern celebrity investigating the life of the first real celebrity in the history of modern literature. More specifically, we have an American film star investigating the success of a writer who, as we will see in this chapter, becomes big first in America and then in Britain. Some of America’s biggest stars will, on the other hand, in one way or other connect with Wilde and his world; among them: Andy Warhol, Lou Reed10 and Truman Capote. Interestingly, as Waldrep observes, Truman Capote as a talented journalist and “in his performance of the role of serious writer […] paralleled Wilde in his use of self-promotion and the ability to sell himself.”11 Capote shared Wilde’s conversation skills, arguing that “great conversationalists are in fact really monologists, and illustrated this principle via the televised talk show.”12 Like Wilde, Capote thought of his “self as theatre,” something which emerges in the selfinterview “Nocturnal Turnings”—included in the collection Music for Chameleons (1980)—in which he investigates his many sides: the alcoholic, the genius, the drug addict and the homosexual, in a way which recalls Wilde’s writing in De Profundis . In this chapter, we will focus on Wilde’s performance during his American tour, investigating first Wilde’s iconicity and his celebrity status in his early London days.

2.2

Wilde’s Iconicity

Lauren Gloss—in an essay significantly entitled “Brand Names. A Brief Study of Literary Celebrity”—notes how “if the Romantic era witnessed the emergence of the author as a literary “personality” addressed to, and 9 David Weir, Decadence. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 111. 10 We will focus on Reed, Wilde and the Velvet Underground in the last chapter of the present study. 11 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 79. 12 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 81.

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partly generated by, an anonymous audience, the rise of realism in the middle of the nineteenth century coincides with the expansion of this audience along with an increasing attention to the authorial personality by journalists and critics as the literary marketplace in the great urban centers expands and stabilizes into a series of overlapping authorial star systems.”13 Gloss insists on how the nineteenth century experienced “a more diverse deployment of literary celebrity, as women, AfricanAmericans and other minority writers gradually manage to appeal to readers through name recognition and audience loyalty.”14 In this sense: As authors accommodate themselves to the exigencies and uncertainties of the marketplace, literary celebrity develops both as a way of addressing an increasingly dispersed and diverse audience on seemingly intimate terms, and as one of the more reliable methods for advertising books, a process that was proving to be rife with controversy and uncertainty. […] Since, unlike other mass-produced commodities, every book is different, the publishing industry struggled to achieve the kind of brand loyalty then developing in other industries. One consequence was that authorial names became brand names, helping their publishers to promote and predict sales in the face of unpredictable market forces.15

Interestingly, “Oscar Wilde” became a brand not so much for the efforts of the late Victorian publishing industry, as for the performative strategies through Wilde managed in the highly normative and morally rigid context of late Victorian England, to turn himself, with extraordinary intelligence, into something resembling a contemporary celebrity. In this perspective, Michael Gillespie significantly entitled his last study on the Anglo-Irish author Branding Oscar Wilde, in which he shows how “through calculated behavior, provocative language, and arresting dress, Wilde self-consciously created a brand initially recognized by family and friends, then by the British public, and ultimately by large audiences over the world.”16 Su Holmes and Sean Redmond stress, however, how

13 Lauren, Gloss, “Brand Names. A Brief Study of Literary Celebrity”, A Companion to Celebrity, eds P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond (London: Blackwell, 2016), 40. 14 Gloss, “Brand Names”, 40. 15 Gloss, “Brand Names”, 40. 16 Michael Gillespie, Branding Oscar Wilde (London and New York: Routledge 2017),

i.

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celebrity status does not reside in the individual; it is, rather, constituted discursively, “by the way in which the individual is represented.”17 Of course, the issue of representation is of paramount importance in any discourse by and on Oscar Wilde; if on the one hand Wilde, in his complex effort of self-promotion, became “the most self-conscious marketer of his own image,”18 on the other, in this very process of construction, the media of the time played a key role, which, however, at times exceeded the possibility of control by the author himself. Making reference to some of the caricatures circulating on such magazines as Moonshine—and in particular to the one entitled “days with celebrities” (1882), portraying an iconic Wilde holding a sunflower— Lois Cucullu notes how “Wilde was acclaimed and mocked as a celebrity in English society, when the very category and term, as scholars and critics have shown, were just gaining attraction in the popular vernacular,” indeed, as the critic observes, “the scholarly community writing on celebrity has rightly come to regard him […] as helping to inaugurate the phenomenon of celebrity culture that is one hallmark of twentieth and twenty-first century modernity.”19 The Moonshine caricature, as Cucullu observes, projects towards the collapse of the barrier separating private from public life that mass media aggressively came to exploit, an issue on which almost all of the studies on celebrity seem to focus. In this sense, in Celebrity, Rojek, after making a distinction between glamour and notoriety—which, as he explains, unlike the former is never associated with favourable public recognition—identifies four main features of celebrity. First of all, it implies “impact on public consciousness;” second, “celebrities are cultural fabrications”; indeed, as Rojek observes, “no celebrity acquires public recognition without the assistance of cultural intermediaries.”20 Third, celebrity always implies a split between private self and a public self, or between a “veridical self” and a “public face;” indeed, “the public presentation of the self is always a staged activity, in which the human actor presents a “front” or “face” to others while keeping a 17 Su Holmes, Sean Redmond, “Editorial. A Journal in Celebrity Studies,” Celebrity Studies, Vol. 1. No. 1, 2010, 4. 18 Richard Kaye, “Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde,” in Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 193. 19 Lois Cucullu, “Adolescent Dorian Gray,” 19. 20 Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 10.

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significant portion of the self in reserve. For the celebrity the split between the “I” and the “Me” is often disturbing.”21 In this sense, as we will see in chapter four, reading De Profundis becomes particularly interesting for the complex dialogism the text establishes between Wilde’s “I” and “Me.” Finally, Rojek identifies a fourth aspect relating to celebrity, that is the category of “renown” referring “to the informal attribution of distinction within a given social network,” which is typical of individuals who “have a sort of localized fame within the particular social assemblage of which they are a part,” on the contrary “the fame of the celebrity is ubiquitous.”22 Wilde’s position seems particularly interesting if we take into account the artist’s and the man’s capacity for transcending spatial and temporal borders, articulating, in this way, a complex condition and experience of celebrity. Considering Wilde in terms of a living sign and icon also implies ideas of complexity, multiplicity. In Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory,23 the icon stands as a specific typology of sign along with the index and the symbol; while the index is a sign that signifies its object by a relation of contiguity, causality or by some physical connection and the symbol is a sign in consequence of a habit (usually determined by a code), the icon is characterized by a relation of similarity between the sign and its object. The icon is the most independent sign from both convention and causality/contiguity: an icon stands for something or for some particular meaning in an unpredictable, often escaping, way implying multiple semiotic possibilities. Wilde, as we have seen, does not imply a single world but a multiplicity of worlds and meanings. In this sense, Wilde has achieved iconic status in contemporary popular culture and within the fields of English literary and cultural studies. Undoubtedly, the secret of Wilde’s success, in his own time, is given by the artist’s ability to translate his life into a form of writing and his writing into a vital gesture and a critique of Late Victorian official culture.24 Nevertheless, if celebrity is constituted discursively, it can be 21 Rojek, Celebrity, 11. 22 Rojek, Celebrity, 12. 23 C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. A. Burks, C. Harthstorne

and P. Weiss (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958). 24 Pierpaolo Martino, “The Wilde Legacy: Performing Wilde’s Paradigm in the TwentyFirst Century,” in Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring

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argued that Wilde’s iconicity implies a kind of double articulation based on a complex discourse involving past and present. As we have seen, in his own time, Wilde was the most self-conscious marketer of his own image, that is, like many contemporary pop stars, he carefully constructed his status within society with the intention of selling himself and translating his art and life into economic success. Wilde’s iconicity also relates, indeed, to the author’s afterlife. Not only did he become a celebrity in his own time, but wrote and performed a script which—through a number of cultural appropriations and performances—guaranteed him iconic status in today’s popular culture. Indeed, in the twentieth and in the twentyfirst centuries, Wilde’s self-conscious construction of his identity and his performance of an ironic masculinity25 have become sources of inspiration for many icons (beside Truman Capote), such as, Andy Warhol, Stephen Fry, Rupert Everett, David Bowie, Gavin Friday, Morrissey and Will Self. In this process, different mediums have enabled different forms of expression/embodiment of Wilde’s celebrity, if cinema and the visual arts have often focused on Wilde’s image (his dandy look, his pose), both (contemporary) literature and (popular) music have often succeeded in the very complex task of translating Wilde’s music, his approach to language as music with its complex interplay of levity and depth (something on which we will focus on Chapters 3 and 5 of the present study). Addressing Wilde in terms of “icon” also implies referring to him in terms of what the OED defines “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration.”26 Undoubtedly, there is a religious aspect connected with Wilde’s iconicity, which today leads admirers to worship both his image and the many dimensions connected to that image (it is possible to speak, indeed, of a Wilde cult; his image and his epigrams are everywhere on t-shirts, album covers, posters). In this perspective, Simon Callow—in a short essay entitled “The Iconic Oscar” included in his book entitled Oscar Wilde and his Circle, published by The National Portrait Gallery for the homonymous 2000 exhibition—speaking about the “image” in and of Wilde writes:

Influences in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Annette M. Magid (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 140. 25 See John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture. 26 Oxford English Dictionary Concise (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), 704.

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Not only do portraits, those of Dorian Gray and Willie Hughes, feature centrally – eponymously indeed – in two of his most original works; representations of him, drawn, written, painted and photographed, occupy a highly significant place in his life. Wilde was not only one of the most illustrious, but also one of the most illustrated of authors. This was no accident. […] He was a pioneer of celebrity, fashioning and re-fashioning his image, until eventually, as with one of the most famous of his own creations, image and reality fatally parted company.27

We will focus on the “image” of Dorian Gray in the next chapter of the present study; what seems interesting to note here is that, as Rojek observes, “as modern society developed, celebrities have filled the absence created by the decay in the popular belief in the divine rights of kings, and the death of God.”28 In short, in coincidence with the emergence of consumerism, the belief in God waned and celebrities became immortal; Rojek makes reference to such icons as John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain, addressing them in terms of “idols of cult worship,” idols whose fame is also connected to a tragic dimension, something which, of course, also defines Wilde. Interestingly, Terry Eagleton entitled a play focusing on Wilde’s life Saint Oscar (1989), a title which, besides projecting towards the tragic epilogue of Wilde’s parable, also makes reference to a trend in gay studies and in gay culture in general to see Wilde as the first homosexual martyr of history; something which, if on the one hand can offer a restrictive view of Wilde’s otherness, on the other, through the concept of martyrdom, seems to connect to Wilde’s construction of himself in De Profundis , where the author somehow emerges in terms of a Christ-like figure, in terms of a saint (and sinner) asking for forgiveness, to be opposed to the demonic representation he offers of Douglas. In his 1989 play, Saint Oscar Eagleton rewrites Wilde as an Irish icon and celebrity. The play was first performed on the evening of the 24 September 1989, in Derry’s Guildhall by the Field Day Theatre Company. […]. Saint Oscar is a two acts play and its plot is constructed around the trial in which Wilde was sentenced, as it is known, to two years’ hard labour for “acts of gross indecency.” In Act 1, Eagleton focuses on 27 Simon Callow, Oscar Wilde and His Circle (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2000), 7. 28 Rojek, Celebrity, 13–14.

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Wilde’s relationship with Ireland and with emerging socialist thought, relating these to his critical thought. In Act 2, the author focuses on the trial and its aftermath, that is the imprisonment and exile. In the play, homosexuality becomes a central issue. In a way, Eagleton affirms Wilde’s identity as Irish and as socialist in relation to Victorian society and thought, to show how the British Establishment annihilates it by reducing it to homosexuality. Eagleton investigates (and stages) Wilde’s Irishness in complex, dissonant terms. According to Killen: “Eagleton’s Wilde is a wildly contradictory figure, who periodically reveals his Irish identity, but who is quite prepared to adopt an ‘English’ persona as it suits,” the critic makes indeed reference to a passage from Act 1 of the play in which Wilde, “in response to his mother’s insistent talk about Irish nationalism,” points to his defence of Ireland against the English and to him and his mother—as Protestant sand upper-middleclass living in Merrion Square—never being truly Irish. Killen concludes affirming how “even in such contradictions as simultaneously asserting and denying his national identity, however, Eagleton’s Wilde is a very Irish Wilde.”29 Wilde’s Irishness is indeed defined by his very postmodernity. In his “Foreword” to the first edition of Saint Oscar, Eagleton insists, among other things, on how astonishingly: Wilde’s work prefigures the insights of contemporary cultural theory. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that such theory, for all its excited air of novelty, represents in some ways little advance on the fin de siècle. Language as self-referential, truth as a convenient fiction, the human subject as contradictory and ‘deconstructed’, criticism as a form of ‘creative’ writing, the body and its pleasures pitted against a pharisaical ideology: in these and several other ways, Oscar Wilde looms up for us more and more as the Irish Roland Barthes.30 29 Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12. Killen also insists on how for Eagleton “such contradiction is crucial to understanding the use of language in a colonial context. […] denied access to normative discourses by the colonial power, writers in colonised countries are forced to use language in a variety of non-normative ways. Thus, in order to challenge the dominant language of realism in nineteenth-century England, writers like Wilde became experts in anti-mimeticism demonstrating that, for the Irish, ‘language...compensates for a history in which you are more determined than determining, more object than agent.’” Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde, 12. 30 Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar (Derry: Field Day, 1989), vii.

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Barthes, the de-constructor of myths and of language—whose work, as we have already seen in chapter one, can be fecundly associated with Wilde’s—himself became a myth, often confounding life and writing; he became a (postmodern) celebrity whose thought has had an enormous impact on a global level.

2.3

Becoming a Global Celebrity

Wilde became a global celebrity during his 1882 tour of the United States; like any contemporary pop star, in order to become a proper celebrity he had first to be big in America. The chance was given by the success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride (1881), which focused on the look and manner of the aesthete in the character of Bunthorne. Richard D’Oyly Carte, the show’s producer, offered Wilde a series of promotional lectures to provide American audiences with the chance to see a real-life aesthete; as Ellmann observes: [Carte] was particularly willing to bring over the purported model for Bunthorne because Americans had little direct information about the type, and no history of the mockery of it such as du Maurier’s. Of course, the United States had a subculture which was dissatisfied with money and power, but this had no single and famed exponent. Neither the shirtsleeved Whitman, nor the bearded Longfellow, nor the tense Emerson could remotely be thought of as Gilbert’s model.31

Wilde’s American tour—which has been at the centre of several recent analysis, especially by American (and British) scholars, to the extent of representing a very prolific and attractive area of Wilde Studies32 —recalls a practice which was to become quite popular in the 1960s with British rock and pop artists, such as the Beatles,33 promoting their albums through long American tours. Interestingly, Wilde didn’t link his name

31 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 144. 32 Recent studies include: Roy Morris, Declaring His Genius. Oscar Wilde in North

America, (Cambridge: Belknap, 2013); David. M. Friedman, Wilde in America (New York: Norton, 2014) and Michèle Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 33 We will focus on Wilde and The Beatles in the last chapter of the present study.

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with Opera as a form of high art, but with operetta as a form of middlebrow entertainment; in this sense, he embarked in a sort of pop tour before the advent of pop itself, in a process in which the operetta helped to publicize Wilde not vice versa. Legend says that on his arrival in New York a customer official asked him if he had anything to declare, Wilde promptly answered: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”34 Wilde’s famous epigram is, among other things, a sign of his astonishing linguistic and conversation skills: “in an attempt to transcribe his unique style of lecturing, one American Journalist went so far as to devise a system of diacritical marks to represent the elaborate pauses and inflections that Wilde would use to manipulate his audience.”35 Indeed, Wilde’s speech was music; he was a great improviser who knew that society—that is, any form of social interaction—is, as Schutz36 (1976) puts it, playing music together. In this musical performance, in which he mixed different genres (stories, philosophy, wit), very often form becomes more relevant than content. Wilde’s epigrams,37 which he would easily drop into his speeches with the same elegance and cool of his characters, were in a sense the melody around which he improvised in different contexts. According to Eagleton, a Wildean epigram, as we have seen, “seizes upon some English commonplace and rips it inside out, deconstructs it.”38 Wilde—as a man and artist fully immersed, as we will see, in consumer culture—used to recycle his epigrams in plays, essays and everyday conversation; indeed, according to Matthew Sturgis:

34 Roy Morris, Declaring his Genius. Oscar Wilde in North America (Cambridge: Belknap 2013), 1. Wilde famously said, in an epigram addressed to Andre Gide, to have put “all his genius into his life and only his talent in his works.” 35 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 66. 36 Alfred Schutz, “Fragments on the Phenomenology of Music,” in In Search of Musical

Method, ed. F. J. Smith (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1976), 23–49. 37 A 2004 documentary entitled Happy Birthday Oscar Wilde directed by Bill Hughes for Wilde’s 150th birth anniversary celebrates the epigrammatic dimension of his work. Among those performing his epigrams, we have Bono, Gavin Friday, Annie Lennox, Gabriel Byrne, Geoffrey Rush and Liam Neeson. 38 Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde,” 4.

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Wilde’s first reputation was as a wit: a sayer of smart things. From his last days at university he was celebrated – or mocked – as master of the ingenious epigram, the provocative paradox, the witty side, or the extravagant conceit. And it was a reputation that endured. Indeed, even after his literary success in the 1890s, it remained a common trope that, however sparkling his writings might be, they were but pallid reflections of his verbal exuberance and wit – or ingenious vehicles for the same. For, if other recorded his conventional flights, so too did Wilde. He used and re-used, many of his sayings in his published works – in his two great ‘duologues’ (‘The Dacay of Lying’ and ‘The Critic as Artist’), in his one novel, in his four plays, and in the several epigrammatic manifestos that he contributed to the periodical press.39

In this sense, one might create a link between Wilde and a great American icon, Andy Warhol, himself “of the Wilde sort,” who “brought seriality to new heights (or depths) by signalling that it was all that art was – indeed, that it could ever be.”40 Warhol, who famously referred to himself in terms of a “deeply superficial person,” treated trivial things as the most important of things and vice versa in a way which recalls the author of The Importance of Being Earnest , a play whose subtitle is indeed “A trivial comedy for serious people.”41 Elise Glick—in a very clever study entitled Materializing Queer Desire. Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol —notes how “Andy Warhol […] has very

39 Matthew Sturgis, “Preface,” in Oscar Wilde, Wildeana. A Compendium of Previously

Unpublished Anecdotes, Epigrams, Asides and Accounts, ed. Matthew Sturgis (London: Riverrun 2020), vi. Sturgis notes that “there have, over the years, been many anthologies of Wilde’s aphorisms. Indeed, he together with his wife, Constance, was responsible for the first collection – called Oscariana. […] Since then the process has never ceased […]. Certainly, over the decades a definite canon has emerged. The same epigrams have become – repeated, reordered, re-enjoyed” (vi–vii). In a way, the many collections of Wilde’s (extraordinarily musical ) epigrams published over the years have played the same function that Best of or Greatest Hits collections of songs by famous pop artists have played in the world (and market) of popular music. 40 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 100. 41 Interestingly, in Bockris’s monograph on Warhol, we read—through a reference to a

1974 London Times review of an exhibition on the cult artist—how: “Warhol is in some ways like Oscar Wilde. He hides a deep seriousness and commitment behind a front of frivolity.” Elsewhere, Bockris, making reference to Warhol’s poses, reports that in 1971 the artist “had bought a miniature dachshund, Archie, which he carried around as part of the ‘look’ – like Oscar Wilde’s lily.” Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 263, 278.

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much in common with early incarnations of the queer aesthete or dandy such as Oscar Wilde,”42 a connection which, as she writes “was not lost on Warhol’s contemporaries,” and indeed, she quotes the words of art curator and critic Henry Geldzahler—the protagonist of the homonymous 1964 iconic film by Warhol—who confesses: I’ve written about Andy that only Oscar Wilde, as far as I know, was able to the same extent to invent a way of behaving with people who were at the margin of society. That whole aesthetic, Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, was invented by the aesthete Wilde. Andy in the sixties did something like that also, that lifestyle.43

In short, as Glick puts it “like his predecessor Warhol used his effeminacy, aesthetic costume, intimacy with objects and celebrity connections to advertise himself as a highly polished, aesthetic surface.”44 A major concern for both Wilde and Warhol was, of course, fame itself; if, since his college days, Wilde knew that he would be “famous, and if not famous, notorious,” Warhol—who, according to Marwick, was himself “the embodiment of spectacle”45 —made “being famous more famous,” something which defines the strategy of Warhol Enterprises during the Eighties. In this sense, as Waldrep notes, in the last part of his career, he replaced the artists and outsiders who had peopled the Factory in the sixties—muses such as Edie Sedgwick and Nico, actors such as Joe D’Alessandro and Paul Morrissey, iconic avant-rock band The Velvet Underground—with rich people, celebrities and royals, retreating in this way into the world of the jet set. Significantly, he transformed his famous magazine Interview into a monthly “almost wholly about fame”:

42 Elise Glick, Materializing Queer Desire. Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol (New York: Suny, 2009), 152. 43 Stephen Shore, Lynn Tillman, The Velvet Years. Warhol’s Factory—1965–67 (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1995), 130. 44 Glick, Materializing Queer Desire, 152. 45 Arthur Marwick, The Arts in the West Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2002), 200. Marwick also notes how “Warhol perceived that with conceptual art (and here the term ‘art’ includes his films) you could outrage people and gain enormous publicity through people simply being made aware of the concept, without ever having actually to view the painting, sculpture, or film.” Marwick, The Arts in the West, 200.

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The process of becoming famous [was] chronicled either in the one-paged bios of hunky young stars that always began each issue or in the main section, which usually included an interview with the cover star based on a “conversation” at lunch with Andy and either another editor or a friend. Each cover, though rarely by Warhol, expressed the Warhol mystique at that time: a celebrity almost instantly recognizable, is painted in a fauxpop style in which the person’s face appears as if on a poster […]. The iconic treatment of anyone who appeared on the cover also added to the idea that the cover has a “star” each issue.46

Wilde himself sat for many interviews during his American tour and his image could be found (even though in some sort of caricature) on the cover of several magazines. The young dandy, determined to become a star, prepared carefully for his tour; he was much concerned about what to wear and thought of a costume for his tailor to make; those who saw his first appearances in the States remember his green overcoat and Polish cap. Most importantly, during the tour, hundreds of photographs were shot of the aesthete in his poses, like the famous Sarony photos which—showing Wilde in a typical costume for the American tour, with his velveteen jacket and knee breeches and his famous long hair—perfectly capture Wilde’s look and capacity for self-promotion. Aa Kerry Powell observes: Celebrity images had market value, then as now, but Sarony’s portraits were also distinguished by a lifelike spontaneity unusual for the time – a variety of poses, gestures and expressions that made his work stand out from the dull sameness of most photography. Notwithstanding the long exposure times of up to a full minute, Sarony was able to avoid the stiff, wooden poses that make the photographs of most of his contemporaries seem so unlifelike.47

Interestingly, in his session with Wilde, “posing the sitter was Sarony’s primary function […] and by all accounts he was meticulous, demanding and even tyrannical in doing it;” like Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “Sarony seemed actually to project himself into the poses

46 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 97–98. 47 Kerry Powell, Acting Wilde. Victorian Sexuality,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21–22.

Theatre and Oscar Wilde

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of his subjects,”48 once again in Wilde’s discourse life was imitating art; even though it is worth stressing, the writer was to publish his novel some eight years later. Wilde was aware, “as he had been at Trinity and Oxford, that he had no talent for oratory. He repeatedly confessed as much in America. What he had to do was to cultivate a way of charming rather than coercing his audience.”49 Besides Wilde had never given a lecture before; for this reason, after making his agreement with the Carte organization, he asked Hermann Vezin, an American actor and drama critic then working in London—who had worked with John Hare, Charles Kean, among others—for elocution (and gesture) lessons.50 Wilde prepared his first lecture in America, probably waiting to measure the cultural temperature before doing so. The first of the three major lectures he delivered in the States was entitled “The English Renaissance of Art;” the remaining two were entitled “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful,” to which he later added a fourth lecture entitled “The Irish poets of 1848.” In “The English Renaissance of Art,” he offered a reconsidered aestheticism; Wilde’s aesthetic taste appeared, in this sense, as a necessarily impure one. It is well known that, in “Economimesis,” Derrida51 (1981) offers a reading of Kant’s view of aesthetic judgement in The Critique of Judgment in which he shows how the idealist elaboration of the aesthetic as an ontological question (with its implicit stress on an idea of purity) necessarily excludes consideration of the material and historical forces that are continually transforming representational practices and aesthetic experiences. Wilde, as we have seen, was well aware of these forces and shaped his aesthetics accordingly; in this sense, his discourse was capable of resolving, or better harmonizing, in an extremely complex and intelligent way, such dichotomies as body and soul, external and internal. It is important to remember here how Wilde’s idea of beauty derived from a complex process of harmonization of the theories of his two 48 Powell, Acting Wilde, 22. 49 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 147. 50 David. M. Friedman, Wilde in America (New York: Norton, 2014), 51. As Friedman reports Wilde told Vazin: “I want a natural style, with a touch of affectation” to which Vazon replied: “Haven’t you already got that Oscar?” Friedman, Wilde in America, 51. 51 Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics, Vol. 11, No. 2, The Ghost of Theology: Readings of Kant and Hegel (Summer, 1981), 2–25.

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masters, namely Ruskin and Pater (even though it must be said, many of Wilde’s ideas are more heavily indebted to Pater’s doctrine). As we have seen, for Ruskin, beauty had to be associated with good, while for Pater it could have the taste of evil. If Ruskin was interested in religion, Pater was more attracted by the excesses of mysticism; moreover, Ruskin’s credo privileged conscience and discipline, while Pater’s was a doctrine centred on imagination and which considered beauty as something contextual. Wilde’s capacity for synthesizing different even opposite perspectives conveyed a considerable strength to the ideas he introduced during his American lectures. The opening section of the first of his American lectures represents a remarkable literary performance, in which the author juxtaposes and harmonizes a multiplicity of voices and visions: Among the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century - still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is possible. I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty.52

Commenting on “The English Renaissance of Art,” Ellmann himself elegantly writes how “by beautifying the outward aspects of life, [Wilde] would beautify the inner ones,” and adds how, in the lecture, he would.

52 Oscar Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art,” in Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (London: Metheun, 1913), 111–112.

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discuss the desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, the passion for physical beauty, the attention to form rather than content, the search for new subjects of poetry, for new forms of art, for new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments. The new Euphorion was, as Goethe had foreseen, the product of mating Hellenism and romanticism, Helen of Troy and Faust. […] It was the capacity to render, not the capacity to feel, which brought true art into being. And once in being, art conferred upon life a value it had not heretofore had. Its creations were more real than the living. […] Wilde was piecing together his later discovery that life imitates art.53

The lecture—which stands as a powerful script brilliantly performed by Wilde/the actor on different American stages—was first delivered in New York on 9 January. Wilde impressed the audience with his attire and his very peculiar modality of enunciation. His costume featured a dark purple coat, and knee breeches; black hose, low shoes with bright buckles; coat lined with lavender satin, a frill of rich lace at the wrists and for tie-ends over a low turn-down collar, hair long, and parted in a middle, or all combed over. He entered on stage with a circular cavalier cloak over his shoulder; his voice was clear, easy and not forced; he changed pose now and then, the head inclining towards the strong foot, and kept a general appearance of repose. What Wilde had succeeded in presenting—and, of course, selling —was not so much precepts as a personality. Stern has recently approached the American tour in terms of Wilde’s interest in aesthetic education seeing his costume as a “deliberate study in pedagogical style” noting how “by approaching the task of lecturing as a kind of performance, Wilde wished to do more than simply profess truths about art: inspired by the examples of Mahaffy and Ruskin, he visibly embodied the figure of teacher as artist. His audiences would not merely imbibe his lessons; they would see those ideas manifested in the flesh.”54 Wilde’s personality and his performances became the subject of vivid contention as he zigzagged impossibly across the country on a tour which lasted until 27 December. Many people so took to heart Wilde’s proclaimed mission “to make this artistic movement the basis for a new

53 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 157–158. 54 Stern, Oscar Wilde, 59.

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civilization,”55 that craft societies and museum patronage blossomed in his wake. Letters home had Wilde crowing that he was a bigger genius than Dickens; in this sense, the personal adulation necessitated three secretaries, of whom Wilde wrote: “one writes my autographs all day for my admirers, the other receives the flowers that are left really every ten minutes. A third whose hair resembles mine is obliged to send off locks of his own hair to the myriad maidens of the city, and so is rapidly becoming bald.”56 On 18 January, Wilde met Walt Whitman, the iconic American poet. Wilde had praised his work in local newspapers and after some initial reticence, the older poet agreed to meet the aesthete. The conversation focusing on contemporary poetry and on the aesthetic school, however, became quite tense when Wilde declared he could not listen to anyone unless he attracted him by a charming style or by beauty of theme. At this, the older poet remonstrated that it always seemed to him that the fellow who makes a dead set at beauty by itself is in a bad way. Whitman’s idea being that beauty is a result not an abstraction, to which Wilde was quite concessive, replying that he agreed.57 As previously mentioned, Wilde was very much fascinated by the Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass who famously wrote: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes.” A disciple of both Whitman and (in a way) Wilde, American icon and Nobel Prize (for literature) winner Bob Dylan significantly entitled the first single from his highly acclaimed 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, ‘I contain multitudes.’ Todd Haynes, the director of Velvet Goldmine also directed a film on Dylan entitled I’m not There, in which he approaches Dylan in terms of the multiplicity of his selves, an idea which again powerfully connects with Wilde. Wilde was, however, an easy, if not eager target in America. A few mocked his poetry or his ideas, including the self-assured Scot Archibald Forbes who found Wilde’s knee breeches particularly repellent; some, at their peril, mocked his utterances and if a few newspapers took his side, most tried to make him look foolish. Particularly, Wilde’s gender

55 Matthew Hofer, Gary Scharnhorst, Oscar Wilde in America. The Interviews (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 99. 56 Wilde, Complete Letters, 126. 57 See Friedman, Wilde in America.

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bending and coded performances were scorned publicly; he was mocked as a degenerate in satirical cartoons, a monkey with a flower in such papers as Harper’s Weekly and the Washington Post. It must be stressed, however, how for Wilde newspapers basically meant interviews, which represented a very precious platform for the construction of his celebrity. Wilde sat for at least ninety-eight interviews while touring North America between January and November 1882, which again the aesthete conducted as if they were proper performances. As Hofer and Scarhorst observe: Wilde often conducted an interview as if it were a performance. The interviewer would arrive to find him playing the part of the idle aesthete, lounging in a chair or on a sofa. Wilde would leap to his feet, shake the interviewer’s hand, and offer him a seat. At the first prompt he would deliver a scripted line (e.g. “No art is better than bad art”). The conversation would end at a predetermined moment when his manager or valet would enter the room interrupt the talk, and explain that the poet had another appointment.58

Interviewers, as Wilde knew, were a product of American civilization. Celebrity interviews began to appear in American newspapers in the early 1870s and travelling lectures were a convenient source of copy for reporters. While Henry James and Mark Twain decried the new celebrity culture—even though Twain was himself a literary celebrity in America and abroad—Oscar Wilde, like Whitman, embraced it creating a paradigm to perform for the new generations up until the new millennium. Interviews were to become a very precious resource, as we have seen with Warhol, for the construction of many celebrities in the late twentieth century. And yet, newspapers and journalists often attacked Wilde; this paradoxically gave him a new confidence. They could attack him, but they could not take their eyes off him. Derision was a form of tribute, and if it went 58 Hofer, Scharnhorst, Oscar Wilde in America, 4. Hofer, Scharnhorst also note how “in his interviews Wilde touched on a wide range of topics, including American architecture, Chinese porcelain, the state of the American theater, Irish Home Rule and the Land League, the American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler, and his plan to visit Japan and Australia. He freely expressed his opinion of such American writers as Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, and Howells and of such British authors as Milton, Shelley, Dante Gabriele Rossetti, William Morris, and Tennyson. […] He was never bereft of opinions, especially irreverent ones.” Hofer, Scharnhorst, Oscar Wilde in America, 4.

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on long enough, could not fail to be interpreted so. He could moreover appeal, over the heads of the journalists, to the people. During the twelve months in America, he learned how to mock his mockers; this is also, in a sense, the essence of contemporary celebrity culture. Wilde, however, was more inclined to transgress gender norms than racial or class boundaries. He treated his black valet W. M. Traquiar with undisguised condescension, for example. He explained to Norman Forbes-Robertson after his arrival in New York that he had been assigned “a black servant” whom he called “my slave,” adding, “in a free country one cannot live without a slave – rather like a Christy minstrel, except that he knows no riddles,”59 a comment which, however, seems to preserve Wilde’s bitter irony. After a few weeks from his arrival in New York, Wilde discovered that he would need another lecture besides “The English Renaissance,” so he wrote not one but two more lectures: “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful.” The first was more closely linked to “The English Renaissance,” drawing upon Ruskin and Morris for its examples. In “The Decorative Arts”—which was first presented in Chicago, with Wilde moving “fluently from point to point, not worrying much about organization, trusting to what quickly became dependable pattern”60 —the author famously declared that: All great art is decorative, but that not all decoration is art. To illustrate that […] point , […] Wilde disdained the then-current American fashion for painting sunsets and other natural phenomena on china […] he said [sunsets] “if beautiful enough should be painted [on canvas], handsomely framed and hung on walls.” [...] Wilde then went on to declare that virtually nothing made by a machine could qualify as beautiful; that art is the result less of exuberant feeling than of excellent technique; that art schools should be housed in elegant buildings; and that craftsmen are more likely to produce beautiful things when surrounded by beautiful things themselves. Even the Tribune acknowledged that these teachings were received

59 Hofer, Scharnhorst, Oscar Wilde in America, 8. 60 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 183. Focusing on Wilde’s second lecture, Ellmann writes:

“Modern dress was ignoble, as could be seen in sculptures […] There must be schools of art, and these must be in more immediate relation with trade and manufacturing than now. Art should portray the men who cover the world with a network of iron and the sea with ships.”

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by an “orderly and appreciative” crowd that presents “not the slightest suggestion of rowdyism or ridicule.”61

The second lecture he added, “The House Beautiful,” was even more prescriptive, it was, indeed, as Morris observes, a “top-to-bottom survey of modern houses and, most particularly, their furnishings;”62 here Wilde’s performative skills, his theatrical and complex enunciation proved, more than in other cases, of paramount importance along with his gestures, as he “metaphorically walked through “the house commenting on the mistakes he had observed.”63 Wilde was quite accurate in his prescriptions: Within the house: the hall should not be papered, since the walls are exposed more or less to the elements by the frequent opening and closing of the door, it could be wainscoted with some of America’s beautiful woods [...]. Don’t carpet the floor: ordinary red bricks tiles make a warm and beautiful floor […] Colours resemble musical notes: a single false colour or false note destroys the whole. Therefore, in decorating a room one keynote of colour should predominate. […] On the walls secondary colours should be used […] Don’ t paper [the ceiling]; that gives one the sensation of living in a paper box, which is not pleasant. […] As regards style of furniture, [the] most liked in England, and the one which is most suitable in every way for you, is that known as Queen Anne furniture.64

After some interesting observations on the presence (and on the use) of a piano in the house and on the importance of flowers—and after some suggestions concerning the manner of dressing of men and women living in it—Wilde insists on how “today more than ever the artist and a love of the beautiful are needed to temper and counteract the sordid materialism of the age” concluding that “there is nothing in common life too mean,

61 Friedman, Wilde in America, 160. Interestingly Wilde, while objecting to machinemade articles, allowed that machinery could in some ways free people for better use of time. 62 Morris, Declaring his Genius, 124. 63 Friedman, Wilde in America, 183–184. 64 Oscar Wilde, “The House Beautiful,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 915–919.

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in common things too trivial, to be ennobled by your touch, nothing in life that art cannot raise or sanctify.”65 A fourth lecture entitled “The Irish poets of 1848” was delivered first in San Francisco at the end of March and then in a few other places; here, Wilde focused on nineteenth-century icons such as W Smith O’ Brien, John Mitchel, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis, James Clarance Mangan and, of course, on his mother Speranza who trained the young Oscar “to love and reverence” the poets of ’48. As Mendelssohn observes, talking about these poets, he was obliquely “addressing the explosive situation playing out in real time back home,” without “mentioning like Parnell and Davitt;” in this sense, in the lecture: By drawing historical parallels, he reframed current events in Ireland as part of a vast, cosmopolitan panorama of world events unfurling across time and space. By these lights he reckoned that the Celtic imagination was responsible for ‘all the great beauties of modern literature’ in Europe. Its ‘chords of penetrating passion and melancholy’ had touched ‘men so widely different as Goethe and Napoleon, influencing the work of many poets, from Byron to Keats and Lamartine.’ […] Diverting the conversation from Celts to cosmopolitans, deflecting from the present to the past, from this to that, from X to Y – these manoeuvres were to become his lifelong strategy for discussing topics that were personal emotional, or controversial.66

The tour was undoubtedly a successful one and in his running commentary to friends at home Wilde described some of the most striking moments. Referring to one talk in Leadville—a mining town in the Rocky Mountains—he wrote: “I spoke to them of the early Florentines, and they slept as though no crime had ever stained the ravines of their mountain home.”67 Wilde agreeably descended to the bottom of a silver mine in a bucket; there, to great cheering, he dined, drank whiskey and smoked a cigar, all but preamble to the main event: Then I had to open a new vein, or lode, which with a silver drill I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause. The silver drill was presented to

65 Wilde, “The House Beautiful,” 925. 66 Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde, 177–178. 67 Wilde, Complete Letters, 161.

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me and the lode named ‘The Oscar’. I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in ‘The Oscar’ but in their artless untutored fashion they did not. Only the silver drill remains as a memory of my night at Leadville.68

While in the bar that same night with the miners and the female friends of the miners, Wilde noticed the sign “Please don’t shoot the pianist; he is doing his best,” which, in his short essay “Impressions of America,” he defined as “the only rational method of art criticism he had ever come across.”69 Back in England, Wilde recalled this with delight; he wrote: “I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt that in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music, my apostolic task would be much simplified, as indeed it was.”70 We will focus on Wilde’s fascinating and multifaceted relationship with music in chapter three; it is important here to point to the relevance of the American journey and of Wilde’s other journeys in the construction of his celebrity. In this sense, it is interesting to note with Evangelista that: Wilde’s fame was built across national borders: his notoriety in Britain was cemented by his American lecture tour of 1882, years before he wrote any of his major works. On his return from America, Wilde started making regular trips to France, where he was always eager to make contact with the most prominent authors and artists of the day.71

68 Wilde, Complete Letters, 162. 69 Oscar Wilde, Impressions of America, ed. Stuart Mason (Sunderland: Keystone Press,

1906), 31. 70 Robert Harborough Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Mitchell Kennerley

1906), 226. 71 Evangelista, “Oscar Wilde: European by Sympathy,” 1. Evangelista points, again, to the relevance of borders and of borders-crossing in his very recent monograph entitled Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). According to the critic “from his early experiences in America to the self-imposed exile that followed his release from Reading Gaol, Wilde would often speak and write from the other side of the border: he proselytized for English aestheticism in America; he satirized English bourgeois habits through Irish eyes; he was a staunch Francophile in London; and, in Paris, he acted as an ambassador of English letters, associating with French authors who were keen to learn about the new trends from across the Channel” in this sense, for Evangelista, Wilde—“a central figure in the literary culture of the English

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These authors and artists had a key influence on him, as Italian culture had in his days as a student; yet his tour of America was possibly the most relevant, intense and productive experience he had outside England. The whole tour was as Ellmann puts it “an achievement of courage and grace, along with ineptitude and self-advertisement. Wilde succeeded in naturalizing the word aesthetic […]. However effeminate his doctrines were thought to be, they constituted the most determined and sustained attack upon materialistic vulgarity that America had seen.”72 And yet, as we will see in the next chapter, back in England, Wilde established a very complex and intelligent dialogue with consumerism/materialism.

fin de siècle”—was also “a key theorist and promoter of the new literary cosmopolitanism of that era” (Evangelista, Literary Cosmopolitanism, 32). 72 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 195.

CHAPTER 3

Wilde Consumerism and the Arts

3.1 Oscar at the End of Two Centuries: Stephen Fry’s Wilde In a study entitled The Resurrection of Oscar Wilde. A Cultural Afterlife, Julia Wood notes how, although the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) has always commanded interest and curiosity, “it has been since the mid-1990s that there has been a revaluation of Wilde’s cultural legacy, as well as a re-examination of public feeling towards him.”1 During the 1990s, there were, indeed, a multitude of events, publications and intermedial adaptations—both filmic and musical—commemorating the centenary dates of Wilde’s life, which, in between the two millenniums, was to become a paradigm of otherness, difference and resistance to the “order of discourse,” to use Foucault’s words, a paradigm to be performed and reproduced in a number of different contexts. Interestingly, this reproduction also took place within the end-of-thecentury’s fascination for (and consumption of) British heritage cinema,2

1 Julia Wood, The Resurrection of Oscar Wilde. A Cultural Afterlife (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2007), 8. 2 British heritage films produced in the 1980s and 1990s—following a trend started by Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire (1981)—show a tendency to articulate, as Higson puts it, “a nostalgic and conservative celebration of the values and lifestyles of the privileged classes.” In short, the heritage films, which very often portray the white community

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2_3

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which often translated into the success of biopics based on a conservative idea of history as a simplified model of great individuals, providing a coherent version of identity,3 strongly at odds with postmodern—but also Wildean—views of the self as instable and “fictional.” This process turned Oscar Wilde into a (film industry) commodity; yet, as often happens, in Wilde’s discourse this very form of consumerism was also able to activate critical processes, that is, spaces of reception and rearticulation of Wilde’s paradigm of outsideness, through productions—such as Haynes’ 1998 film—based on creativity, unpredictability and transgression of any pretence of faithfulness.4 One of the most successful films of the late Nineties was, nevertheless, Brian Gilbert’s acclaimed but, as we will see, reassuring 1997 biopic Wilde which was based on Ellmann’s 1987 biography; here Stephen Fry plays Oscar in a performance which exceeded the screen to become a kind of visual reincarnation of Wilde for the late Nineties.5 As Wood herself observes in the late 1990s, “the image of Stephen Fry became sufficiently associated with Wilde’s that the two figures were discussed in conjunction, as if they were the same person. In terms of the

in a semi-rural Southern England, avoid addressing the social and racial diversity of a changing Britain. In doing so, those films reinvent “an England that no longer existed (…) as something fondly remembered and desirable.” Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12. See also Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s (London: BFI Publishing, 1999). 3 Hila Shachar, Screening the Author. The Literary Biopic (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3. 4 See Neil Sammells, Wilde Style. The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde (Harlow: Longman, 2000). 5 In this sense, a 1998 bronze memorial named A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, sculpted by Maggi Hambling, was unveiled in Adelaide Street by Stephen Fry himself. Inscribed with Wilde’s famous epigram words: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, the memorial depicts him rising from a granite sarcophagus. The idea, as Hambling said, is that he is rising, talking, laughing, smoking from this sarcophagus and the passer by, should he or she choose to, can sit on the sarcophagus and have a conversation with him’ (Laura Reynolds, ‘Is the Oscar Wilde Memorial a Bench?’, Londonist, 1 November 2016, https://londonist.com/2015/07/is-the-oscar-wilde-mem orial-a-bench). Interestingly, the idea of a permanent memorial was suggested by the late gay film director Derek Jarman. Several prominent figures, including former Labour leader Michael Foot, leading actress Dame Judi Dench and Irish poet Seamus Heaney, supported the cause. The unveiling also saw Dame Judi Dench and Nigel Hawthorne reading an extract from his work A Woman of No Importance (1893).

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mourning urge, the substitute or surrogate Wilde, satiated the demand for an incarnation of Wilde. Fry, in fact, answered the need for a figure who could play Wilde, not merely on stage or in film, but continually, upon the stage of the centenary.”6 Besides the physical resemblance, Fry also shared Wilde’s eclectic approach to writing: he wrote novels, plays (1980 Latin! Or Tobacco and Boys ) and autobiography and worked for television and cinema (not only as an actor, but also as a director of famous films such as 2003 Bright Young Things, adapted by him after Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies ). Nevertheless, as Tanitch observes in his encyclopaedic work Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, “Fry had a physical similarity to Wilde but not the emotional range as an actor to manage the hubris at the end. He tones Wilde down. There was no flamboyance, no energy, no sparkle. He was gentle, shy and softly spoken, a sad, somewhat detached Oscar, who identified with The Selfish Giant.”7 As we will see in the next chapter, in 2018 Everett will identify with the protagonist of another story by Wilde, namely The Happy Prince, focusing on the very years—that is, his post-prison ones, in which he played the role of the pariah and exile—left outside Gilbert/Fry’s narrative. In short, Wilde was a film which perfectly fitted with the late nineties’ British heritage zeitgeist in which, as we have seen, cultural products were very often produced for an easy, pleasant form of consumption; as French wrote in The Observer, “for all its sexual frankness, Wilde is a discreet work that amuses and moves us, but never shocks or disturbs.”8 Buckton points in this sense to the continuity between Wilde and the string of Hollywoodian adaptations of his literary texts in the following years—namely, An Ideal Husband (with two 1999 versions directed respectively by Parker and Cartlidge), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), Dorian Gray (2009)—noting how this embracing “of Wilde by mainstream cinema has come to the cost of sacrificing the most cryptic, transgressive aspects of his depiction of sexual identity.”9 And yet, in a short article entitled “Playing Oscar,” Fry himself—besides speaking

6 Julia Wood, The Resurrection of Oscar Wilde, 105. 7 Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, 72–73. 8 Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, 73. 9 Oliver S. Buckton, “Wilde Life: Oscar on Film,” Oscar Wilde in Context, eds. Kerry

Powell, Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 354.

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about his lifelong obsession with Wilde and of how he prepared to play Oscar—declared that “Wilde’s courage lay not in his ‘alternative sexuality’ but in the freedom of his mind.”10 It is interesting to note that, even after the release of Gilbert’s film, Fry continued performing Wilde on the stage of the new millennium, through a series of interviews and university lectures (through the late Nineties and early Noughties). In this sense, during a 1998 interview with Roger Ebert,11 Fry spoke of the relevance of Wilde in contemporary culture, noting that, arriving at the end of the twentieth century, we ask what will last and make a difference. Fry points to how his generation put up posters of Che and Dylan and had the sensation rock music might make the difference. At the same time, he stresses how authority of such figures as Wilde and Einstein is still intact. For Fry, Wilde was the “crown prince of Bohemia,” a prince who was able to constantly reinvent himself, illuminating with his ironic stance and critical intelligence our now and he adds: Wilde looms higher with the passage of time. Take an Englishman like myself, visiting America. I’m told that I’m driving past the Empire State Building, but as I look out the window all I can see is the next building, which stands in the way. As we continue down the street, however, the Empire State Building re-emerges, and when I get far enough away it towers above all of the others. Something like that has happened to Wilde. The further away we’ve got from him, the more he’s grown.12

In 2008, Fry was the protagonist of another fascinating intermedial performance: a reading of Wilde’s short stories which was published in cd format. Introducing the reading to his audience, in a short video, after pointing to the musicality of his prose, Fry refers to Wilde as a man of great compassion, who could sympathize with the misery of human life:

10 Stephen Fry, “Playing Oscar”, in Oscar Wilde, Nothing… Except my Genius, ed. Alastair Rolfe (London: Penguin 1997), xix. 11 Roger Hebert, “Fry was Born to be Wilde”, 9 June 1998, https://www.rogerebert. com/interviews/fry-was-born-to-be-wilde. 12 Hebert, “Fry was Born to be Wilde.”

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Wilde “saw human faults very clearly and saw the best way of exposing them;”13 in this sense, his stories, according to Fry, were really parables. Ironically, in his 2014 memoir More Fool Me, Fry confesses that he— the protagonist of an iconic movie on Wilde’s life—was first introduced to Wilde, through a film, namely Anthony Asquith’s 1950s adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest which he watched on a little television when he was twelve: I vividly recall sitting on an uncushioned wooden kitchen chair, face flushed, mouth half-opened, simply astonished at what I was watching and, most especially, hearing. I had had simply no idea that language could do this. That it could dance and trip and tickle, cavort, swirl, beguile and seduce, that its rhythms, subclauses, repetitions, clasulae and colours could excite quite as much as music.14

This first meeting with Wilde and his music prompted Fry to read his works loaning first The Collected Comedies of Oscar Wilde and then The Complete Works from a mobile library, revealing how “the stories for children made [him]weep, as they do this day” while De Profundis seemed “a work of fiction that held some allegorical meaning” beyond his reach. Then, he asked the librarian for a work “about” Wilde and that is how he was introduced to The Trials of Oscar Wilde by Montgomery Hyde which was “like a kick in the groin. A kick most especially in the heart;” the story of Wilde’s fall deeply impressed Fry and stayed with him—who shared a similar “‘nature’, as [Wilde] would say or ‘sexuality’ as we would call it today”15 —for the rest of his days both in real life and on the screen. It is important to stress how in all of Fry’s discourses on Wilde and in all of his Wildean performances emerges the image of a great writer and a great man who had the courage to be the person he really desired to be, refusing to bow down to an image of himself that other people wanted. In so doing, he also opened people’s eyes to the complexities hidden behind imposed truths. Wilde’s freedom of mind is, in this sense, a precious legacy left by Wilde for the centuries to come; Wilde himself negotiated it in a cultural 13 Stephen Fry, “Stephen Fry Presents a Selection of Oscar Wilde’s Stories”, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBCKiWh85oA. 14 Stephen Fry, More Fool Me. A Memoir (London: Penguin 2014), 43–44. 15 Fry, More Fool Me, 49.

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space—that of late nineteenth century—dominated by consumerism, that is by a consumer culture in which he acted in very complex and intelligent ways.

3.2 The Picture of Dorian Gray: Beauty, Desire, Consumerism and Dissonance Following the discussion of Fry’s Wildean performances, we will try now to access and investigate the discursive arena in which Wilde— the twenty-first-century literary commodity par excellence—exercised his countercultural and apparently contradictory aesthetic taste in his own time. Wilde seemed, indeed, to embrace opposite and irreconcilable approaches to consumer culture, as it is witnessed by such works as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” one of Wilde’s most famous essays, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, on the one side, and “The Decay of Lying,” Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband, on the other.16 In this sense, in the introductory notes to Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (2007), Paul Fortunato focuses on Wilde’s ambiguity in relation to consumer culture, noting how “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” seems to stand as a powerful critique of consumerism and of the practitioners of consumer culture in both journalism and fashion. Nevertheless, a play like Lady Windermere’s Fan, written just a few months after the essay, seems to legitimate that very culture standing as Wilde’s first big commercial success, capable of attracting a vast audience. As Terry Eagleton has shown, in Wilde everything is “doubled, hybrid, ambivalent,”17 indeed, one of Wilde’s most interesting features is his liminal positioning, his capacity of never taking sides, of rejecting a fixed, predictable, centralizing frame of mind, and so in his resistance to the irreconcilability of contradictory, opposite that is dissonant, realities; in this sense, Wilde’s impure aesthetics —with its roots in capitalist consumerism—seems to reflect this very complexity.

16 See also Pierpaolo Martino, “Consumerism, Celebrity Culture and the Aesthetic Impure in Oscar Wilde” in English Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2, December 2015 (Special Issue: Victorian Literature and the Aesthetic Impure, ed. Mariaconcetta Costantini), 425– 445. This and the following section of the chapter draws on that contribution, rewriting and expanding it in terms of the connection of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermare’s Fan and An Ideal Husband with Wilde’s personal life. 17 Terry Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde” in The Wildean, n. 19. 2001, 2.

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Fortunato notes how Wilde cleverly manipulated consumer culture in order to articulate a fresh and intelligent discourse in which the very interplay of surface, image and ritual allowed him to elevate elements which Victorian culture tended to marginalize—“things gendered feminine, considered as bodily rather than rational, and often marked as Oriental”—in order to “de-centre the Western, rationalist, masculinist subject” offering in this way a “conception of art that is not anti-Western but otherwise-than-Western.”18 Although the American tour turned him into an iconic figure, Wilde’s fame, in our now, is profoundly associated with his iconic (and only) novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–1891), a work which played a key role in the process of construction of his celebrity status and in the mythical fall that followed the two trials, after which he articulated a new version of himself and of his celebrity status in the long epistola addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, commonly known as De Profundis . According to Cucullu: Ironically what both fuels and hastens [Wilde’s] physical downfall is The Picture of Dorian Gray. At his first trial and thereafter, this story serves as evidence of Wilde’s profligacy and his sodomitical associations that persist down to the present. So while the novella continues willy-nilly to be read as a melodramatic parable of deviance, moral corruption and self-destruction, it persists more radically as Wilde’ s uncanny foretelling of his own cultural rise and physical ruin.19

It is interesting to note how The Picture of Dorian Gray’s three protagonists seem to reflect three aspects of Wilde himself; indeed, as mentioned in Chapter 1, in a letter to Ralph Payne, Wilde declared: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages perhaps.”20 As Gillespie observes, the tension between “the probity of Basil, the immorality of Lord Henry and the unabashed self-indulgence of Dorian combines to echo the author’s conflicting feelings”21 during the early 1890s and 18 Paul Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), p. ix. 19 Cucullu, “Adolescent Dorian Gray”, 21. 20 Wilde, Complete Letters, 585. 21 Gillespie, “Preface”, x.

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informs the audience’s response to his work and to his public persona in the following years; Wilde starts, indeed, to be perceived and read, in terms of categories which are central to the aesthetics, more specifically to the gothic aesthetics of the 1890s, that is doubleness and multiplicity, categories which express the instability of identity and become horrifying and threatening to the stability of Victorian society. Wilde’s iconic novel seems, indeed, to synthesize Gothic conventions like doppelgänger, magic pictures and physical mutability. In his chiaroscuro reading of the novel, Riquelme notes how “Wilde simultaneously anesthetizes the Gothic and gothicises the aesthetic” and notes how “this merger is possible because of the tendency of Gothic writing to present a fantastic world of indulgence and boundary-crossing and the tendency of the aesthetic (Pater) to press beyond conventional boundaries and to recognize terror within beauty.”22 Wilde begins his novel by evoking Pater’s aestheticism through a series of statements about beauty and through allusions to the best-known passages of Pater’s writing: that is the “Conclusion” of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and the description of Mona Lisa from the essay on Leonardo da Vinci in that volume. The first epigram in the Preface, which asserts that “[t]he artist is the creator of beautiful things,” is followed in the remaining epigrams by numerous references to “beauty,” “beautiful things” and “beautiful meanings.” As the reader soon discovers, Wilde’s gothic narrative is permeated by the aesthetic, since it concerns throughout the desire to create, experience, possess or destroy beauty. Wilde’s narrative was originally written in two different versions; the first novella version of 1890 published in the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine was expanded and revised following the many moral attacks addressed to the author. The 1892 edition features the aforementioned programmatic preface, which includes a succession of epigrams, in which Wilde, among other things, separates art and morality, writing—through an extremely musical and concise language—that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” The preface also features an epigram on music in which the author writes: “from the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician,” which if on the one side seems to echo, as 22 Jean Paul Riquelme, “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment and The Picture of Dorian Gray”, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall 2000, 610.

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we will see, Pater’s famous epigram on “the condition of music” on the other introduces music as a language through which to approach Wilde’s literary form, music also being, as we will see in the last section of the present chapter, the most unfunctional and hence aesthetic of the arts, perfectly enacting the “art for art’s sake” imperative. True to form Wilde’s only novel can be approached from many different perspectives, as it contains a plurality of worlds articulating a fascinating multidimensional space in which life and art constantly redefine themselves. It is interesting to note that, even though Wilde was not introduced to Douglas until the year after the novel was published, he resembles the Dorian character incredibly; in this sense, Neil Bartlett in his personal literary “present for Mr. Oscar Wilde”—Who was that Man?—writes: Dorian Gary had gold hair, blue eyes, and rose-red lips. Lord Alfred Douglas, of course, was also blonde, blue eyed, lily white, and he had rose-red lips. The point is, Dorian Gray was imagined in 1890. Wilde first met Douglas in January or June 1891. He was the man for whom he gave years of his life, the man for whom he would have died, the greatest love of his life. He was his type. He was a fiction, one that already existed in his books.23

David Weir, discussing Wilde’s doubleness, points to how the novel relates to Wilde’s personal life in his own time and in the twenty-first century, stressing how parts of Wilde’s quintessentially decadent work: in the more incriminating Lippincott ’s version – were read in court, and indeed Wilde’s three trials make it difficult not to read the narrative about a secret life and a mysterious portrait hidden in an attic as an allegory of closeted homosexuality. At one point Dorian feels “keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life,” a pleasure that Wilde perhaps felt himself, as a married man (with two young sons) who also paid stable boys and bootblacks for sexual services. In a way, Wilde continues to lead a double life today, as both a martyr of the gay rights movement and a decadent author whose plays, stories, essays, and novel continue to delight.24

23 Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988), 195–196. 24 David Weir, Decadence. A Very Short Introduction, 75.

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Many critics have established critical links between the 1891 novel and Wilde’s personal life; Michael Kane, like Weir, reads, for instance, Dorian “as evidence of a crisis of identity resulting from the author’s discovery of the joy of unconventional sex and a consequent difficulty in identifying with any of the available, conventional male role models”25 and yet he also insists on how: Wilde’s questioning of fixed identities was motivated by a desire to escape two defining and limiting labels which might have been stuck on his persona by his contemporaries. The modern discourse of race and sexuality stood at the ready with a loaded label gun. Perhaps Wilde did not want to be simply ‘Irish’, ‘homosexual’ and neatly marginalized as doubly degenerate. Which is not to say that he wanted to be ‘English’ or ‘straight’ either, but to transcend such polar oppositions and be free to play with the masks and personalities of a ‘complex multiform creature.’26

It is important to stress that Kane is quoting from a key passage in Wilde’s novel, included in an extremely dense, fascinating and profoundly decadent section of the novel—namely chapter eleven—in which we learn that Dorian himself. used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.27

We will focus on Wilde’s approach to and performance of gender later in this chapter, discussing The Importance of Being Earnest ; we might say here, with Weir, that in the period in which Dorian Gray was published, Wilde started styling his hair “after the fashion of the decadent emperor Nero, […] making a statement about the value that the Roman Decadence held as a model for his own appearance and behaviour,”

25 Michael Kane, Modern Men. Mapping Masculinity in English and German Literature, 1880–1930 (London: Cassell, 1999), 44. 26 Kane, Modern Men, 43–44. 27 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 119.

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indeed “that behaviour included, for Wilde and others, the experience of same-sex affection that classical antiquity sanctioned.”28 What is particularly relevant about Dorian Gray is that Wilde’s multiform decadent novel—in which the author stages a profound investigation of the idea of doubleness—can also be read, more than any other work in Wilde’s canon, as a complex and severe critique of consumerism itself, with, possibly, the only exception of the already mentioned “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” In this essay, indeed, Wilde’s interest in Christ nourished—as would happen later with De Profundis —his reflections about the positive aspects of a socialist model of society, freed of consumerism. As we read in Wilde’s essay, we should not think “that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things” as our “affection is inside”29 of us—something which seems to be somehow at odds with Wilde’s philosophy of life. But again, Wilde’s aesthetics is all about the coexistence and harmonization of contradictory, even opposite stances. The Picture of Dorian Gray shows the modality in which an individual fully embracing materialism and consumerism can experience self-destruction. The novel introduces through the characters of Hallward and Wotton two different approaches to the idea of beauty. In Chapter 1, we read about “the curious sensation of terror” coming over Basil when he confesses to Wotton: “I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself;” in truth, the words offer a more interesting and fascinating “picture” of Dorian than Henry’s supposition that Basil’s “mysterious young friend”—he significantly first meets through and in the portrait—could be “some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.”30 Wotton turns Dorian into a commodity into a beautiful object to be consumed; hence, Basil’s attempt to protect his young friend from the corrupting influence of

28 Weir, Decadence, 13–14. 29 Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde,

1180. 30 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London and New York: Norton, 2007), 7, 10.

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Wotton can, in a way, be read as a warning by Wilde himself about the corruptive/destructive potential of materialistic culture. In this sense, Gagnier notes how in his only novel, through the character of Lord Henry, Wilde was able to capture “the essence of modern economic man when he named the cigarette the perfect type of a perfect pleasure because it left one unsatisfied. For this reason, of course, the cigarette is the perfect commodity.”31 Interestingly, in Wilde’s iconic story, it is Dorian, under the influence of Wotton, that loses himself in consumerism and yet despite the “exquisite”32 quality of the precious treasures he collects, the young man feels ultimately restless and unfulfilled. This very restlessness informs the portrayal of the novel’s protagonist in adaptations and rewritings of the novel in the domain of contemporary popular culture, from major American productions such as Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray (2009), to cult film versions33 —such as Massimo Dallamano’s The Secret of Dorian Gray (1970) or Goldstein’s Dorian to Will Self’s twenty-first-century literary parody Dorian. An Imitation (2002). In a way, Dallamano’s 1970 iconic film The Secret of Dorian Gray has been able to really capture the decadence of Wilde’s original story. Dallamano sets, indeed, his film version of Dorian Gray in the present, which at that time was the height of the sexual revolution in the late sixties; this, of course, gave the director ample opportunity to explore the world of swingers, uninhibited sex and gender bending through the eyes of the curious Dorian Gray.

31 Regenia Gagnier, “On the Insatiability of Human Wants: Economic and Aesthetic Man”, Victorian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter, 1993), 299. 32 Wilde, Picture, 78. Wotton’s words Gagnier refers to are: “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” 33 Commenting on the legacy left by the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Weir writes “the best illustration of the pop-culture afterlife of decadence has to be the remarkable posthumous career of Oscar Wilde who died in 1900. Consider, for example, that the online Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists Wilde as “screenwriter” of roughly 250 films, almost 100 more than those credited to Ben Hecht, possibly the most prolific screenwriter in cinema history. Many of Wilde’s IMDb credits are for film adaptations of his stage plays, which were extremely popular in his own day. Moreover, film versions of Wilde’s plays span the entirety of cinema history, from silent era to the present,” Weir, Decadence, 110.

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On its part, Self’s novel Dorian—which was originally to be a filmic adaptation for Channel 4—is interestingly subtitled “an imitation,” which really is in the full Wildean sense. Self’s novel, indeed, flatters its original by taking both subject and style entirely seriously. The locations, characters, plot and epigrams are all transposed from the 1890s to the 1990s, chapter by chapter. To be more precise, in Wilde’s Dorian sixteen years pass which in Self become the sixteen years from the first stirring of the HIV/Aids epidemic until the introduction of Haart (Highly active antiretroviral therapy). These were the same 16 years as the ones between the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer and the latter’s death. Little else is materially altered, but, as Neil Bartlett suggests, “everything is reused - sharpened, blackened and intensified by Self’s idiosyncratic remix of Wilde’s combination of wit and rage, extravagant debauchery with clinical introspection.”34 The proliferation of remakes and rewritings of Wide’s novel shows that not only Dorian’s desire but our own desire (as contemporary readers and enthusiasts) to consume Dorian through The Picture of Dorian Gray can never be completely fulfilled.

3.3 Lady Windermere's Fan and an Ideal Husband: Consumerism, Style, Scandal and the Arts The Picture of Dorian Gray reflects the period’s fascination with objects from exotic cultures and for “sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance;”35 the novel features memorable descriptions such as those featured in chapter eleven, where we read that “for a whole year” Dorian: sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and stitched over with iridescent beetles’ wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the East as “woven air,” and “running water,” and “evening dew;” strange figured cloths from Java; elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound 34 Neil Bartlett, “Pictures of Ill Health”, The Guardian, 21 September 2002. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/21/shopping.fiction. 35 Wilde, Picture, 109.

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in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with fleurs-de-lys, birds and images; veils of lacis worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish velvets; Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas, with their green-toned golds and their marvellously plumaged birds.36

The stage directions of some of his scripts also signal the author’s interest in eccentric objects, as exemplified by the first act of An Ideal Husband, where describing Sir Robert Chiltern’s house in Grosvenor Square— an indirectly making reference to his decadent taste—Wilde reveals that “over the well of the staircase hangs a great chandelier with wax lights which illumine a large eighteenth-century French tapestry representing the Triumph of Love, from a design by Boucher.”37 We also read about Mrs Marchmont and Lady Basildon, two very pretty women “seated together on a Louis Seize sofa;” these references define an aesthetic taste which is interestingly based on mixing neo-classical and rococo-styles. Besides referencing very old and often precious pieces of furniture, Wilde asked several late Victorian artists and tailors to design trendy dresses and furniture for his stages. There was a large number of artisans and companies who worked in the context of Wilde’s theatre. Fortunato observes how in the playbills for the production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, we see noted that “the ‘furniture and draperies’ were provided by Frank Giles, & Co., Kensington, and the dresses by Mesdames Savage and Purdue. The floral decorations come from Harrod’s stores, the major elite department store in London. We see advertised the names of the interior designers (for the sets), for example, Walter Hann.”38 In this sense, Wilde seems to be fully immersed in the more complex mechanisms of consumerism; his indirect advertising of prestigious brands and companies nourished the success of his own plays. Wilde’s theatrical productions functioned, in brief, as a space of promotion for the latest trends in fashion and interior design. Paul Fortunato highlights, in particular, the centrality of the fan in the title of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892): “the fan being a very fashionable consumer item at the time. In the fashion magazines, there were full illustrations of the dresses of the leading female characters in the play [such as Mrs Erlynne] and there were fine illustrations also of the enormous ostrich

36 Wilde, Picture, 116. 37 Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 515. 38 Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics, 96.

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feather fan.”39 Wilde was, in short, engaged in a very complex dialogue with the latest fashions of his time; if on the one side his plays were nourished by these very trends, on the other his art was able to activate new processes, to introduce new ideas and symbols which were in a sense appropriated by the fashion market, in order to be sold to the mass audience. Interestingly, Rossetti, a major influence on Wilde, had achieved something similar in painting. Wilde himself had written in “The Decay of Lying” on how “a great artist invents a type, and life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in popular form, like an enterprising publisher.”40 In this essay, the author focuses on the centrality of style in his (consumerist) aesthetics, stating that “it is style that makes us believe in a thing – nothing but style;”41 it is, in short, not the real thing that matters to the person, either as consumer or as artist; it is the admixture of style that the artist has infused in the thing. Wilde anticipates in this way some basic assumptions emerging in the area of Cultural Studies between the 1970s and the 1980s from Hebdige’s subcultural theory to Chambers’ concept of lifestyle. Wilde understood how commodities could become vehicles of individual expression and of self-definition of identity. Wilde’s project had of course its “political” implications. The author’s intention was to present his consumerist aesthetics in terms of discourses of the irrational and the oriental, capable of decentring the rationalist, Western subject. In this sense, Fortunato42 mentions a major work by Wilde, namely An Ideal Husband (1895), focusing on a significant exchange between Sir Robert Chiltern and the woman of fashion, Mrs Cheveley:

39 Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics, 96. 40 Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”, 1083. 41 Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”, 1089. 42 Paul Fortunato, “‘Well-Dressed Women Do’: Embracing the Irrational in Wilde’s

Consumer Aesthetic”, in Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Annette M. Magid (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 2–18.

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MRS. CHEVELEY: [Optimism and pessimism] are both of them merely poses. SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural? MRS. CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up. SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: What would those modern psychological novelists, of whom we hear so much, say to such a theory as that? MRS. CHEVELEY: Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women…merely adored. SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women? MRS. CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world. SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: And women represent the irrational. MRS. CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.43

Here, Mrs Cheveley introduces a number of binary oppositions (to be natural/to pose, rational/irrational) in order to question them to the extent of seeing one as an extension of the other; like Wilde, she conceives life as a performance and resolves the opposition rational/irrational by pointing to a conception of reason which is centred on the body—that is, on both physical beauty and bodily needs—and which gives value to the cultural, that is the performative possibilities offered by consumerism. In this play as elsewhere, Wilde seems to be theorizing the positive, creative aspect of art’s link to consumer culture. When Mrs Cheveley specifies that “well-dressed” women represent the irrational, Wilde implies that the artist and the person of fashion are interested in the very same idea—representing an object (in the case of the woman, herself) not in an accurate flat-footed mode, but rather in a stylish, somehow distorted mode; interestingly, it is the very fact that women-of-fashion are commodified (that is, “well-dressed”) that gives them power. Mrs Cheveley becomes, in this perspective, a woman who is not afraid of commodity culture, to the extent of embracing its irrational logic. In short, consumer culture is not only concerned with commodities, and with their value in a given market; consumerism always implies the

43 Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 519–520.

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emergence of specific lifestyles and the staging of very complex (contextbound) performances by social actors. Interestingly, both Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband, similarly to The Picture of Dorian Gray, seem to interrogate and to be interrogated by Oscar’s real-life performances, and more specifically by a key aspect in late Wilde’s life, that is, scandal. In this perspective, in Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer, Antony Edmonds quotes a key passage from Lady Windermere’s Fan in which Cecil Graham, who is asked by Lord Windermere about the difference between scandal and gossip, cynically replies: Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I’m glad to say.44

Interestingly, gossip and scandal are key aspects of the very process which turned celebrities into commodities in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Wilde returns to the theme in An Ideal Husband when Mrs Cheveley addresses Sir Robert Chiltern—in a dense and powerful passage—in these terms: Remember to what a point Puritanism in England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one’s neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues—and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man—now they crush him. And yours is a very nasty scandal. You couldn’t survive it […] Sir Robert, you know what your English newspapers are like. Suppose that when I leave this house I drive down to some newspaper office, and give them this scandal and the proofs of it! Think of their loathsome joy, of the delight they would have in dragging you down, of the mud and mire they would plunge you in. Think of the hypocrite with his greasy

44 Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, 451.

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smile penning his leading article, and arranging the foulness of the public placard.45

Commenting on this passage, Edmonds—pointing to “the dramatic irony” the contemporary reader, who knows about the drama of Wilde’s last years, associates with these words—affirms that Wilde “almost certainly wrote these lines, knowingly, well aware that circumstances could easily arise where they would apply to his own situation. He was getting in his retaliation in advance.”46 Edmonds’ study not only focuses on Wilde’s (1894) scandalous summer in Worthing but also on the aftermath in which he composed the most successful and iconic of his plays, namely The Importance of Being Earnest .

3.4

The Importance of Being (Earnest): Queering Wild(ean) Performances

Wilde’s was a theatre that pointed to the centrality of the dramatic aspects of everyday life. As we have seen, his own performance was part of his “self-promotion, which fed his professionalism”47 ; Wilde was at once director and actor of himself in that complex and charming play which became his life, which, as Frankel puts it, “now reads like the greatest of his works.”48 Wilde had a theatrical sense of life, and his was a dialogical interiority49 in which, as in a play, different personae spoke to each other without ever reaching a fixed, immutable truth (or identity). Interestingly, one of the most iconic theatrical tributes to Wilde is entitled The Importance of Being Oscar and is a one-man show written and performed by actor Micheál Mac Liammóir and launched at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1960 under the direction of Hilton Edwards. The screenplay consists of excerpts from the poems, the prose, the letters and the plays of Wilde presented in chronological order, with the addition of commentary by Mac Liammóir. The play is a postmodern collage in

45 Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 528. 46 Anthony Edmonds, Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer. The 1894 Worthing Holiday

and the Aftermath (Stroud: Amberley, 2014), 8. 47 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 68. 48 Nicholas Frankel, The Invention of Oscar Wilde (London: Reaktion Books, 2021), 9. 49 See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.

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which the voices of Wilde and Wilde and Mac Liammóir overlap and echo the multiplicity of voices inhabiting Wilde’s works creating a polyphonic canvas, an oral biography, inhabited by a profound and disturbing (for the sense of tragedy informing it) musicality. Significantly, the play opens with one of Wilde’s early poems “Hèlas!,” which introduces Wilde’s identification with music (on which we will return in the next section): To drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control? Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay, Which do but mar the secret of the whole. Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God: Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance — And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?50

Here, the verbal and musical image of “life’s dissonance” projects towards the contemporary reception of Wilde’s complexity, his doubleness and towards the mixture of success and tragedy defining him as icon and celebrity. In the very last lines of the play, Mac Liammóir gives voice to Wilde’s last words addressed to Ross the day before he died asking Robbie to pretend with him not to hear “The Last Trumpet”51 of death. In short, the evocation of sound, music and more in general of listening work both as opening and as ending of Mac Liammóir’s play, translating in this way one of the essential features of Wilde as author, character and most importantly living play. Although the relevance of the Wildean plays we have already mentioned, namely Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband, is 50 In Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 864. 51 Micheál Mac Liammóir, The Importance of Being Oscar (Buckinghamshire: Colin

Smythe, 1995), 70. On Mac Liammoir, see Christopher Fitz-Simons, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards (Dublin: New Island Books 2002). Before Mac Liammóir’s there had been another drama based on Wilde’s life namely 1938 Oscar Wilde A Play by Leslie and Sewell Stokes.

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unquestionable, Wilde’s most successful play of the 1890s remains The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) which, in a sense, mirrors Oscar Wilde as a living play with its focus on masks, double identities, inversion of gender roles and verbal complexities. The very title of the play refers to the idea of performance, to the importance of being, playing and performing someone else in particular contexts. Yet this is also a permanent condition: we are the differences, the different roles which we enact every day; in this sense, the play exceeds the page and the (theatrical) stage: the importance of being Earnest turns into the importance of being Oscar which again becomes the symbol of life as theatre and of an ironic approach to identity. The play reflects Wilde’s interest in gender issues, questioning, once again, within a consumer culture, the normative and rational aspects of Victorian masculinity, focusing not so much on women’s irrationality (as was the case with An Ideal Husband) as on men’s queerness, expanding the work he had done elaborating the character of the dandy52 (namely, Lord Goring) in the play written a few months before. In Waldrep’s view, The Importance of Being Earnest, like the post prison work has a typological function only to the extent to which it acts as an expression of Wilde’s own interest of discovering the possibilities in himself. If Dorian Gray represented in the characters of Basil, Harry and Dorian – the splitting of his consciousness into three separate versions of himself, then Earnest carries his self into the arena of pure concept. It represents a world where queer space is not merely hinted but explicitly defined.53

The queerness at the heart of Earnest (and indirectly) of Wilde has sometimes been over-simplified. The play, according to some scholars, contains a clear homosexual politics and subtext. Sloan stresses how, “Jack and Algernon both pretend to be Earnest in order to maintain a double life. Algernon’s special term for this – “Bunburying” – has also been credited

52 According to McCormack “the dandy is a key to Wilde’s society comedies” but “Who or what is the dandy? By the late nineteenth century, the dandy may be taken as the shorthand for a political phenomenon that Wilde perfected on the stage, representing the transactions by which the powerless, the nobodies, assume power and importance.” McCormack, “Wit in Earnest”, 27. 53 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 60.

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as another coded word for homosexual desire, a play on the slang word ‘bun’ for ‘buttocks.’”54 Even without taking into account such readings, today, the relevance of the play today still lies in the ‘Oriental’ and irrational subversion of rigidly conventional Victorian attitudes to gender and sexuality. Such attitudes are exemplified by the character of Gwendolen, who often acts and speaks against accepted norms concerning female behaviour. As Waldrep puts it, “Earnest is a performance about performance, as it is only by performing a gender – or a sexuality – via the use of masks and language that one can begin the manipulate and change the status quo.”55 What we have here is again the Wildean idea of the “self as theatre,” of the individual as a subversive space.56 In his seminal study Sexual Dissidence. Augustine to Wilde. Freud to Foucault, Jonathan Dollimore investigates Wilde’s “anti-essentialist, transgressive aesthetic,” first of all, defining the author’s complex approach to identity and his notion of individualism, which—as it emerges from “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”—has “less to do with a spiritual essence than a social potential, one which implies a radical possibility of freedom.”57 Individualism generates, in Wilde’s view, “a disobedience [which] in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man’s original virtue” and he notes how, as we have seen with Stoppard, “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”58 54 Sloan, Oscar Wilde, 118. 55 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 59. 56 A contemporary text which stands as an intelligent rewriting of Wilde’s last play is

the already mentioned Handbag (1998) by Mark Ravenhill, which Sammells defines a work of “creative criticism”—Neil Sammells, Wilde Style. The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 126. In the play twenty-eight years before the first performance of The Importance of Being Earnest , a young woman gives birth to a baby boy; accidently, a Nanny places him in a handbag and her unpublished novel into the pram. In 1998, a new baby is stolen and an academic discovers an unpublished novel of more than usual revolting sentimentality. As we read in the introductory notes to the text (on the back cover of the 2015 Bloomsbury edition) “from Victorian wet nurses to Nineties sperm banks, Handbag exposes the confusions and absurdities of parenting at the end of the Twentieth Century.” Mark Ravenhill, Handbag (London: Bloomsbury 2015). 57 Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence. Augustine to Wilde. Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 58 Wilde, The Soul of Man, 1176.

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For Dollimore, “Wilde’s notion of individualism is inseparable from transgressive desire and a transgressive aesthetic.”59 In this sense, individualism, as an affirmation of cultural as well as personal difference, is fundamentally opposed to that “immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule” which, according to Wilde, “is prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England,”60 and yet in Dollimore’s view, Wilde’s individualism is both “a desire for a radical personal freedom and a desire for society itself to be radically different.”61 Hence, the centrality of art (on which we focused in Chapter 1): according to Dollimore, in Wilde’s discourse “nature and reality signify a prevailing order which art wilfully, perversely, and rightfully ignores, and which the critic negates, subvert and transgresses […]. Not surprisingly then criticism and art are aligned with individualism against a conservative social order”62 and yet, and most importantly, Wilde’s deviant desire— which according to Dollimore “decentres and disperses the self”—leads the author “not to escape the repressive order of society” but “to a reinscription within it, and an inversion of the binaries upon which that ordering depends: desire, and the transgressive aesthetic which it fashions, reacts against, disrupts and displaces from within.”63 This leads us to the complex issue of Wilde’s personal performance of gender. As we have seen, there has been a general trend in twentiethcentury criticism to consider Wilde as the first gay martyr. For many, the trials which found Wilde guilty and gave him two years of hard labour coincided with the advent of a public homosexuality. In truth, Wilde’s was an attempt to construct an alternative discourse on masculinity, which sharply contrasted with the rational, Western, imperial one so dominant in Victorian England. As Alan Sinfield notices: Wilde’s principal male characters do look and sound like the mid-twentieth century stereotype of the queer man. They are effete, camp, leisured or aspiring to be, aesthetic, amoral, witty, insouciant, charming, spiteful dandified. If these characters are not offered as homosexual (and generally they

59 Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 8. 60 Wilde, The Soul of Man, 1195. 61 Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 9. 62 Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 10–11. 63 Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 14.

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are pursuing women characters), the whole ambience reeks, none the less, of queerness. Or rather, it does for us. And so does Wilde himself.64

Sinfield notes how Wilde’s contemporaries “didn’t see queerness in the way we have come to see it. […] Wilde was perceived as effeminate, to be sure; but not thereby as queer.”65 The term effeminacy, up until Wilde, did not mean being womanish, and consequently desiring men, but rather spending too much time on and with women, and consequently not being sufficiently occupied with proper manly pursuits. As we have seen, Wilde was obsessed with fashion and interior design and he adored stars such as Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry, who, in their time, were the equivalent of today’s pop celebrities; most importantly, in 1887, Wilde became editor of The Woman’s World which, thanks to contributions from prominent women writers, activists and actresses, tried to change conventional attitudes to women’s history and women’s lives. In short, Wilde was displaying and supporting effeminacy in ways potentially threatening to the establishment. In this perspective, the article entitled “The Bi-Social Oscar Wilde and ‘Modern’ Women”66 by Stetz shows how Wilde was capable of moving freely between male and female environments; he regularly attended universities, offices, clubs but also women’s drawing rooms and workplaces. As we anticipated, this very approach to gender as performance seems in many ways to anticipate Judith Butler67 and more specifically the possibility to problematize categories (such as “woman” or “man”) and question normative approaches to identity. As we have already seen, with Eagleton, Wilde’s most interesting feature is undoubtedly his liminality, his ability never to take sides, to escape a fixed, predictable, frame of mind, in short, his resistance to the irreconcilability of contradictory realities.68 In Masculinity and Culture, John Beynon contrasts Wilde with Eugene Sandow, who, in 1890s, began to publish books on physical training

64 Sinfield, The Wilde Century, vi. 65 Sinfield, The Wilde Century, vii. 66 Margaret D. Stetz, “The Bi-Social Oscar Wilde and ‘Modern’ Women”, Nineteenth

Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 4, March 2001, pp. 515–537. 67 See Butler, Gender Troubler. 68 Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde.”

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which attracted a considerable readership, whereas Sandow “stood for normal masculinity and the improvement of the national and racial stock Wilde represented the abnormal and was the living embodiment of the debauched.”69 In this sense, Wilde’s humiliation was often considered as a victory for imperial masculinity and, by implication, for national and imperial health. It is also important to stress, with Hoare, that the notion of decadence which also dominated in early twentieth century “was largely formed during the First World War, in turn fed by nineteenth-century fin de siècle culture, and the overwhelming influence of one man,” namely Wilde, who, to some, was “a sinner whose sins could not be named.” Hoare also stresses how Wilde was: a man before his time – he started the twentieth century ten years before the year 1900 – Wilde exemplified the coming age: the cult of the personality, the new, the incestuous ties between the media and culture. He addressed pressing questions of social change in a superficially facile manner. His reward for his prescience and his lampooning of straight society as heterosexual revenge: ignominy, prison, exile and death.70

The twentieth century witnessed the crisis of the British Empire and of the kind of masculinity associated with it. Paradoxically, the defeat of Wilde implies the defeat of the Empire and the full emergence of Wilde’s legacy, in particular Oscar’s performative paradigm of masculinity as something capable of questioning the Victorian—and later, as we will see, even Thatcher’s—heavily normative approach to gender. As we will see, in the last chapter of this book, representations of non-normative sexual identities are what very often informs the patterns of rewriting and adaptation of Wilde in the field of contemporary popular music, from Bowie to Morrissey, from Neil Tennant to Pete Doherty. Here, most of the interest of musicians focus, again, on “Oscar Wilde” as a living play and as an extraordinary figure within the Victorian marketplace, more than on his works. After all as Kaye puts it:

69 Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 44. 70 Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand. Decadence, Conspiracy and the most

Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998), 3.

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Queer Theorists have placed a much greater stress on Wilde as historical figure and cultural commodity rather than on his achievements as a writer. To be sure, many Queer Theorists have offered meticulous exegeses of Wilde’s texts, offering readings as “close” as those provided by any New Critic. But such interpretations are always informed by a sense of Wilde not simply as motivated by “private” impulses but as functioning within a historical framework, a writer whose achievements are determined by what was allowable within the restrictions, aspirations, and expectations of the Victorian literary and theatrical marketplace.71

In this perspective, Wilde’s complex strategy of inversion can be understood and investigated also in relation to his very peculiar approach to consumerism. As the first proper celebrity of the modern age, Wilde articulated an extremely complex consumerist aesthetics, which conveyed centrality to performance and style. Wilde’s aesthetics seems to be one of the most relevant legacies of late Victorian culture, to which postmodernity—as we have come to know it, with its taste for bricolage and the mixing of high and low cultures—is heavily indebted. Interestingly, in 2016, Wilde, who, as we have seen, embraced a very complex approach to consumerism, was celebrated—and (again) posthumously commodified—in an exhibition entitled Oscar Wilde. L’Impertinent Absolu organized by Merlin Holland at Paris’ Petit Palais,72 which emerged as the first major exhibition ever held in France in honour of Wilde. It ran from 28 September 2016 through 15 January 2017 and comprised more than 200 rare and impressive pieces including private collections, unique editions, caricatures, photographs, drawings (many, in particular from Aubrey Beardsley), portraits, original manuscripts and documents including the infamous card left by Queensberry at the Albemarle club. The Petit Palais show was centred on Wilde’s cult of personality, that is on Wilde as “a work of art” and on his work as art critic; indeed, a large section of the exhibition was focused on the works Wilde wrote about, with quotations from his articles under each (original) painting. Short excerpts from movies—with a whole room dedicated to Salomé—and interviews were also on view, perfectly translating the image 71 Kaye, “Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde”, 196. 72 The Exhibition catalogue, published in September 2016, features photos, reproduc-

tions of the art-works on display and essays by among others, Holland himself. Merlin Holland, Dominique Morel (eds), Oscar Wilde. L’ Impertinent Absolu (Paris: Paris Musees, 2016).

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of a postmodern, intermedial Wilde, engaged in a complex and fascinating conversation with twenty-first-century popular culture. It is interesting to note how, in his seminal 1985 study Urban Rhythms. Pop Music and Popular Culture, Iain Chambers approaches and defines popular culture in spatial terms, as a fascinating and inclusive space in which: Leisure was no longer simply a moment of rest and recuperation from work, the particular zone of family concerns and private edification. It was widened into potential life-style made possible by consumerism. To buy a particular record, to choose or skirt cut to a particular fashion, to meditate carefully on the colour of your shoes is to open a door onto an actively constructed style of living.73

Significantly, this style locates music at the centre of an extremely articulated culture, in which youth itself—a major preoccupation of Wilde’s— will be no longer thought as a stage of physical life, but as a floating symbol denoting modernity, again: “that promised the requisite succession of present ‘moments’, that perpetual Now.”74 I will focus on the influence of Wilde on contemporary pop music and culture in the last chapter of the present study; what here seems particularly relevant is the central, even though very rarely debated, role played by the language of music in the progressive emergence of Wilde’s philosophy of the arts.

3.5 Consumerism and Beyond: Music, Sound and Listening in Wilde’s Discourse SCENE Morning-room in Algernon’s flat in Half-Moon Street, London, W. TIME The Present. The room is luxuriously and artistically furnished. The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room. LANE is arranging afternoon tea on the table, and after the music has ceased, ALGERNON enters. ALGERNON. Did you hear what I was playing, Lane? LANE. I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir. 73 Iain Chambers, Urban Rhythms. Pop Music and Popular Culture (London: Macmillan, 1985), 16. 74 Andrew Calcutt, Brit Cult: an A-Z of British Pop Culture (London: Prion, 2000).

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ALGERNON. I’m sorry for that, for your sake. I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.75

In both The Importance of being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gary, two of the main characters—Algernon and Dorian—are introduced through music, that is we see and listen to them playing the piano.76 Besides, in Dorian 77 —as we will see at the end of this section—Wotton’s influence on the young protagonist is referred to through a musical simile, while the novel also includes a very long section on Dorian’s collecting very rare, oriental and strange musical instruments. In Wilde’s discourse—and more specifically, within the consumerist context in which he performed both as man and as author—music is, however, not only a commodity, but it represents a critical perspective, a space of resistance which embodies the richness, ambiguity and otherness of literary and artistic communication. Creating a connection between Oscar Wilde and the language of music78 means, in short, creating a fascinating dialogue involving the 75 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), 357. 76 One of the most defining aspects of the fin de siècle was the artists’ interest in synesthetic associations; these very associations, as it is known, powerfully emerge in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and in particular in the incipit of the novel, in the famous description of Basil Hallward’s studio. This is an aspect which also informs Wilde’s poetic production, where very often we can hear echoes of his favourite French writers; in this sense, Beckson and Fong make reference to Teophile Gautier who importantly “provided [Wilde] with models;” indeed, “Wilde’s ‘Symphony in Yellow’ (1889) owes something to Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’, which Wilde called ‘that flawless masterpiece of colour and music’. Both poems employ the transposition of art - that is, the fusion of the arts to emphasise artifice with suggestions of synaesthesia.” Karl Beckson, Bobby Fong, “Wilde as Poet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 65. 77 As we will see in Chapter 5, music and in particular popular music seem to be the discursive mode in which Wilde’s performative paradigm—and freedom of mind—seems to be more easily translatable; this can, as we will see, also be explained in terms of the centrality of music in his work and in his life. 78 See also Pierpaolo Martino, “Oscar Wilde and the Language of Music”, in Interconnecting Music and the Literary Word, eds Fausto Ciompi, Roberta Ferrari and Laura Giovannelli (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 95–109. This section of the chapter draws on that contribution, rewriting and expanding it in terms

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most iconic of the English writers and the most iconic79 of the arts. The richness and complexity of the relationship between Wilde and music must be underlined: it encompasses the author’s knowledge and love of the music both of his time and previous centuries, the multiple references to music in his oeuvre, the literary use of forms such as ballads and chansons, the musical organization of some of his major works, the musicality of his verses and epigrams, but also the music of his own voice (as reported by many of his contemporaries), and, most importantly, Wilde’s steadfast commitment to the idea of performance in art and life. It was this aspect that was to attract many twentieth- and twenty-first-century musicians who, as we will see in Chapter 5, besides adopting a Wildean stance, would also set his verses to music, or write music inspired by the author and his writings. Music, sound and listening are central in any approach to Wilde and they represented very important categories and concerns in late Victorian age. Indeed, in his seminal study entitled The Audible Past, Jonathan Sterne offers a history of the possibility of sound reproduction—the telephone, the phonograph, radio and other related technologies—examining the social and cultural conditions that gave rise to sound reproduction and, in turn, how those technologies crystallized and combined larger cultural currents. Sound-reproduction technologies are, for Sterne, artefacts of vast transformations in the fundamental nature of sound, the human ear, the faculty of hearing and practices of listening that occurred over the long nineteenth century. Capitalism, rationalism, science, colonialism and a host of other factors all affected constructs and practices of sound, hearing and listening. In other words, as Sterne brilliantly puts it: “as there was an Enlightenment, so too was there an “Ensoniment.” A series of conjunctures among ideas, institutions, and practices rendered the world audible in new ways and valorized new constructs of hearing and listening.” In the long nineteenth century:

of the investigation of the relevance of sound and listening in Wilde’s discourse and (in the Romantic) and Late-Victorian context, focusing, at the same time, on the relationship between Wilde’s work and the language of music through the critical lenses offered by Word and Music Studies. 79 See C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce.

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Sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practice […] Hearing was reconstructed as a physiological process, a kind of receptivity and capacity based on physics, biology, and mechanics. Through techniques of listening, people harnessed, modified, and shaped their powers of auditory perception in the service of rationality. In the modern age, sound and hearing were reconceptualized, objectified, imitated, transformed, reproduced, commodified, mass-produced, and industrialized.80

From the late 1850s to the end of the century, London’s prestigious venue “The Royal Institution Great Britain” hosted a series of lectures on acoustics (and acoustical demonstrations) by eminent scientists such as John Tyndall (and the Germans), Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Muller. Tyndall—an Irishman—gave lectures on sound at the Royal Institution beginning in 1857 and continued them throughout the next three decades, which were to be published in his 1878 volume entitled Sound.81 In his lectures, Tyndall fascinated his audience with demonstrations of the marvels of sound and appealed to children and their parents with sonic tricks, which included magic wands which vibrated in response to notes, and singing flames that moved in response to the sound of bells hit with a hammer. In his 1878 study, Tyndall very clearly explains how sound “is propagated as a wave or pulse through the air. This wave impinging upon the tympanic membrane causes it to shiver, its tremors are transmitted to the auditory nerve, and along the auditory nerve to the brain, where it announces itself as sound;”82 sound is seen as a force which can affect bodies and the world; in a way, Tyndall’s work projects towards contemporary “sound act”83 theory. Tyndall pointed to the physiological aspects of hearing and listening at times comparing a man’s senses to parts of musical instrument such as strings and keys. In his 1863 study On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, Tyndall’s mentor Helmholtz explored the concept of sympathetic vibration, that is the idea that sound could cause nearby passive bodies such as strings, bells and glass to vibrate at the same frequency as the tone emitted, to the extent that an opera singer’s voice 80 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (London: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. 81 John Tyndall, Sound (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1867). 82 Tyndall, Sound, 73. 83 See Theo van Leeuwen, Speech, Music, Sound (London: Macmillan, 1999).

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could break glass. Helmholtz’s theories extended to the vibratory responsiveness of the human body, which he believed acted like a “nervous piano”84 that responded to specific wave lengths of sound, suggesting that the hair-like nerve fibers in the cochlea, the inner cavity of the ear, behaved like strings that vibrate sympathetically to sonic events. Most importantly, Helmholtz developed a resonator: a device that emitted specific, concentrated frequencies of sound and communicated them to human listeners. These lectures and publications had an enormous impact on popular culture and in particular on literature. In a February 1869 entry in her journal, George Eliot reported about reading “about plants and Helmholtz on music”85 while in another entry Eliot engaged with Helmholtz’s theory of sympathetic more explicitly. Like Eliot, Thomas Hardy had familiarity with the work of Helmholtz and was curious about the intricacies of sonic vibration and the embodied nature of music listening and performance. In a key passage of The Return of the Native, Eustacia offers us a synesthetic image of the sound of the wind “realized as by touch” calling to mind the growing Victorian appreciation of the exquisite sensitivity of the human ear as discussed by Helmholtz and Tyndall. Literature is intrinsically associated with sound and music, at another level too, as Coombs puts it, to see “words as words” on a page, we are also “more subtly, drawing from [our] competencies in auditory perceptions. Letter signify sounds first of all.”86 Wilde’s father, as we have seen, was, at the time of his marriage with Jane, one of the most eminent ophthalmic surgeons in Ireland (he was knighted in 1864); author of an important study entitled Practical Observations on Aural Surgery and the Nature and Treatment of Diseases of the Ear 87 published in 1853, he was a very clever and original researcher and scientist able “to bridge the world of the modern and the premodern” and who tried to prove: “the value of legendary, mythic and folk material 84 Hermann Helmhotz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, ed. Alexander Ellis (New York: Dover Publications, 1954), p. 119. 85 George Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, eds. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135. 86 David Sweeny Coombs, Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 1. 87 William Wilde, Practical Observations.

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by showing how it can be mapped against the historical and archaeological record, attempting to give value and dignity to the ‘primitive’ oral culture of the peasants at the very moment when science threatens to discard all such knowledge.”88 Young Oscar interest in orality and folklore—which powerfully emerges in (and nourishes) his short stories—can, as we have seen, be explained in these terms; his fascination with sound and musicality also derives from his family and their Irishness. Wilde stands as a space of translation between literature and music, in which writing is conceived as sound and sound and music as forms of writing. Wilde’s life and work seem to respond to Bakhtin’s invitation89 to look to one language through the eyes (and ears) of another, hence the very possibility of a musical reading of some key moments and experiences of Wilde himself. We already discussed in chapter one the relevance of intermediality in any approach to literary texts. Our musical reading of Wilde responds to the rising interest in the academic world for “the confluence between literature and music.”90 Delia da Sousa Correa—in her introduction to a collection entitled Phrase and Subject. Studies in Literature and Music— notes how “until the 1980s critical approaches that brought together literature and music, rather than literature and the visual arts, were rare. Since then, increasing attention has been paid to aesthetic and cultural interactions between literature and music. As the field of literary studies progressively embraces interdisciplinarity, there have been signs of burgeoning interest in the role played by music within literary culture.”91 Cultural studies has also played a fundamental role in the establishment of this very dialectic. Much of the research in the field has focused on the relationship between music and the novel, and here, culture has proved of paramount importance. In this sense, in his study Music in 88 Sean Ryder, “Son and Parents: Speranza and Sir William Wilde,” in Oscar Wilde in Context, eds. Kerry Powell and Peter Ruby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10. 89 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 259–422. 90 Delia Da Sousa Correa (ed.), Phrase and Subject. Studies in Literature and Music,

(London: Legends, 2006), 1. See also Pierpaolo Martino, Mark the Music: The Language of Music in English Literature from Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie (Roma: Aracne Editrice, 2012). 91 Correa, Phrase and Subject, 1. One pioneering study which addresses the present topic is Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts, by Calvin Brown (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948).

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Contemporary British Fiction, Gerry Smyth defines the “interdisciplinary turn” in this field of study in terms of the “emergence of culture as a common object of study for formerly demarcated scholarly systems.”92 Interestingly, Smyth, in his approach to contemporary fiction, also refers to modern and modernist figures such as Sterne, Austen, Hardy, Proust and Joyce, in order to show that the novel has always been preoccupied with and interested in music in its multiple shapes. Music and literature have much in common. Their very closeness importantly relates to the continuity which we have between speech and music since very ancient times, when poetry and music often coincided: Speech, music and other sounds […] have usually been treated as separate, in theory as well as in practice. They have been talked about in different ways and with different terminologies: linguistics to talk about speech; musicology to talk about music […]. And they have been practised as separate disciplines too, especially in dominant modes of communication and high culture art forms. This kind of semiotic purism has not always existed. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the voice was still a musical instrument and music was embedded in every aspect of everyday life, just as many ‘less developed’ cultures had and still have songs for grinding grains, songs for harvesting crops, songs for constructing houses, songs for carrying goods, toilet training songs, puberty songs, news bulletin songs, political comment songs and so on (cf. Merriam, 1964). But as clergical plainsong, the cries of night-watchmen, and the chanting of ABC in schools were replaced by reading aloud, speech was divorced from music.93

Literature as a secondary modelling system94 resonates (especially in the novel) with the many inflections of language as speech, that is, as a primary modelling system. The language of music, on its turn, interestingly stands in between the two systems, being, as we have seen with Van Leeuwen, at the very heart of any verbal enunciation and preserving, at the same time, literature’s unfunctionality and artisticity. Literature establishes a communicative process which is very similar to the one established by the language of music, in both cases what is said is 92 Gerry Smyth, Music in Contemporary British Fiction, Listening to the Novel (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 4. 93 Theo van Leeuwen, Speech, Music, Sound (London: Macmillan, 1999), 1. Here Van Leeuwen makes reference to Alan Merriam’s Anthropology of Music. 94 Lotman, Uspensky, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.”

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less relevant than the very process of saying. The “how,” the modality of the narration, becomes of paramount importance; in this sense, content can sometimes be just a pre-text for the very act of narrating.95 Music and literature have also in common that very peculiar form of dialogism which is intertexuality. According to Barthes, “a text is […] a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations […] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original,” in other words “his only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.”96 In music and literature, this aspect is strictly connected with listening. Bakhtin stresses how the poet97 receives his words and learns how to give them an intonation in the whole course of his life, thanks to an exploratory process of communication with the social context in which he lives. This, of course, also happens with the musician, whose sound is always somebody else’s sound, heard on a recording, during a concert or in a distant memory. This also connects with the dialectics T.S. Eliot establishes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”98 between work of art and time, between artist and history which perfectly illuminates as we will see Wilde’s career as a poet. Music and literature also raise similar problems in relation to the issue of spatial and temporal articulation. Both languages—both artistic forms—seem to be mainly concerned with time; their narratives imply a temporal development and yet the most interesting forms of musical and literary writing seem to deal with a sort of spatialized time, that is to say, with what Edward Said—in On Late Style. Music and Literature against the Grain—defined in terms of a conversion of time into space.99

95 See Michele Lomuto, Augusto Ponzio, Semiotica della Musica (Bari: Edizioni B.A. Graphis, 1997). 96 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, in Image-Music-Text, ed. S. Heath (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 142–148. 97 Michail Bakhtin (V. N. Volosinov), Slovo v žizni I slovo v poezii, Zvezda, 6. 192; “La

parola nella vita e nella poesia”, in M. Bachtin, Linguaggio e Scrittura, trans. L. Ponzio (Roma,: Meltemi, 2003), 34–64. 98 Thomas Stearns, Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in Id. Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 13–20. 99 Edward Said, On Late Style. Music and Literature Against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).

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In his late prose and poetry, Wilde will enact an aesthetics of space which seems strongly indebted to music. John Cage’s concern with pure sound becomes, in this sense, particularly relevant. According to Pagnini,100 musical sounds can present different degrees of closeness, according to the particular emphasis conveyed by a musician during a performance. This establishes an interesting geography of sound which, as we will see, is at the heart of many literary experiences of the twentieth century. La Rue also offers an idea of a spatialized musical time, when he observes that “at the same time that a piece moves forwards, it creates a shape in our memories to which its later movement inevitably relates.”101 This also happens in literature; in this sense, both music and literature seem to be concerned with memory, that here, however, we distinguish from mnemonic capacity; memory articulates, through the use of iconic associations, an unsystematic approach to time which turns it into space. Music is undoubtedly an extremely complex and multifaceted phenomenon. It can be addressed as a widely-shared social practice, from Shakespeare’s time, where it was an essential part of everyday life (with ballads, songs and dance performed in alehouses and during theatre performances), to the piano concert of the Romantic and late Victorian period, the jazz performances of the twentieth century, to a number of contemporary practices associated with rock and pop (such as record collecting, journalism, file-sharing in internet, which, as we will see, become of paramount importance in the process of re-figuration and rewriting of Wilde in our now). But music is also and most importantly pure sound, which becomes essential in our perception of poetry from Shakespeare102 to Romanticism, from early Wilde to Larkin, from Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite,

100 See Marcello Pagnini, Lingua e Musica (Bologna: Mulino, 1975), 50. 101 13Jan La Rue, Guide Lines for Style Analysis (New York: Norton and Company,

1970), 1. 102 Music is of paramount importance in Shakespeare’s discourse; it is a language both spoken (that is, practiced) by characters and speaking about (commenting on) characters, events and philosophical ideas concerning man and society. All of the plays, though making reference to different times and spaces, are the product of a context in which music was a fundamental and widely shared social practice. See Pierpaolo Martino, Mark the Music: The Language of Music in English Literature from Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie (Roma: Aracne Editrice, 2012).

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for whom “poetry is a form of music,” to dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Music, that is, performed music, is also, and most importantly a discourse addressed to the listener but also to the musician’s self and to other musicians involved in a performance; music is a polyphonic practice which helps us to understand the rich dialogism which nourishes both fiction and drama, as we have seen in our reading of The Importance of being Earnest . The two arts, in brief, should never be approached in a structuralist sense, but always as discursive practices that speak to each other. This will also bring us, in particular in Dorian Gray, to associate the dynamics between characters in a novel to the dynamics between musical instruments in a performance, something which also seems to define modernist fiction and more specifically the works of Joyce103 and Woolf.104 103 In that uncontainable and uncontained novel which is Joyce’s masterpiece—namely Ulysses —the relationship between literature and music is refracted in a multiplicity of mirrors and shadow-lines. Joyce’s novel stands as a tribute to the story of humanity. It is a tribute to art as a totality by an artist who loved singing and who tried to portray his citizens through a complex at one visual and aural writing. Ulysses is nourished by music at many different levels. During the composition of the novel Joyce used many different, colors, to mark relevant passages, in order to distinguish between different themes or melodies. But Ulysses is also about impossible and grotesque harmonies which recount a man—Leopold Bloom—who walks, acting as a walking bass, to make music, that is, to interact, with other people. The novel has a complex rhythm which often conveys uneasiness and sadness for a distant wife; only when Leopold’s narration becomes Molly’s the novel finds a final, serene note in a “yes,” which recounts many different sounds and many different worlds. 104 According to Lodge, Virginia Woolf expresses a tendency among modernist writers to develop from a metonymic (realist) to a metaphoric (symbolist) representation of experience The critic, however, insists on Woolf’s specificity when he stresses how her “metaphorical mode is correspondingly different from Joyce’s. It might be said that whereas his writing aspired to the condition of myth hers aspired to condition of lyrical poetry.”—David Lodge, “The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature” edited as “Virginia Woolf,” in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, ed. Su Reid (London: Macmillan, 1993, 27). If in Kamau Brathwaite’s view, poetry can be considered “a form of music,” then Woolf’s writing enacts not only the passage from the metonymic to the metaphoric, that is from prose to poetry, but also from literature to music. Novels such as To The Lighthouse and The Waves see the author involved in a very complex process of intersemiotic translation. Woolf’s style is indeed based on a constant translation of the musical into the literary; in this process, the reader becomes, a listener, a translator and a performer (himself/herself) and the very act of reading a concert in which the novel resonates of a multiplicity of voices, noises and discourses. In this sense, To the Lighthouse’s central section ‘Time Passes’ establishes

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In this sense, through Wilde we can investigate the way in which music becomes an illuminating metaphor and subject in his writing, but also the many ways in which literature and in particular Wilde’s writing often resemble, that is, becomes music, trying to covey its discursivity and iconicity. Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson—during a lecture delivered in Los Angeles in 2007105 —identified some of the numerous musical references in Wilde’s work and underlined the importance of music in the education of “the artist as a young man.” It was, indeed, in the 1860s’ Dublin that Wilde received his first impressions of literature, music and the intellectual coterie that his mother introduced him to at her open-house salons at number 1 Merrion Square; even though he did not speak, he became acquainted with the beauty of words, with their music, in other words, with the art of conversation, which was to prove of paramount importance in the construction of his Oxford and London personae. As we have seen during his 1882 American tour and in his early London years, Wilde also started to think of and deliver his speeches—with their legendary accents, pauses and intonations—as if they were pure music; and yet, as previously mentioned, music was also the art which most deeply informed his writing. According to Holland, for Wilde music was not only a “poetic device” but also “a mood and a metaphor most often of love and beauty.”106 In this sense, before turning to Wilde’s aestheticism—via Pater’s theories about music and art, it is worth focusing on the writer’s involvement with Romanticism, which—besides being an often-neglected area of Wilde Studies—also explains and illuminates Wilde’s relationship with music as a metaphor for love and beauty, but also for sorrow.

Woolf as an extraordinary composer and performer; the section displays an extraordinary sense of the musical with its perfect and intense structure and its focus on interacting sounds and rhythms, within a larger orchestral canvas represented by the novel as whole in which the three main characters Mr and Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe interact as musical instruments—namely, bass, piano and violin—in an improvised performance. See Pierpaolo Martino, Virginia Woolf. La musica del faro. Pagina e improvvisazione (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2003) and Pierpaolo Martino “Poetry is a Form of Music’. Intervista a Kamau Brathwaite, con un saggio introduttivo”, in Id. (ed.), Exodus. Studi sulla Letteratura Anglo-Caraibica (Bari: Graphis, 2009). 105 Perala, “‘Oscar Wilde and Music.’ 106 Perala, “Oscar Wilde and Music.”

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Today any proper reading of Romanticism must embrace a European and synesthetic view of the movement. Looking at French, German and Italian versions of Romantic art—and not only just literature but also and most importantly music and painting—the English romantics find themselves contextualized within a wider discourse and a shared worldview. If Turner’s landscapes offer a perfect visual translation of the Romantic turmoil, Romantic music was mostly a German and French phenomenon, with authors such as Schumann107 and Schubert particularly preoccupied with the idea of infinity and with the investigation of genius, with Chopin and Liszt offering more introspective soundscapes. Before making reference to the two generations of English romantic poets and to their relationship with music (and with Wilde), it is important to stress how Romanticism, as Bloom, Abrams and others have pointed out, exceeds its own time to become an “ageless and recurring phenomenon.”108 This allows us not only to investigate the issue of music in Romanticism, but also to speak about Wilde’s peculiar form of romanticism through his connections, not much with the movement as with some of its leading figures, who like Wilde have manifested, among other things, their fascination with the music of words and with words capable of evoking music. One of the few studies to deal with the issue of Wilde and the Romantics is John Stokes’s Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations. In the chapter entitled “Romantic reincarnations” Stokes notes how in De Profundis Wilde very often made reference to the Romantics: if meditating on his sad condition in prison, he quotes William Wordsworth for whom “suffering is permanent, obscure and dark and has the nature of infinity;”109 in another passage—as we will see in the next chapter—he declared that should he write again, it would be on Christ, who he sees as a sort of precursor of the Romantic movement. Wilde, whose present was now one of sorrow, knew “where identification with Romantic attitudes might lead.”110 107 Interestingly, for Schumann, music was a form of poetry and vice-versa. 108 Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, Romantic Poetry and Prose (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1973), 5. 109 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín, (London: Penguin 2013), 101. 110 John Stokes, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89.

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Wilde’s was an unsystematic approach to Romanticism; unlike his contemporary Symons, he did not write extensively about the movement; he was rather sympathetic with some of the figures, responding to their music with his own music in his poems, essays and plays. Blake for instance—whose early poetical sketches included very short poems entitled “Song,” “Mad Song” and “To the Muses” (Wilde himself called one of his early poems Chanson) and whose greatest achievement was represented by Songs of Innocence and Experience 111 —did not attract Wilde for his poetical writing but for some of his ideas. They shared an interest in the liberating power of paradox, in the coexistence of contraries, in short, in the aesthetics of dissonance we have referred to in the present study. Wilde as a fin de siècle individualist found Blake’s maxim that “ages are all equal, but genius is always above the age” particularly appealing; besides, that of the genius was an obsession of much Romantic music. Even though revolutions had failed, social harmony and unity could be achieved by the action and thought of individual agents. Wilde’s individualism was according to Stokes, Romantic, revolutionary and theatrical. In his early days, he even acted out the Romantic ideology as modern comedy pronouncing, as we have seen, on his arrival in America the famous epigram “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”112 Wilde’s criticism too has very often had this kind of tone; writing about the Romantics in “The Critic as Artist,” he wrote: “Wordsworth saw in Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth’s message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him.”113 Wilde was probably interested in some of the implications of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, the very choice of calling his last and longest poem “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” seems to connect both to the Elizabethan musical tradition and to the famous romantic

111 As it is known, Blake’s first edition of the Songs featured the poet’s engravings; this multimodality brings to mind the first edition of Wilde’s Salomè which featured Beardsley’s illustrations. 112 Some years later, however, he confessed how he had become the spendthrift of his own genius. 113 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”, 1150.

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collection. “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” also includes references to music as joy and its absence is associated with sorrow: It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!114

There is urgency in Wilde’s words here, but it seems to be of a different kind from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s. Wilde, who believed in human potential, was at times scathing of Wordsworth’s natural wisdom. Wilde, as it emerges from the passage quoted from “The Decay of Lying,” was also critical of Byron,115 who he saw as enslaved to his own age (unlike himself, whose commitment was with something more permanent), but was particularly sympathetic to Shelley and Keats. Shelley’s large ambitions and his unappeasable desires fascinated Wilde, who addressed him as a great poet, one who escaped the hypocrisy of the English and in De Profundis placed him in the company of Sophocles and Christ. Interestingly, Shelley closes a small poem entitled “Another Fragment: To Music” with the lines: No, Music, thou art not the ’food of Love.’ Unless Love feeds upon its own sweet self, Till it becomes all Music murmurs of.116

Shelley’s establishes a dialectic relationship between love and music, inviting love and indirectly poetry itself, to become music; it is this very process of translation that Wilde tries to perform in some of his most intense verses.

114 Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde,

886. 115 Byron wrote a poem called “Stanzas for music.” His poem Manfred was set to music by Tchaikovsky. 116 Percy B. Shelley, “Another Fragment: To Music”, in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 2 (Pennsylvania State University, A Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication), 40, http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/shelley/Shelley2.pdf.

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And this brings us to the important link between Wilde and Keats. Wilde saw both Shelley and Keats “as offering ways in which life, or the perception of life, could profitably imitate art.”117 In this sense, “we can see the dawn through Shelley’s eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the moon grows amorous of our youth.”118 In other words, it is possible to see through the poets’ eyes and to listen through their music. Wilde’s sonnet “The Grave of Keats” puts Keats alongside St Sebastian as a martyr of feeling. Keats becomes “the poet-painter of our English land,” whose “name is writ in water” and whose “memory” will be kept green by Wilde’s tears. Keats was at once poet-painter and poet-musician. Keats’s music119 powerfully emerges in “Ode to the Nightingale” a poem about listening, in which there is a complex interplay of sound and beauty and which conveys the idea of the immortality of music through the ever escaping, ever-elusive bird. A similar and yet more dramatic interplay animates Wilde’s tale “The Nightingale and the Rose,” where the nightingale dies in the name of love and beauty. In Holland’s view, the song of the nightingale aims to express the profound notes of beauty in sadness: “If you want a red rose,” said the Tree, “you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart’s-blood. You must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine.”120

Later in the text, the sacrificial nature of the Nightingale’s song elevates the mood and meaning of the most sublime of all sacrifices, love through death: And when the moon shone in the heavens the Nightingale flew to the Rose-tree, and set her breast against the thorn. All night long she sang, 117 Stokes, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations, 103. 118 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”, 1138. 119 On Keats and music, see Giuseppe Galigani, “Keats and Music”, in The Challenge of Keats: Bicentenary Essays, 1795–1995, eds. A. C. Christensen, L. M. Crisafulli, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 279–292. 120 Oscar Wilde, “The Nightingale and the Rose”, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 279. A song entitled “The True Lover”—written by the present author and included in the first homonymous album by Italian post-rock ensemble The Wilde Club (2012)—is based on this short-story.

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with her breast against the thorn, and the cold crystal Moon leaned down and listened. All night long she sang, and the thorn went deeper and deeper into her breast, and her life-blood ebbed away from her.121

Here, while the reader realizes that the Nightingale’s sacrifice is prompted by her desire to facilitate the course of true love for another, the fact remains that this love is ultimately spurned. Wilde seems to be deeply attracted by the music of the voice, seeing it as the most artistic and erotic of forms; in so doing, he anticipates some of the ideas of Roland Barthes, informing in particular “The Grain of the Voice” and A Lover’s Discourse.122 In a letter written to his wife in December 1884, he wrote: “The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some exquisite ecstasy with yours.”123 The language of music once more is presented as an escape from identity, as a space where differences mix and become “other.” In a sense, music is presented as coming from and leading to the feminine; this can be read as a possible, and probably unconscious, critique of conventional, normative masculinity and explains Wilde’s liminality with respect to gender.124 The poet’s possibly favourite voice, and one of the sounds he fell in love with, belonged to Lillie Langtry. Wilde wrote a beautiful poem dedicated to the famous actress, in which once again he employs the discourse of music to address the most musical of women: I remember we used to meet By an ivied seat, And you warbled each pretty word With the air of a bird; And your voice had a quaver in it, Just like a linnet, And shook, as the blackbird’s throat With its last big note;

121 Wilde, “The Nightingale and the Rose”, 280. 122 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York:

Hill and Wang, 1978). 123 Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 241–242. 124 See again Sinfield, The Wilde Century.

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And your eyes, they were green and grey Like an April day, But lit into amethyst When I stooped and kissed;

And your mouth, it would never smile For a long, long while, Then it rippled all over with laughter Five minutes after. […]

Well if my heart must break, Dear love, for your sake, It will break in music, I know, Poet’s hearts break so.125

These are lines about love and beauty, sorrow and loss, conveyed in particular by the beautiful image of a broken heart which turns into music. Once again the image of the bird perfectly translates the idea of a beloved sound; in this sense, “melodic lines to Lily Langtry, however fleeting their real-life affair might have been, express vivid memories and evoke shifting moods.”126 “The Harlot’s House” presents instead a more dissonant soundscape and represents a turning point in Wilde’s use of music. The poem contains a wealth of grotesque images (“ghostly dancers,” “loud musicians,” “laughter”) and the notion of love as not being true to song, or indeed struggling to sing in phantom arms: We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the harlot’s house Inside, above the din and fray, We heard the loud musicians play The ’Treues Liebes Herz’ of Strauss.

125 Oscar Wilde, “Roses and Rue”, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 837–838. 126 Perala, “Oscar Wilde and Music.”

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Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin To sound of horn and violin, Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons, Slim silhouetted skeletons Went sidling through the slow quadrille, […]

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they tried to sing. […]

Then turning to my love, I said, “The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.” […]

But she—she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust.

Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz, The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.127

Here, Wilde seems to move beyond Romanticism, projecting us towards the complex soundscapes created by an aesthete who was progressively turning into a decadent.

127 Oscar Wilde, “The Harlot’s House”, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 867.

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Salomé—which was written in French by Wilde in 1892—is undoubtedly the most decadent of Wilde’s plays; the author’s debt to the Symbolist poets clearly emerges here in the disturbing music which characterizes Wilde’s literary score. In the first act of the play, the very fact that Iakonan’s voice comes from the cistern of the palace is foregrounded, offering us the possibility of accessing through sound the complex geography and acoustics of the setting. During her most intense and fascinating speech at the end of the play, Salomé, seizing Jokanaan’s head, utters the following words: Ah, Jokanaan, Jokanaan, thou wert the only man that I have loved. All other men are hateful to me. But thou, thou wert beautiful! […] There was nothing in the world so white as thy body. There was nothing in the world so black as thy hair. In the whole world there was nothing so red as thy mouth. Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music.128

The “strange music” Salomé seems to hear looking at Jokanaan is in truth the complex music the audience hears through the compelling sonic textures, sensual rhythms created by Wilde especially through the repetitions and variations of key imperatives such as “you must not look at her,” uttered by Herodias, “Let me kiss thy mouth” which Salome addresses to Jokanaan and Herod’s “dance for me, Salomé.” As Robert Ross himself reported in one of the first editions of the play, “Wilde himself, in a rhetorical period, seems to have contemplated the possibility of his prose drama for a musical theme. In De Profundis he says: ‘The refrains, whose recurring motifs make Salomé so like a piece of music, and bind it together as a ballad.’”129 Interestingly, it was the only play by Wilde set to music by a major composer writing on the cusp between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely Richard Strauss.130

128 Oscar Wilde, Salomé, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 604. 129 Robert Ross, “A Note on Salomé”, in Oscar Wilde, Salomé (London: Bodley Head,

1907), xvi. 130 As Powell observes: “Strauss who saw Salomé in max Reinhardt’s production at the Kleines Theater in Berlin in 1901, used an abridged German translation of Wilde’s text as the libretto of an opera more famous than the play which inspired it. First performed in Dresden in 1905 to a reported thirty-eight curtain calls, Strauss’s violent score was the outcome of his realization that Wilde’s play “was simply calling for music” Kerry Powell,

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Wilde’s words resonate as music and shine with a multiplicity of images; there is attention to sounds and to details (as we will see in our brief analysis of Dorian Gray). In this sense, Wilde’s musical sensibility owes much to his “aesthetic” education at Oxford where as we have seen he became a disciple of both Ruskin and Pater. In his essay entitled Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature, in a chapter entitled “The School of Giorgione,” Walter Pater famously wrote: All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation – that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape – should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. […] It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire.131

Pater—anticipating, in a way, Peirce’s semiotics—perfectly captures the iconic quality of music and its rejection of the predictable realms of the symbolic and the indexical. Music is about what Barthes defined in terms of signifiance, shifting meanings, unpredictable associations. As Pater puts it, music is about the perfect con-fusion of matter and form, of form and content. The only limit of Pater’s definition is, however, as Alan Durant brilliantly argues, the reference to a “condition without conditions.”132 Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 37. 131 Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione”, in Id. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1912), 135–137. 132 Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (New York: Suny, 1984), 9.

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According to Pater, “all arts do have specific and individual qualities. These can occasionally be drifted across from one art-form to another.”133 In this sense, all art should aspire to music’s union of form and content, which especially literature often achieves. The problem with Pater is that his condition becomes a “level of perception,” exceeding real, contextual conditions, that is music as a social practice. In Wilde’s corpus, the references encompass more than a century of music making. In this sense, while music—along with the music of the voice—has hitherto been considered, we can now turn to music as everyday practice in Wilde’s society. I am referring here of course to concerts, musical events and especially private amateur recitals mentioned in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray—whose publication, according to Kingston, marks “the beginning of the ‘decadent’ aesthetic period in England”134 —and to a certain extent in his plays, which introduce the notion of performance itself. Going back to the second chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is, again, important to stress how the young protagonist is presented for the first time to the reader in the act of playing piano:135 As they entered they saw Dorian Gray. He was seated at the piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann’s “Forest Scenes.” “You must lend me these, Basil,” he cried. “I want to learn them. They are perfectly charming.”136

133 Durant, Conditions of Music, 8. 134 Angela Kingston, Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction (London and

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 94. 135 Wilde depicts here a private/domestic performance; it is interesting to note that, as Raykoff suggests, the solo piano recital was a quite recent phenomenon, “invented” by Franz Liszt in London “around the same time as the early telegraph and typewriter were being pioneered;” most importantly, the piano recital introduced audiences to a new type of listening, that is to an intercorporeal (fully responsive) listening to the sound of the player’s “touch.” Ivan Raykoff, “Piano, Telegraph, Typewriter: Listening to the Language of ‘Touch’,” in Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Colette Colligan, Margaret Linley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 161. 136 Wilde, Picture, 16.

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The choice of this pastoral piano piece by Schumann is highly significant, as the German composer’s melodic, romantic, and intricate compositions were, as Gillespie observes,137 highly esteemed by the aesthetes, as indicated by the elegant and fitting choice of the adjective “charming.” The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel about charm, fascination and influence; in one of the subsequent paragraphs, we read: Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music.”138

Here is Wotton uttering one of his aphorisms in a “low, musical voice.”139 Dorian becomes literally possessed by Lord Henry’s music and attempts to transform his life in accordance with Henry’s precepts. In this sense, as Deutch observes, “in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde further uses music to arouse and to legitimatize overtly physical same-sex mentorship.”140 In one of their last moments together, Dorian is performing at the piano, and again music is defined through its very capacity to charm: Dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair. “Yes, life has been exquisite,” he murmured, “but I am not going to have the same life, Harry. And you must not say these extravagant things to me. You don’t know everything about me. I think that if you did, even you would turn from me. You laugh. Don’t laugh.” Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me the nocturne over again. Look at that great, honey-coloured moon that hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth. You won’t? Let us go to the club, then. It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly. There is some one at White’s who wants immensely to know you—young Lord Poole, Bournemouth’s eldest son. He has already copied your neckties, 137 Michael P. Gillespie, “Notes to Wilde”, Picture, 16. 138 Wilde, Picture, 19. 139 Wilde, Picture, 19. 140 David Deutch, English Literature and Classical Music. Cultural Contexts 1870–1945

(London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 143.

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and has begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite delightful and rather reminds me of you.141

In Dorian Gray, music is also associated with desire, a state of grace and temptation, or is employed as a means to signal a shift in accent, intonation and in the characters’ development. In his novel, Wilde also makes reference to the “curious concerts” Dorian attends as a fin-de-siècle dandy: At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed or feigned to charm -- great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert’s grace, and Chopin’s beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear.142

Later, Wilde makes reference to Dorian’s decadent passion for collecting instruments and anything connected with music, as we can see in this long section which is worth quoting in its entirety: He collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chile, and the sonorous green jaspers that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness. He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the long clarin of the Mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of 141 Wilde, Picture, 179. 142 Wilde, Picture, 111.

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three leagues; the teponaztli, that has two vibrating tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to “Tannhauser” and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.143

It is important to stress how, in these passages, music is not presented as an abstract entity, but mostly in terms of a social practice and performance; instruments themselves are always contextualized in terms of their original, cultural use, at the same time conveying the idea of the aesthetes’ fascination with the exotic. The Picture of Dorian Gray can be considered a novel about performance in which, as we have seen, Wilde staged three aspects of himself through the representation of three different characters—Dorian, Henry and Basil—giving voice, in this way, to three facets of his identity. In short, in the novel, the self is showcased as music and theatre, in conjunction with the self as an iconic space open to multiple interpretations and projected towards the future performances of its many complexities. At the same time, Wilde’s novel is also a story of a young man’s success and of his tragic fall, which casts, as we anticipated, a sinister life on Wilde’s own life. Indeed, in the same year in which the success of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest turned their author into a star of The West End, Wilde experienced the “greatest drama of his life,” he became, indeed, the protagonist of a tragedy which he was able to recount, to translate in literary terms in what many consider one of his best works, namely the epistola De Profundis .

143 Wilde, Picture, 112. On Listening and on the arts as sources of pleasure, see: Christopher Butler, Pleasure and the Arts. Enjoying Literature, Painting and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

CHAPTER 4

Performing De Profundis

4.1

De Profundis Now

Asked to write an introduction to the 2020 Folio special edition of De Profundis singer and poet Patti Smith decided to write in the form of a personal letter addressed (and, in a way, in reply) to Wilde which—beside sending her back to her schooldays and to the influence Wilde had on her as a teenager—saw the singer, who defines De Profundis “the most shattering” of all Wilde’s output, summarize the drama of Wilde’s life, and the “meteoric reverse” of his fortune, in a powerful sequence of sonorous, profoundly musical words: In creating the character of Dorian Gray, you had unwittingly set the table for your own ruin, for soon you were to encounter Lord Alfred Douglas, an arrogant young beauty who fashioned himself in Dorian’s image. This golden spider, not an intellectual match but irresistibly reckless, drew you into his dangerously seductive web, smack in the eyes of Victorian society. Homosexuality was then a criminal offence in England, and a series of manipulative circumstances landed you in a public entanglement with his rigid, highly appointed father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Sorely underestimating your vindictive adversary resulted in a heinous trial where you were accused of gross indecency. Society judged and sent you to prison.1 1 The introduction was published, in an abridged version, by The Telegraph on 17 may 2020: Patti Smith, “You Showed us the Terrible Mystery of Love,” The Telegraph,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2_4

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The iconic singer stresses, in her powerful letter, how important it was for Wilde in this context of dramatic “deprivation” to have access to the very possibility of writing: Eventually you were granted a daily sheet of prison stationery and it was upon these sheets that you wrote your De Profundis , a letter of love and admission to Lord Alfred Douglas. […] There you were the scribe of your own misfortune, confession and revelation, laid out on 80 close-written pages, on 20 folio sheets of thin blue prison paper. You thrust a mirror in the hand of your former lover, then turned it upon yourself.2

Interestingly, on Sunday 30 October 2016 Smith herself read Wilde’s last great work of prose in the former Chapel of Reading Prison, in a performance which lasted more than three hours and which ended with a remarkable a cappella version of her (fittingly themed) song “Wing.” Smith with her androgyny and her complex and committed approach to gender is herself3 strongly indebted to Wilde. Interestingly, the event was part of Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison, an intermedial series featuring exhibitions and readings organized by the immersive art group Artangel, in the notorious prison where Wilde served his sentence from 1895 to 1897.4 Artists, writers, actors and musicians—such as Ralph Fiennes, Neil Bartlett (who also read De Profundis in its entirety on 4 September 2016) Smith and Colm Tóibín—gathered with audiences inside the prison from July to October to celebrate and commune with the spirit of Wilde. In this context, Wilde’s epistola emerged as a central text in Wilde’s canon, one which against its presumed aura of authenticity, asserted its complex status of literary performance—in which Wilde,

17 May 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/read-patti-smiths-loveletter-oscar-wilde-showed-us-terrible/. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (London: Folio 2020). 2 Smith, “You Showed us the Terrible Mystery of Love”. 3 On Patti Smith see Eric Wendell, Patti Smith: America’s Punk Rock Rhapsodist

(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 4 In the last three decades, we have recorded several remarkable artistic efforts aimed

at rewriting Wilde’s prison post-prison years. Prison studies has also become a central area of research within Wilde Studies as witnessed by a number of recent publications; see: Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde, The Unrepented Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) and Nicholas Frankel (ed.) The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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as we will see, was constructing himself for posterity—which asked for a responsive, performative understanding by artists and public alike. Josephne Guy and Ian Small, in an article entitled “Reading De Profundis,” note how Oscar Wilde’s notorious letter seems to be “the most infamous but the least analyzed of Wilde’s works,”5 interestingly, however, one of the volumes (2005) of the Oxford English Texts of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde—the unparalleled critical edition of Wilde’s works—is dedicated to the epistola and includes two collated versions (one based on the Ross’s 1905 edition and the other on Vyvyan Holland’s 1949 text) besides invaluable commentary and notes. De Profundis is at once a marginal and a central work in Wilde’s canon and possibly the one which best projects towards a responsive and intelligent reading of Wilde as a central author and character in the late Victorian scene. De Profundis is an unstable text which, as such, is perfectly capable of recounting an unstable, contradictory and double character. Guy and Small insist, indeed, on its very instability, De Profundis exceeds any reading which tries to reduce it to a single and stable identity; Wilde’s letter is not just a(n) (auto)biographical document, and yet, it cannot be fully considered a philosophical enquiry into the nature of suffering and redemption. We might be tempted to affirm that through De Profundis Wilde wrote his own partial autobiography,6 self-acknowledging—through a complex exercise of literary artifice and invention (which according to Small and Guy is what best characterizes the text)—his celebrity status, in other words, the position of a man who “stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture” of his time, revealing, at the same time, to the reader the very reasons and events which turned his success and celebrity into failure and infamy. Wilde’s will be a magnificent fall which turned his social failure into eternal literary fame, translating “Oscar Wilde” into a cultural icon,

5 Guy, Small, “Reading De Profundis,” 123. 6 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man and

Prison Writings, ed. Isobel Murray. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), xiii. See also Pierpaolo Martino, “Celebrity, (Auto)biography and Failure in Wilde’s De Profundis ,” in A Quintessential Wilde, His Worldly Place, His Penetrating Philosophy and His Influential Aestheticism, ed. Annette Magid (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 116–133. This section of the chapter draws on that contribution, rewriting and expanding it in terms of the investigation of the relevance of the epistola in rewritings by Kilroy and Hare.

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into a global celebrity, into a paradigm of otherness, difference and resistance to the “order of discourse,” to be performed and “reproduced” in a number of different contexts.7 Holmes and Redmond, in the first issue of the Celebrity Studies journal (2010) focus on the relationship between stardom and celebrity, making a distinction between the two terms and noting how: Film studies in particular has historically used the term ‘star’ [...] to refer to a representational interaction between the on/off-screen persona. In comparison works outside film studies has more often used the term ‘celebrity’ to indicate a broad category, which defines the contemporary state of being famous, [...] but what generally unites the work on stardom and celebrity is the agreement that celebrity or fame does not reside in the individual: it is constituted discursively ‘by the way in which the individual is represented.’8

The idea of representation is of course of paramount importance in any discourse by and on Oscar Wilde; if on the one hand, as we have seen, Wilde, in his complex effort of self-promotion, self-consciously constructed his public image in a process which turned him into the director and main actor of his own drama (to the extent of becoming, as we have seen, “the most self-conscious marketer of his own image,”9 carefully constructing his status within society with the intention of selling himself and translating his art and life into economic success), on the other, in this very process of construction, the media of the time played a key role, which, in a way, exceeded the author’s control. We have seen how Lois Cucullu, making reference to some of the caricatures circulating in such magazines as Moonshine—and in particular to the one entitled “days with celebrities” (1882), portraying an iconic Wilde holding a sunflower—insists on how this very caricature projects towards the collapse of the barrier separating private from public life that mass media would aggressively come to exploit, an issue on which almost all of the studies on celebrity seem to focus.

7 See again Martino, “The Wilde Legacy”. 8 Su Holmes, Sean Redmond, “Editorial. A Journal in Celebrity Studies,” Celebrity

Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2010, 4. 9 Richard A. Kaye, “Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde,” 193.

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As we have affirmed, in the process of construction of his celebrity status and in the mythical fall which followed the two trials (after which, as we will see, he articulated a new version of himself and of his celebrity status), his literary works —and not only Wilde’s life performances—played a key role. Wilde’s literary celebrity is strictly associated with The Picture of Dorian Gray, which “fuels and hastens [Wilde’s] physical downfall.”10 A completely different function has been played by his last work in prose, De Profundis , which however stands not so much as Wilde’s ultimate autobiographical statement as, possibly, one of his finest literary achievements. In a sense, De Profundis stands as a kind of belated answer to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that is, as a literary attempt to rewrite Wilde’s notion (and personal experience) of celebrity. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) inaugurates Wilde’s celebrity season, which, as we have seen in Chapter 3, approximately coincides with the composition and performance of his major theatrical successes from Lady Windermere’s Fan, first performed in early 1892 to The Importance of Being Earnest , first performed in February 1895; that same February in which Wilde returning to his club, the Albemarle, found a card from the Marquis of Queensberry (notoriously inscribed: ‘For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic]’),11 which prompted Wilde to take

10 Cucullu, “Adolescent Dorian Gray,” 21. 11 Dominic Janes formulates very interesting observations in relation to the case of the

Queensberry’s card: “The issue of the truth of poses was of importance in the libel trial of 1895 because the scrawled words on the card left by John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, at the Albemarle Club were read as an accusation that Wilde had posed as a sodomite, and therefore, was one. […] What divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite but whether it did or did not matter that people could appear to be sodomites. On the one hand, it could be held that sodomy was so disgusting and obscene that it should be kept, at all costs, from public attention. On the other, it might be felt that intimations of sodomy were simply part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life. From the latter viewpoint, men who sought sex with other men could deploy coded expressions of their desires that were more or less obvious and legible depending on the audience at which they were targeted. Pleasure was facilitated by flirtatious visual games of posing and supposing in opposition to textual imperatives of naming and shaming. However, to flirt with the appearance of sodomy was not the same as proud affirmation, since it had to take place in the context of the threat of public denunciation. Moreover, to pose as a sodomite was to engage with forms that had developed in collusion with imagery conjured from the lurid imaginations of moral opponents.” Dominic Janes, Oscar Wilde Prefigured. Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1–2.

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out an action accusing Douglas’ s father of criminal libel, with the tragic consequences which are widely known. Interestingly, Tóibín—editor of a recent edition of De Profundis —trying to explain the reasons which led Wilde to act as he did, notes how “Wilde’s highly charged time in Algeria [where he had been persuaded to go by Bosie] and the stresses of travelling there and back had […] upset his equilibrium. A hundred years later, his behaviour would have been perfectly understood as deriving from a mixture of jet lag and crazed celebrity.”12 As later noted by George B. Shaw, Wilde’s celebrity status, indeed, “led him to believe that there was nothing he could not carry through successfully.”13 But the truth is that, “the excitement of the previous two months had [literally] impaired his judgement,”14 to the extent that, according to Tóibín, he was unable to understand that, as the trial began, he was really the most vulnerable man in London. In this sense, as Ashley H. Robbins puts it, if Wilde put all his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, “he put his personality in his downfall,” his tragedy was “an outcome that in large measure emanated from his extraordinary character and temperament,”15 especially when he was at the apex of his career. As it is known, after being tried twice at the Old Bailey, on 25 May 1895 Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour for “acts of gross indecency with other male persons.”16 He was first sent

12 Colm Tóibín, “Introduction,” in Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín. (London: Penguin, 2013), xix. 13 Quoted in Tóibín, “Introduction,” xx. 14 Tóibín, “Introduction,” xx. 15 Ashley H. Robbins Oscar Wilde. The Great Drama of His Life. How His Tragedy Reflected His Personality (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), 1. 16 Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde is the title of a 1998 play by Moises Kaufman, which as Marcovich puts it “is written as a poststructuralist resistance to authorship and to textual authority,” indeed “Gross Indecency attempts to reconstruct the Wilde trials out of newspaper reports, memoirs and various biographies of Wilde.” Heather Marcovitch “The Judas Kiss , Gross Indecency, Velvet Goldmine: the postmodern Masks of Oscar Wilde,” in Quintessential Wilde, ed. Annette M. Magid (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017), 141. Kauffmann himself in his “Introduction” to the Metheun edition of the drama insists that his original idea was that “any legitimate attempt to reconstruct this historical event had to incorporate, in one way or another, the diversity of accounts. This posed a fascinating problem: how to create a theater piece that could encompass all the different stories. And yet have a coherent, dramatic though line.” Hence the idea “that the piece had to make[…] the presence of the actor telling

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to Wandsworth Prison, then, in November, after being declared bankrupt, he was transferred to Reading Gaol.17 In the first phase of his detention in Reading, Wilde had no access to writing. Interestingly, just before being sentenced, he wrote two passionate letters to Douglas, in which he addressed Bosie in terms of the “most loved of all loved;” and yet, once in gaol, he did not and could not write to Douglas again for nineteen months. It was clearly during this time that Wilde started to think about what had really happened between them; his feelings towards Bosie progressively turned from love into bitterness (often creating dark and contrasting moods) and in the very last period of his detention18 he gave shape to the long letter which came to be known as De Profundis —a title suggested by Ross, to whom Wilde entrusted the manuscript on his release from prison—which was directly addressed to Douglas, but also as we will see, to all those who had loved and hated him. In this perspective, as Frankel stresses “it is vital to understand that the picture Wilde draws in De Profundis of his relationship with Douglas is shaped by the bitterness of his imprisonment”19 and he quotes Regenia Gagnier for whom “if there had not been an Alfred Douglas, Wilde would have had to invent one […] Douglas was the image of all unworthy audiences.”20

the story – visible.” Moises Kauffman, Gross Indecency. The Thrre Trials of Osca Wilde (London: Metheun, 1998), x. 17 On Wilde’s trials and his imprisonment see the very recent and exhaustive monograph by Joseph Brostow, Oscar Wilde on Trial. The Criminal Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022). 18 As Frankell records, in the summer of 1896 Wilde wrote a “moving desperate clemency petition” in which he “documented his treatment over the previous year, and in it Wilde pleaded for some remission in his sentence.” Wilde’s petition met with a largely sympathetic response from Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the recently appointed head of British prisons […] On 27 July 1896, Ruggles Brise instructed Major James O. Nelson the governor of Reading Prison to provide Wilde with foolscap paper, ink and pen “for use in his leisure moments in his cell.” Wilde addressed Nelson in terms of the “most Christ-like man I ever met;” Nelson’s “compassion and generous actions helped rebuild Wilde’s self-confidence, not just as man but as a writer.” Nicholas Frankel, “Introduction,” in Id. (ed.), The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 7–8. 19 Frankel, “Introduction” in Id. (ed.), The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde,

12. 20 Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 180.

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Oscar, who was once familiar with celebrity and fame, had now, for the very first time, to face failure and shame. De Profundis offered Wilde the opportunity to deal with this complex situation in literary terms; indeed, Wilde’s famous manuscript works at many different levels simultaneously, it is a long letter addressed to Bosie inhabited by many different texts; of course there are many quotations, from the Bible and other literary works, but we can speak of a text, or better of texts, within the text, as Wilde self-consciously wrote passages, even very long ones, in which there seemed to be less room for immediacy and urgency and more for artifice and (careful) construction. It is important to stress how De Profundis was first published in 1905 by Robert Ross, in an abridged version that, dispensing with every direct reference to Douglas—which were to be included in the later editions: the one published in 1947 by Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland, based on Ross’s typescript (containing corrections by Ross and several omissions) and the 1962 Rupert-Hart Davis version which is the one included in almost all contemporary editions—resulted in a powerful essay touching on different topics such as suffering, redemption, the conditions of prison-life and famously Christ as the precursor of the Romantic movement in life; Wilde, as Small and Guy cleverly observe, had undoubtedly thought of these passages—in other words of what is known as Ross’s De Profundis —for future publication.21 Wilde’s epistola stages a complex dialectic between private and public dimensions, one which, as we will see in the next excerpt, allows him to cope with his fall, inviting Douglas (and future readers) to remember the celebrity, the great writer (the “lord of language”) that he was, also pointing to the distinction and world-wide fame of his family name: A week later, I am transferred here [Reading Gaol]. Three more months go over and my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they

21 Guy, Small, “Reading De Profundis,” 129.

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might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.22

Ironically, the function of De Profundis is exactly that of recording—as a musical support would do—through the author’s voice, what Wilde suffered; there is, in short, a meta-textual dimension to the text, which is always there, in-between the lines, making the very act of reading Wilde’s letter a fascinating, “charming” (as Wilde himself would put it) literary experience. One of the most quoted passages in Wilde’s letter is that in which he offers a portrait of himself and of his position in his own time; he speaks of his literary achievements and skills, with a tone, with a literary inflection, which powerfully constructs Wilde’s (Late-Victorian) celebrity for the generations to come: I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope. The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy and philosophy an art. I altered the minds of men and the colours of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or sonnet; at the same time I widened its range and enriched its characteristics. Drama, novel, poem in prose, poem in rhyme, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I and beautiful in a new mode of beauty. To truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true and are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. I awoke the

22 Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín (London: Penguin, 2013), 89.

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imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me. I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.23

The public dimension of these words cannot be overlooked. As Small and Guy observe “Wilde’s summation of his life here does not seem to be addressed only to Douglas; it feels more as if Wilde is self-consciously fashioning a version of his life for posterity, and perhaps attempting to control the shape of subsequent narratives about him.”24 In De Profundis , the author never questions those controversial aspects of his persona which, although criticized in some Victorian quarters, had helped him achieve his celebrity status, as for instance his notorious individualism, which, in the epistola he approaches in all its complexity: People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. I must be far more of an individualist than ever I was. I must get far more out of myself than ever I got, and ask far less of the world than ever I asked. Indeed, my ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection. To have made such an appeal would have been from the individualist point of view bad enough, but what excuse can there ever be put forward for having made it? Of course once I had put into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, ‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to.’ The result is I am in gaol.25

Here, Wilde—whose very life had been, as we have seen, nothing but the staging of a very complex play in the theatrical space represented by London society26 (a position which allowed him to be, at the same time, both inside and outside this space)—makes, for the very first time, reference to his condition of outsider, a condition which implies something different from that of the failed artist and man De Profundis is usually 23 Wilde, De Profundis , 100. 24 Guy, Small, “Reading De Profundis,”130. 25 Wilde, De Profundis , 134–135. 26 For the issue of the performance of the self, see also the seminal study by Erving

Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday) published in 1959. On Wilde and performance theory see, again, Marcowitch, The Art of the Pose.

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associated with, and which fully emerges at the end of the manuscript. Of course, he understands that his biggest mistake was to “appeal to” the laws of that very society he had mocked in his lifetime and is able to translate this discovery through a tone which recalls that of his short-stories (such as The Selfish Giant ); he is, in short, able to speak about Wilde through Wilde, conveying power and effectiveness to the whole narrative and to its impact on the “public.” The discourse on Wilde’s fall was very often articulated, especially in official Late-Victorian contexts, in terms of a parable; Wilde’s punishment was considered as the natural outcome for a life lived with the only aim (according to the restricted views of a few people) of pursuing pleasure. Any reader of Wilde knows perfectly how vital those experiences were for the very existence and substance of his writings; those experiences were in themselves capable of articulating a sort of third space in-between life and art, they were a bridge between street and paper, blood and ink: People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But they, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement. [...] What I do feel ashamed of is the horrible Philistine atmosphere into which you brought me. My business as an artist was with Ariel. You set me to wrestle with Caliban.27

Here, the reference to The Tempest expresses Wilde’s dialogic capacity of using other literary discourses as masks for his own and foreshadows the final passages of the epistola in which Wilde focuses on Hamlet ; besides, it is essential to note how (in Ross’s version) the pronoun (“you”) with which he addresses Douglas is absent; it is precisely the reference to Douglas which renders the passage effective. If ever Wilde’s pleasures had to be sources of shame it was, in a sense, because of Bosie’s philistinism. Wilde, here, is anticipating—through the image conveyed by the “horrible Philistine atmosphere”—the discourse on “Christ as a pre-romantic figure,” which nourishes one of the best sections of De Profundis . It is important to stress how Wilde’s narrative—in its self-conscious (but apparently hidden) effort to create a continuum between the private and the public—establishes a very subtle connection between pleasure and 27 Wilde, De Profundis , 135–136.

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sorrow, one which allows him to see them as both fundamental for the full development of the individual: I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on.28

For Wilde “to pass on,” meant accessing a completely new territory, one in which, sadly, sorrow rhymed with isolation and desperation with the mortification of the self, a territory which allowed Wilde to rethink and rewrite in fresh and original terms the figure of Christ himself, whose iconicity, according to Wilde—being itself nourished by Jesus’ artistic temperament—inspired (poets, musicians) artists of different ages: To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppression, and ‘whose silence is heard only of God,’ he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found no utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven. And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and sorrow were modes through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing.29

Here, the author praises different aspects of Christ: his love for children and for ignorant people, his preference for exceptions over laws, his capacity of conceiving the divided races as unity. Wilde knew Christ’s place was with the poets; most importantly, Wilde praised Christ’s extraordinary 28 Wilde, De Profundis , 113. 29 Wilde, De Profundis , 120.

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imagination and his capacity of being in-tune with different people, to the extent of becoming the other. There is of course a narrative level in De Profundis which allows an identification of Wilde with Christ and yet, as Godwin interestingly observes, Wilde used Christ’s narrative to position himself in the condition of a sinner worthy of Christ’s forgiveness.30 We are once again faced with Wilde’s doubleness,31 that is, Wilde’s long narrative positions him in-between Saint and Sinner, he is a Christlike figure (suffering his own crucifixion) who is paradoxically asking for forgiveness. Patti Smith visiting the cell where De Profundis was written, was impressed by the number, C.3.3 which identified the cell itself, as it made her think of the age of Christ at the moment of his crucifixion and transfiguration.32 Thus, Wilde’s doubleness can be conceived of part of that process of becoming immortal, on which, as we have seen, Rojek insists in his study on Celebrity. According to Johnson indeed: “his imprisonment elevated his life from the merely brilliant to something closer to the immortality— in religious terms, sainthood—to which he aspired. Martyrdom is much more interesting than ordinary mortality, and Wilde was a passionate devotee of all that is interesting. After conquering the pinnacle of success what remained to explore but the topography of descent?”33 This kind of celebrity—achieved through martyrdom—is written in Wilde’s story, is, in other words, part of him, we read Wilde through his personal tragedy, as, today, we listen to John Lennon or Kurt Cobain, through the lenses offered by our knowledge of the tragic epilogues of their existences. According to Johnson, Wilde’s fascination with Christ never implied a complete identification of the author with Jesus: though Wilde “took 30 According to Godwin “De Profundis enabled Wilde to reconstruct his public image

during his incarceration. This reformed identity is dependent upon Wilde’s ability to position himself alongside the sinful woman anointing Jesus, the prodigal son, and the adulteress, who are all forgiven by Christ for their sexual sins. Through the retelling of these parables, Wilde asserts that he has received Christ’s forgiveness, since his plight is analogous to these celebrated biblical figures. In so doing, Wilde parallels the forgiveness of homosexual and heterosexual sins and positions himself as a forgiven sinner worthy of public exoneration.”—Kelli M. Godwin, “Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis : A Narrative of Sexual Sin and Forgiveness,” The Explicator, Vol. 67, No. 1, 2008, 60. 31 See, again, Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde”. 32 Smith, “You Showed us the Terrible Mystery of Love”. 33 Fenton Johnson, “De Profundis , 1895–97; published 1905 and 1962,” in 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read, ed. R. Canning (New York: Alison 2009), 84.

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Jesus as his model […] He never embraced the ultimate humility—the submission of reason to the manifestly unreasonable story of the resurrection […] Wilde preferred noble rebellion to humble submission, at least until his deathbed [where] he completed his mystical journey by converting to Roman Catholicism.”34 In life, as in theatre, timing is all, as Johnson insists, noting, besides, how any approach to Wilde should dispense with specific or restrictive labels, such as the one which identifies him with the archetypical “gay writer.” It would be more appropriate to think of him as a contemporary outsider; in this, De Profundis rearticulates the concept of (social) failure into something different: the failed man (and artist) becomes a self-conscious loser, an outsider, who refuses to come to terms with reality; this very image will be appropriated, as we will see in the next chapter in the following century by artists as diverse as Bowie, Gavin Friday and Steven Patrick Morrissey.35 It is interesting to note how in the last section of the epistola Wilde makes reference to Hamlet and writing of Hamlet as a dreamer and poet and constructs a new version of himself; the self-conscious marketer of his own image has now turned into the man who refuses to grapple with “life in its practical realization,” I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare’s drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet’s college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper 34 Johnson, “De Profundis,” 84–85. 35 See Martino, “The Wilde Legacy”.

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actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but ‘words, words, words.’ Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a divided will.36

It is absolutely appropriate that one of the final images introduced in such a complex text as De Profundis should come from literature—as the quintessential iconic and polyphonic space—and in particular from the world of theatre; De Profundis appears, in this sense, one of Wilde’s best and more effective performances. In short, one should not approach the epistola in the hope of finding there the authentic Wilde; Guy and Small point to the artefactual nature of the manuscript (as they call the De Profundis in its unabridged version), which confuses documents initially composed with different audiences in mind and in which the personality he chose to exhibit in a private remonstration to Douglas was very different from the more elevated sufferer he wished to construct for posterity. Most importantly, as the authors observe, “both of these personas may have had an element of artifice to them and should not necessarily be taken as indications of the real Wilde.”37 If we consider the persona of Wilde the sufferer we cannot avoid noting how, even when his suffering seems most authentic, there is always some kind of mask he is wearing, some kind of discourse he is quoting and making his own, as in the case of the first passage quoted in which, reproducing Tennyson, defines himself “a lord of language.” In another passage, in which he refers to the loss of access to his children, Wilde, as Small observes, “registers his emotions in a highly stylized, almost theatrical manner,”38 which given the nature of this particular loss—one which would ask for the stylistic immediacy of desperation—is particularly striking. The dramatic issue of the loss of access to his children is investigated and masterfully staged in the opening section of (Irish playwright) Thomas Kilroy’s 1997 play The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde in which Wilde begs Constance to let him see his children before he dies. As

36 Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, 151. 37 Josephne Guy and Ian Small, “Reading De Profundis,” 130. 38 Guy, Small, Reading, 136.

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Graham Price notes in his precious study entitled Oscar Wilde and contemporary Irish Drama: The Secret Fall is Kilroy’s attempt to depict Wilde’s life in a self-consciously theatrical and fictitious manner. Kilroy wished to create Wilde for the stage as Wilde would have wished himself to be portrayed: unnatural, unrealistic, and purely as a work of art. Kilroy would, in all probability, have been aware that a straight biography of his subject would not have been to Wilde’s liking.39

In this perspective, Kilroy besides using historical details and more in general well-known facts about Wilde’s life “wished to use some of Wilde’s own thoughts and ideas as a means for creating a dramatic structure for The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde.” Price points, through Patrick Mason, to one passage from De Profundis which came to have particular relevance in Kilroy’s play: This excerpt from Wilde’s lengthy piece of epistolary prose concerns Lord Alfred Douglas and Wilde’s view of his former lover: ‘It makes me feel as if you yourself had been merely a puppet worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a terrible issue. But puppets themselves have passions. They will bring a new plot into what they are presenting, and twist the ordered issue of vicissitude to suit some whim or appetite of their own’. This passage, according to Mason, inspired Kilroy to use puppets in The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde as a means of propelling the action of the play forward. Thus, Kilroy was not merely intending to write an autobiographical drama about Wilde and his wife, he wished to create a piece of Wildean art that would draw upon Wilde’s artistic theories as well as his personal history.40

Wilde’s De Profundis , as quintessential Wildean art, is rich in contradictions and in that it resembles Wilde himself, who, as we have seen, loved taking different, even contrasting positions; often in the manuscript a particular event is recorded different times—as in the case of Wilde’s accounts of Douglas’s trouble in Oxford—each time showing a different mood by the author, and this does not allow us to read De Profundis as a 39 Graham Price, Oscar Wilde and contemporary Irish Drama. Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 108. 40 Price, Oscar Wilde, 128.

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reliable, authentic autobiography, in the epistola the emotions are always too “cooked up.” In short, De Profundis should be approached as Wilde’s literary testament, as a work which cannot be reduced to a specific function and that, as such, can represent the best way to read, to access Wilde as a literary icon. In this sense: the tendency to see Wilde’s manuscript as originating in his own experience has done no great justice to Wilde the writer, for it has tended to obscure the richly layered literary allusiveness by which he “constructs” himself. At its best the prison manuscript contains wonderfully moving prose that exhibits Wilde’s skill in synthesising different sources and traditions into a coherent and quite new voice, so much that the modern reader can no longer easily perceive the elements of that synthesis.41

This is, we would add, the precious gift of the great musicians and composers, if, as Wilde’s Maestro Walter Pater suggested “art constantly aspires to the condition of music,”42 in one of his last literary statements Wilde had finally turned into the most refined of musicians.43 In a passage in which he speaks to Douglas about the very shape and quality of his writing in the letter, he affirms: As for the corrections and the errata, I have made them in order that my words should be an absolute expression of my thoughts, and err neither through surplusage nor through being inadequate. Language requires to be tuned, like a violin: and just as too many or too few vibrations in the voice of the singer or the trembling of the string will make the note false, so to much or too little in words will spoil the message.44

In other words, every expression, sound or passage of Wilde’s epistola is, again, the fruit of “the most self-conscious effort.” In this sense, in his annotated edition of Wilde’s prison writings Nicholas Frankel—after evoking early responses to the epistola and in particular Lucas, for whom the value of the letter is in “the triumph of the literary temperament 41 Guy, Small, Reading, 145. 42 Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” 135. 43 It is interesting to note how, in the last decades, De Profundis has represented

a source of inspiration for musicians moving in different fields, from art-rock to contemporary music. 44 Wilde, De Profundis , 148–149.

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over the most disadvantageous conditions” and Beerbohm who famously wrote that “one does not seem to read a written thing. The words sing”— notes that “the power of De Profundis derives ultimately from its majestic and impassionate prose”45 and adds: To approach it as a truth-telling document or as an accurate historical record is to mistake Wilde’s relish in demonstrating – not least to himself – that he was once again “a lord of language.” […] The letter was a virtuoso performance. Before prison Wilde had used his gift to entertain and shock or to play gracefully with ideas. In De Profundis he uses those same powers to seduce and shock in an entirely different fashion – in the service of persuading readers of the truth and extent of his personal transformation.46

One of the most fascinating and lyrical passages in the De Profundis can be heard towards its conclusion. Here, Wilde addresses the “mystical” as his ultimate object of research. However, Wilde’s words do not seem particularly convincing; more than addressing a real quest, Wilde’s intent seems to be a pretext for a literary exercise in aesthetics: Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.47

The iconic passage which follows—which is one of the most quoted from De Profundis —represents the perfect synthesis of the life and meaning of a cultural icon, of a celebrity whose failure and fall gave birth to the myth of the outsider, of the loser, of the artist who, learning to say “no,” turned art into a better place to live, within a postmodern present, which sadly, often appears as a long, never-ending trial against the rights to difference and dissent:

45 Frankel, “Introduction,” in Id (ed.) The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde,

16. 46 Frankel, “Introduction,” 16. 47 Wilde, De Profundis , 158.

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All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.48

Interestingly, this inspired and powerful passage has been used by David Hare as the epilogue of his 1998 play The Judas Kiss ,49 which focuses on Wilde’s days immediately before the arrest and after his release from Reading Gaol; more specifically Act 1—“Deciding to Stay”—takes place at the Cadogan Hotel in-between the second and third trials, while Act 2—“Deciding to Leave” is set in Naples and recounts his last days with Bosie. As Marcovitch observes, in his play Hare is less interested in biography than in “the authorial persona created in his texts, especially in his resolute adherence to a life lived in art.”50 In this sense in Act 1 we read: BOSIE: Oh Oscar, I beg you…I beg you, do not give up. WILDE: Give up? Give Up? Why should it matter? ‘Shall I give up?’, ‘Shall I carry on’ Either?, Neither? Guilty! Not guilty! How can it make a blind bit of difference? The simple fact is: I am cast in arole. My story has already been written. How I chose to play it is a mere matter of taste. The performance of the actor will not determine the action.51

The fatalism which emerges from the play powerfully connects with issues of class; Wilde, unlike Douglas, was not an aristocrat and this, of course, turned him into a victim of Victorian classism. Another interesting aspect of the play is the stylistic one; Hare escapes the cliché of having Wilde speaking through aphorisms; his words, especially in Act 2 convey a

48 Oscar Wilde. 2013. De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, 158–159. 49 David Hare, The Judas Kiss (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). 50 Marcovitch, “The Judas Kiss,” 140. 51 Hare, The Judas Kiss , 37.

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sense of urgency, and seem to powerfully connect with some of the best passages written by Wilde—the suffering man—in De Profundis ,52 as emerges in this final exchange between the protagonist and Bosie: WILDE: The vulgar error is to think that love is a kind of illusion BOSIE: Is it not? WILDE No. It is the fault of bad poets who encourage this mistake. ‘I am completely enraptured’ lovers say, as somehow they were being deceived. When the affair ends they say, ‘I have been stripped of my illusions.’ When they cease to love, they say, ‘Oh. I see him clearly now.’ BOSIE Are they not right? WILDE No, Bosie. The reverse is the truth. The two men look at each other. The everyday world is shrouded. We see it dimly. Only when we love we see the true person. The truth of a person is only visible through love. Love is not the illusion. Life is.53

The play was first presented by the Almeida Theatre Company, in association with Robert Fox and Scott Rudin, at the Playhouse Theatre, London, on 12 March 1998, with a cast featuring Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde. This was not a particularly successful production, while the 2012 revival, directed by Neil Armfield, at London’s Hampsted Theatre, in which Wilde was played by Rupert Everett and Bosie by Freddie Fox, was a much more convincing effort. 52 Another play which stands as a rewriting of Wilde’s last years and more specifically of De Profundis and “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” is Gareth Armstrong’s Wilde Without the Boy (2014) which has been regularly performed by Gerard Logan since its opening in July 2014 at the Buxton Festival. As Rose puts it “the adaptation of Wilde’s epistle presents an unusual and difficult challenge as far as adaptations go: the morphing of a private letter into a stage play.” Gerard Logan and Armstrong’s collaborative creative process gave birth to a one-act play, of about an hour, in which—also in order to provide the audience with some context as the adaptation would have to communicate with very mixed audiences, some of whom knew nothing, or very little, about Wilde’s letter—we see Wilde reviewing the manuscript before his release from prison. We have in short Wilde reading the epistle with the voices of key players in the story from Justice Wills to Charles Parker as voices off. See Riccardo Cassarino, Maggie Rose, “Gareth Armstrong’s Stage Adaptation of De Profundis and The Ballad of the Reading Gaol and its Italian Translation” in Wilde World, eds Giovannelli, Martino, 183–197. 53 Hare, The Judas Kiss , 97.

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The Happy Prince by Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett’s very recent film The Happy Prince (2018) recounts Wilde’s magnificent fall, focusing on his last “gutter” days as a pariah and exile, first in France and then in Italy. Interestingly, Everett rewrites Wilde starting from the very years and experiences which are usually left outside conventional narratives on him. For instance, Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) had Oscar—interestingly played by Peter Finch with an Irish accent—coolly refusing to speak to Bosie on the railway station platform before he headed off to his unimaginable future, while Brian Gilbert’s acclaimed film Wilde (1997) halted after a sentimental embrace between the reunited Oscar (famously played, as we have seen, by Stephen Fry) and Bosie in Naples. Everett insists on how watching these films we are not able to look at what society really did to Oscar Wilde, in terms of punishment, both in prison with hard labour, and after prison, in exile, which in a way could be considered another form of imprisonment. In this sense, Everett’s idea of the last great vagabond of the late nineteenth century, the celebrity, famous for being famous, the pop idol on the skids,54 becomes a very potent and poignant story to try to address, which, in a way, complements Haynes’s narrative about Wilde’s self-invention as a pop icon and of the fall of glam stars such as Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine. In his film, Everett takes us through the devastating horror of poverty and humiliation, which however Wilde faces with gallows humour and wit. In this sense, in one of the first sequences of the film we see him vomiting in agony on his deathbed before declaiming: “Encore du champagne!” Here, the director has clearly been influenced by Peter Ackroyd’s 1983 novel The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde 55 and by the already 54 Steve Prokopy, “Interview: What Oscar Wilde Means to Rupert Everett, and the

Most Poignant Scene in The Happy Prince,” Third Coast Review, 29 October 2018, https://thirdcoastreview.com/2018/10/29/film-interview-rupert-everett/. 55 Peter Ackroyd, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (London: Abacus, 1983). As Joe Moran brilliantly summarizes Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde: “reads a line between historical reclamation and literary invention, and is [an] amalgam of painstaking research and biographical speculation in which its central character recounts the story of his life during his last days in Paris between August and November 1900. In this account, Ackroyd’s Wilde reveals much about the relationship between class, culture, and sexuality in late Victorian society, only to suppress these issues ultimately by transforming his life into a personal morality tale. Wilde confesses in the novel to two principal ‘sins’—his desire for fame and his desire for young men—and these desires become linked in the text as

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mentioned David Hare’s 1998 stage play The Judas Kiss , in whose 2012 revival, directed by Neil Armfield, Wilde was played by Everett himself. In a way, even in his last, very difficult days, Wilde, the lifelong performer and man of theatre, found a new world to perform to, where the stars were rent boys, petty thieves and street urchins. He was endlessly being cited for extraordinary empathy with people, while at the same time being an incredible snob, as well. Again, Wilde’s most interesting feature is his determination to escape fixed identities, which also implies a capacity to harmonize dissonant, contrasting positions.56 The film’s narrative shows how the enchantment of Oscar Wilde was his humanity; the iconic writer had some of the bad traits most of us, as human beings have, that is snobbery, greed, vanity and egomania, but he got caught out for it. As Everett himself notes, many people have the desire to throw themselves over the edge, but most of them have a natural constraint and natural borders before going that far, putting themselves back; “Oscar Wilde for some reason, didn’t.”57 In this sense, commenting on the film—and comparing it to screen portrayals by Morley, Finch and Stephen Fry—Merlin Holland affirmed how Everett’s can be considered probably the most fascinating of the biopics on his grandfather. Where Gilbert’s film with Stephen Fry was very intellectual, Everett’s is mostly emotional.58 If it is true that in Wilde, there is both the intellectual and the emotional, at this stage of his life, the author is living on what is left of his emotions, and that’s exactly what Everett excels in conveying.

he turns his back on both of them in favor of an eternalized and transcendent ‘art.’ […] Ackroyd’s novel is told by Oscar as he lives out his final days in the down-at-heel Hotel d’Alsace in Paris, surviving on money borrowed from friends. […] In a so-called journal which is, as the book’s title suggests, more of a ‘last testament,’ he intersperses anecdotes of his encounters in Paris—where Oscar is often snubbed in restaurants and theatres, and spat at and jeered by strangers in the street—with a more substantial chronology of his life from his Dublin childhood to his arrest, imprisonment, and exile.” Joe Moran, “‘Simple Words’: Peter Ackroyd’s Autobiography of Oscar Wilde,” Biography, Vol. 22, No. 3 (summer 1999), 356–357. 56 Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde.” 57 Prokopy, “Interview: What Oscar Wilde Means to Rupert Everett”. 58 Dalya Alberge, “Oscar Wilde’s grandson ‘terribly moved’ by Rupert Everett’s

Biopic,” The Guardian, 5 June 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jun/ 05/oscar-wilde-grandson-terribly-moved-rupert-everett-biopic-merlin-holland.

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In the film, Everett is both director and main actor of Wilde’s drama; as Bradshaw observes, “that of Wilde is a part Everett was born to play, and he does it with exactly the right kind of poignantly ruined magnificence.”59 Besides, Everett can also be defined an outsider in the world of cinema, who suffered discrimination because of his homosexuality. In this sense, the film establishes a fascinating dialogue between two artists and actors who have always lived out of the box. Focusing on the director’s stylistic choices, Everett was inspired by what happens when a brain starts collapsing and how it throws off images and ideas and starts playing with a kind of spatial awareness; more specifically, he was really impressed by his own father’s death,60 and seeing how his brain was falling apart, coming up with bubbles of memory. There is, indeed, a sort of feverish dimension, a magical and dream-like quality to the film with a room that seems to shrink and expand (with his brain’s last memories) as Wilde dies. One of the most intense scenes of the movie refers to a real event when in Clapham Junction train station Wilde is transferring trains on his way to prison and is being yelled at and spit on by others on the platform for thirty minutes. It was the rush hour and the policeman escorting him was just reading the newspaper while this big crowd gathered around him. In a way, what happened is one of the most extraordinary scenes in the whole of Wilde’s life. A man, who just recently had been the most famous, lauded and wanted author in London, was reduced to being spat on by a crowd of commuters.61 This is an extremely strong and dramatic episode, which significantly resembles a moment from the passion of Christ. Experiences and humiliations such as these, suffered by Wilde during the last years of his life turned him, as we have seen, into Saint Oscar the first

59 Peter Bradshaw, “The Happy Prince Review—Rupert Everett Is Magnificent in Dream Role as Dying Oscar Wilde,” The Guardian, 22 January 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/22/the-happy-prince-film-reviewrupert-everett-oscar-wilde. 60 Kristen Page-Kirby, “It Took a Decade for Rupert Everett to get ‘The Happy Prince’ Made—and in the End, He Had to Do It Himself,” The Washington Post, 19 October 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2018/10/19/it-took-decaderupert-everett-get-happy-prince-made-end-he-had-do-it-himself/ 61 A permanent plaque commemorating Oscar Wilde on Platform 10 at Clapham Junction was unveiled in July 2019 as part of a combined project by Wandsworth LGBTQ + Forum and Studio Voltaire. David Robson, chairman of Wandsworth LGBTQ+, explained that at a time when people are still under threat because of their sexuality, the plaque would act as a reminder that hate crime is not tolerated in the rail industry.

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homosexual martyr of history. It is also important to stress that Wilde’s connection with the Queensberry family was at once a gender and a class transgression; in this sense, in another sequence Everett shows Wilde with a portrait of Queen Victoria by his deathbed; he died one year before her, and the film hints that Wilde’s vindictive treatment was part of the ugly sense of shame and mortification at aesthetic indulgence which, as we have seen in chapter three, the manly and masculine slaughter of the first world war was supposed to redeem. In the script, Everett imagines Wilde, in extremis, befriending a young Parisian rent boy and his kid brother, holding them spellbound with “The Happy Prince” story. Everett’s recent memoir To the End of the World. Travels with Oscar Wilde—which documents the ten years the actor dedicated to the film project—significantly opens with the memory of little Rupert in his bed listening to his mother reading him the story of “The Happy Prince:” “introducing me to Oscar Wilde is Mummy’s most audacious move, and her greatest contribution to my emotional development,” it is through Wilde’s stories that Everett learns “for the first time that there is a thing called love and that it usually has a price.”62 In happier times, Oscar Wilde himself would recite, to his entranced sons, the iconic tale of a statue who allows a swallow to denude him of all his gold to feed the poor. The story was included in the collection entitled The Happy Prince and other Tales published in May 1888 which was extremely well-received;”63 as Sturgis writes—in his recent biography of Wilde—at the time of its publication “there was general recognition

62 Rupert Everett, To the End of the World. Travels with Oscar Wilde (London: Abacus, 2020), 14–15. 63 Particularly, interesting among recent rewritings of The Happy Prince collection is Wilde Stories, a 2016 artistic transmedia project designed by Athena Media. The project brings together Irish artists including composer Michael Gallen and visual artist Felicityn Clear, to re-imagine the stories in a broadcast collaboration with RTE’ lyric fm. Each reading/performance of the stories by actors/narrators Robert Sheehan, Lauren Coe and Brian Gleeson with music by Gallen is followed by a commentary by Wilde scholars Anne Markey, Jarlath Killeen, Eleanor Fitzsimons and Merlin Holland; all the five readings are available as podcasts on Soundcloud while the original artworks were brought together in a Live Event in Temple Bar ins October 2016. The project website, with links to podcasts, videos, musical performances and project blog is accessible at: http://www.wil destories.ie/index.html.

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that, although there was much for children to enjoy, the stories were likely to appeal rather more to adults.”64 Walter Pater himself, reviewing the collection, wrote: “there is a piquant touch of contemporary satire which differentiates Mr Wilde from the teller of pure fairy tales”65 and yet in these stories which very often involve an ultimate sacrifice on the part of their main characters, the satire seems, as Ellman puts it to be “subordinated to a sadness unusual in fairy tales.”66 Focusing on “The Happy Prince” story, in his 2007 monographic study on Wilde’s fairy tales, Jarlath Killenn writes that “it is society that must align itself with the Prince, not the Prince who must somehow forcibly alter society. The Prince does not overthrow capitalism, but he sets an example of radical self-sacrifice for others to follow.” In this perspective, “the major point is that only the Prince and the Swallow are blessed by God which justifies them both. Wilde’s story offers a Catholic response to social problems rather than either a socialist or a realist one.”67 In this sense, “in Everett’s hands, the ‘The Happy Prince’ tale becomes an ambiguous parable for Wilde’s passion and (possible) redemption, the unhappy prince who makes a lonely discovery that love is the only thing worth worshipping.”68 “The Happy Prince” is indeed a story that somehow reflects Wilde: we have a gilded, jewelled character who gradually is stripped of everything and ends up being thrown on the rubbish heap. And yet, in a sense, even then, as we anticipated, Wilde experienced a different kind of happiness, one which allowed him retain his irony and humour. In a sense, what we have in Everett’s film is life as writing, the film recounts the great drama of Wilde’s life constructing the whole narrative on the powerful intertext represented by the story of The Happy Prince; 64 Sturgis, Oscar: A Life, 364. 65 Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde, The Critical Heritage (London and New York:

Routledge, 1970), 60. 66 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 282. 67 Jarlath Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 38.

See also Anne, Markey Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. Origins and Contexts (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2011), in which the author extensively explores “Wilde’s recourse to Irish Folklore” (8) in conceiving and writing his tales. 68 Bradshaw, “The Happy Prince Review”.

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what characterizes Everett’s film is, in this sense, the same fairy-tale-like quality informing Velvet Goldmine. As a fairy-tale constantly retold by contemporary cinema, Wilde’s life as writing, becomes immortal. Thanks to these filmic portrayals, Wilde the outsider has become an eternal icon. In short, Everett’s film focuses on Oscar’s magnificent fall, portraying the alterity of a writer whose very outsideness could stand as a lens through which to read and deconstruct our (success-obsessed and selfcentred) age. This fall has become, as we have seen, a source of inspiration for directors and actors such as Haynes, Fry, Everett but again also, as we will see, for musicians from Bowie to Pete Doherty who using different discourse modes have performed Wilde’s paradigm of outsideness, questioning the very idea of polarity inviting us to cross the boundaries between genders, bodies, art forms and most importantly between innocence and guilt, failure and success.

4.3 Wilde, Prison and Crime: Gyles Brandreth and the Murders at Reading Gaol In “Pen, Pencil and Poison”69 (included in the already mentioned 1889 collection Intentions ) Oscar Wilde focuses on the notorious writer, artist, forger and serial murderer Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847), giving voice to his personal fascination for the character’s complexity and multiplicity. For Wilde, Wainewright was a man of many masks (and indeed he used such pseudonyms as Janus Weathercock, Egomet Benmot and Van Vinkvooms), he was, in short, a young dandy “who sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is an Art, and has its modes of style no less than that the arts that seek to express it,”70 through such words as these Wilde was articulating, as we have seen in chapter one, his own aesthetics,71 and his belief that life is a performative space, that is, in short, nothing but theatre. After acknowledging some of Wainewright’s artistic merits, Wilde declares that his best achievements were carried out in the criminal sphere—Wainewright was

69 Oscar Wilde “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1093–1107. 70 Wilde “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1095. 71 See Norbert Koh, Oscar Wilde. The Works of a Conformist Rebel (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980).

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indeed a poisoner almost without rival in any age; his very crimes—as Wilde observes in the final section of the essay—seem to have had an important effect upon his art. “They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked.”72 In this sense, as Wilde puts it, “one can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.”73 Most importantly, “the fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not, in his view, the true basis of art.”74 Wainewright, as Wilde notes, “had a sincere love of art and nature” and adds: “there is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot rewrite the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.”75 Enunciations such as these seem to project towards The Picture of Dorian Gray and to some of the epigrams included in its famous “Preface.” Interestingly, Wilde had already written about crimes and murderers in the story Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime published in 1887 in which Lord Saville learns from a chiromantic that he is destined to kill someone and—acknowledging that he cannot marry his fiancée until he has not committed the murder—makes some unsuccessful attempts to kill various men until one day he chances on the chiromantist himself and in a moment of inspiration throws the man into the Thames. It is important to stress, with Gillespie, how here, “Wilde strips the story’s outcome of consequences making it humorous;” being presented as a burlesque, “the narrative need not fear the public opprobrium that would adhere to a story that seemed seriously to condone immorality.”76 In short, Wilde’s story seems to embrace two logics at once, if on the one side the irony makes us not question the idea that murder is a sin, the story does not completely exclude an amoral stance. In both works, Wilde’s approach to crime is profoundly ambiguous and contradictory; critics have focused on Wilde’s complex literary performance in “Pen, Pencil and Poison” in particular. Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann insists on the similarities between the writer and the

72 Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106. 73 Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106. 74 Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106. 75 Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106. 76 Michael Gillespie, Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 32.

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subject of the essay. Wainewrights’s skills as a forger seem to appeal to Wilde’s interest in artificiality, according to Ellmann “the writer is as free of moral compunction as the murderer;”77 Ellmann also underlines the connection, created by Wilde, between the Victorian artist and murderer and Baudelaire, described as poisonous and perfect. In her seminal study, Idylls of the Marketplace, Regenia Gagnier, embracing Bakhtin’s dialogism, problematizes readings which seem to impute “to Wilde a simplicity and transparency which is entirely uncharacteristic,”78 some of the most relevant passages in the essay are indeed quite ironic. In this sense, Wilde’s identification of crime and culture points to “the cultured man’s […] limited conception of social life and a dangerously isolated egocentrism.”79 Paradoxically, Wilde’s essay becomes, for Gagnier, a critique of “what is commonly understood to be l’art pour l’ art.”80 According to Gillespie in “Pen, Pencil and Poison” we have both irony and idealism, we must praise its multiplicity and polyvocality,81 that is Wilde’s capacity to introduce a more complex system of aesthetics that acknowledges multiple values as an inherent aspect of creativity. In a sense, Wilde’s ironic approach to Wainewright’s criminal conduct is not aimed at criminalizing this very conduct but at playing with it (the criminal’s sarcasm plays a key role and allows Wilde to play with his readers’ expectations); in short, the essay’s main topic becomes the very idea of “writing about” that is of articulating an intelligent form of criticism in particular in relation to such a complex figure as Wainewright. In a sense, Wilde’s preoccupation is not with the protagonist of his essay but with the reader who should be capable of embracing multiplicity. In a process which seems to anticipate a practice which is at the heart of Neo-Victorian writing here we see Wilde writing his own version of Wainewright’s life using paraphrases and quotations from essays Hazlitt anthologized; there seems to be little originality here, however, as Gilbert affirms in “The Critic as Artist,” “treatment is the test,”82 that is, as Guy and Small observe, “the source or originator of an idea is less important 77 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 283. 78 Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 34. 79 Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace 39. 80 Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace 39. 81 Gillespie, Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, 40. 82 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1125.

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the what the critic is able to do with it.”83 Interestingly, as we have seen in chapter 1, within the context of Intentions, “Pen, Pencil and Poison” and “The Truth of Masks” stand as first-person narratives in contrast with the other two essays while the other two are basically dialogues. Nevertheless, here we are faced with a dialogic voice which seems to unveil his own multiplicity through the very investigation of Wainewright’s complexity. It is interesting to note that if on one side, through his essay Wilde has been capable of rewriting Wainewright’s life, Wilde himself has become in the postmodern—and more specifically—in the Neo-Victorian—context the subject, as we have seen, of a multiplicity of processes of rewriting. Dana Shiller defines “Neo-Victorian,” “those novels that adopt a postmodern approach to history and that are set at least partially in the nineteenth century, […] texts that revise specific Victorian precursors, texts that imagine new adventure for familiar Victorian characters, and ‘new’ Victorian fictions that imitate nineteenth century literary conventions.”84 Interestingly, Wilde—as a late Victorian character and subject— recently turned into the protagonist of Gyles Brandreth’s series “Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries” (2008–2019), a postmodern rewriting of Wilde’s epopee, in which he becomes a detective working with celebrities such as Conan Doyle in order to solve complex murder cases, showing how the theme of serial killing has turned into a central concern of Neo-Victorian literature and culture with its postmodern fascination for deviance and perverse behaviour. The collection of six novels opens with an ageing Robert Sherard, one of Wilde’s many disciples and biographers, as narrator. Using Sherard’s retrospective stance, Brandreth recreates the seedy underbelly of Victorian London with its rent boys, prostitutes and criminals. They do not lurk in the shadows or are pressed to “move along,” like Jo from Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), but actively participate in the plot. Each volume isolates a specific moment in Wilde’s life rewriting and expanding it in terms of detective fiction. Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders is set in 1889 and begins with the first encounter between Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle; Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile 83 Guy, Small, Studying Oscar Wilde. History, Criticism and Myth (Greensboro: ELT Press), 91. 84 Dana Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel.” Studies in the Novel 29.4 (1997): 558.

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is set in the early 1880s, at the time of Oscar’s celebrated lecture tour of the United States and, later, when, for a while, he lived and worked in Paris. Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders begins right back in 1877 when Oscar, as a student visiting Rome, had an audience with Pope Pius IX while Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers begins in the Spring of 1890 and features Wilde’s association with the Prince of Wales and Bram Stoker. Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death is an adventure that takes place in 1892, at the time of Wilde’s great success with the play Lady Windermere’s Fan and introduces readers to Lord Alfred Douglas and his family, while in the latest volume in the series Oscar Wilde and the Return of Jack the Ripper: An Oscar Wilde Mystery (2019), in an account narrated by Conan Doyle, Wilde gathers together suspects from the theatres, brothels, asylums and travelling circuses of East London in the hopes of finding the true identity of Jack the Ripper before he can strike again. Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol 85 (2012) stands out within the genre of crime fiction because here Wilde is portrayed as both a criminal —sentenced to two years of hard labour for gross indecency— and detective who tries to uncover the serial killer responsible for the deaths of two prison wardens and the prison chaplain. In this sense, Brandreth’s novel questions the stereotype—often attributed to Victorian crime fiction (in relation to Doyle more than say Dickens)—of the detective as “the guardian of the moral principles by which society should operate.”86 Brandreth is able, in this sense, to translate Wilde’s main feature that is his ambiguity, his capacity of exceeding binarisms. This Neo-Victorian rewriting of Wilde’s darkest period—in which the author seem somehow to possess something similar to Wilde’s ironic touch—is built upon two main intertexts namely, “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” and De Profundis . An important section of the ballad is used by Brandreth as an epigraph to the novel to translate the idea that if according to Wilde “each man kills the thing he loves” than we are all guilty murderers, moreover the ballad’s protagonist becomes a character in the novel and the very act of writing the poem (after Wilde’s release) is mentioned quite often in the novel. Brandreth’s privileged intertext is, however, De Profundis whose most relevant passages are quoted in full length in the 85 Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (London: John Murray, 2012). 86 Clare Clarke, Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8.

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novel. Wilde’s famous and longest letter appears, as we have seen, one of Wilde’s best and more effective performances and became a precious source of inspiration for Brandreth himself. Brandreth’s novel is nourished by a powerful polyphony, it stands as a direct and accessible text in which nevertheless a multiplicity of voices, accents and genres can be heard; fragments of poems, newspaper articles, trail reports, letters and novels dialogically interact with the main narrative voices (and with the multiple voices inside Wilde). At the beginning of the novel—whose core narrative is introduced by trail reports and a long metanarrative note by Sherard—we learn that Wilde has been imprisoned for sodomy (or what was called “gross indecency”) and after an initial dark and deeply depressive period finds himself investigating a series of murders that occur in prison. At the heart of these murders is a criminal genius, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. Atitis-Snake is convicted on the same day as Wilde—25 May 1895, for attempting to murder his wife. At Reading Gaol, Snake goes on to murder several characters using the poison cantharides. Cantharidin, commonly known as Spanish Fly, after the beetle from which it is derived, was often used in Victorian medicine for producing a range of irritations from aphrodisiac to abortive. Depending on the dosage, it could either improve the performance of the body temporarily or lead to death. Brandreth writes that poison as modus operandi attracts Snake not because he had any real motive, or because poison was easy to conceal in prison, but because of its “name.” Wilde deduces, “You have a wonderful name, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. I think you love it. I think it has been the making of you - at least, the making of your personality. It has also been your undoing. Names do make and unmake a man. I know. Were I called John Smith, I would not be Oscar Wilde.”87 It is connections like these that blur the moral boundary between the murderer and the detective and leave the reader free to question Wilde’s (and by extension, Brandreth’s) thoughts and judgements. If, in a sense, Wilde becomes for Brandreth what Wainewright—with his ambiguity and multiplicity—had been for Wilde himself, it is also possible to suggest that in a way Sebastian Atitis-Snake stands as a NeoVictorian version of Wainewright the poisoner, with his extraordinary performative skills. Atitis-Snake is indeed a great performer, if at the end

87 Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol, 287.

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of the core narrative about Wilde’s prison days he is able to escape the gallows wearing a simple mask, that of the Eunuch who in the end is killed in Snake’s place, in the narrative frame provided by the meeting and the dialogue between Wilde and the mysterious Dr Quilp we learn that the latter is Snake himself wearing a new mask in order to meet Wilde and kill him (or better poison him) because Wilde is the only person who could have revealed the mysteries concerning Snake. And yet, the poisoner’s attempt at killing Wilde fails, it is Wilde who in the end poisons Snake, revealing to the serial murderer, just before his death, that he had understood the killer’s plan. Wilde’s astonishing skills as a detective in the novel can be explained and somehow understood in terms of the writer’s interpretative capacity, in terms of his philosophy of the critic as creator, as forger. The writer, or better the critic, as we have seen in chapter one, knows and reads reality at a deeper and more complex level, seeing and creating connections where other people would see nothing. In the final exchange with Quilp, that is with Snake, Wilde himself is wearing a mask that of Sebastian Melmoth (a pseudonym Wilde actually used in his last years), Wilde and his criminal seem to have the same name which is also that of the martyr, both in this last section act as poisoners; Wilde paradoxically turns into a murderer who kills Snake with his own poison. If such an ending can stand as a reference and a eulogy of Wilde’s “poisonous,” that is, disturbing writing (especially in relation to Victorian culture) it can also represent an attempt to translate the idea that sometimes it is hard to make a distinction between murderer and victim, criminal and innocents. Again, as Wilde himself wrote: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” In this sense, it is possible to conclude noting how in Brandreth’s narrative and in Everett’s film, Wilde seems to inhabit a liminal space, which can be accessed by the contemporary reader herself by activating a process of re-definition of ideas such as deviance, guilt and outsideness. In this sense, Wilde the outsider invites his readers and fans to walk beside him “on the wild(e) side.”

CHAPTER 5

On the Wilde Side: Oscar Wilde in Contemporary Pop Culture

5.1

Pop Wilde

According to cultural critic and novelist Michael Bracewell—author of England is Mine, Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie (1997) and director of possibly the most fascinating documentary-film on Wilde, the 1997 Oscar (BBC, Omnibus Series)—the Anglo-Irish writer stands as the first pop star of British history, a pop celebrity, a cultural icon who put all his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, in the desperate and yet successful attempt to turn his life into a work of art. Bracewell’s works (both book and film) are, in this sense, according to Sammells, “examples of the way Wilde is now reproduced as a kind of Godfather of Rock”1 ; interestingly, Sammells’ now coincides with the year 2000; more than twenty years later, this form of Wildean reproduction is still detectable in the domain of popular culture and has given shape, as we will see, to extremely rich, complex and fascinating intermedial performances. In England is Mine, Bracewell notes how the “prehistory of the English sensibility of subversion,”2 which is at the core of some of the most interesting experiences of British rock and pop from Lennon to Jagger, from Bowie to punk:

1 Sammells, Wilde Style, 121. 2 Bracewell, England Is Mine, 13.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2_5

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can be traced back to the sons and daughters of the late Victorians in their inherited parks or newly acquired domestic mansions. This rebellion – the hatred of certain young people for the values and environments of their privileged families and ancestors – began at the end of the nineteenth century in the cult of aesthetics and artifice which grew around Oscar Wilde, and eventually destroyed him, the first martyr to modern bigotry.3

Bracewell insists on this idea also in the 1997 BBC4 documentary which, as Tanitch notes, was conceived “to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Wilde’s release from prison”5 and most importantly to look not only at his life but also on his “legacy.” As Bracewell affirms in the film, Wilde was an aesthete with attitude, who would treat London as an art gallery with himself as the main work of art; on the other hand, London’s West End, with its iconic theatres, was to give him his greatest successes, an essential achievement for an artist and a man who, as we have seen, was to live his life as theatre. In a key section of the documentary, Bracewell establishes a powerful link between Wilde’s only novel and postmodern, and more specifically pop culture, noting how Wilde’s first hit, The Picture of Dorian Gray, proposed a cult of artifice as the only possible reaction to the vulgarity and boredom of life as the young Dorian found it. Bracewell notes how even though the novel was labelled as immoral by the critics of the time, Dorian Gray has since become one of the founding fables of contemporary culture. Wilde turned, as we have seen with Sammels, into the Godfather of Rock and pop and the pop/rock Dorians would remain for ever young in the audience’s consciousness; always looking for new sensations which, however, very often were to cost them an early death or a ravished life. In this section, Bracewell’s words cleverly establish a fascinating dialogue with a charming sequence of images of Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, David Bowie, Michael Jackson and The Who, counterpointed by excerpts from the 1970s BBC filmic version of the novel, creating a powerful visual continuum from Wilde’s hero to his postmodern reincarnations. Focusing on Wilde’s relationship with rent boys, the director wonders if the iconic writer was more fascinated by the criminal glamour of it, than 3 Bracewell, England Is Mine, 13. 4 Michael Bracewell, Oscar, BBC Omnibus Series, 1997. 5 Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, 69.

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by the young boys themselves; one senses that like all people experiencing forms of addiction. Oscar was falling in love with secrecy and in a way with risk and danger. In this perspective, the film shows how Wilde can be considered a sort of Virgil who can guide us down to our own private Infernos, showing, in this way the universal appeal of temptation. The underworld became for Wilde his “dining with panthers”—as he famously put it in De Profundis —also leading him to his meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas; in this sense, if, according to Bracewell, Wilde represented the first pop star of British history, Bosie was the quintessential groupie: at once obsessive and dangerous. Investigating Wilde’s fascination with low-life, the director also notes how in the last years before his arrest Wilde was interestingly experiencing a link between the criminal underworld and the world of aristocracy, more than half a century before—in the swinging sixties—gangsters and rock celebrities became part of the same scene. In this sense, in the documentary, which as we said was first broadcasted in 1997, Bracewell wonders if in the late 1990s people were trying to make Oscar too respectable (something we already referred to discussing Fry’s performance6 in Gilbert’s film); in this perspective, he not only sees Wilde as a prophet of the pop age, but he also insists on how crucial, in the construction of his posthumous celebrity, were the two years spent in Reading Gaol; indeed, prison will kill the man but give birth to the legend; indeed, as Neil Tennant, from Pet Shop Boys, puts it in a key moment of the film, his works were only a part of the Oscar Wilde story, his life, that is his fall forged his myth. Bracewell’s film features a key contribution by Tom Stoppard—the playwright also featured in the cast of Al Pacino’s 2011 film—who in the final sequences of the documentary affirms that to label Wilde, from our point of view, as a gay hero (or martyr) is to do him a disservice, because he was a hero to humanity. Besides pronouncing Wilde’s famous epigram on disobedience,7 Stoppard also stresses how Wilde had perfect pitch, perfect touch, a musician’s sense of a sentence, showing how the

6 Ironically, Fry himself is part of the docu-film’s cast. Besides giving voice to some of Wilde’s most famous epigrams, he also offers interesting insights into Wilde’s last years as a pariah in Paris. 7 “It’s through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” Wilde, The Soul of Man, 1176.

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link between Wilde and music emerges in all its centrality and complexity in many contemporary discourses on him. In the very first sequence of the film, Bracewell creates an important link—which we will investigate in this chapter—between Wilde and the quintessential pop legend, David Bowie; both, indeed, made feeling and being different look glamorous. This idea is also reinforced by the use in the documentary of some of Bowie’s tracks and in particular of ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide,’ a song through which Bowie fosters a sense of belonging in his fans, who, as outsiders identify, with their hero (Bowie and indirectly Wilde), who reassures them that they, the wonderful outsiders, are not alone. Wilde’s self-conscious construction of identity and his dandyish performance of an ironic masculinity have become sources of inspiration for many musicians, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this perspective, in a very fascinating study entitled The British Pop Dandy. Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture, Stan Hawkins notes how “British pop dandies are the arrivals and products of a post-industrialized society, following closely in the footsteps of Beau Brummell, Count D’Orsay, Lord Byron, Edward VIII, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Cecil Beaton and many others,” indeed, “adopting opulent roles, they have taken style to absurd extremes with blasé sensibility and formidable panache.”8 It is interesting, in this sense, to focus on the British pop dandies who were to follow more closely in the footsteps of Wilde; if the 1970s and 1980s are the decades which have most fully embraced Wilde’s legacy and in which musicians such as Bowie, Morrissey and Friday powerfully reproduced (that is staged) the Wildean paradigm, in the second half of the Sixties several bands were already fascinated by the character of Wilde and by his artistic life, among them: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Wilde Flowers. As Pinnock points out “The Wilde Flowers, who floundered quietly in Canterbury in the mid-’60s, not only spawned a whole batch of England’s finest songwriters and musicians, but an entire genre – the Canterbury Scene, made up of jazz-tinged, psychedelically playful outfits such as Soft Machine, Caravan, Matching Mole and Hatfield And The North, and solo artists like Robert

8 Stan Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy. Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 15–16.

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Wyatt and Kevin Ayers.”9 The band that was formed in 1964, included not only Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt10 but also iconic artists such as Richard Sinclair and Hugh Hopper. The band, as Hugh’s brother Brian has affirmed in a recent essay, was originally called The Wild Flowers from a reference to “wild flora” they found in a book they consulted at their rehearsal space in Tanglewood. It was Ayers, before leaving the band, who bequeathed the ‘e’ to change the name from “The Wild Flowers” to “Wilde Flowers.” This was influenced by Oscar Wilde—a great favourite and influence on Ayers.11 And, indeed, in Ayers’s music one can detect many Wildean traits such as the coexistence of at time contradictory approaches to art, in which high and low elements, postmodern experimentalism and folk accessibility coexist: For a group who all involved admit were primarily a “dance band,” the sheer weirdness of some of the cuts […] is a surprise. […] This stranger side of The Wilde Flowers’ music, which would of course find fuller expression later on, was testament in part to the band members’ sophisticated tastes. Rather than being into the trad jazz popular in the late ’50s and early […] the Flowers bonded over their passions for the likes of Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor.12

In other words, theirs was a passion for some of the most innovative and distinctive jazz voices of the time; interestingly, the music of the Wilde Flowers—and of the bands its members formed after their split—is today appreciated by both jazz and rock fans. Of course, speaking about the Sixties, one cannot escape pointing to the centrality of The Beatles in that decade, a relevance which seems to echo that of Wilde in the fin de siècle. According to Cawthorne, The Beatles “were” the sixties: “they carried the beacon of the decade from the naïve pop of the late fifties, through sexual liberation, drugs, Eastern mysticism, pacifism and hippysm. They were leather-clad rockers, dapper

9 Tom Pinnock, “The Wilde Flowers,” Uncut, No. 226, March 2016, 85. 10 On Robert Wyatt and the Wilde Flowers years, see Marcus O’Dair, Different Every

Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2014). 11 Brian Hopper, “Brian’s Tale,” in The Wilde Flowers (London: Floating World Records, 2015), CD. 12 Pinnock, “The Wilde Flowers,” 86.

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Mods and, finally the ultimate Flower Children”13 ; most importantly, as Silvia Albertazzi points out, with The Beatles the pop song itself becomes what Raymond Williams famously defined “a way of life.”14 Andrew Calcutt—similarly to the Ian MacDonald of Revolution in the Head 15 —approaches the Beatles through the concept of nowness in order to define a condition, echoing to a certain extent that of the dandy Wilde, in which: “awareness and conscience of the present moment (‘simultaneity’), rather than ideas of material progress and historical advancement have come to be the criteria through which we both evaluate, and indeed, live our lives,” Calcutt notes how “the new consciousness was ostensibly apolitical, but its effect has been to disrupt traditional politics and the accompanying social order.”16 The image of Wilde is one of the many iconic images featured on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely-Hearts Club Band by Pop artist Peter Blake, in which, significantly, Wilde17 stands very close to John Lennon, who apparently asked for the inclusion of the Irish playwright.18 It seems particularly fascinating that in his last interview with 13 Nigel Cawthorne, Sixties Sourcebook. A Visual Reference to the Style of a Decade (London: Grange Books, 2005), 164. 14 Silvia Albertazzi, Questo è domani. Gioventù, cultura e rabbia nel Regno Unito 1956– 1967 (Lissone: Paginauno, 2020), 37. Here, Albertazzi makes, of course, reference to Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). 15 Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head (London: Fourth Estate, 1994). 16 Calcutt, Brit Cult, 50. 17 Significantly, in a 2010 documentary entitled “Love is all you Need,” cultural critic Camille Paglia makes reference to (1960s) John Lennon’s brilliant sense of British humor, to his surrealistic kind of writing […] that, according to Paglia, came out of Lewis Carroll via Oscar Wilde. 18 Another major literary influence on Lennon was James Joyce. In their second more experimental phase, which sees Lennon compose his Joycean track ‘Revolution 9’ included in 1968 The White Album, The Beatles composed a song entitled ‘I Am The Walrus’ released in 1967, a complex intertextual/Psychedelic exercise—which includes oblique quotation from Finnegans Wake. Lennon’s work exhibited a similarly dispirited sense of entanglement to the characters in Finnegans Wake, which likely explains why a copy of the book appears in the ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ video (1980). In these very years, many avant-pop musicians will be fascinated by Joyce’s art, to the extent of writing songs which adapt, or make reference, to works by the Irish writer in complex and unpredictable ways, mixing directness end experimentalism, low and high art. In the late 1960s, Pink Floyd’s founder and solo artist Syd Barrett was inspired by the poem ‘Golden Hair’ included in Chamber Music and decided to put it to music. Main motifs of the thirty-six poems that the collection contains are yearning for love, disappointment, and beauty and universality

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Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Cott—which took place on 5 December 1980, that is three days before Lennon was killed and in which the two talked for more than nine hours—Lennon made reference to the “Oscar Wilde part” of himself: I still drop into that I’m-a-street-kid stance, but I have to keep remembering that I never really was one. That’s what Yoko has taught me. I couldn’t have done it alone – it had to be a female to teach me. That’s it. […] I look at early pictures of meself, and I was torn between being Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet – the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet, feminine side. I was always torn between the two, mainly opting for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead.19

On their part, The Rolling Stones themselves paid a more direct tribute to Wilde through the video of their song ‘We Love You.’ The song was written in the aftermath of the drugs arrests faced by Jagger and Keith Richards at the Redlands country home of the latter in Sussex in 1967 (the same year in which Sgt Pepper’s was published). The promotional film for the single directed by Peter Whitehead, besides including footage from recording sessions, also featured sequences that re-enacted the 1895 trial of Wilde with Mick Jagger—defined by Melly a “total”20 pop personality who like Wilde put only his talent in his work, his genius into his life, who in 1970 was also the protagonist of the iconic film Performance—Richards and Marianne Faithfull respectively playing the roles of

of music. The poems are also characterized by a complex musicality, for they were written more like lyrics for songs than like poems. Even though it appeared on Barrett’s debut album The Madcap Laughs which is part of his solo work after the Pink Floyd, ‘Golden Hair’ is one of Syd’s first songs, made at the time he experimented with setting poetry to music, during his early psychedelic (cannabis-nourished) idyll at Earlham Street in 1966. In 1967, American psychedelic band Jefferson Airpalne composed a song entitled ‘Rejoyce’ whose lyrics features a more direct reference to Ulysses and Leopold Bloom. Interestingly, the song’s progressive sonic canvas perfectly translates the polyphony and pluridiscursivity of Joyce’s novel; Irish melodies and atmosphere are counterpointed with complex piano figures and a dynamic, inventive approach to bass, whose walking lines seem to sonically stage Bloom’s wanderings in Dublin. 19 Jonathan Cott, “John Lennon. The Last Interview,” Rolling Stone, 1980, https:// www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/john-lennon-the-last-interview-179443/. 20 Melly, Revolt into Style, 138.

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Wilde, Queensberry and Bosie. As Sammells brilliantly observes, in the video: Jagger as a rockstar is identified in his criminality with Wilde as artist: both are identified as martyrs to personal freedom. Wilde is lifted from his historical context and identifies with modern celebrity. Together they embody an androgynous sexuality which attracts a cluster of significations: glamour, marginality, sexual nonconformism, freedom through role-play. Further Jagger and Faithfull are identified with ‘aristocracy’ , That is to say they transform it into an oxymoron; the ‘pop-aristocracy’. The film is a neat anatomy of dandysm, laying bare both its oppositional stance and its ambivalent relationship to what it defines itself and seeks to transform. The film is after all an advert; it commodifies the diverting spectacle of revolt and refusal.21

If multimodal and intermedial experiences such as these point to the centrality of Wilde in the Swinging Sixties,22 we will have to wait for the glam era to witness the translation of Wilde’s paradigm in “a way of life,” in a subculture informed by an aesthetics of self-invention.

5.2

From Velvet Goldmine to ‘Lazarus’: David Bowie and Oscar Wilde

We can now go back to where we started, that is to the first chapter of this study and to Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, recalling how the film focuses on three main characters: journalist Arthur Stuart, who in the early Eighties, doing some research for a work commissioned by The Herald Tribune, finds himself investigating the mysterious retirement of a glam rock star; singer Brian Slade (whose life is the object of Stuart’s investigations) and American rock icon Curt Wild (who initiates both Slade and Stuart into homosexual love); the story of the film’s protagonist Brian Slade is in truth a filmic translation of the existential/musical adventure of glam era David Bowie and his famous alter-ego Ziggy Stardust. As Bowie did with Ziggy, Slade stages the death of his alter-ego Maxwell 21 Sammells, Wilde Style, 122. 22 Interestingly, a Chilean band from the 1960s called Los Vidrios Quebrados composed

a song (in English) entitled “Oscar Wilde” in which the protagonist is “Wilde” himself narrating the main events of his life in the first person; the song was included in their 1967 album Fictions.

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Demon during a concert, a choice that in the film, however, has the effect of alienating his fans. It is important to stress how in the movie the Seventies are described and re-constructed through the personal memories of Arthur Stuart—a glam enthusiast—and through the memories and stories of two characters he interviews: namely, Slade’s wife and his first manager. Through Stuart’s investigations, we discover that Slade’s mysterious disappearance (after Demon’s fake murder during his last concert) conceals his metamorphosis into Tommy Stone: glam’s subversive hero has, in short, become the author of mainstream songs and the incarnation of a normal and normative masculinity. Interestingly, Coppa sees in this transformation a form of (Wildean) Bunburying—with the Jack/Earnest double identity turning into the Brian/Tommy one—which, however, “is chronological rather than geographical.”23 If on the one side Haynes seems particularly interested in investigating the Slade-Bowie parallel, making an indirect reference to Bowie’s 1980s commercial (and for some fans disappointing) turn, the very moment of Stuart’s discovery, that is 1984, allows us to create a connection with another seminal writer, namely George Orwell24 and with his iconic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a work which inspired one of Bowie’s best works, namely his album Diamond Dogs .25 As is known, Orwell’s novel 23 Coppa, “Performance Theory and Performativity,” 90. 24 Orwell’s iconic novel holds a very specific space and meaning in Bowie’s work and

biography. Deeply impressed by a train journey across the Russian Continent in 1973 in which the dramatic poverty of the fabled Communist paradise generated in the singer a sense of panic and claustrophobia, Bowie chose to design a rock musical around Orwell’s fictional recreation of a Stalinesque society in his novel—Peter Doggett, The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie and the 1970s (London: Vintage, 2012), 196. Orwell’s widow, however, refused to let Bowie have the rights; hence, the artist was left to mould his Orwell-inspired rock-show in a work equally apocalyptic which in the end escaped the conventional physiognomy of the musical to turn into the complex hyper-textual space composed by both the album Diamond Dogs and the show aimed at promoting the album. 25 Published in May 1974 the Diamond Dogs album was Bowie’s attempt to emphasize the literary credentials of his songbook—Christopher Sandford, Bowie. Loving the Alien (London: Time Warner Paperbacks, 1997); indeed, with its echoes of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Burroughs’ The Wild Boys (1971), the album moved beyond the margins of Orwell’s novel. Bowie replaced Oceania with his own future urban environment, Hunger City, a post-nuclear and yet technologically primitive hell. The album’s fragmented lyrics and the portrait of urban America’s meltdown clearly derived from Burroughs, and indeed, much of the album’s literary inventions were the outcome of Bowie’s recourse to Burroughs’s cut-up techniques.

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investigates the limitations imposed on human freedom by a totalitarian regime.26 The author illustrates how such a regime can impose its will on its people through a sophisticated system of supervision and terror, involving the secret police, planted microphones and telescreens in public places and private homes; but the novel also shows how the state has an even greater potential for imposing authority by means of control of the media and manipulation of language: the past is rewritten by the efforts of the workers of the Ministry of Truth and Newspeak is designed as a means to limit the possibilities of revolt against accepted ideas. In truth, “what is being described is not only a universal danger but a universal process. That is the true source of Orwell’s horror.”27 The author’s enemy was not a particular ideology but a “prevailing cast of mind. The mind as it functions on the basis of conformity and habit.”28 As we know, through

26 The last four tracks of the album, however, directly relate to Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘We are the dead’ is the first of the Orwellian songs included in the album; introduced by a beautiful electric piano figure, the song takes its title directly from the novel, when Winston Smith and Julia repeat “we are the dead” to one another as the Thought Police approach to arrest Winston, Bowie’s vocal performance here perfectly translates the dominant sense of loss. The sound of ‘1984’ projects towards Bowie’s romance with Philly Soul, and indeed, it is characterized by a powerful 4/4 tempo, which seems to convey the idea of a machine-like society characterized by strict and predictable rhythms, in which, however, the social actors are capable of unpredictable intonations and variations. The lyrics seem to refer to Winston’s interrogatory by O’ Brien. ‘Big Brother’ seems to present a more serene and choral tone, almost conveying the idea that after the brainwash Winston has found someone to believe in. In truth, the song’s theme is the dangerous charm of power and the easiness with which succumb to totalitarianism. Here, “the glamour of dictatorship is balanced with the banality,” reminding us that “anyone with a mind to it could be a Hitler;” Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2011), 39–40. ‘Chanting of the EverCircling Skeletal Family’ is truly Big Brother’s outro, closing on the machine repetition of the word “bro.” This repetition represents an interruption in the order of discourse, something which through pure chance turns a machine into a creative force and a space of subversion of an ideology which is based on the ideal of a perfect, controllable machine-like society. On Bowie and Orwell see also Will Brooker, Why Bowie Matters (London: Collins 2019). 27 Raymond Williams, “Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. How Does the Novel Help Our Understanding of the Year,” Marxism Today, January 1984, 12. 28 William Cain, “Orwell’s Essays as a Literary Experience,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83. Much pop of the 1980s will be characterized by a prevailing sense of conformity, by a desire to turn music into a source of pure entertainment. Of course, there will be exceptions as represented by Bowie’s 1986 masterpiece ‘Absolute Beginners.’

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his life and work, Wilde himself articulated a very complex criticism of any form of conformity and in particular of late Victorian morality. In his film, Haynes also highlights the limits of the glam experience; indeed, it was a gender revolution in which women often played the role of simple spectators. This is what happens to Slade’s wife (a filmic counterpart of Bowie’s first wife Angie) who in the first part of the film is portrayed as co-protagonist of the most successful moment of Slade’s career, only to be progressively marginalized. As Kaye observes, “the film concedes that women sometimes lose out in sexual revolutions: years after the collapse of her marriage to Brian, we see his ex-wife in a darkened bar as she is interviewed by another ‘survivor’ Arthur. She seems subdued, foggy about her ex-husband’s whereabouts and about what he meant to her.”29 The film is a journey not only into the Seventies but also into Stuart’s consciousness. Re-constructing the early years of the decade, he discovers the centrality of glam in his adolescence, which Haynes recounts through a number of fascinating sequences: from Arthur’s first experiments in transvestitism to the ecstasy experienced listening to an album by Slade while looking at the image of his hero on the album cover, to his enchantment listening to a teacher at school reading excerpts from The Picture of Dorian Gray, to the many conflicts with his parents who are unable to understand Arthur’s inner turmoil. The glam sensibility deeply affects the young boy, who as a mature journalist seems to be still inhabiting that world, something which nourishes his restlessness and his incapability of dealing with his present. In the film, the reference to Wilde’s only novel is particularly significant. Simon Reynolds refers to the centrality of the novel in the glam aesthetics: Wilde is the first philosopher of glam, expounding its tenets eight years in advance. He did this through critical essays, but above all with The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is less a novel than a scaffold over which Wilde drapes his theories and aesthetic stances in the form of exquisitely wrought, mordantly witty epigrams and aphorisms. Speaking largely through the character of Lord Henry, Wilde scorns authenticity and artlessness as tedious humbug: ‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know’; ‘the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it’. He celebrates the theatricality

29 Kaye, “Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde,” 219.

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and facades of social life: ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances’; I love acting. It is much more real than life.’30

One of the film’s most iconic moments is represented by Arthur’s meeting with Curt Wild in the 1980s; disappointed by Slade’s commercial turn, he sees in Wild a living and powerful embodiment of the glittery world he had so much loved; it is Curt Wild himself who gives him a brooch which belonged to Oscar Wilde (which had been a gift from Slade). In this sense, the film becomes a circular journey, and its ending brings us to where we started, thanks to a magical object which represents the irreducible Wildean alterity and outsideness Stuart finally embraces. Stuart’s investigations and inner quest represent, in short, a possibility of re-appropriation and rearticulation of an experience—that of glam (but also of Wilde himself)—whose sense and meaning become today particularly relevant, offering a model for the performance of a new paradigm of masculinity based on irony, decentring and self-invention, outside the imperatives of the order of discourse. One of the most fascinating and convincing performers of this paradigm is—as we have suggested—David Bowie himself. Approaching David Bowie’s life and oeuvre from a Wildean perspective means, first of all, translating his work into a sort of dialogue between dialogues and into a performance involving different performances, in which music interrogates other media and where images, sounds and words constantly redefine themselves.31 In Velvet Goldmine, glam articulates a complex cultural revolution which also implies a radical criticism of the machismo of late sixties rock’n’roll. Bowie during an interview with Anglo-Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi—himself very interested in an idea of (gender) identity as performance, as something fluid and escaping—speaking about the Sixties, notes how homosexuality was a real taboo then; the very idea of free love did not imply an open-mindness in relation to gender issues.32 Bowie hated the scene; he really aspired to an art which might have a symbolic

30 Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe. Glam Rock and Its Legacy (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), 91. 31 On this aspect see Nick Stevenson, Bowie. Fame, Sound and Vision (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2006). 32 David Bowie, “Interview by Hanif Kureishi,” Interview Magazine, May 1993.

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value, in short to music as theatre. At the beginning of the Seventies, he understood that his moment had finally come. Through glam, the new decade represented an ironic and intelligent critical answer to what we could define in terms of the earnestness of the previous decade. The very deconstruction of the normative masculinity and of the imperialist approach to gender of the Sixties was performed by glam both at the visual level (through the make-up and clothes already mentioned) and at the musical one through the reintroduction of irony, of musical transvestitism, of vaudeville and the anti-hippy sound of bands such as the Velvet Underground. It is interesting to note how glam was mostly a British phenomenon whose very philosophy sharply contrasted with the American obsession for cowboys, machos and rock’n’roll and yet in the music of New York iconic band The Velvet Underground one could experience the vital coexistence of light and darkness, of love and sorrow, beauty and dissonance which informs most of Wilde’s works. The solo debut album by The Velvet’s singer Lou Reed, entitled Transformer, which was produced by Bowie himself, and published in 1972, features a key song ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ which, with its narrative about early Seventies transvestitism and homoerotic relationships powerfully, connects with the fascinating link—we discussed with Bracewell—between late Oscar Wilde and the (London) underworld; and yet in Reed, writing in the early 1970s, the “Wild side” is not a dangerous or a criminal dimension, but a space in which it is possible to rethink one’s identity and in particular one’s idea of gender. As Reed biographer Anthony De Curtis puts it: ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ celebrates the sexual transformations of Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling, three transgender Factory stalwarts and the stars of Warhol ad Paul Morrissey’s 1971 satire of the feminist movement, Women in Revolt. […] It’s not as if Reed knew those characters at all […] ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is more than a song. It’s a slogan, and an invitation. Its title distils Reed’s primary symbolic value: to expose people to worlds they might never have become aware of otherwise. In the early seventies, millions of people were standing on the brink of taking a walk on the wild. All they needed was a little push, and Reed provided exactly that.33

33 Anthony De Curtis, Lou Reed. A Life (New York: Back Bay Books, 2017), 151–153.

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In our discourse, the “wild side” can also be translated into the “Wilde side,” conceived of as a “threshold” as a liminal, even “risky” space in which it is possible to question essentialist discourses on identity. As Beynon insists, “rather than being made of ‘essences’ or ‘fundamentals’, masculinity and femininity are sets of signs that are performed.”34 As we have seen, glamsters constructed (for themselves) a hybrid gender identity using very specific visual signs. Fashion of course played a central part in this process of (re)construction. As Clover observes, “glam coopted fashion before fashion could co-opt it, making the idea of ‘the real’ seem ridiculous;”35 in a sense, glam invented a style, did not simply adopt one (as Mods did). Ironic make-up, glittery clothes, dyed hair and platform shoes were some of the most glamorous signs which were each time combined in fresh and unpredictable ways, ironically responding to the music.36 We had then in Bowie, as we will see, the use of gold or silver suits through which the creator of Ziggy Stardust connected to a space imagery, space having recently turned (with Kubrick’s 1968 iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey and with the Apollo mission) into one of the main concerns of pop culture. According to Sandford in Bowie, the space becomes a sign of his alterity, of his unsettling other-worldliness.37

34 Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 11. 35 Joshua Clover, “Fables of the Self-Construction. A Users Guide to Velvet Goldmine,”

Spin 14, November 1998, 92–99. 36 Interestingly, Auslander establishes a powerful link between glam with its gender bending strategies (that is glamsters’ use of glitter suits, make-up, platform shoes, etc.) and the gothic as a genre; quoting Halberstam, he describes in particular the gothic novel a “cross-dressing performance” whose stylistic excesses are understood as feminine dressing up and whose pages are filled with instances of “grotesque transvestism.” The “transvestism of glam rock is similarly grotesque, and glam rock personae often border on the monstrous,” the excessive (Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, 64). Both gothic novel and glam rock music can then be defined as cannibalistic. If gothic as a genre is itself a hybrid form, a stitched body of distorted textuality (think of Dorian Gray too), glam rock songs are often monstrous effigies made up of parts of other textual bodies. In short, gothic and glam partake intriguingly of shared means, including self-conscious stylistic excess and overstatement, the violation of boundaries, transvestism and the assertion of the constructedness of identities and texts, something central in both Wilde and Bowie. 37 Christopher Sandford, Bowie. Loving the Alien (London: Time Warner Paperbacks, 1997), 107. Many of Bowie’s songs are nourished by a space imagery, such as: ‘Space Oddity,’ ‘Life on Mars,’ ‘Starman,’ ‘Moonage Daydream,’ ‘Loving the Alien and ‘Hello Spaceboy.’

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As Waldrep observes, Bowie “represents contemporary culture as a heterogeneous expression of a performative self and acts as the ultimate type of Wilde in his ability to take Wilde’s permutations and transformations of self and fashion a career that is based completely on displaying and practicing this performative paradigm.”38 Indeed, until his death in 2016, Bowie performed many different roles and personae throughout his career, from Major Tom in 1969 to glam fictional hero Ziggy Stardust ; from the late Seventies Thin White Duke to 2016’s Lazarus/Button Eyes. Bowie also had a successful career in the world of cinema, playing key roles in such films as Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), directed by Nagisa Oshima, Absolute Beginners (1986), by Julian Temple and Basquiat (1996), by Julian Schnabel, in which he, interestingly, played the role of Andy Warhol. Commenting on the polyphonic album Hunky Dory, Watts39 argues that Bowie has an acute ear for parody which derives from his innate sense of theatre. In this sense, the singer thought himself more in terms of an actor and entertainer than a musician. There was always in Bowie a capacity to make clear to his audience that he was performing a role, that music, like life, is basically theatrical stuff . Interestingly, his major influence in the early 1970s was not a band or a singer, but the English mime Lindsay Kemp, who offered Bowie a connection with queer culture and introduced him to the use of masks. As Waldrep observes, “the decadent seriousness of Kemp’s work helped Bowie fashion a career of ironizing detachment.”40 If his use of masks, as he confessed to Kureishi, allowed him to feel more at ease on stage his very style of acting was defined by “an economy of gesture” which allowed him “to make clear to his audience - whether on film on video or in concert – that he is in fact performing a performance […] to be deconstructed.”41 Kemp himself loved Wilde and in 1975 staged a remarkable production of Salomé. Most importantly, he shared Wilde’s capacity of creating a synthesis of opposing, contradictory realities. In this sense, as queer director Derek Jarman puts it, that of Kemp is 38 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 105. See also Pierpaolo Martino, La filosofia di David Bowie. Wilde, Kemp e la musica come teatro (Milano: Mimesis, 2016). 39 Michael Watts, “1972: Oh You Pretty Thing,” in The Faber Book of Pop, ed. Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), 391–396. 40 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 111. 41 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 111.

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A kind of performance that lies outside of the ready classifications, or perhaps combines them: the public preconceptions are generally confounded by its mixture of dance, theatre, mime, music-hall and ritual, by its combination of the erotic, the comic, the religious and the grotesque, and by its blurring of the divisions between the avant-garde and the archaic, between frivolity and seriousness, passion and parody.42

Kemp’s approach to performance powerfully connects with the aesthetics of the threshold which is at the core of Bowie’s philosophy. Bowie’s commitment to performance and the theatre translated into the construction of a new, revolutionary identity for the pop/rock artist; his emphasis on artificiality testified to a desire to distance himself from the ‘cockrocker’ paradigm of the 1960s and, in general terms, from hippie culture and its obsession with authenticity. Glam rock was all about escaping identities, about irony and masks. If, as we have seen in “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde famously wrote that “man is least himself when he speaks in his own person, give him a mask and he will tell you the truth,”43 Bowie’s truths were delivered through a multiplicity of masks, that is, through the many identities he played on and offstage; in a sense, as Simon Reynolds recently pointed out, “Bowie’s entire career is predicted – and the carping distrust of his critics deflected in advance – with Wilde’s rhetorical question: ‘Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities,’”44 a question we already discussed in our analysis of Dorian Gray. Bracewell notes how “Bowie was a suburban boy who had progressed from the sharp individualism of Mod, through psychedelic mysticism, to wrap trashy rock’n’roll pantomime in tinfoil” and he adds how “English dandyism reached an apotheosis with Bowie, and dandyism in England, had always suggested the suburban outsider’s subtle revenge on home and high society alike – a mask behind which to advance.”45 Sammells too, noting that Wilde “unlike Bowie was no suburbanite,” acknowledges, nevertheless that “Bowie’s sequence of stage-personae from Ziggy Stardust through Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke and 42 Derek Jarman “Preface,” in Anno Wilms, Lindsay Kemp and Company (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1987), 9. 43 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1142. 44 Reynolds, Shock and Awe. Glam Rock and Its Legacy, 91. 45 Bracewell, England Is Mine, 193.

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beyond spring from a Wildean aesthetic grounded in ‘make believe’, in role playing and the inauthentic: and it is one which he self-consciously culled from artists like Warhol and other avant-garde ‘underground’ sources.”46 Interestingly, Bowie relates not only to Wilde’s life performances but also to his works. In this perspective, in her psychoanalytic reading of Bowie, Ana Leorne establishes a fascinating connection between Bowie and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, observing how the obsession with youth and immortality “was a constant in Bowie’s early career, and the fact that he himself gave up a part of his own life – his personal side – to be immortalised through Art (his own) makes him the perfect example of someone affected by Dorian Gray syndrome as he was seeking, in his own way, immortality.”47 Leorne focuses on the creation of the Ziggy Stardust mask as Bowie’s most self-conscious effort in this direction, noting, however, how his ‘immortal’ and ultra-famous alter-ego was in a way killing the individual; hence, the necessity of staging the death of Ziggy at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, killing the mask. Besides, Leorne interestingly reads Ziggy’s sacrifice “to make the Infinites real”48 as a process which turns him into another character from Oscar Wilde’s work, namely “The Happy Prince” and adds: “The only valuable gold is that which is used to enrich others; this concept can be seen as a metaphor to Bowie’s ability to put a part of himself – or his alter-ego – in his performances, while his Ego was symbiotically fed by the sharing of his artistic essence with others.”49 Another link with Wilde emerges from Bowie’s awareness that music, as an artistic form in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cannot be conceived of outside capitalism. In this sense, it might be argued that Bowie’s changes—and in particular his progression from late 1970s’ art rock (in the albums Low, “Heroes ” and Lodger, featuring Brian

46 Sammells, Wilde Style, 121. 47 Ana Leorne, “Dear Dr Freud-David Bowie Hits the Couch. A Psychoanalytic

Approach to Some of His Personae,” in David Bowie. Critical Perspectives, eds Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin Power (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 113. 48 In Ziggy’s narrative, “when the Infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti matter and cannot exist in our world” (Bowie, in Leorne, “Dear Dr Freud-David Bowie Hits the Couch,” 114). 49 Leorne, “Dear Dr Freud-David Bowie Hits the Couch,” 114.

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Eno) to the mainstream pop of the 1980s—had as much to do with commerce as with creativity. As he himself admitted, commerce drove him as much as anything else. Consequently, music videos, as an essential part of the music business but also as an important contemporary art form (British director Derek Jarman’s experimental videos of the 1980s are a case in point), played a crucial role in Bowie’s career. If according to Chambers, Bowie’s songs were “miniature films,”50 his videos represented his most consistent effort at marketing himself and especially at creating an image or character that was meant, as Waldrep notes, not only to complement his music, but to offer both a critique of it and a fuller autobiographical statement of what he was trying to do in his work. Interestingly, in one of his older videos, Bowie makes a direct reference to Wilde and more specifically to The Picture of Dorian Gray: In his video for “Look back in Anger” (1979), Bowie plays the character of a poor artist alone in a greater studio, caressing a portrait of himself as angel. As he rubs his hand across the surface, paint appears on his face, which soon looks grotesque—even diseased. As a comment on Dorian Gray, Bowie seems to play the parts of both Basil and Dorian – or indeed, to reinterpret the novel’s theme of duality in such a way to combine the artist with his subject. Bowie here makes his more direct homage to Wilde and also joins a tradition of musicians—the Rolling Stones, Morrissey – who also make explicit references to Wilde in this medium.51

The world of the visual arts also offers us a fecund territory to compare the two artists; Wilde was an art collector and an art critic, while besides being a collector Bowie was a painter himself. In recent years, both Bowie and Wilde have been at the centre of two major exhibitions; we already mentioned Oscar Wilde. Impertinent Absolu, organized by Merlin Holland at Paris’ Petit Palais in 2016; the British singer was the focus of the exhibition entitled David Bowie Is, organized in 2013 by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which toured several cities such

50 Chambers, Urban Rhythms, 132. 51 Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 123–124.

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as Barcelona, New York, Tokyo and Boulogne. Through these shows, both artists are turned at last into works of art.52 Bowie’s songs, it must be said, are themselves powerful performances; their lyrics are characterized by a fascinating theatrical dimension, inhabited, as they are, by many different masks—constructed by the author during his career to problematize the notion of a natural, stable and authentic identity which was dominant in 1960s popular music—but also by different voices resonating, as Bakhtin would have put it, in the author’s words. Bowie’s work is nourished by a profound dialogical relationship not only with Oscar Wilde but also with other writers53 such as Shakespeare54 (in 1976 ‘Station to Station’), George Orwell (as we

52 Interestingly, Brett Morgan’s very recent docufilm or better art-film on Bowie, Moonage Daydream (2022)—entirely constructed on fragments of interviews and performances—features a sequence in which introducing some of the key artistic influences we can see an image of Oscar Wilde himself. 53 According to novelist Jake Arnott: “Bowie was a furious reader,” so much that in 2013 he issued on his official website a (100 titles) reading list. The list is “wonderfully eclectic,” embracing everything from the Beano to Transcendental Magic by Eliphas Lévi. Orwell is of course included, “as is Burgess and Bulwer-Lytton, and others he would have read growing up: John Braine, Keith Waterhouse and Muriel Spark. His own contemporaries are well represented: Ackroyd, Amis, Chatwin, McEwan and, of course, Angela Carter.” Of Arnott’s generation, there are Sarah Waters and Rupert Thompson with Thompson standing as “something of a Thin White Duke of British fiction, sustaining a long career by constantly changing the way he writes.” Many writers including himself, as Arnott observes “owe Bowie for showing us all that work that never made it on the curriculum.” Jake Arnott, “David Bowie. The Man Who Read the World,” The Guardian, 15 June 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/ 15/david-bowie-man-read-world-literary-influences-books-orwell. On Bowie and literature and on the 100 titles reading list, see John O’Connell, Bowie’s Bookshelf. The Hundred Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life (New York: Gallery Books, 2019). 54 The Bard seems particularly relevant in order to investigate Bowie’s many complexities of a man who thought himself as theatre; it is possible to establish a link between Bowie’s mid 1970s-mask, namely The Thin White Duke and Shakespeare’ s Prospero, the Duke of Milan in The Tempest . Lombardo focuses on Prospero’s multiplicity: Prospero is at once a man (who must choose between life and death), the father of Miranda, the Duke of Milan, a coloniser but also a scientist and magician. If on the one hand we must acknowledge that Prospero is the product of peculiar historical circumstances and specific conventions, four centuries distant from our own, on the other hand this very idea of plurality perfectly captures Bowie’s deeper essence and his extraordinary capacity for self-fashioning. At a different level Bowie’s role in his album Station to Station (1975)—a work powerfully nourished by Bowie’s interest in occultism—seems to be that of a magician, who is able to conduct a fascinating sonic theatre, in which he creates a synthesis of all his musical influences, indirectly composing, in this way, a tribute to the most

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have seen, in 1974 Diamond Dogs ), Colin MacInnes55 (in 1986 ‘Absolute Beginners’), William Burroughs (in 1972 ‘Moonage Daydream’) and Hanif Kureishi56 (in 1993 The Buddha of Suburbia).

musical of Shakespeare’s plays. Besides as Greenblatt affirms “Shakespeare the working dramatist did not typically lay claim to the transcendent, visionary truths attributed to him by his most fervent admirers; his characters more modestly say, again in the words of Prospero, that their project was ‘to please’ (The Tempest, Epilogue, line 13). The starting point, and perhaps the ending point as well, in any encounter with Shakespeare is simply to enjoy him, to savour his imaginative richness, to take pleasure in his infinite delight in language;” this kind of stance should also inform our approach to Bowie, who like Shakespeare was a man of theatre, so we must take delight and pleasure in his theatrical approach to pop itself. See Agostino Lombardo, “Prefazione,” in William Shakespeare, La Tempesta, (Milano: Garzanti, 1984), xxxvii–L and Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction,” in The Norton Shakespeare, eds Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2000), 1–71. 55 In 1986, Bowie contributed to the soundtrack for Julian Temple’s filmic adaptation

of MacInnes’ 1959 Absolute Beginners , composing two original tracks, “That’s Motivation” and a song named after the novel, which stands as a tribute to the teenage years spent with his half-brother Terry in Soho. Interestingly, the unnamed protagonist of this novel is like Bowie himself an inside-outsider; in the very first pages of the novel, he reveals his craft of photographer and indeed what we have here is a series of moving pictures of a scene, that of 1950s London, inhabited by beautiful girls, musicians, gays, black immigrants, prostitutes and corrupted producers who literally construct and sell the latest musical talent available on the market; this was basically the London Bowie grew in. The protagonist is at once inside and outside that scene: he moves within that culture and yet he is able to capture its images and details, through very careful and almost documentary descriptions. The novel investigates the revolution generated by the rise of the world of teenagers which was strictly connected with the post-war economic boom. There was indeed, in the Fifties, an increase in the general welfare and consequently of the amount of money boys and girls could have access to which they could earn through their jobs or get through their parents. The absolute beginners of a scene emerging first in America and then in the UK were indeed teenagers who used music, fashion and the last trends in matter of catering and motorcycles to write their own identity and signal their affiliation to a specific subculture. 56 In 1992, Bowie composed the soundtrack for Roger Michell’s BBC version of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). The novel tells the story of a mixed heritage young Londoner, Karim Amir, who finds in pop a precious resource to cross all barriers (sexual, racial, social) and to give sense and vitality to his life. The novel features two main sections entitled “In the Suburbs” and “In the City” and it documents the passage of the protagonist from one to the other in a way which somehow recalls Bowie’s own translation from Brixton to Soho in the early Sixties. The novel is rich in references to popular music which document the evolution of rock and pop music from the early Seventies to the very dawn of the Thatcher’s era. In this sense, the novel signals the passage from glam rock and other parallel phenomenons like prog to punk. Charlie Hero, Karim’s best friend and lover, seems to be modelled after Bowie who among other things had attended ten years before the same Bromley School as Kureishi himself. In a

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Interestingly, for the last great single of his career, namely ‘Lazarus,’ included in the Blackstar album released on 8 January 2016, two days before his death, Bowie chose as his main intertext the Bible. In this sense, it is possible to establish an interesting link with another work by Wilde, who had a profound knowledge of the Bible, that is his short prose piece entitled “The Doer of Good” in which Wilde, rewriting the Biblical character, stages a meeting between Jesus and Lazarus: And He passed out of the city. And when He had passed out of the city He saw seated by the roadside a young man who was weeping. And He went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and said to him, ‘Why are you weeping?’ And the young man looked up and recognised Him and made answer, ‘But I was dead once, and you raised me from the dead. What else should I do but weep?’57

Philosopher Simon Critchley, in his seminal 2016 study on Bowie, focuses on the dialogic relationship between Lazarus and Bowie’s last theatrical alter-ego Newton (protagonist of the 2015 Broadway musical Lazarus based on Bowie’s epopee) defining a condition (a liminal position of enunciation) which can de-fine both Wilde and Bowie’s afterlives, with which we would like to conclude our analysis of the Wilde-Bowie relationship: (Gracchus), Lazarus and Newton are all figures who cannot die and cannot live. They occupy the space between the living and the dead, the realm

recent article, Kureishi himself has focused on Bowie’s relevance in contemporary popular culture, stressing again how "he constructed himself and his many aliases from a wide range of sources" and refers to his obvious precursor, Wilde, who, as we have seen, wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray “Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature”—Hanif Kureishi, “Starman Jones,” in Id. What Happened? (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), 97–105. Bowie indeed is best described by ideas such as multiplicity and plurality; his was a philosophy based on the vital coexistence and simultaneity of opposite, irreconcilables stances. In this sense as Kureishi observes, his finest work was that incredibly difficult thing—both experimental and popular. Bowie, like Wilde, was as Critchley puts it, a ventriloquist, a man of many voices and languages. Simon Critchley, On Bowie (London: Serpents Tail, 2016), 45. 57 Oscar Wilde, “The Doer of Good,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 901.

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of purgatorial ghosts and spectres. Perhaps Bowie is telling us that he also occupies that space between life and death, that his art constantly moved between these two realms, these two worlds while belonging fully to neither. Bowie is dead and not dead. And perhaps he always was.58

5.3

The Importance of Being Morrissey: Wilde, the Smiths and (Steven Patrick) Morrissey

Besides Bowie, another pop link can be traced with the singer hailed by many as the late twentieth-century (and early twenty-first century) Wilde, namely Morrissey, solo artist and leader of Eighties seminal band The Smiths. Wilde famously declared that he had put all his genius into his life and only his talent into his work. This maxim can be perfectly applied to Morrissey; like Wilde, Morrissey, especially in his Smiths years, made a considerable effort to construct his persona,59 often using resources provided by Wilde. Many of the interviews60 given by the singer in the early years of his career featured a number of epigrams and paradoxes which were clearly Wildean,61 and which contributed to the construction of Morrissey’s intellectual complexity, something which was strongly at odds with the superficiality of many pop stars of the early 1980s. Moreover, Morrissey shared Wilde’s iconoclastic stance on which, as we will see, the Smiths’ masterpiece The Queen is Dead is based, while his 2013 Autobiography 62 seems to echo Wilde’s writings and in particular De Profundis especially in its more dramatic sections dealing with the 1996 court case with the other members of The Smiths.

58 Critchley, On Bowie. 59 See Pierpaolo Martino, “‘Vicar in a Tutu’: Dialogism, Iconicity and the Carniva-

lesque in Morrissey,” in Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities, eds E. Devereux and A. Dillane, M. Power (Bristol, Chicago: Intellect, 2011), 225–240. This section of the present chapter draws on that contribution, rewriting and expanding it in terms of Morrissey’s (and The Smiths’) relationship with Wilde. 60 See Paul A. Woods, ed., Morrissey in Conversation: The Essential Interviews (London: Plexus, 2007). 61 Wilde’s epigrams can, in a sense, also be considered, as we have seen, the equivalents of Sixties pop’s 45 rpms; they are easily accessible and, in a way, ubiquitous. 62 Morrissey, Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics, 2013).

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Morrissey, especially in his Smiths years, paid—like Wilde in his own age—much attention to his look and, of course, to that of his band. The Smiths’ visual appearance was a highly peculiar one; they all were shorthaired and they all dressed like ordinary people in a period in which every pop performer wanted to grab the audience’s attention through New Romantic display of eccentric and colourful clothes, deliberate makeup and elaborated hairstyles. The Smiths’ concerts and TV appearances, however, saw the band employing some specific indexical signs63 which contributed to the construction of the band’s iconic originality. Some of them were of considerable relevance, in particular the flowers used on stage, and the hearing aid and the glasses worn by Morrissey in performance. The Smiths decided to use flowers ever since their first concert at Manchester’s Haçienda Club in 1983. Morrissey, making reference to that concert, explains the meaning of the flowers in these terms: They’re symbolic for a least three reasons. We introduced them as an antidote to the Haçienda when we played there; it was so sterile and inhuman. We wanted some harmony with nature. Also, to show some kind of optimism in Manchester which the flowers represent. Manchester is semi-paralyzed still” […] Looking back the singer later noted “The flowers were a very human gesture […] It had got to the point in music where people were really afraid to show how they felt. To show their emotions. I thought that was a shame and very boring, the flowers offered hope.64

As Rogan observes, “the floral spectacle owed much to Morrissey’s mentor Oscar Wilde who was notorious for decorating his Oxford rooms with lilies. As his fame increased, Wilde’s love of flowers captured the public imagination and Morrissey clearly wanted to achieve something of the same.”65 For Smiths’ fans, flowers became a language by which to communicate with their hero, often laying gladioli at his feet during the concerts.

63 See C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. We introduced Peirce’s semiotic theory in chapter 2 of the present study. 64 Johnny Rogan, Morrissey and Marr. The Severed Alliance (London, New York and Sidney: Omnibus Press, 1993), 158. 65 Rogan, Morrissey and Marr, 158.

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Within the Smiths’ visual repertoire another key sign was the hearing aid used first by the singer during a performance of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ at Top of the Pops in 1984. Morrissey explained that the idea ‘emanated from a fan letter he had received from a deaf girl, Morrissey empathized with her disability and wore the device as a gesture of support.’66 A similar function was played by the NHS spectacles wore by the singer to express his solidarity with boys and girls who were considered unattractive. In youth culture, “bespectacled” is often a synonym of “undesirability.”67 In short, these visual signs, in particular the glasses and the flowers, were cleverly used in the Smiths’ narrative in order to amplify the effect of their musical and verbal enunciations, which were addressed to outsiders of all kinds. The unique iconicity of the Smiths’ visual choices was matched by the complex iconicity of the singer’s voice. Morrissey’s, indeed, was an extremely peculiar voice, with a grain 68 in between male and female; more precisely, Morrissey’s voice was that of the Northern Woman, characterized by “a certain intensity mixed with a certain breeziness, a certain desperation mixed with a lot of self-irony.”69 Hopps identifies a double side of Morrissey’s voice, one is connected with a kind of Wildean dandyism represented by a tendency to sing with a correct, clear diction and the other with the carnivalesque which “is most apparent in his penchant for performed noises: groaning, sneezing, stage belching, spoof vomiting, etc. […]. Hence, in contrast to the ‘health and efficiency’ of New Pop, where the body is a source of pleasure and pride, in Morrissey’s songs it becomes a source of trouble and embarrassment.”70 In this way, the singer gives particular prominence to the unpoetic and the low within the realm of pop itself. Besides, these sounds are iconic themselves because they exceed the symbolic, that is codified aspect of verbal language, to access a realm of motivated, often onomatopoeic signification. Other aspects of Morrissey’s unconventional singing are represented 66 Rogan, Morrissey and Marr. The Severed Alliance, 185–186. 67 Zoe Williams, “The Light That Never Goes Out,” The Guardian, 23 February 2002,

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/feb/23/shopping.smiths. 68 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 179–189. 69 Mark Simpson, Saint Morrissey (London: SAF, 2004), 49. 70 Gavin Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart (London and New York:

Continuum, 2009), 24.

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by his use of melisma (the singing of multiple notes to a single syllable of the text), yodelling, which evidences “a daring and comical appropriation of the kitsch”71 and his trademark falsetto, through which, interestingly, he is able to access female territory through a male body. The very choice of calling himself just Morrissey expressed the artist’s desire to reject the first name as sign of gender identification, in order to inhabit a sort of borderline from which to address outsiders of both sexes, and embracing thus the ambiguous approach to gender which lies at the heart of Wilde’s work and life. The design of their singles and album covers shows how one of the The Smiths’ major achievements was the mixing of iconic recognizability and clever intertextual quotation from other medias (cinema, TV), something which connects with Wilde’s own interest in using illustrations and art in his published works. Featured on the cover of the single ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again,’ James Dean—as a postmodern embodiment of Wilde’s cult of the fair youth—was a big iconic obsession of the young Morrissey who was attracted by the actor’s handsomeness, by his sexual ambiguity, his fascinating restlessness and, to a degree, unhappiness. Dean was also the symbol of the transcendence, of the immortality Morrissey wanted to achieve as a pop star. With the death of the Smiths, Morrissey appeared for the first time on the front cover of a recording of his own—in a full and definitive enunciation of his iconic status—with the publication of the single ‘Suedehead’ in February 1988, the video of which was shot in James Dean’s hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. The British Sixties new realism films represented the biggest cinematographic obsession of Morrissey and—within the singer’s rich intertextual world—they stand as a point of conjunction between the visual and the literary.72 This form of realism was to deeply affect Morrissey’s writing; Morrissey’s favourite films include Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1960), Billy Liar (1962) and A Taste of Honey (1961), all significantly 71 Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, 26. 72 Speaking about these films during a 1985 interview on Australian Radio, Morrissey

confessed: “I’m afraid that they probably remind me of my childhood because I lived in lots of those circumstances and I also think that […] I gaze upon them fondly because it was the first time in the entire history of film where regional dialects were allowed to come to the fore and people were allowed to talk about squalor and general depression and it wasn’t necessarily a shameful thing. It was quite positive […] people were allowed to be real instead of being glamorous and Hollywoodian, if that is a word, and I sincerely hope it isn’t” Simpson, Saint Morrissey, 58.

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adapted from major literary works. This last film was an adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s play by the same name which became a key literary intertext for Morrissey’s poetic work.73 And yet the most important literary intertext in the lyrics of Smithsera Morrissey is represented by Oscar Wilde’s Complete Works.74 The Smiths’ songs are indeed characterized by images and themes which are clearly Wildean. One of their first singles ‘This Charming Man,’ later included in The Smiths album (1984), features a presumably young male protagonist, who has punctured his bicycle tire on a desolate hillside, and is approached by a charming man in a charming car. After a brief hesitation, the protagonist climbs into the car with the man, who flirts with his passenger and invites him out later that evening. Interestingly, the protagonist rejects the man’s offer, because he has nothing to wear. As mentioned, the adjective “charming” is used very frequently in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel about influence and charm, which frequently capitalizes on musical images to convey ideas of beauty and persuasion. In the video of the song, we see the young singer holding a bunch of flowers while performing in a rehearsal room with a floor itself carpeted with flowers. As a further irony, The Smiths’ albums and singles were published by British label Rough Trade a name which projects us to Wilde’s own relationship with rent boys in the 1890s. Morrissey also shared Wilde’s iconoclastic stance from which the Smiths’ masterpiece The Queen is Dead (1986) springs. As Smiths biographer Johnny Rogan notes, the album: captures the Morrissey/Marr partnership at its apotheosis. More than any other work in their canon, The Queen is Dead crystallised the contradictory and complementary visions of its creators in a panoramic sweep of absolute grandeur. An album of strikingly different tones, the work begins with

73 According to Simpson, A Taste of Honey represents: “The landscape, the mother country, the heart of Morrissey’s work […] it is a lyrical play whose affecting but plainspeaking poetry proceeds from ordinary people showing their extraordinary side […] Likewise, it exists narcissistically in a word of its own, where it is everything to itself: the drama and all the characters seem to proceed from Jo’s adolescent imagination; they are merely aspects of her own predicament, conversations between her emotions.” Simpson, Saint Morrissey, 60. 74 In a 1987 Sanremo Festival interview asked about his favourite book Morrissey answered: “Oscar Wilde: Complete Works.”

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the drama of a fully-fledged concept album and closes with a comic lightness of touch that could not have come from any other pen than that of Morrissey. The range of mood, emotion and perspective is breathtakingly diverse; rage and laughter alternates, sometimes within the space of a single line; romantic idealism gives way to Carry On comedy; maudlin despair is alleviated by music hall frivolity; humanity and misanthropy coalesce uneasily, while world-weary resignation finds expression through a strange, yet glorious defiance.75

If Wilde’s work and especially his theatre articulated a complex critique of Late Victorian society, with the The Queen is Dead the Smiths gave body to a powerful narrative whose aim was to attack the 1980s world of the monarchy and Thatcherism itself which in a way represented two sides of the same coin. One of the album’s key songs is entitled ‘Cemetry Gates’ and features Wilde as a character alongside Keats and Yeats. As Goddard puts it, the song is a “coy confessional of Morrissey’s own literary plagiarism” something which again connects with Wilde and especially with his early lyrical production, which according to many commentators76 was quite derivative: A firm believer in ‘talent borrows, genius steals’ a maxim commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde and later etched into the run-out groove on the B-side of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, the singer had all too often been rumbled by critics who happily exposed his sources from films … In ‘Cemetry Gates’ he impishly preaches the virtues of originality while arguing the merits of Keats, Yeats and Wilde.77

Since the very beginning of the song, the protagonist makes overt his affiliation with his much-loved author, presenting a scene in which John Keats and William B. Yeats are on the addresse’s side while Oscar is on his, something which seems to point to the more ironic and detached stance of Wilde in comparison with those of Keats and Yeats (the combination

75 Rogan, Morrissey and Marr. The Severed Alliance, 247–248. 76 See Malcolm Hicks,“Introduction,” in Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems, ed. Malcolm

Hicks (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), 7–15. 77 Simon Goddard, The Smiths. Songs That Saved Your Life (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002), 201.

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of whose names also offering Morrissey a beautiful alliteration). Campbell notes how here “the singer eschews authors associated with England (Keats) and Ireland (Yeats)78 and affiliates himself with a figure (Wilde) who has occupied ambiguous terrain between these national frames.”79 Embracing Wilde allows, in short, Morrissey to “oscillate” between different, even opposite positions and identities (such as nationality and gender). One of the few Smiths instrumental compositions is entitled ‘Oscillate Wildly’ (1985), a title conceived by Morrissey as a pun on his literary hero’s name. The strength of the song—which was first published as the B-side of the ‘How Soon is Now’ single—resides exactly in its lack of words, here Wilde’s complexity and, in a way, enigma is perfectly translated into a beautiful, decadent, musical canvas which exceeds genres. A more direct reference to Wilde’s Irishness is included in the opening track of The Smiths’ last album Strangeways here We Come (1987). As Goddard observes: “though Wildean in title, ‘A Rush and a Push and The Land Is Ours’ actually took its cue not from Oscar but his mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, who wrote radical Republican prose for Ireland’s leading nationalist publication, The Nation, under the pseudonym ‘Speranza.’” Goddard also adds that “the line itself was Lady Speranza’s

78 We have already focused in chapter 3 on Wilde’s interest and fasciation for Keats. In a recent and extremely rich study—significantly subtitled “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music”—Maureen Doody focuses instead on the relationship between Wilde and Yeats and affirms how “From their first meeting in London in 1888, Oscar Wilde’s personal image fascinated W. B. Yeats, and was catalytic in setting the workings of influence in motion. As a young man, Yeats was timid and introverted but he had aspirations to rise beyond what he saw as his limitations and develop a public persona that was more outgoing and self-assured. He saw Oscar Wilde as the embodiment of social ease, and admired his flair, fluency and style, perceiving him to be an apposite image for emulation. Both writers shared much in common: both were Dublin men from Ireland and, besides their mutual engagement with literature, politics and philosophy, they were very much interested in Irish politics and cultural concerns. Many of their friends and acquaintances were familiar to both writers. At the time of their first meeting, Wilde was a more established man of letters than his countryman who was in the early stages of his literary career, and Yeats recalls in Autobiographies the powerful impact made on him by the brilliance of Wilde’s intellect and the persuasive charm of his personality. Wilde became a constant presence in Yeats’s imagination throughout his creative life.” Noreen Doody, The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats. “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music” (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3. 79 Sean Campbell, “‘Irish Blood, English Heart’: Ambivalence, Unease and The Smiths,” in Why Pamper Life’s Complexities? Essays on The Smiths, eds Sean Campbell and Colin Coulter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 51.

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adaptation of a traditional Irish battle charge used to incite a potential uprising against the English garrison in the north of the province.”80 Interestingly, the Smiths’ album, which includes the song, takes its title from the name of Manchester’s famous prison, a space which, in the fans imagery, evokes the band’s last days, as Reading Gaol continues to evoke Wilde’s. Even if, as we have seen, a number of Smiths’ songs feature images and themes which are clearly Wildean and the band used visual signs such as flowers which strongly connected with the world of the Anglo-Irish writer, Wilde’s strongest influence must be detected in the living text named Morrissey. Morrissey started his solo career with the publication of the album Viva Hate in 1988. From its very cover, the album signals a departure from the Smiths’ visual poetics. The sleeve indeed features a photo by Anton Corbijn of Morrissey himself, with the singer’s “cavernous eyes shaded and inscrutable.”81 This was undoubtedly a consecration of Morrissey’s iconic status. More than any Smiths’ album, Viva Hate is to be read as an autobiographical work, as a kind of personal diary, with the album’s title making reference to some personal sentiment—probably against his friend Marr, which powerfully echoes Wilde’s own resentment towards Bosie in De Profundis —and to the general political and social climate of the late Eighties. Musically, the work is characterized by the loss of The Smiths’ chorality and by the introduction of a number of strategies aimed at enhancing the voice’s centrality, as in the case of the string section used (instead of the conventional guitar/bass/drums one) in ‘Angel, Angel Down we Go Together.’ According to Rogan, at the lyrical level, Viva Hate was almost “a concept album based on the Seventies.”82 Rogan also describes the literary metamorphosis of Morrissey from The Smiths’ years to his first solo experience: Of course, Morrissey, had always been obsessed with his own past, but usually the landscape he created in song was strangely out of sync, its northern imagery redolent of the Sixties, while also conjuring monochrome, celluloid visions of the Forties or Fifties. Sometimes it 80 Goddard, The Smiths. Songs That Saved Your Life, 277. 81 John Mullen, “Detest and Survive,” MOJO Morrissey & The Smiths Special Edition,

2004, 87. 82 Johnny Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums (London: Calidore, 2006), 128.

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seemed an imagery world of Morrissey’s creation, naturalistic in part, but made up of scattered fragments from favourite books and films. Viva Hate was like witnessing the switch from black and white television to bad colour, then flashing through a decade highlighted by decidedly unglamorous memories. From the axed child star at the start of the decade in ‘Little Man, What Now?’, through to the condescendingly treated Bengali with his platform shoes and the ordinary boys and girls with their supermarket clothes, this was no era to feel nostalgic about. ‘Break Up the Family’ also recalled his early teens; ‘Angel, Angel Down we Go Together’ took its title from a 1970 movie and ‘Suedehead’ referred to Richard Allen’s cult novels of the same period.83

The first four years of Morrissey’s solo career were characterized by an almost complete absence of the artist from the stage (with the only exception of a concert at Wolverhampton in 1988 where, interestingly, fans wearing a Smiths T-shirt were offered free entrance). He recorded instead a number of brilliant singles later collected in 1990 Bona Drag. Two of them deserve particular attention for their literary and thematic originality: ‘Piccadilly Palare’ and ‘November Spawned a Monster.’ The title of the first song and the name of the album refer to a type of slang used by nineteenth-century male prostitutes, that is the rent boys Oscar Wilde himself was familiar with: Later this street vernacular was taken up by homosexuals as a secret language to disguise sexual predilections which, up until 1967, could result in imprisonment. Phrases such as ‘sharpie homie’ for policeman, ‘eek’ for face, ‘bona’ for good and reversed lettering like ‘riah’ for hair could be thrown freely into general conversation without fear of detection from hostile heterosexual eavesdroppers.84

In the song, Morrissey gives up his self-reflective stance to create a complex narrative landscape inhabited by different characters, with a firstperson narrator referring to the Piccadilly Palare as a silly slang between him and the boys in his gang. However, in the lyrics written in the solo years, there is often a double narrative at work: here, for instance, the author ironically distances himself from his characters’ voices and stories. Nevertheless, one can read the song as an indirect reference to Morrissey’s 83 Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 128–129. 84 Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 148.

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love for the gang dimension (something strictly connected with his love for the criminal world) and, most importantly, the palare can stand as a metaphor for Morrissey’s language (at once iconic, literary, musical)—and indirectly of Wilde’s—which is properly understood only by his fans. However, Morrissey’s literary complexity has often been source of misinterpretation; in the case of this song, commentators were mainly concerned with his position within (or without) the gay community. Members of this community reacted to ‘Piccadilly Palare’ pointing to the lack of responsibility and commitment on the part of the singer. Morrissey, like Wilde, has never declared himself to be homosexual, even though, it must be said, he has always played with homosexual imagery. He has instead spoken of an almost lack of interest in sexual life. However, Morrissey’s personal position, his escaping sexual identity, might be located within the singer’s interest in ambisexuality as a liberalizing force, and as a form of resistance to gender identification. ‘November Spawned a Monster’ features the same narrative complexity of ‘Piccadilly Palare.’ Here, the main theme is disability, which is investigated through a highly personal and slightly dangerous perspective. Indeed, “in attempting to strip away the offensive condescension shown towards the invalid, Morrissey does not merely empathize but appears to act out the self-revulsion of his subject and adopts a disconcertingly tone as a narrator.”85 Paradoxically, the author’s cold/cynical perspective (who introduces a disabled protagonist for whom love can be only a dream) somehow reminiscent of Dorian’s cynical stance in Wilde’s novel turns into an extremely moving narrative in which the singer, by “adopting the ambivalent persona of tormentor and saviour, forces the listener to face their own prejudices.”86 The disabled girl, however, is not only spoken but speaks too, through the magnificent vocal work of Morrissey’s guest Mary Margaret O’Hara, who dialogically responds to Morrissey’s symbolic narrative through an iconic use of her voice, which at once gives birth to the “monstrous” child and embodies the child’s difficult position in the world. Unfortunately, ‘November Spawned a Monster’ was, like some other important songs of this period, misinterpreted and its author was considered cynical and insensitive once faced with such delicate themes.

85 Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 151. 86 Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 152.

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Morrissey’s position within the pop establishment started to be a very difficult and complex one. His introduction of (literary) irony and depth in the pop domain was not always welcomed. Like Oscar Wilde, he became a victim of his own wit. After the success of such masterpieces as Your Arsenal (a tribute to Bowie and glam rock published in 1992) and Vauxhall and I (1994), he was, like Wilde, put on trial in his late thirties, an event which did not have the tragic consequences of the 1895 trials, but, nonetheless, had lasting repercussions on his private and artistic life. Adopting a sort of Wildean stance, Morrissey liked to embrace paradoxical, even dangerous, positions; in the early and mid1990s, he had ironically sympathized with skinhead imagery and written a complex, ambiguous song about racism entitled ‘The National Front Disco.’ Other commentators focused on the low quality of his albums (in particular of 1995 Southpaw Grammar) often comparing them with his masterpieces in The Smiths years while others focused on the court case with drummer Mike Joyce about The Smiths earnings in 1996, in which Judge Weeks described Morrissey as “devious, truculent and unreliable.”87 He thus found himself becoming the target of a number of media attacks focusing on his unclear political position, something which again recalls the attacks endured by Wilde for his ambiguity in sexual matters. Morrissey’s unfavourable media profile, the lack of success of his recent work, and the economic collapse of his label, caused the end of his solo career and led the artist to embark on a long exile in America, far removed from his beloved England. Interestingly, a 2003 docufilm on the Manchester singer was fittingly entitled The Importance of Being Morrissey. Directed by Flintoff and Kelehar, the film documents the first years of Morrissey’s exile in America and investigates the multiple sides of the artist through interviews by famous fans and followers such as J. K. Rowling, Alan Bennett, Bono, Nancy Sinatra, Will Self and Chrissie Hynde. In this perspective, the album entitled You are the Quarry (2004) represented Morrissey’s return from the fringes of the cultural establishment to its very centre. As Wilde’s exile can be read between the lines of Morrissey’s exile, the former seems to be given a second chance, a second life (if not a full reincarnation) through Morrissey. Like Wilde,

87 John Dee, “I’m Not Sorry,” Mojo. Morrissey & the Smiths Special Edition, 2004,

112.

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Morrissey is an Irishman as well as a naturalized Englishman who is fascinated by America. Indeed, one of the most significant tracks on the album is entitled ‘Irish Blood, English Heart;’ here, Morrissey focuses on his particular human condition, that of someone inhabiting the borderline between differences, this time not between genders, but between different national identities. The song’s first chorus introduces the image of an artist who cannot be bought or sold by any regime, translating Morrissey’s otherness in relation to any system and regime and yet at the same time indirectly and ironically referring to his position of artist sold and bought, within a marketplace, within the capitalist system something which again reminds us of Wilde himself. However, since his voice is speaking from the very heart of this system, Morrissey’s discourse has a truly deconstructive effect. Morrissey sees his personal condition as a perspective through which to address and analyse the condition of England; his partial Irishness is indeed a sort of blackness,88 a form of hybridity and a postcolonial location through which to question Britain’s identity. In his treatment of Britain, Morrissey presents images connected with power; in particular, he concentrates on some signs, or better symbols, associated with the British colonial empire, like, for instance, the Union Jack which becomes a shameful even racist sign. In the song’s second chorus, references to the colonial empire and to English history with the figure of Cromwell and to English politics with its Tories and Labour become even more precise. Commenting on the song89 during an interview, Morrissey explained that: “it’s a comment

88 Simpson, Saint Morrissey, 51. 89 It is interesting to note that the publication of the single—two weeks before the

album—was accompanied by the release of a video-clip consistently played at MTV, which in this way “promoted”—in visual terms—Morrissey’s counter-discourse on the establishment’s favourite discursive channel (television), something which again connects to Wilde at different levels that is to his problematic relationship with journalism and to his use of London as stage. The video features Morrissey singing the song with his musicians and a few people as audience in a relatively small (underground) marginal space. The focus of the video’s director is on Morrissey’s voice, on his words and hence on the importance of “listening” to those words. Morrissey is portrayed as a middle-aged singer who asserts his otherness in relation to the “young and beautiful” prototype often reproduced in music television, which makes us think of Wilde’s own transformation from his 1880s dandified to the more mature, decadent Nero look of the 1890s. Dressed in a white jacket—which besides being a pacifist symbol is perfectly in tune with the singer’s choice of wearing extra-elegant (Rat Pack-like) suits during concerts and public appearances from 2002 onwards—Morrissey accompanies his words with a mime which amplifies the verbal

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on the whole British monarchy. Oliver Cromwell was no more than a general, but he behaved like some of them by slaughtering thousands of Irishmen just to get them out of the way. As for British politics, the only choice you have is between the Tories and Labour, neither of which are spokesmen for the people. It’s an age-old, ridiculous circus.”90 In short, here, Morrissey deconstructs the very idea of polarity as a static dimension, as a space of identification and exclusion; he seems, instead, to inhabit the borderline, the limit, the “coma” which at once joins and specifies his Irish origins and his English sensibility, translating it into a worldview. Gavin Hopps reads Morrissey’s in-betweenness in terms of the “oxymoronic self,”91 something which he explains by (again) making reference to Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s most fascinating feature is, as we have seen, his capacity to never take sides and to reject a fixed, centralizing attitude, which also means a resistance to the irreconcilability of oxymoronic realities. Something similar happens with Morrissey. He is, for example, typically described as an “ordinary working-class ‘anti-star’ who nevertheless loves to hog the spotlight, a nice man who says the nastiest things about other people, a shy man who is also an outrageous narcissist.”92 Hopps analyses Morrissey’s elusiveness and oxymoronic self in terms of mobility and multiplicity; by “elusiveness,” he alludes, among other things, to the artist’s capacity to shift from one position to another within the space of a song (as seen in ‘Cemetery Gates,’ where a cultivated person criticizes a plagiarist only to be later criticized in his turn), while oxymoronic qualities inform his capacity to be many different things at once, and in particular his mixing levity and gravity in a way which again recalls Wilde. Morrissey’s image as a translated man, which we borrow from Salman Rushdie,93 that is as a living text moving freely between different ways of being and different cultures—and spaces, something which as we have contents in particular on words such as spit, denounce and salute, that is, the expressions more directly related to the ideology of resistance. 90 Cited in David Bret, Morrissey. Scandal and Passion (London: Robson Books 2004),

257. 91 Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, 59. 92 Hopps, Morrissey, 6. 93 Salman. Rushdie “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands. Essays and

Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), 9–21.

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seen defines Oscar Wilde too—is what connects You are the Quarry to Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006). In You are the Quarry, Morrissey’s enunciative position coincided with Los Angeles; Ringleader, instead, sees the artist addressing his fans from Rome, where he moved in 2005. There is, however, some stylistic and thematic continuity between the two albums. The very title of the album makes reference to the gang dimension, with Morrissey declaring in different interviews of being himself the ringleader mentioned in the title. It must be added that one of the more incisive songs of the album ‘The Youngest was the Most Loved,’ a ‘saga of a spoilt child turned killer’ (Rogan 2006, p. 299), thematically recalls You are the Quarry’s ‘First of the Gang to Die’ which focused on Los Angeles street gangs. However, the connections between the two albums are even deeper. The first track of the new album is entitled ‘I Will See You in Far-Off Places’ and is thematically linked to ‘America is not the World.’ The song is a meditation on life, death and immortality; however, the philosophical tone of the opening sharply contrasts with the reference to America’s (and UK’s) responsibility for the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq. This very first song investigates the complex dialogic between religion and death which will inform—along with the artist’s renewed interest in sex—the whole album. The album’s most relevant track in both lyrical and musical terms (thanks to Ennio Morricone’s impressive string arrangement) is ‘Dear God Please Help Me,’ which opens with the narrator making reference to his enunciative position, namely Rome, and asking for God’s help in facing the temptations of the flesh. The song features the most direct reference to sex ever included in a Morrissey’s song mentioning someone’s hand on the protagonist’s knee, something which attracted many critic’s attention. However, what matters here is not Morrissey revealing his homosexuality—which is also a risky interpretation given the narrative complexity typical of the author—but the capacity of the narrator of establishing a very fascinating dialogue with God, making Him both saviour and confident in a way which recalls Wilde’s fascination with Christ in De Profundis . The song closes in a circular way with the narrator walking through Rome—another image reminiscent of Wilde (whose Rome days, in 1900, were, however, marked by sadness and solitude)—this time with a free heart, most probably the effect of sexual accomplishment. Italy’s capital is the space of enunciation for both ‘Dear God Please Help Me’ and the powerful ‘You have Killed Me.’ Here, Morrissey

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mentions two cultural icons strictly associated with the Italian city: Pasolini94 with whom the singer identifies and Anna Magnani who worked on maybe Morrissey’s favourite Pasolini film: Mamma Roma (1962).95 Morrissey found Pasolini’s realism absolutely fascinating, something at once very close to and yet very different from the British Sixties Film realism he had so much loved in his twenties. Pasolini’s realism was essentially about the bodily existence, about a low-life which, at least in the early Sixties, had nothing to do with the official culture96 and with mainstream trends; on the contrary, through its emphasis on the naked body, swearwords and dialect, it stood as a space absolutely resistant and subversive in relation to high- and middle-class life. No wonder Morrissey found Pasolini absolutely attractive. Moreover, speaking about Morrissey love for Rome, Beaumont suggests that what the singer probably enjoys about the city is the closeness of the bodies and the particular spontaneity of the people. Like ‘Dear God Please Help Me,’ ‘YOU HAVE KILLED ME’ makes reference to the sex/love theme conveying the idea of a finally freed bodily life. It’s not a chance that the album closes with a track entitled ‘At Last I am Born,’ which is a sort of confession about the suffered achievement of a state of physical and emotional serenity. Even the album’s cover—featuring a serene Morrissey playing violin—suggests “a state of mind verging on the harmonious.”97 Once again, Morrissey’s great gift is in the capacity of articulating his complex enunciations, using different discourse modes almost simultaneously. Years of Refusal —released in 2009—witnesses, on the contrary, a departure from this kind of serenity and a refusal of any kind of conventional dialogue and relationship. The cover of the album turns Morrissey into a living (assertive) sign of human alienation which the baby he 94 On the figure of Christ in Pasolini and Wilde, see Aldo Onorati, Il Cristo di Wilde e Pasolini (Napoli: Paolo Loffredo 2020). 95 Speaking about the Italian director and poet during an interview, Morrissey confessed: “I’ve seen all the films […] There’s nothing flash about them. You’re seeing real people without any distractions, just the naked person, with everything taking place on the streets […] He didn’t have to be anybody else, he was being himself in his own world and even though he was obsessed with the low-life that was all he wanted.” Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 298. 96 See Pier Poalo Pasolini Lettere Luterane (Torino: Milano, 1976). 97 Mark Beaumont, “The New Roman Emperor,” New Musical Express (25 February

2006), 23.

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holds can’t but emphasize. It is an album about refusing and—like postprison Wilde—being refused; the whole collection is, indeed, centred on a poetics of rejection and on a concern for loneliness, for solitude as a kind of strategy to react, to respond to past events as witnessed by such tracks as: ‘I am OK by myself,’ ‘One day Goodbye will be Farewell’ and ‘It’s not your Birthday Anymore.’ Love and its bruising unattainableness, along with the exploration of mortality, seem to be the other main concerns of the album. What seems particularly interesting is that here Morrissey seems to have forgotten Rome in order to embrace Paris, which here, however, becomes a kind of non-place, a symbol again of solitude and a belated version of the bedroom of his adolescence. In the 2010s, Wilde will variously remerge in Morrissey’s discourse, interestingly, very often in visual terms; if Oscar’s image could be found on many concerts’ backdrops, one of the most iconic official Morrissey t-shirts (from the 2012 tour) features an image of Wilde in green asking himself, in comics style, “Who’s Morrissey?” Here, as elsewhere, Morrissey’s carnivalesque utterances—delivered in his albums, during his concerts and interviews—are always addressed to a listener/reader/viewer who in turn is compelled to rethink his/her own identity, possibly reshaping it through an intelligent recombination and rearticulation of the artist’s most loved signs, texts and cultural icons, from David Bowie to The New York Dolls, from Patti Smith to Oscar Wilde himself.

5.4 Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves: Nick Cave’s Salome´ and Gavin Friday’s Ballad of the Reading Gaol Nick Cave is possibly the most successful and world-wide known Australian cultural icon; an alternative cultural icon, a rock icon who, like Morrissey, never giving in to commercial pressures, has been true to his artistic and personal beliefs, and is still admired by thousands of fans who, iconically,98 try to emulate him, to look like him and to share his tastes. If as we have seen the term icon can also refer to “a devotional painting of Christ or another holy figure,”99 there is undoubtedly,

98 Peirce, Collected Papers. 99 Oxford English Dictionary (Concise), ed. by Judy Pearsall (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1999), 704.

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something religious about Cave’s iconicity, which, as we have seen with Morrissey, brings admirers to worship both his image and the world—that is, the multiple meanings—connected to that image, which is, basically, the image of a restless artist obsessed with the Bible and with such themes as love, death, sin and redemption. In short, Cave is at once a saint and a daemon, an artist who gained his iconic status through the difficult performance of himself in terms of a “same-other,”100 that is through his extreme faithfulness to a highly recognizable persona which, however, he has always been capable of (self)translating, of re-inventing— like Wilde—in different and complex ways. The unique appeal of his persona is given by the artist’s capacity of thinking, of presenting himself in dialogical terms, that is in using—often through direct quotation— multiple discourses at once: the Bible, Faulkner, Baudelaire and as we will see Oscar Wilde. In this sense, Cave is a “living text,” that is, a space of interaction between different signs, different voices and discourses. If as we have seen with Brummett “a text is a set of signs related to each other insofar as their meanings all contribute to the same set of effects or functions,”101 then Cave the performer, as a songwriter, author, actor, screenwriter and painter, stands as a “multimodal text,”102 one in which the visual, the musical and the literary meet to articulate a complex critique of our times. Cave, like Bowie and Morrissey, has always crossed and still crosses artistic and also geographical borders, moving freely between different communities, continents and musical spaces. Born in Warracknabeal, Victoria, in 1957, he was, as a very young child, active in his local church choir. The hymns he sang in this period were all absorbed into his subconscious, and as Hanson observes, although his own rock’n’roll persona would be startlingly different, “it was obvious much later on, that all that youthful exuberance and theological education had sunk in.”103 After the

100 Augusto Ponzio, “Lo Stesso Altro: il Testo e la sua Traduzione,” in Lo Stesso Altro, Athanor, n. 4, ed S. Petrilli, 2001. 101 Brummett, The Rhetoric of Popular Culture. 102 Kress, van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse. See also Mapping Multimodal Perfor-

mance Studies, eds Maria Grazia, Sindoni, Janina Wildfeurer and Kay O’ Halloran (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). 103 Amy Hanson, Kicking Against the Pricks. An Armchair Guide to Nick Cave (London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 2005), 10.

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church choir, Cave became steeped in the power of popular music and formed a band with a group of school friends named the Boys Next Door. It is worth noting that by the mid-1970s rock’n’roll in all its guises was indisputably cast as an Anglo-American phenomenon. The industry focused upon the industry centres and in Australia bands tried to sound American.104 Away from the commercial mainstream, the isolation was not completely bad; in Brisbane, the capital of Australia’s most conservative state, there was The Saints, a massively influential punk band that was and would remain the touchstone for many other bands of the decade. Cave was particularly impressed by the Saints aggressive and misanthropic behaviour, but at the same time he was deeply responsive to what was happening in Britain and in America with the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. However, according to Mick Harvey, it was an advantage to be in Australia, and so far away from what was happening elsewhere, because it was all a piece of knowledge.105 In short, the geographical distance allowed a critical approach to musical and artistic experiences coming from abroad, for Cave punk became one of the multiple registers which were to compose his musical and artistic language; in Australia the land of possibility and multiplicity, Cave’s music became the soundtrack of that very polyphony, a space in which European, American and Australian sounds spoke to each other. Cave’s first band The Boys Next Door renamed itself The Birthday Party and became successful in Britain in the late Seventies. With The Birthday Party, Cave’s music started his journey, namely its translation, from the peripheries into the colonial centre, from Australia into London. As cultural critic Simon Reynolds106 observes The Birthday Party moved to London from Melbourne, but were disappointed by the fashionable direction post-punk had taken. In this sense, with their literary influences, from Rimbaud to Baudelaire, they veered in a deliberately American direction, with the effect of creating a complex sonic and literary landscape in which again Britain, America and Australia coexisted in a music which stood as an extremely rich mixture of rock, punk, soul, gospel and noise. According to some critics, Australia’s landscapes provide the

104 Hanson, Kicking Against the Pricks, 8. 105 Hanson, Kicking Against the Pricks, 9. 106 Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 429.

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persistent atmosphere of the uncanny which pervades the world the songsters summons up.107 However, the third album of the band entitled Junkyard “teemed with American Gothic imagery – kewpie dolls, an evangelist’s murdered daughter. [Shakespeare’s] Hamlet was rewritten as a gun-totin’, Cadillac drivin’ cartoon psycho.”108 The band’s last album the double ep Mutiny stands as an important key of access to Cave’s complex and disturbing literary world. “Blasphemy worthy of Lautreamont, the lyrics of Mutiny conjured a corrupt and derelict heaven, riddled with trash and rats [...]. [And indeed, Cave started] using Old Testament imagery – sin, retribution, curses, bad seed, damnation.”109 When the band imploded in 1983 Cave, moved from Melbourne to London to West Berlin to New York to Sao Paulo all the time travelling farther down to nihilistic obliteration. Even though Cave’s journeys were often journeys into human pain, into loneliness, betrayal and loss—which connect with late Wilde—they nevertheless became creative journeys of a homeless artist who inhabited and still inhabits the borders, the interstices between different places and cultural spaces, in order to belong only to sound, to a kind of musical/emotional geography. In this sense, Cave like Morrissey is another embodiment of Salman Rushdie’s concept of the “translated man,” that is someone who is translated across cultures. As Rushdie observes in his seminal essay Imaginary Homelands (1991), “it is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately that something can also be gained;”110 the outcome of this process of translation is indeed the double nature of the postcolonial artist who is both an insider and outsider, who can see and analyse European, American and Australian realities through a very rich and complex perspective; in Cave’s specific case, this process of translation also implies the capacity of translating between different languages or arts. In Cave’s world, different art forms speak to each other in a process of reciprocal hybridization. Cave’s songs have the complexity of literary texts and his novels and poems are very much musical. In the introduction to the Penguin edition of Cave’s Complete Lyrics, British novelist

107 See Will Self, “Foreward,” in The Complete Lyrics 1978–2007 , ed. Nick Cave (London: Faber & Faber, 2007). 108 Reynolds, Rip It Up, 430. 109 Reynolds, Rip It Up, 431. 110 Rushdie„ “Imaginary Homelands.”

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Will Self notes how Cave, “as a poetic craftsman, provides all the enjambment, ellipsis and onomatopoeia that anyone could wish for;”111 himself an advocate of pop’s experimental poets such as Bob Dylan, Self maintains that the beauty of Cave’s poetic corpus resides in its standing as “an album of lyrical portraiture, all of the (songs) bearing a family resemblance. Yet all of distinct phenotypes. The joy lies in relating each to the other, building the connections. And in hearing the melodies in one’s inner ear,”112 something which as we have seen also happens with Wilde. Songs’ lyrics indeed are not poems, their beauty resides in the capacity of establishing a complex and rich dialogue with music itself, escaping the realm of verbal symbolism, to embrace the iconicity of the human voice in its multiple variations of rhythm, tempo and intonation.113 The song form is capable of developing in a few minutes a complex dialogic in which the voice—hot, cold, distant, close, in standard or in a particularly inflected English—of the singer meets and sometimes clashes with the voices of other instruments (guitar, bass, drums) which in their turn tell a difference, a particular world. A song is very similar to a fragment of life isolated from the urban continuum, a fragment whose sense is, however, given in relation to other fragments of the whole; the meanings of an album often lie in the in-between spaces, in the interstices dividing and joining the many tracks. While living in London and in West Berlin, that is in between the split of The Birthday Party and birth of his band the Bad Seeds, Cave conceived and completed his first novel114 entitled And the Ass saw the Angel published in 1989, which was first thought as a screenplay. The novel narrates the story of Euchrid Eucrow, a mute born to a drunken mother and a cruel father obsessed with traps and animal torture. The ultimate outcast, the protagonist bears his mother’s beatings, his father’s indifference, and the hatred and loathing of an entire community that of the Ukulites, the inhabitants of an imagined puritan American village called Ukulore; as a consequence his mind is inhabited by terrible angelic 111 Self “Foreward,” xi. 112 Self, “Foreward,” xi–xii. 113 On this aspect, see Simon Frith, “Why Do Songs Have Words,” in Id (ed) Music for Pleasure; Essays in the Sociology of Pop (London and New York: Routledge 1988) and Alan Moore, Song Means. Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 114 Cave’s second novel The Death of Bunny Munro was published in 2009.

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visions and later raised to inevitable madness and that mostly because of his inability to communicate. However, Euchrid narrates his tale through a highly personal language, a mixture of old-fashioned country vernacular and formal Bible-speak. Besides And the Ass Saw the Angel , Cave has published three lyric books; King Ink (1988) includes most of the lyrics Cave had recorded with The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, as well as assorted prose pieces, and lyrics written, but not recorded. King Ink II (1997) continued where the first volume left off, again including a wealth of lyrics for film, those commissioned by other artists as well as an illuminating article about the language of the Bible. Interestingly, the first volume of King Ink includes a rewriting of Wilde’s Salomé which consists of five extremely concise acts, or better mini plays,115 entitled “The Seven Veils,” “Dialogue with the Baptist,” “Salomé’s Reward,” “The Chop” and “The Platter.” Some acts are so terse (“Salomé’s Reward,” for instance, consists of only twenty-six spoken words) that one can assume Cave conceived Salomé to be appreciated more as a poetic exploration in abjection than to be produced for a live performance. And yet at a different level, one has the impression that we are faced with a score to be performed by the reader, with a form of writing whose very clusters, dissonances and broken rhythms perfectly translate Cave’s post-punk and to an extent goth musical aesthetics. Play one entitled “The Seven Veils” opens with the character of a young girl—that is the Vestal Vergin who in the work’s economy has the function of announcing the title of each of the five acts (or plays)—who tells the audience that they are going to watch (or read, or listen to) the story of Salomé and John the Baptist in five parts, defining it a mess of thorns. This verbal/semantic cluster of ritual and religion, pleasure and pain powerfully connects with Wilde and with his practice and conception of opposite stances as simultaneity. In his rewriting of Wilde, Cave interestingly mixes high and low language, the biblical and the colloquial as when Herod asks the princess: “What ails thee, my precious Salomé? What is it that has put your pretty little nose so out of joint.” Cave’s carnivalesque stance seems almost at odds with the extreme, cynical almost punk Salomé character, with her aggressive disturbing sexuality. Interestingly, while Wilde names Salomé’s

115 Nick Cave, King Ink (London: Black Spring Press, 1988), 68–75.

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dance in an iconic stage direction “Salome dances the dance of the seven veils” (140), Cave’s Salomé triumphantly announces herself, as a young girl would do with a pop song, the naming of the dance within the text: “Music! Let’s have some life! Your Majesty, ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils.’” King Herod’s voyeurism is brought to an abrupt end with the entrance of John the Baptist; it is interesting to note that Cave decided to forgo the queen’s presence and elected to stage the relationship between Salomé and men only. In Act or Play 2, entitled “Dialogue with the Baptist”—while Wilde’s Salomé yearns for Iokanaan’s love—Cave’s Salomé employs a sexual activity of self-gratification in which the man, the sacred prophet, is not necessary to satisfy her. The fact that Salomé is experiencing sexual pleasure while simultaneously eating an apple provides an insight into the psychological structure of her character. Salomé is the threatening other, as she revels in the taste of a forbidden fruit. Interestingly, John the Baptist defines Salome’s “Cloven gender,” referring to Salomé’s “split” gender as her character, as demonstrated in Wilde’s text, exhibits signs of gender ambiguity, which is represented in the variable oscillation between the character’s masculine and feminine attributes. Act or Play 3 is provokingly entitled “Salome’s reward;” indeed, the concept of reward is usually bestowed upon a person as an award for doing good, but in the case of Salomé, she gets rewarded for acts of evil; Cave’s idea is, however, profoundly Wildean, conceiving Salomé herself as disturbing and yet fascinating work of art distances her from any moral implication. In Act/Play 4 entitled “The Chop,” Cave’s makes reference in the stage directions to the remarkable painting by Puvis de Chavannes “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist” (1869) to which the scene should resemble with (left to right) the negro with his axe; John the Baptist kneeling with his hands roped and Salomé, but while the painting depicts an ambiguously demure Salomé, her head inclined modestly, as she clasps her cloak to cover her body, Cave smashes the sexual taboo, presenting Salomé once more in an act of sexual self-gratification. What we have here is an intersemiotic association, which again powerfully connects with Wilde; not only Wilde was a Master in describing portraits and paintings in his literary and critical works but he often invited us to think and conceive reality through the lens of the arts.

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In the last act, entitled “The Platter,” we are again faced with Salomé’s disturbing abject eroticism. The executioner enters with John the Baptist’s head on a platter offering it to Herod affirming that this is the head of John the Baptist “minus the tongue,” which Salomé demanded for herself, in a profoundly ambiguous, open finale. In short, Cave’s art itself is an open space, inhabited by angels and daemons, beauty and ugliness, a world in which the voice of the singer and the pen of the writer translate once again Wilde as multiplicity and unpredictability. In a recent letter in which he replied to a fan asking him to define the concept of mercy, Cave answered quoting Wilde, and more specifically a passage from De Profundis in which the writer accused Bosie of not having “been able to acquire the “Oxford temper” in intellectual matters, never […] been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had arrived at violence of opinion merely.”116 What we get in Cave is exactly this graceful—and I would add preciously destabilizing—play with ideas, sounds and visions. In the same year in which Cave published his Salomé, 1988, an influential Irish songwriter, Gavin Friday wrote—with pianist and composer Man Seezer—the music for a concept album dedicated to Wilde entitled Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves (1989), from a line taken from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Friday, who like Wilde can be considered an outsider connecting in complex ways with his Irish cultural background, was the leader of the influential late Seventies post-punk band The Virgin Prunes. In his seminal study entitled Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds notes how: The Prunes started out as Bowie boys stranded in the Republic of Ireland, then became obsessed with post-punk and regularly made pilgrimages by ferry to Liverpool to pick up the latest records and see favourite bands such as Wire and Cabaret Voltaire. But their Bowie-fan core surfaced in their ‘glam-savage’ appearance – a poke in the eye to said Dublin folk. Dressed in a skirt and make-up, singer Gavin Friday would saunter provocatively down Grafton Street, Dublin’s upmarket shopping area.117

116 Wilde, De Profundis , 48. Cave’s reply to his fan’s question can be read on Cave’s official site: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/what-is-mercy-for-you/ (The Red Hand Files, Issue 119, August 2020). 117 Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again (London: Faber & Faber 2004), 431.

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Ironically, not too far away from Grafton Street—that is, in Merrion Square—a statue of another major influence for the Prunes themselves, namely Wilde, was unveiled in 1997. It is important here to stress how that of The Virgin Prunes was an example of art that exceeded tags and in which, as in Bowie,118 the theatrical/performative dimension was of paramount importance. Interestingly, in an article written for The Sunday Independent, for the first centenary of Wilde’s death, Friday makes reference to the Bowie-Wilde influence explaining how, when he was a teenager, it was David Bowie who turned him onto music and Oscar Wilde to literature; in other words, he was confronted with “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Picture of Dorian Gray from the seductive and ruthless charms of Dorian Gray’s Faustian pact to the tragic romantic chaos of Ziggy Stardust selling his soul to rock and roll.”119 Suddenly, for the young Gavin the grey and depressing world of Dublin’s Ballymun was transformed. In 1978, he formed his band, the Virgin Prunes, and in their 1979 Late Show appearance, they performed the song ‘Theme for Thought’ with band member Guggi, “cigarette and carnation elegantly in hand, narrating the opening passage of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ As Oscar would have said it was ‘a deliciously scandalous affair’. […]. Friday confesses: ‘Wilde was always there with us, our touchstone, the aesthetic godfather to the bastard sons of Dorian, Ziggy and Johnny Rotten.’”120 In a 2003 monograph on the Dublin-born songwriter and artist— significantly entitled Gavin Friday. The Light and The Dark—Caroline van Oosten de Boer tries to investigate his complexity in fascinating dialogues with prominent critical voices. In one of these exchanges, discussing Friday’s Irishness, Bill Graham, probably one of Ireland’s bestknown rock publicist (who died prematurely in 1994) and founder of the Hot Press magazine notes how:

118 On Bowie’s influence on Friday, see Friday, Gavin Friday, “Foreword,” in David

Bowie. Critical Perspectives, eds Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin Power (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), xi–xii. 119 Gavin Friday, “It Was Oscar Drove Me Wilde,” Independent, November 22, 2000. The Sunday Independent, https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/itwas-oscar-drove-me-wilde-26257419.html. 120 Gavin Friday, “It Was Oscar Drove Me Wilde.”

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The Oscar Wilde background is very Irish. […] You’ll find within a lot of Irish musicians, songwriters and so forth a definite sense of: the people who precede them are the writers. If you are involved in American music, you say: “The Ramones preceded me or Elvis or Blondie, Patti Smith, Dylan or whatever.” Since you don’t have that sort of musical heritage – we have folk-heritage but no rock and roll or pop-heritage – you’ll see Van Morrison relating himself to Yeats, you see it in Shane McGowan, also. You’ll see a lot of people identifying with Flann O’Brien, you’ll see it in the Radiators. Phillip Chevron has all sorts of references to Joyce and O’Casey and Behan and so forth.121

Friday’s 1989 tribute to Wilde, produced by iconic US producer Hal Willner, can be considered one of the most fascinating art-pop albums of the decade; the work stages a multiplicity of lyrical tones and musical inflections and it opens with the Kurt Weill mood of the title track (significantly in ¾) in which Friday sings three key stanzas from Wilde’s “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol:” Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.122 121 Caroline van Oosten de Boer, Gavin Friday. The Light and The Dark (Amsterdam: Von B Press, 2003), 16. 122 Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde,

884.

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Commenting on the ballad and on its central refrain, Frankel notes how “the poem is at once an eloquent expression of Wilde’s own suffering, a defiant statement of his solidarity with other outcast men, a meditation on the human propensity to inflict pain and violence on those we love, and above all an indictment of the pitiless and hypocritical criminal-justice system that had imprisoned Wilde”123 and then quotes Wilde, whose intention with the “Ballad” was “to speak to the world again on an instrument that has […] gained other strings, and become wider in possibility of range and effect.”124 In our now, that is in Friday’s rewriting of the poem, Wilde’s instrument charmingly resonates through the strings, that is the fascinating melodies harmonies and rhythms created by the Irish singer and by co-composer Man Seezer. Listening to Friday’s album, one is also particularly fascinated by the melancholic beauty of ‘Apologia,’ a ballad in which Friday’s singing evokes the singer’s beloved Edith Piaf and where his lyrics seem to respond to Wilde’s drama through evoking a Judas betrayal and a character possibly a lover who appears as both friend and enemy. The beauty, drama and disturbing grotesqueness of the album are also nourished by the astonishing performance of an extraordinary band which features some of the most influential jazz players of the age from Hank Roberts to Fernando Saunders, from Marc Ribot to Bill Frisell.125 In this sense, 123 Frankel, “Introduction,” in Id (ed.) The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde,

24. 124 In Frankel, “Introduction,” 24. 125 Frisell has very often worked in literature-related and quite sophisticated musical

productions as in the case of Hal Winner’s work on (and with) Alen Ginsberg entitled The Lion for Real (Antilles, 1989). In a way, Frisell’s ironic and carnivalesque approach to music and in particular to jazz—that is, his thinking sound as theatre—connects with Wilde. Jazz music is mostly about improvisation, interplay and interaction; in this sense, it is mainly, even though unintentionally, concerned with the redefinition of the self in dialogical terms through its multiple masks; it is an art-form which being strongly rooted in concepts such as enunciation and performance confers centrality to listening. In jazz, very often there is no score to read or respond to, what the musician is asked is to listen to her body and to the body of others in order to read and translate sounds in other sounds, in a horizontal, democratic dimension, which conceives no verticality, no authority. Jazz becomes in this sense a model for a free and freed social interaction, and for the construction of a polyphonic self within this very social dialogue; jazz is a language capable of speaking across cultures, it is about stepping across lines and borders, and it is a language which refuses to rest in a single place and which very often coincides with the idea of migration itself. As Watson observes in his recent study on Bill Frisell, “jazz has always been a generous and a malleable music […] it has always reached out beyond

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the album can be approached both as a collection of poems and as tragicomic play in which the singer’s voice interrogates and is interrogated by the very distinctive and rich voices of the musicians involved in the performance. Interestingly, in The Sunday Independent article focusing on the genesis of the 1989 project, Friday confesses how, after the Virgin Prunes Wildean idyll, the next time he turned to Wilde, was “to the two monuments of his tragedy De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” both products of his imprisonment.” Friday had the impression of finding there the “real” Wilde: “All his life Wilde tried to escape reality, and ended up being beaten over the head with it.”126 And yet as we have seen, discussing Everett’s recent biopic, even in his dramatic final days Wilde was performing roles, wearing complex and fascinating masks. It is interesting to note how the 12,, single of ‘Each man Kills the Thing He Loves’ featured on its B-side another version of Wilde’s lines originally sung by French actress Jeanne Moreau and included in Fassbinder’s 1982 movie Querelle de Brest . The song’s light musical tones create a fascinating contrast with Wilde’s dramatic lines producing a grotesque effect which in the film was particularly striking. We are, in short, confronted with two completely different soundscapes, two different worlds illuminating the drama of the Anglo-Irish Writer. It is possible to conceive these versions of Wilde’s verses as musical masks, as postmodern reincarnations of a literary work (and life) which stands as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. A more recent project, in which Wilde’s verbal music has been rendered in more abstract and experimental terms—and which is reminiscent of Friday’s work with Willner—is Marconi and Pennese’s version

race, culture and nation, and beyond doctrine and dogma. Jazz has always been a hybrid music as complex as its history.” Philip Watson, Bill Frisell. Beautiful Dreamer (London: Faber & Faber, 2022), 290. On jazz, migration and dialogism, see also Andy Shipton, A New History of Jazz (London: Continuum, 2008) and Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 126 Gavin Friday, “It was Oscar Drove me Wilde.” In September 2003, Friday performed for the ESB Dublin Fringe festival, a monologue that revisited his childhood, his teenage heroes and anti-heroes, and his life’s experiences of Dublin. In the monologue entitled I Didn’t Come Up the Liffey in a Bubble, Friday confessed: “I lost my virginity to Oscar Wilde and was f***ed by Bowie, here was something that was new, it was antihippy, it was outrageous, it was anger. You could go to Mars with David Bowie or the bank. I knew where I was going.”

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of De Profundis , where Wilde’s text is read in the Italian translation with a soundtrack by Pennese and Walter Prati.127 Its published version by Auditorium—including both book and audio-cd—conveys again the idea of a multimodal and intermedial Wilde, involved in a permanent process of translation, whose words constantly ask for new music as a response to and a means towards rewriting.

5.5 Wilde Personalities: From the Pet Shop Boys to Pete Doherty Speaking about the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Bracewell’s 1997 docufilm Neil Tennant—the singer of the art-pop cult duo Pet Shop Boys—notes how Wilde: invented the idea of an alternative kind of rebellion […] you can rebel by not being pulled out bourgeois society, by turning everything upsidedown, by exaggerated behaviour, by being exaggeratedly sophisticated, by being decadent. And that was the image that Oscar Wilde defined in the 1890s. You see it in the Rolling Stones in 1967 […] they were outsiders, they had that style of decadence in the way they dressed; you see it in the 1970s in Brian Ferry […], you see in the 1980s with Morrissey […]. It was the birth of the modern world in terms of art, literature and music. A lot of things were starting to happen for the first time then.128

The Pet Shop Boys themselves embraced Wilde’s legacy turning things upside-down within the pop industry. Andrew Calcutt brilliantly describes the band’s very peculiar position within the realm of pop defining Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s ensemble an ultra-intelligent pop group—an oxymoron they are wise to. Indeed, “they have been living and working off this contradiction-in-terms since their first hit single (‘West End Girls’) in 1985. As Tennant says ‘we are of pop music and we attack it at the same time.’”129 As Maus effectively summarizes in a challenging essay in which he focuses on the band’s musical inventiveness and their attention to detail: 127 Oscar Wilde, Claudio Marconi, and Matteo Pennese, De Profundis (Milano: Auditorium, 2012). 128 Bracewell, Oscar. 129 Calcutt, Brit Cult, 328.

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“there are many reasons to think of the Pet Shop Boys’ songs as artistic, and as serious in purpose. They combine carefully crafted music, full of thoughtful, imaginative touches, with subtle, psychologically astute lyrics.”130 And yet what we are really faced with in the work of this duo is the capacity to establish a fascinating dialogue between seriousness and lightness, drama and comedy in a fashion which recalls Wilde himself. According to Bracewell, “as authorized by their position as pop stars whose ‘talent to amuse’ was underwritten by a harder, political agenda of social commentary, the Pet Shop Boys would come to represent their own independent position as ambassadors for an attitude towards their times.”131 In this sense, he notes how “the Englishness of the Pet Shop Boys manipulates mannered language (the undefended argot of the urban bourgeoisie) and forces it comment on itself”132 something which again powerfully connects with Wilde’s treatment of language in his epigrams. The band’s 1991 song ‘DJ Culture’ includes a direct quotation from Wilde,133 which interestingly does not come from one of his works but from the report of the last of Wilde’s trials in which the author asked the judge: “And I my lord, may I say nothing?” In the video of the song, we see Tennant playing Wilde in the trial context, pronouncing these very words in a double tribute to both Wilde and the Rolling Stones. Tennant’s position as one of Britain’s most intelligent and gifted pop writers also emerges in the 2018 Faber & Faber collection One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem. In the beautiful and inspired introduction to the

130 FV.

Fred Everett Maus, “Glamour and Evasion: The Fabulous Ambivalence of the Pet Shop Boys” Popular Music, Vol. 20, No. 3, October 2001, 381. 131 Bracewell, England Is Mine, 43. 132 Bracewell, England Is Mine, 44. 133 In a Diary feature written in 2009 for The Spectator, Tennant has again focused on

Wilde: recalling a strange experience he had when he was 16 and he had a séance with some friends, and at some point, Oscar Wilde’s voice was heard invoking the children not to make his mistakes. Tennant has always felt a connection to Wilde since then, as though he was someone he met once for a brief moment. In the diary, Tennant also reveals how he has come across a book called Oscar Wilde in Purgatory, published in the 1920s, which consists of transcriptions of conversations a man called Hester Travers Smith claims to have had with Wilde via a ouija board. To put it with Tennant, in death, as in life, it seems Oscar is a great talker. Neil Tennant, “Diary” The Spectator, 23 May 2009.

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volume, Tennant undirectedly acknowledges his debt to Wilde; remembering his days in Newcastle as a teenager—when he started writing songs for a few productions—he confesses how “from the start [he] was interested in music in a theatrical context,”134 besides we also read about his interest in creating masks/personae in his lyrics: writing in character, imagining the world from someone else’s point of view, is very liberating, and a way of telling stories. I occasionally try to write from the point of view of a woman […] for instance in the song ‘Rent.’ I quiet often assume the persona of a heterosexual man (for instance in ‘Only the Wind’). In ‘Delusions of Grandeur’, I’m a megalomaniac fantasist; in ‘Electricity’ a drag queen; in ‘Legacy’, a New Labour politician; in ‘Odd man out’, a queer hairdresser in London in 1961; in ‘Shameless,’ an early-nineties wannabe celebrity; […] in ‘The theatre’, a rough sleeper in London; […] in ‘Your early stuff’, a London taxi-driver who has one of the Pet Shop Boys in the back of his cab.135

Like Wilde (who, as we have seen, was editor of the Woman’s World) in his early days, Tennant worked as a magazine editor and a journalist (for Smash Hits), something which allowed him in his career as a songwriter to make texts “clearer and more focused.”136 As in Wilde’s case, his writing very often is related to (and set in) London; the metropolis becomes for him (as for Wilde) a space to describe, but also a stage for remarkable performances as artist and superstar. In this sense, he confesses how living in London since 1972, he has taken “continual inspiration from its streets and inhabitants […] the city creates both the pressure and the means to escape from it.”137 He loves London, but in the eighties in the song ‘King’s Cross,’ it is portrayed as a desperate place, and three decades in the song ‘Twenty-Something’ later […] it becomes a decadent city. In a fashion which recalls Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Tennant’s discourse, London becomes necessarily

134 Neil Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem (London: Faber & Faber, 2018),

x. 135 Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xxi–xxii. 136 Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xv. 137 Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xxii.

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double: magnificent and desperate. But for the Pet Shop Boys London— with its trends in dance music—is also the “pop capital of the world”138 where art and consumerism (as in Wilde’s case) are strictly interrelated; in this sense, at the centre of many of their songs runs—as we have already seen with Calcutt—“a satirical critique of the music industry (and of their place in it).”139 One should never forget, as Tennant insists, that pop is necessarily words with (and within) music; Pet Shop Boys’ songs are themselves theatrical spaces in which lyrics and musical sounds constantly redefine themselves, through irony and wit. In ‘It’s a Sin,’ Tennant elaborates a complex narrative about (homo)sexuality as sin, which becomes a theatrical, critical interruption140 —through the magnificent avant-pop arrangement, mixing dance groves, church choirs and melodic beauty (and the cult video directed by Derek Jarman)—of the morality and hypocrisy of postmodern British (institutional) culture, from 1960s Newcastle grammar school to daily life during Thatcherism (something which seems echoing Wilde’s own artistic stance in relation to late Victorian morality).141 Another very clever band of the 1980s, namely the Television Personalities, paid a direct tribute to Wilde and in particular to his work with their song ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1981) composed by their singer/songwriter Daniel Treacy. As Wolk observes “in the late 1970’s, the Television Personalities […] built a sizable cult following by tweaking their London peers with songs like “Part Time Punks.” In the 80’s, as Mr. Treacy became a darkly powerful songwriter, exploring his fascinations with childhood, Roman Catholicism and the mod movement.”142 ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ is characterized by a mod/proto-indie sound and by somehow dark lyrics in which Tracey stages the narrator’s inner fracture, playing with nostalgic images of an idealized Englishness as in the verses that see the two protagonists sitting by the river drinking lemon 138 Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xvi. 139 Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xxii. 140 On the concept of critical interruption, see Iain Chambers, Postcolonial Inter-

ruptions. Unauthorised Modernities (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 141 Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, 89. 142 Douglas Wolk, “A Full Time Punk,” The New York Times, 12 March 2006, https://

www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/arts/music/a-fulltime-punk-again.html.

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tea and eating cucumber sandwiches, with this very last image charmingly reminiscent of Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest. A darker, less ironic stance is what defines ‘Dark Entries’ a 1980143 song by post-punk band Bauhaus, in which the quintessential gothic band pays a tribute to Wilde’s Dorian Gray. One year before, another English band Dexys Midnight Runners published their first single entitled ‘Dance Stance’ (1979) in which the singer/songwriter Kevin Rowland—like Wilde of Irish parentage—investigates the anti-Irish sentiment that had become dominant during the troubles in Northern Ireland, making reference to Irish writers such as Brendan Behan, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde himself. The sound of bands such as the Television Personalities was defined by a DIY, almost punk stance which went on to nourish the aesthetics of one of the major British bands of the Noughties, namely The Libertines.144 Wilde is an important intertext in The Libertines and most importantly in their singer/guitarist Pete Doherty’s discourse. The choice of calling themselves Libertines signalled their desire to articulate a critical, antiinstitutional discourse founded on a love for excess recalling the Rolling Stones; as Lynskey observes: “The Libertines charm rather than irritate, because all their eccentricities are clearly so deeply felt. Like any good Wilde fans, they know that a pose can be genuine and a fantasy can have the ring of truth.”145 If on the one hand the band and in particular Doherty were fascinated by excesses of any kind, constructing a dissonant/noisy/disturbing image of themselves—perfectly in tune with the pop/rock decadent philosophy of the NME magazine which worked as an echo chamber for their epopee—on the other hand their very music is particularly rich in nuances reflecting their musical, literary and cinematographic influences. As Simon Hattenhouse puts it, “The Libertines’ songs were as furious as they were 143 Bauhaus, ‘Dark Entries,’ In the Flat Field, 4AD, 1980. 144 As Lynskey observes “Like the Smiths […] the Libertines come armed with several

bedroom-walls’ worth of heroes and icons, a cultural collage that reaffirms the idea that sometimes in rock there is nothing sexier than a voracious intelligence. They enthuse about a mythic Englishness they refer to as Albion […] and Arcadia. […] They have expressed affection for Oscar Wilde, Disraeli, and Galton and Simpson. You might also add Joe Orton, Lindsay Anderson’s film If… and Pinkie from Brighton Rock.” Dorian Lynskey, “We Believe in Melody, Hearts and Minds,” The Guardian, 10 January 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/jan/10/artsfeatures.libertines 145 Lynskey, “We Believe in Melody.”

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lyrical, as trash-happy as they were pub singalongs. They were threeminute exocets to the heart or boots to the groin – sometimes both. The band saw themselves as troubadours, romantics, angsty dissipated types, losers and scoundrels.”146 Undoubtedly, that of pop’s textuality is a complex issue which, as we have seen with John Shepherd proved must necessarily be based on the dia-logic involving words and music (and within music on the combination of rhythm, timbre, harmony and melody) and on the interplay between text and context,147 and yet one can say that the Libertines’ originality derives from the freshness of their literary inventiveness. As Burton and Petridis observe: “The Libertines entered a rock scene that hadn’t appeared to care about lyrics for years: words were best left to rappers […]. The Libertines were one of the few rock bands in recent memory to emerge lyrics-first: what was arresting about their early singles wasn’t the punk backing or construction, but the words particularly those written by Pete Doherty.”148 In their 2002 song, ‘Narcissist’—in which they articulate a direct criticism of a cultural system obsessed with stereotyped and commodified ideas of beauty—they ironically make reference to Wilde’s Dorian Gray affirming that it would be nice to be Wilde’s iconic character even for a single day. What characterizes the Libertines’ discourse is a carnivalesque stance in which the high and the low, the literary and the colloquial speak to each other.

146 Simon Hattenstone, “Down and Dirty,” The Guardian, 22 April 2006, https:// www.theguardian.com/music/2006/apr/22/popandrock.libertines 147 See John Shepherd, Music as Social Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 148 Laura Barton, Alex Petridis, “Emily Dickinson? She’s Hardcore,” The Guardian, 3

October 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/oct/03/poetry.popandrock. In this perspective, in his 2007 monograph on Doherty, Hannaford focuses on The Libertines and on their capacity of creating with their admirers a community through a shared interest in literature: “Rock’n’roll hadn’t seen anything like The Libertines for too long. Pete knew his poetry and his literature, but he gave it an edge – he made it cool. And the truth was, thousands of kids were getting inspired. Pete’s love of language; his passion for England and Englishness; his quest for Arcadia; his love of literature, all rubbed off on his audience. Rock’n’roll had been injected with intelligence. Suddenly Internet message boards – thought of as time-wasting and even dangerous by parents – were alive with chatter, but fans were discussing where the terms ‘Albion’ and ‘Arcadia’ had cropped up in British literature. They were talking about Oscar Wilde, quoting Blake, Yeats, Coleridge and Byron.” Alex Hannaford, Pete Doherty. Last of the Rock Romantics (Reading: Ebury Press, 2007), 263.

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Soon after the split of the Libertines (in 2004), Doherty founded Babyshambles, whose first album was interestingly entitled Down in Albion. The album included ‘A Rebours’ a fascinating song which stands as an indirect tribute to Wilde, through the reference in its title to J. K. Huysmans’s novel which, as it is known, had a significant impact on the author of Dorian Gray. Pete Doherty paid a more personal and lyrical tribute to Wilde with his ballad ‘Salomé’ included in his 2009 solo album Grace/Wasteland, which shares several lyrical references to Wilde’s play.149 Interestingly, in the song, Doherty mentions another mythical dancer, Isadora Duncan one of the greatest performer of all times, who in a sense stands as a modern counterpart for Salomé and who at the end of the song, while dancing reclaims the head of a bastard on a plate; most probably, Doherty is the bastard in question. He is hypnotized and consents to give his own head, while Salome could stand for his ex-partner, super-model Kate Moss. ‘Broken Love Song’ from the same album includes quotes from “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol,” that is: “I never saw a man /Who looked with such a wistful eye / Upon that little tent of blue which prisoners /Call the sky.”150 Another Wildean pop celebrity is undoubtedly Neil Hannon—leader and singer/songwriter of The Divine Comedy (an iconic band from Northern Ireland)—who not only shares Wilde’s interest in Dante but also, like Wilde, went to Portora Royal School. There is something profoundly Wildean about Hannon’s wit and about his charmingly decadent music; besides, Oscar is one of the protagonists of Divine Comedy’s 2004 song ‘Absent Friends’ in which the songwriter makes reference to Wilde’s outsideness, portraying him as a lonely child who fought to conquer that very audience, that very world which condemned him to death.

149 Other songs based on Wilde’s play include Kim Wilde’s ‘House of Salome’ (1981, in which the singer mixes 1980s synth-pop and Arabian melodies), ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ by John Cale (1991, featuring dark, hypnotic piano figures and spoken word by Judy Nylon) and ‘Stand Inside your Love’ by The Smashing Pumpkins (2000, whose video stands as a fascinating black and white filmic adaptation of the play and a tribute to Aubrey Beardsley). 150 Wilde, “The Ballad” 883.

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In 2009, Chicago indie band Company of Thieves released a song entitled ‘Oscar Wilde’151 which can be described as a Dorian Gray song. Characterized by a sound heavily reminiscent of late Smiths and in particular of Johnny Marr’s guitar work, the song not only features a line in which the narrator refers to an Oscar Wilde confrontation but is inhabited by a number of images which powerfully connect with Wilde’s only novel, from parallels with its hints to Dorian’s double life, to the imperative of living like it is a matter of style (which might have come from Wotton).152 A more recent Wilde-related song is ‘Oscar Wilde Gets Out’ by Elton John, himself a Wilde-like figure, who, in a 2006 interview, offered an ironic overview of his career in terms of: “glasses, homosexuality, Watford football club, tantrums, flower [and] music [which was] pretty phenomenal.”153 The ballad, included in his 2013 album The Diving Board, is characterized by a beautiful, hypnotic, in a way, decadent piano figure and by lyrics—written by Bernie Taupin—evoking poignant images of a beaten post-prison Wilde who is branded a sinner by the law.154 In the very same year, the Italian band Marlene Kuntz released their single ‘Il genio (L’importanza di essere Oscar Wilde),’155 a powerful post-punk meditation on Wilde as a genius and as resistant voice in the face of general hypocrisy; while in 2019 Italian post-folk singer Vinicio Capossela set to music “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” in a beautiful arrangement

151 The Australian band The Cat Empire also published a song entitled ‘Oscar Wilde’ in 2019; the song characterized by a world music upbeat sound heavily indebted to Paul Simon most definitely seems not to reflect the melancholy and complexity of the playwright’s character. 152 Commenting on the promo of ‘Oscar Wilde,’ Wilde scholar S. I. Salamensky observes how: “dressed, in a video of the song in a schoolboy uniform, and humorously depicted as ‘French Club President,’ ‘Debate Team Captain,’ ‘Choirmaster,’ ‘Kung Fu Club Yellow Belt,’ and in other ways Most Likely to Succeed, Schatz, like her bandmates, is spirited and bright – undoubtedly someone whom Wilde, were he alive today, would like far more than the dim, dull scholars who read and study his work.” Salamensky, The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde, 155. 153 Tom Doyle, “Fantastic Voyage,” Mojo, Vol. 155, October 2006, 90. 154 Elton John, ‘Oscar Wilde Gets Out’ in The Diving Board (Capitol, 2013). 155 Marlene Kuntz, ‘Il genio (L’importanza di essere Oscar Wilde),’ Nella tua luce (Sony, 2013):

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in which a chamber ballad for piano trio and strings is nourished by echoes of Irish folk.156 A folk atmosphere is also what defines Canadian (new-folk) band Mahones’s 2015 song entitled ‘Stars,’ whose lyrics are inhabited and nourished by (deconstructed) Wildean epigrams, such as the famous “We are all in the gutter, bit some are looking at the Stars” (from Lady Windermere’s Fan).157 American singer Marchelle Bradanini’s single ‘Oscar Wilde’ (2020)158 is, instead, characterized by a sound reminiscent of the music of Americana artists such as Lucinda Williams and (late) Bill Frisell. A more fascinating and complex effort is represented by Black British singer and poet Benjamin Clementine’s ‘Eternity’159 (2018), a song based on Oscar Wilde’s poem “The True Knowledge” defined by an impressive orchestral arrangement and a poignant, memorable vocal performance by Clementine, which make it one of the most fascinating adaptations of Wilde into music in recent years. In the final chapter of Wilde Style, Neil Sammells, focusing on Wilde’s postmodern afterlife, points to how: Wilde seems close to us partly because he grapples with contradictions we have yet to resolve. While proclaiming the importance of individualism, he nevertheless recognizes it as problematic and indeterminate. He champions self-fashioning while undermining the sense of self. These contradictions can be seen as reflective of his historical moment, as symptomatic of an emergent Modernism seeking to extinguish a fading Romanticism. But they are also inherent to Postmodernism. […] Insofar as Wilde anticipates and articulates [the] contradictions [of our age] we should see him not simply as reflective of his historical moment but as formative of our own. For Wilde the process of contradiction is enabling and exhilarating, because it promises that an ideological or intellectual impasse is ever final – it will move on, generating its own opposite.160

156 Vinicio Capossela, ‘La ballata del carcere di Reading,’ in Ballate per uomini e bestie (Warner, 2019). 157 Mahones, ‘Stars,’ in The Hunger and the Fight (True North, 2017). 158 Marchelle Bradanini ‘Oscar Wilde’ in Only a Woman (Bandcamp, 2020). 159 Benjamin Clementine, ‘Eternity,’ (Behind, 2018). 160 Sammells, Wilde Style, 127.

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In this perspective, we can conclude our long journey through music and literature, by noting that what we get in the popular music of the new millennium is less a re-enactment of Wilde’s oppositional stance than an investigation in song form of the complexity, of the structural dissonance which, according to Oscar, defines us as human beings.

Coda

During the Q&A at London’s BFI Southbank with Al Pacino, Jessica Chastain and Stephen Fry—organized, as we have seen, for the London premiere of Wilde-Salomé and Salomé in 2011—Fry, who was chairing the event, decided to close it reading from the Epilogue of Richard Ellmann’s 1987 Wildean biography. In the last iconic paragraph of his book, Ellmann notes how Wilde’s “work survived as he claimed it would” and—pointing to the profound influence of Wilde on our age—adds: We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria’s. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.1

In this study, I have tried, in this perspective, to approach Wilde, through our now, that is through “our world,” investigating contemporary modalities of reading but also, most importantly, rewriting Wilde in the fields of cinema, music and literature, proving the centrality of different cultural 1 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 553–554.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2

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texts—films, songs, literary works inspired by Wilde—in the very process of reading and performing Wilde Now. This long journey throughout the rich cultural and semiotic landscape beside and within Wilde’s work and life also proved that a literary icon can be read, as a living sign as a sort of hyper text, a living text where different signs (belonging to different languages) meet to articulate complex meanings in a profoundly dialogical dimension which asks for an active, dramatic, engagement by readers. As we have seen, Wilde must necessarily be approached in terms of doubleness and multiplicity; his novel, his stories, essays and plays make us access completely different dimensions; besides, he used different discourse modes simultaneously often translating between them: journalism, fashion, novel and, most importantly, drama. This, in a way, allowed me to compose a (personal, necessarily not exhaustive) cultural itinerary, through which I have re-read and re-composed his life and his writings. Rewritings and intersemiotic translations of Wilde in the field of contemporary popular culture have, as we have seen, cast a fresh, fascinating light on Wilde’s own personal and literary performances. In this sense, as we anticipated in our preface, these pages have exceeded the shape and meaning of a critical study to turn into a drama of five different acts/moments. In the opening scene, we have seen how with his aesthetics of masks, so charmingly articulated in the essays included in Intentions, Wilde—who proved himself a brilliant performer in his early days in Dublin, Oxford and London—seemed to invite his audience and his readers to read or better to perform his epigrams as verbal and musical masks, able through their condensation and iconoclastic value, to question the ideo-logic and the very order of discourse, then as now. We have also seen how the whole American tour was, in a sense, an attempt to question this order. It was an achievement of selfadvertisement but also of courage—projecting us towards postmodern performances by American icons such as Truman Capote and Andy Warhol—through which Wilde succeeded, as Ellmann has shown, in naturalizing the very word aesthetic. In America, Wilde self-fashioned himself as an icon and celebrity and yet it is important to stress how Wilde’s iconicity always implies a dialogue between past and present; Wilde’s image is indeed worshipped today by fans from all around the world. In this sense, Wilde’s enunciations—his epigrams, plays, letters—seem to be addressed to a contemporary listener who in turn is invited, through Wilde, to rethink his/her own identity. In a way, the Wilde lover is asked to play with his/her favourite writer—re-combining and rearticulating his

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texts and intertexts—in a process in which the self becomes more and more other, and identity, like literature itself, starts to be considered in iconic (that is in escaping) more than in symbolic (encoded) terms. In his own time, Wilde was, as we have seen, the most self-conscious marketer of his own image; like many contemporary celebrities, he carefully constructed his status within society with the intention of successfully selling himself, in his case, on the Victorian literary and cultural marketplace. Interestingly, in the brief analysis of Dorian and of his most famous plays, from Lady Windermere’s Fan to The Importance of Being Earnest included in this book, we have seen how consumer culture is not only concerned with the commercial value of commodities; consumerism, as Chambers has shown, always implies the emergence of specific lifestyles and the staging of very complex (context-bound) performances by social actors. Wilde’s often spectacular performances can also be read in these terms. We have also seen how in his post-prison years Wilde never stopped performing, but accessed different, even disturbing stages, inhabiting and, in a way, shaping a liminal space which allows us today to activate a process of re-definition of such ideas as deviance and outsideness. In a way, in his last days, Wilde the outsider was inviting his fans to walk beside him “on the wild(e) side.” In this sense, in the last chapter of this study, we have seen how in the popular music of the new millennium we have recorded—beside a re-enactment of Wilde’s oppositional stance— a fruitful investigation in song form of the complexity of the structural dissonance which according to Wilde defines us as human beings. Today, we are confronted with the many fascinating echoes of Wilde’s voice: with charming melodies, grotesque rhythms but also, and most importantly, with noise and dissonance. Wilde’s last days can be read and perceived as a dissonant coda to his lifelong performance and yet sound is very often a mirror recalling us to the “vital importance” of the compresence and simultaneity of opposites in our lives. In conclusion, it seems fitting to stress how in Wilde the language of music becomes a way of both listening to and reading the world, allowing us to perform in it—now—as musicians and, most importantly as improvisers, in elusive and unpredictable ways. As Wilde wrote in “The Critic as Artist,” “the world is made by the singer for the dreamer.”2 In this

2 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1123.

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sense, on the one hand, as Oscar’s readers and listeners, we cannot but live in a dreamlike dimension immersed in pure sound, that is, in the pure and yet at times disturbing beauty of a soundscape brimming with the echoes of Wilde and the singing voices of his many masks. On the other hand, singers like Bowie, Morrissey, Friday, Tennant and Doherty—but also directors, actors and writers such as Pacino, Fry, Everett and Brandreth—with their awareness of the importance of being/playing Oscar in their specific worlds and cultural contexts, have shown us that Wilde can be conceived as a subversive, critical role one might successfully perform and appropriate, now more than ever.

Bibliography

Wilde’s Works An Ideal Husband, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 515–582. De Profundis, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín (London: Penguin 2013). “Impressions of America,” ed. Stuart Mason (Sunderland: Keystone Press, 1906). Lady Windermere’s Fan, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 420–464. “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1093–1107. “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), 1244–1245. Racconti (Milano: Rizzoli, 1982). “Roses and Rue,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 837–838. “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol”, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 883–899. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, eds. M. Holland and R. Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). “The Critic as Artist,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1108–1155. “The Decay of Lying,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1071–1092.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2

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“The Doer of Good,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 900–901. “The English Renaissance of Art,” in Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde (London: Metheun, 1913), 111–115. “The Happy Prince,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 271–301. “The Harlot’s House,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 271–277. The Importance of Being Earnest, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 357–419. “The Nightingale and the Rose,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 278–282. The Picture of Dorian Gray (London and New York: Norton, 2007). The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1174–1197. “The Truth of Masks,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1156–1173.

Criticism on Wilde Bartlett, Neil, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988). Becker-Leckrone, Megan, “Oscar Wilde (1854–1900): Aesthetics and Criticism,” in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory, eds. Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins, and Kenneth Womack (New York: Continuum Press, 2002), 658–665. Beckson, Karl (ed.), Oscar Wilde, The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1970). Beckson, Karl, Fong Bobby, “Wilde as Poet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–68. Belford, Barbara, Oscar Wilde. A Certain Genius (New York: Randhom House, 2000). Bennett, Michael Y. (ed.), Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Bennett, Michael Y., “Introduction: A Wilde Mind: The Witty Aesthete and Serious Thinker, or the Witty Thinker and Serious Aesthete?” in Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–5. Bloom, Harold (ed.), Oscar Wilde (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011).

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Wilde Now: Adaptations, Rewritings, Tributes Transmedial Adaptations Landow, George, The Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ wilde/index.html Marconi Claudio, Matteo Pennese, De Profundis (Milan: Auditorium, 2012). Book + CD Wilde Stories, a 2016 artistic transmedia project designed by Athena Media. The project website, with links to podcasts, videos, musical performances and project blog is accessible at http://www.wildestories.ie/index.html

Popular Music Bauhaus, ‘Dark Entries’ in In the Flat Field (4AD, 1980). Beatles, The, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely-Hearts Club Band (Emi, 1967). Bowie, David, ‘Look Back in Anger’ in Lodger (RCA, 1979). Bowie, David, ‘Lazarus’ in Blackstar (Capitol, 2016). Bradanini Marchelle, ‘Oscar Wilde,’ in Only a Woman (Bandcamp, 2020). Cale, John, ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (ROIR, 1987). Cat Empire, ‘Oscar Wilde,’ in Stolen Diamonds (Two Shoes Records, 2019). Capossela, Vinicio, ‘La ballata del carcere di Reading,’ in Ballate per uomini e bestie (Warner, 2019). Cherry Five, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ in Cherry Five (Cinevox Records, 1976). Clementine Benjamin, ‘Eternity’ (Behind, 2018). Company of Thieves, ‘Oscar Wilde’ (Wind-Up Records, 2011). Dexys Midnight Runners, ‘Dance Stance’ (Oddball Records, 1979). Divine Comedy, The, ‘Absent Friends’ in Absent Friends (Parlophone, 2004). Doherty, Pete, ‘Salomé’ in Grace/Wasteland (Emi, 2009). Doherty, Pete, ‘Broken Love Song’ in Grace/Wasteland (Emi, 2009). Dylan, Bob, ‘I Contain Multitudes’ in Rough and Rowdy Ways (Columbia, 2020). Friday, Gavin, Seezer, Man, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves (Island, 1989). John, Elton, ‘Oscar Wilde Gets Out’ in The Diving Board (Capitol, 2013). King, Charles, ‘Wilde Love’ in LoveBlood (Universal, 2012). Libertines, The, ‘Narcissist’ in Get Up the Bracket (Rough Trade, 2002). Los Vidrios Quebrados, ‘Oscar Wilde’ in Fictions (RCA 1967). Mahones, ‘Stars’ in The Hunger and the Fight (True North, 2017). Marlene Kuntz, ‘Il genio (L’importanza di essere Oscar Wilde)’ in Nella tua luce (Sony, 2013). Moreau, Jean, ‘Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves’ (Carosello, 1983).

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Morrissey, ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ (Attack, 2004). Pet Shop Boys, ‘It’s a Sin’ (Emi, 1987). Pet Shop Boys, ‘DJ Culture’ in Behaviour (Emi, 1990). Reed, Lou, Transformer (RCA, 1972). Rolling Stones, ‘We Love You’ (Decca, 1967). Smashing Pumpkins, ‘Stand Inside your Love’ in Machina. The Machines of God (Virgin, 2000). Smiths, The, ‘This Charming Man’ in The Smiths (Rough Trade, 1984). Smiths, The, ‘Oscillate Wildly’ in How Soon Is Now (Rough Trade, 1985). Smiths, The, ‘Cemetry Gates’ in The Queen is Dead (Rough Trade, 1986). Smiths, The, ‘A Rush and a Push and The Land Is Ours’ in Strangeways here we Come (Rough Trade, 1987). Steppenwolf, ‘Born to be Wild’ (Dunhill, 1967). Television Personalities, ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ in And Don’t the Kids Just Love It (Rough Trade 1981). U2, ‘Mysterious Ways’ in Achtung Baby (Island, 1991). U2, ‘Salomé’ in Achtung Baby, Deluxe Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Island, 2011). Velvet Undergound The & Nico, The Velvet Undergound & Nico (Verve, 1967). Wilde, Kim, ‘House of Salomé’ in Catch as Catch Can (RAK 1981). Wilde Club, ‘The True Lover’ in The Wilde Club (Self-Produced, 2012). Wilde Flowers (The), The Wilde Flowers (Floating World Records, 2015). Zazou Hector, Vega Suzanne, Cale, John, ‘The Long Voyage’ (Columbia, 1995).

Selected Films (1970-2018) Barnard Clio, dir. The Selfish Giant, 2013. Bene Carmelo, dir. Salomé, 1972. Bracewell Michael, dir. Oscar, BBC, 1997. Dallamano Massimo, dir. Dorian Gray, 1970. Everett Rupert, dir. The Happy Prince, 2018. Gilbert Brian, dir. Wilde, 1997. Haynes Todd, dir. Velvet Goldmine, 1998. Hughes Bill, dir. Happy Birthday Oscar Wilde, 2004. Pacino Al, dir. Wilde Salomé, 2011.

Drama Armstrong, Gareth, Wilde Without the Boy (Players’ Account, 2015). Cave, Nick, Salomé. Five Plays in Id. King Ink (London: Black Spring Press, 1988), 69–75. Eagleton, Terry, Saint Oscar (Derry: Field Day, 1989).

224

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Hare, David, The Judas Kiss (London: Faber &Faber, 1998). Honoré, Philippe, L’importance d’être Wilde (Paris: Harmattan 2012). Kauffman, Moises, Gross Indecency. The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: Metheun, 1998). Kilroy, Tom, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (London: Gallery Books, 1997). Mac Liammòir, Micheàl, The Importance of Being Oscar (London: Buckinghamshire, 1995) [1963]. Ravenhill, Mark, Handbag (London: Bloomsbury 1998). Stokes, Leslie and Sewell, Oscar Wilde. A Play (Franklin Classics, 2018) [1939]. Stoppard, Tom, Travesties (London: Faber & Faber, 1998) [1974].

Novels Ackroyd, Peter, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (London: Abacus, 1983). Brandreth, Gyles, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (London: John Murray, 2012). Meehan, Andrew, The Mystery of Love. Oscar and Constance: A Novel. (London: Apollo, 2021). Reed, Jeremy, Dorian: A Sequel to the Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Peter Owen, 1997). Self, Will, Dorian. An Imitation (London: Vintage 2001).

Exhibitions and Events L’Impertinent Absolu (Paris: Petit Palais, 2016–2017).

Index

A Abrams, Meyer Howard, 97 ‘Absent Friends’, 197 Absolute Beginners , 157, 162 Ackroyd, Peter, 131, 132, 161 Alberge, Dalya, 132 Albertazzi, Silvia, 148 Amis, Martin, 161 And the Ass saw the Angel , 183, 184 ‘Angel, Angel Down we Go Together’, 171, 172 ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’, 194 ‘Apologia’, 189 Armfield, Neil, 130, 132 Armstrong, Gareth, 130 Arnott, Jake, 161 ‘A Rush and a Push and The Land Is Ours’, 170 A Taste of Honey, 167, 168 ‘At Last I am Born’, 178 Auslander, Philip, 8, 156 Australia, 55, 181 avant-garde, 8, 158, 159 Ayers, Kevin, 147

B Babyshambles, 197 Bachmann, Gideon, 38 Bachtin, Mikhail, 93 ballad, 189 Barrett, Syd, 148, 149 Barthes, Roland, 6, 16, 28, 45, 46, 93, 101, 105, 166 Bartlett, Neil, 69, 73, 112 bass, 35, 95, 96, 149, 171, 183 Baudelaire, Charles, 138, 180, 181 Bauhaus, 195 BBC, 143, 144, 162 Beardsley, Aubrey, 8, 37, 49, 85, 98, 197 Beatles, The, 46, 146–148 Becker-Leckrone, Megan, 11 Beckson, Karl, 87, 135 Beerbohm, Max, 128, 146 Beethoven, Ludwig W., 108 Bene, Carmelo, 37, 38 Bennett, Alan, 174 Bennett, Michael Y., 10, 18 Berlin, 3, 104, 182, 183

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Martino, WILDE NOW, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2

225

226

INDEX

Bernhardt, Sarah, 20, 26, 27, 83 Beynon, John, 8, 9, 43, 83, 84, 156 ‘Big Brother’, 152 ‘Bigmouth Striked Again’, 167, 169 Billy Liar, 167 Birthday Party, The, 181, 183, 184 Bizzotto, Elisa, xii Blackstar, 163 Blake, William, 98 Bloom, Harold, 97 Bockris, Victor, 48 Bono, 34, 35, 47, 174 Bowie, Angie, 153 Bowie, David, 7, 9, 27, 43, 144, 146, 150, 154–161, 163, 164, 174, 179, 180, 186, 187, 204 Bracewell, Michael, 8, 143–146, 155, 158, 191, 192 Bradanini, Marchelle, 199 Bradshaw, Peter, 133, 135 Braine, John, 161 Brandreth, Gyles, 136, 139–142, 204 Brathwaite, Kamau, 94–96 Bret, David, 176 Bristow, Joseph, 2, 3, 30 ‘Broken Love Song’, 197 Brown, Calvin, 91 Brown, Julia, 11 Brummell, Beau, 146 Brummett, Barry, 36, 180 Buckton, Oliver S., 63 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 161 Burgess, Anthony, 151, 161 Burroughs, William, 6, 151, 162 Butler, Judith, 18, 83 Button Eyes, 157 Byrne, Gabriel, 47 Byron, Lord, 99, 119, 146, 196

C Cage, John, 94

Cain, William, 152 Calcutt, Andrew, 86, 148, 191, 194 Caliban, 121 Callow, Simon, 43, 44 Campbell, Sean, 170 Capossela, Vinicio, 198, 199 Capote, Truman, 39, 43, 202 Caravan, 146 Carter, Angela, 161 Cassarino, Riccardo, 130 Cat Empire, 198 Cave, Nick, 179–186 Cawthorne, Nigel, 147, 148 Cecil, Taylor, 147 celebrity, 2, 8, 17, 20, 22, 27, 31, 34, 39–44, 46, 49, 50, 55, 56, 59, 67, 77, 79, 83, 85, 113–116, 118–120, 123, 128, 131, 139, 143, 145, 150, 193, 197, 202, 203 Chamberlain, J. Edward, 38 Chambers, Iain, 75, 86, 160, 194, 203 ‘Changes’, 27 ‘Chanting of the EverCircling Skeletal Family’, 152 ‘Charming Man, This’, 168 Chastain, Jessica, 33, 37, 201 Chatwin, Bruce, 161 Chevron, Phillip, 188 Chopin, Fredrick, 97, 108 Ciompi, Fausto, 87 Clarke, Claire, 140 Clementine, Benjamin, 199 Clover, Joshua, 156 Cobain, Kurt, 44, 123 Coe, Laureen, 134 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 98, 99, 196 Company of Thieves, 198 Coppa, Francesca, 9, 17, 20, 151 Corbijn, Anton, 171 Cott, Jonathan, 149

INDEX

Coulter, Colin, 170 Coward, Noel, 146 Critchley, Simon, 163, 164 Cromwell, Oliver, 175, 176 Cucullu, Lois, 41, 114

D D’Alessandro, Joe, 49 Dallamano, Massimo, 72 ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ (song), 185, 197 Danson, Lawrence, 11 Dante, 197 Darling, Candy, 155 Da Sousa Correa, Delia, 91 Davis, Thomas, 58 Dean, James, 167 ‘Dear God Please Help Me’, 177, 178 De Curtis, Anthony, 155 Delaney, Shelagh, 168 Dench, Judi, 62 De Profundis , 2, 19, 29, 35, 39, 42, 44, 65, 67, 71, 97, 99, 104, 109, 111–113, 115–130, 140, 145, 164, 171, 177, 186, 190, 191 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 13, 51 Deutch, David, 107 Devereux, Eoin, 159, 164, 187 Dexys Midnight Runners, 195 Diamond Dogs , 151, 162 Dickens, Charles, 54, 140 Dillane, Eileen, 159, 164, 187 Divine Comedy, The, 197 ‘DJ Culture’, 192 Doggett, Peter, 151 Doherty, Pete, 84, 136, 195–197, 204 Dollimore, Jonathan, 81, 82 Dolphy, Eric, 147 Donyale, Luna, 38 Doody, Maureen, 170

227

Dorian, 70, 72, 73, 87, 144, 203 D’Orsay, Count, 146 Dotto, Giancarlo, 37 Douglas, Alfred Lord, 19, 38, 44, 67, 69, 111, 112, 116–118, 120, 121, 125–127, 129, 140, 145 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 139, 140 D’Oyly Carte, Richard, 46 Dublin, 1, 18, 21–23, 27, 34, 35, 96, 132, 149, 170, 186, 187, 190, 202 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 58 Durant, Alan, 105, 106 Dylan, Bob, 54, 64, 183, 188 Dystopia, 151–152 E ‘Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves’, 35, 140, 142, 186, 190 Eagleton, Terry, 15, 44, 45, 47, 66, 83, 123, 132 Edmonds, Anthony, 77, 78 Eliot, George, 90 Eliot, T.S., 93 Ellmann, Richard, 20, 25, 46, 51–53, 56, 60, 62, 135, 137, 138, 201, 202 Eno, Brian, 160 ‘Eternity’, 199 Evangelista, Stefano, xii, 30, 31, 59 Everett Maus, Fred, 192 Everett, Rupert, 3, 43, 63, 130–136, 142, 190, 204 F Faithfull, Marianne, 149, 150 Fassbinder, Rainer Wener, 190 Ferrari, Roberta, 87 Ferry, Brian, 191 Finch, Peter, 131, 132 Fitzsimons, Eleanor, 20, 134

228

INDEX

Floyd, Pink, 148, 149 Fong, Bobby, 87 Foot, Michael, 62 Forster, Edward Morgan, 7 Fortunato, Paul, 12, 66, 67, 74, 75 Foucault, Michel, 61 Fox, Freddie, 130 Frankel, Nicholas, 30, 78, 112, 117, 127, 128, 189 Friday, Gavin, 43, 47, 124, 146, 186–190, 204 Friedman, David M., 46, 51, 54, 57 Frisell, Bill, 189, 199 Frith, Simon, 183 Fry, Stephen, 37, 43, 62–66, 131, 132, 136, 145, 201, 204

G Gagnier, Regenia, 26, 27, 72, 117, 138 Galigani, Giuseppe, 100 Gallen, Michael, 134 Gantar, Jure, 15 Gautier, Teophile, 87 Geldzahler, Henry, 49 Gilbert and Sullivan, 46 Gillespie, Michael P., 2, 40, 67, 107, 137, 138 Gilman, Sander L., 26 Gioia, Ted, 190 Giovannelli, Laura, xii glam, 7–9, 131, 150, 151, 153–158, 162, 174 Glick, Elise, 48, 49 Glitter, Gary, 9 Gloss, Lauren, 39, 40 Goddard, Simon, 169–171 Godwin, Kelli M., 123 Goffman, Erving, 120 ‘Golden Hair’, 148, 149 Goldsmiths, Oliver, 21

Graham, Bill, 187 Greenblatt, Stephen, 162 Gross Indecency, 116, 117 Guy, Josephine, 12, 29, 113, 118, 120, 125, 127, 138, 139 H Hambling, Maggi, 62 Hamlet , 2, 121, 124, 182 Handbag , ix, 81 Hannaford, Alex, 196 Hannon, Neil, 197 Hanson, Amy, 180, 181 Hardy, Thomas, 90 Hare, David, 129, 130, 132 Hare, John, 51 Hawkins, Stan, 146 Hawthorne, Nigel, 62 Haynes, Todd, 3, 7, 8, 10, 54, 62, 131, 136, 150, 151, 153 Heaney, Seamus, 62 ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, 166 Hebdige, Dick, 75 Hebert, Roger, 64 “Heroes” , 159 Hicks, Malcolm, 169 Higson, Andrew, 62 Hoare, Philip, 84 Hofer, Matthew, 54–56 Holland, Merlin, 9, 11, 14, 16, 20, 29, 34, 52, 57, 85, 87, 96, 100, 101, 132, 134, 136, 160, 163 Holland, Vyvyan, 113, 118 Holmes, Su, 40, 41, 114 Hopper, Brian, 147 Hopps, Gavin, 166, 167, 176 ‘House of Salomé’, 197 Hudson, Hugh, 61 Hughes, Ken, 131 Hutcheon, Linda, 5, 6 Hynde, Chrissie, 174

INDEX

I ‘I am OK by myself’, 179 ‘I am the Walrus’, 148 ‘Il genio (L’importanza di essere Oscar Wilde)’, 198 Importance of Being Morrissey, The, 174 improvisation, 189 intermediality, 3–5, 91 ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’, 170, 175 ‘It’s a Sin’, 194 ‘It’s not your Birthday Anymore’, 179 J Jackson, Michael, 144 Jagger, Mick, 2, 143, 149, 150 Jameson, Fredric, 6, 7 Jarman, Derek, 38, 62, 157, 158, 160, 194 jazz, 94, 146, 147, 189, 190 Jefferson, Airplane, 149 John, Elton, 198 Johnson, Fenton, 123, 124 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 95 Joyce, James, 7, 21, 22, 92, 95, 148 Judas Kiss, The, 116, 129, 130, 132 K Kane, Michael, 70 Kaufman, Moises, 116 Kaye, Richard A., 41, 84, 85, 114, 153 Kean, Charles, 51 Keats, John, 58, 98–100, 169, 170 Kemp, Lindsay, 157, 158 Killen, Jarlath, 45, 135 Kilroy, Thomas, 113, 125, 126 Kingston, Angela, 106 Koh, Norbert, 136 Kott, Jan, v Kress, Gunther, 36, 180

229

Kubrick, Stanley, 156 Kureishi, Hanif, 154, 157, 162, 163

L ‘La ballata del carcere di Reading’, 199 Lacan, Jacques, 15 Landow, George, 1 Langtry, Lillie, 8, 20, 27, 101, 102 Larkin, Philip, 94 La Rue, Jan, 94 Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, The, 131 Lautréamont, 182 ‘Lazarus’, 150, 163 Lennon, John, 44, 123, 143, 148, 149 Lennox, Annie, 47 Leorne, Ana, 159 Lévi, Eliphas, 161 Libertines, The, 195–197 ‘Life on Mars’, 156 listening, 19, 20, 28, 79, 88–90, 93, 100, 106, 109, 125, 134, 153, 175, 189, 203 Liszt, Franz, 97, 106 Lodge, David, 6, 95 Lodger, 159 Lombardo, Agostino, 161, 162 Lomuto, Michele, 93 London, 8, 18, 20–22, 25–27, 34, 35, 37, 39, 51, 74, 89, 96, 116, 120, 130, 133, 139, 140, 144, 155, 159, 160, 181–183, 193, 194, 201, 202 Longxi, Zhang, 11 ‘Look Back in Anger’, 160 Los Vidrios Quebrados, 150 Lotman, Yuri, 24, 92 Low, 159 Lytton, Lord, 11

230

INDEX

M MacDonald, Ian, 148 MacInnes, Colin, 162 Mac Liammoir, Michael, 78, 79 Major Tom, 157 Mangan, James Clarance, 58 Marcovitch, Heather, 9, 13, 17, 23, 24, 116, 120, 129 Markey, Anne, 134, 135 Marlene Kuntz, 198 Marr, Johnny, 168, 171, 198 Marshall, David, P., 40 Martino, Pierpaolo, xii, 37, 42, 66, 87, 94, 96, 113, 114, 124, 130, 157, 164 Marwick, Arthur, 49 masculinity, 8, 29, 43, 80, 82, 84, 101, 146, 151, 154–156 McCormack, Jerusha, 18, 23, 80 McDonald, Paul, 36 McEwan, Ian, 161 Melly, George, 8, 149 Melmoth, Sebastian, 3, 13, 30, 142 Mendelssohn, Michèle, 18, 19, 22, 46, 58 Merriam, Alan, P., 92 Mingus, Charles, 147 Mitchel, John, 58 Mods, 148, 156 ‘Moonage Daydream’, 156, 162 Moore, Alan, 183 Moran, Joe, 131, 132 Moreau, Jeanne, 190 Morel, Dominique, 85 Morley, Robert, 132 Morrison, Van, 188 Morris, Roy, 46, 47, 56, 57 Morrissey, Paul, 49, 155 Morrissey, (Steven Patrick), 2, 27, 28, 43, 84, 124, 146, 164–180, 182, 191, 204 Morris, William, 55

MTV, 175 Mullen, John, 171 Murphy, Robert, 62 ‘Mysterious Ways’, 35

N ‘Narcissist’, 196 Nazimova, 37 Neeson, Liam, 47, 130 NME, 195 ‘November Spawned a Monster’, 172, 173

O O’Brien, Flann, 188 O’Brien, W. Smith, 58 O’Connell, John, 161 O’Hara, Mary Margaret, 173 ‘One day Goodbye will be Farewell’, 179 Onorati, Aldo, 178 Orwell, George, 151, 152, 161 ‘Oscar Wilde’ (Company of Thieves song), 198 ‘Oscar Wilde’ (Marchelle Bradanini song), 199 ‘Oscar Wilde’ (The Cat Empire song), 198 ‘Oscar Wilde Gets Out’, 198 ‘Oscillate Wildly’, 170 Oshima, Nagisa, 157 Oxford, 5, 11, 18–25, 27, 39, 43, 46, 49, 51, 59, 62, 81, 96, 97, 105, 109, 113, 126, 165, 179, 190, 202

P Pacino, Al, 3, 33–35, 37–39, 145, 201, 204 Page-Kirby, Kristen, 133

INDEX

Pagnini, Marcello, 94 Parker, Oliver, 63, 72 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 178 Pater, Walter, 5, 25, 28, 52, 68, 69, 96, 105, 106, 127, 135 Payne, Ralph, 29, 67 Pearsall, Judy, 179 Pegg, Nicholas, 152 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 42, 88, 105, 165, 179 Pennese, Matteo, 190, 191 Perala, Tiffany, 20, 96, 102 performance, 2, 7, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 47, 53, 55, 62, 64–66, 70, 76–78, 80–83, 85, 88, 90, 94–96, 106, 109, 112, 115, 120, 128, 129, 134, 137, 141, 143, 145, 146, 152, 154, 157–159, 161, 165, 166, 180, 184, 189, 190, 193, 199, 202, 203 Petrilli, Susan, 28, 180 Pet Shop Boys, 145, 191–194 ‘Piccadilly Palare’, 172, 173 Pine, Richard, 18 Pinnock, Tom, 146, 147 Ponzio, Augusto, 28, 93, 180 pop, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 28, 34, 38, 39, 43, 46–48, 72, 83, 86, 94, 131, 143–147, 149, 152, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164–167, 174, 183, 185, 191, 192, 194–197 Pop, Iggy, 8 Powell, Kerry, ix, 19, 24, 50, 51, 63, 91, 104 Power, Martin, 159, 164, 187 Prati, Walter, 191 Presley, Elvis, 144 Price, Graham, 126 Prokopy, Steve, 131, 132 Prospero, 161, 162 Proust, Marcel, 92

231

punk, 143, 162, 181, 184, 195, 196 Q Queen is Dead, The, 164, 168, 169 Querelle de Brest , 190 R Raby, Peter, ix, 63, 87 Rajewsky, Irina, 4, 5 Rambova, Natacha, 37 Ramert, Lynn, 34 Ramones, 181, 188 Ravenhill, Mark, ix, 81 Raykoff, Ivan, 106 Redmond, Sean, 40, 41, 114 ‘Rejoyce’, 149 Reynolds, Laura, 62 Reynolds, Simon, 153, 154, 158, 181, 182, 186 Ribot, Marc, 189 Richard, Cliff, 18 Richards, Keith, 149 Ringleader of the Tormentors , 177 Rippl, Gabriele, 3–5 Riquelme, Jean Paul, 68 Robbins, Ashley H., 116 Robbins, Ruth, 11, 25, 26 Roberts, Hank, 189 Robson, David, 133 rock, 8, 9, 46, 94, 143, 145, 147, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159, 162, 174, 181, 187, 188, 195, 196 Rogan, Johnny, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171–173, 177, 178 Rojek, Chris, 41, 42, 44, 123 Rolling Stones (The), 146, 149, 160, 191, 192, 195 Romeo and Juliet , 2 Rose, David, 1 Rose, Maggie, 130 Rossetti, Dante Gabriele, 55, 75

232

INDEX

Ross, Robert, 35, 79, 104, 113, 117, 118, 121 Rowland, Kevin, 195 Rowling, J.K., 174 Rushdie, Salman, 176, 182 Rush, Geoffrey, 47 Russell, Ken, 38 Ryder, Sean, 19, 20, 91

S Said, Edward, 93 Salamensky, Shelley I., 25, 198 ‘Salomé’ (Pete Doherty song), 197 ‘Salomé’ (U2 song), 34 Sammels, Neil, 144 Sandford, Christopher, 151, 156 Sanremo Festival, 168 Sarony, Naoleon, 50 Saturday Night, Sunday Morning , 167 Saunders, Fernando, 189 Savage, Jon, 157 Scatasta, Gino, xii Scharnhorst, Gary, 54–56 Schechner, Richard, 23, 24 Schnabel, Julian, 157 Schubert, Franz, 97, 108 Schumann, Robert, 97, 106, 107 Schutz, Alfred, 47 Sedgwick, Edie, 49 Sex Pistols, 181 Shakespeare, 2, 11, 12, 16, 33, 35, 94, 124, 161, 162, 182 Shaw, George Bernard, 21, 116, 195 Sheehan, Robert, 134 Shelley, Percy B., 55, 98–100 Shepherd, John, 196 Sherard, Robert Harborough, 59, 139, 141 Sheridan, Richard, 21 Shiller, Dana, 139 Shipton, Andy, 190

Shore, Stephen, 49 Simpson, Mark, 166–168, 175, 195 Sinatra, Nancy, 174 Sinclair, Richard, 147 Sinfield, Alan, 29, 82, 83, 101 Sloan, John, 23, 26, 80, 81 Small, Ian, 29, 113, 118, 120, 125, 127, 138, 139 Smith II Philip E., 24 Smith, Patti, 111, 123, 179, 188 Smiths, The, 27, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174 Smyth, Gerry, 92 Soft Machine, 146 Soho, 162 song, 22, 27, 34, 100, 102, 112, 146, 148–150, 152, 155, 162, 168–177, 183, 185, 187, 190, 192–200, 203 sound, 19, 22, 79, 82, 88–94, 100–102, 104, 105, 109, 122, 154, 155, 166, 181, 182, 186, 194, 195, 198, 199, 204 Southpaw Grammar, 174 ‘Space Oddity’, 156 Spark, Muriel, 161 ‘Stand Inside your Love’, 197 ‘Stars’, 199 ‘Station to Station’, 161 Sterne, Jonathan, 88, 89, 92 Stern, Kimberly J., 10, 24, 53 Stetz, Margaret D., 83 Stevenson, Nick, 154 Stokes, John, 97, 98, 100 Strangeways here We Come, 170 Strauss, Richard, 104 Sturgis, Matthew, 23, 47, 48, 134, 135

T Tanitch, Robert, 38, 63, 144

INDEX

Taupin, Bernie, 198 Taylor, Alfred, 38 Television Personalities, 194, 195 Tempest, The, 121, 161 Temple, Julien, 157, 162 Tennant, Neil, 84, 145, 191–194, 204 Tennyson, Alfred, 55, 125 ‘That’s Motivation’, 162 Thatcherism, 169, 194 The Buddha of Suburbia, 162 Thin White Duke, 157, 158, 161 Thompson, Rupert, 161 Tillman, Lynn, 49 Tóibín, Colm, 29, 97, 112, 116, 119 Top of the Pops , 166 Treacy, Daniel, 194 Trilling, Lionel, 97 ‘True Lover, The’, 100 Turner, J.M.W., 97 Tyndall, John, 89, 90

U U2, 34 Uspensky, Boris A., 24

V van Leeuwen, Theo, 36, 89, 92 van Oosten Boer, Caroline, 187, 188 Vauxhall and I , 174 Velvet Goldmine, 3, 7–10, 16, 54, 116, 131, 136, 150, 154 Velvet Underground, The, 39, 49, 155 Verushka, 38 Vidal, Gore, 34 Virgin, Prunes, 186, 187, 190 voice, 9, 12–14, 35, 38, 52, 53, 79, 88, 89, 92, 95, 101, 104, 106, 109, 127, 130, 136, 139, 141, 145, 147, 161, 163, 166,

233

171–173, 175, 180, 183, 186, 187, 190, 192, 198, 203, 204 Von Eckardt, Wolf, 26

W Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths, 136–139, 141 Waldrep, Shelton, 5, 10, 12, 17, 39, 49, 80, 81, 157, 160 ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, 155 Warhol, Andy, 6, 15, 38, 39, 43, 48–50, 55, 155, 157, 159, 202 Waterhouse, Keith, 161 Waters, Sarah, 161 Watson, Philip, 189, 190 Watts, Michael, 157 Waugh, Evelyn, 63 ‘We are the Dead’, 152 Weill, Kurt, 188 Weir, David, 37–39, 69–72 Wells, Orson, 8 ‘We Love You’, 35, 149 Wendell, Eric, 112 Whitman, Walt, 27, 46, 54, 55 Who, The, 144 Wilde Club, The, 100 Wilde, Lady, 20 Wilde, Oscar, 1–31, 33–55, 57–59, 62, 66, 67, 69–88, 91, 93, 94, 96–109, 111–150, 153–161, 163–165, 167–180, 182–204 Wilde’s Works An Ideal Husband, 23, 29, 63, 66, 74–80, 109 De Profundis , 2, 19, 29, 35, 39, 42, 44, 65, 67, 71, 97, 99, 104, 109, 111–113, 115–121, 123–126, 128, 130, 140, 145, 164, 171, 177, 186, 190 “Hèlas!”, 79 “Impressions of America”, 59

234

INDEX

Lady Windermere’s Fan, 74, 140, 203 Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime, 137 “Pen, Pencil and Poison”, 11, 13, 136–139 “Ravenna”, 25 “Roses and Rue”, 102 Salomé, 4, 21, 33–35, 37, 38, 85, 104, 157, 184–186, 197, 201 “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol”, 22, 30, 35, 98, 99, 130, 140, 186–188, 190, 197, 198 “The Critic as Artist”, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 24, 27–29, 48, 98, 100, 138, 158, 203 “The Decay of Lying”, 11, 13–15, 48, 66, 75, 99 “The Doer of Good”, 163 “The Happy Prince”, 3, 4, 63, 131, 133–135, 159 “The Harlot’s House”, 102, 103 The Importance of Being Earnest , 29, 34, 48, 63, 65, 70, 78, 80, 81, 87, 95, 109, 115, 203 “The Nightingale and the Rose”, 100, 101 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 2, 11, 18, 22, 29, 50, 61, 63, 66, 67, 70–73, 77, 87, 106, 107, 109,

115, 137, 144, 153, 159, 160, 163, 168, 187, 191, 193 “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, 11, 66, 71, 81 “The Truth of Masks”, 10–13, 139 Wilde Without The Boy, 130 Williams, Lucinda, 199 Williams, Raymond, 148, 152 Williams, Zoe, 166 Winters, Peter M., 37 Wolf, Werner, 4 Wolk, Douglas, 194 Wood, Julia, 61–63 Woodlawn, Holly, 155 Woods, Paul A., 164 Woolf, Virginia, 95 Wordsworth, William, 97–99 Wright, Thomas, 24 Wyatt, Robert, 147 Y Years of Refusal , 178 Yeats, William Butler, 169, 170, 188, 196 You Are the Quarry, 174, 177 ‘You have Killed Me’, 177, 178 Z Ziggy Stardust, 150, 156–159, 187