All statues are sculpted, but not all sculptures are statues.
A bronze bust entitled ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ was installed recently on Dovehouse Green—a small London park not far from where Wilde lived in Tite Street, Chelsea,
It is a posthumous work by the Scottish sculptor and graphic artist, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924—2005), made possible by a charitable foundation to mark the centenary of his birth, and its unveiling was also timed appropriately to occur on Oscar Wilde’s birthday.
The physical configuration of the piece renders our man of letters as a fallen and fractured figure. Metaphor this may be—but, absent a meaningful reading, its composition is inclined to suggest itself, ironically, as a symbol of divided opinion.
From Quill Classics comes a new full length video documentary written and directed by Erik Ryding: Wilde in New York.
Although Oscar Wilde is mostly associated with London at his zenith as a playwright, New York City also deserves a special place in his history. It was in New York, in fact, that his first two plays—Vera and The Duchess of Padua—had their world-premiere performances. During his yearlong tour of the United States in 1882, when he was a little-known poet associated with the comic character Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Patience, he sojourned in New York several times, establishing important social and artistic connections. Prompting newspaper stories wherever he went, he returned to Europe a genuine celebrity.
The Oscar Wilde Calendar Frank & Cecil Palmer Ltd., London 1910 [Mason 637-9] (Author’s Collection)
A New Earliest Example of Wilde’s ALLEGED Remark:
I have nothing to declare except my genius?
In my latest post I referenced the godfather of Oscar Wilde researchers, Stuart Mason, in connection with his unique scrapbooks of Wilde ephemera.
“Stuart Mason” was, in fact, the pseudonym of Christopher Sclater Millard, who produced Wilde’s first, and finest, bibliography, a decade-long study he conducted alongside his many other Wildean pursuits including authoring Wilde books, being his staunch defender, of the man, and sharing his experience as a fellow victim of state-sanctioned homophobia and imprisonment. He was also, crucially to our story, at one time the private secretary to Wilde’s literary executor Robert Ross, in whose circle he was intimately entangled.
I am not going to alleged that an allegiance to alliteration is actually alluring, but I allude to it in this little Oscar Wilde story, as it is about a Liberal politician, the Lord of Language, and the ladies Labouchère and Langtry.
Or perhaps it would be even more obscure, and thus more intriguing, to say it is about Henrietta Hodson, Hester & The Two Henrys, and The Home Depot.
Either way, we must first place the tale in context.
“Making Oscar Wilde” by Michèle Mendelssohn Oxford University Press (2018)
—Reviewed by: John Cooper—
As its title suggests, Making Oscar Wilde is an attempt to establish a premise for the shaping of Oscar Wilde’s persona—the latest in a history of such perspectives which has included disquisitions of his Irish roots, his American experience, his men, his women, his friends, his enemies, his wit, his letters, his published works, his unpublished works, his recorded life, his unrecorded life, and, for good measure, his legacy after life.
Now Michèle Mendelssohn takes a potentially useful and probably unique view through the prism of Wilde’s racial profile. On surface reading the work has much to commend it—but to discover whether it works as a construction we will have to disassemble it.
Screenwise, Stephen Fry is best known for playing Oscar Wilde in the 1997 movie Wilde.
The opening of that film shows Oscar arriving in town on horseback for his lecture in Leadville, Colorado, but the scene gives a false impression. Not because he actually arrived in Leadville by train. The point is that the 1997 film is not about Wilde’s time in America. Its story arc is the period of Oscar’s relationship with Alfred Douglas in Europe ten years later.
“May Morning on Magdalen College, Oxford, Ancient Annual Ceremony.” William Holman Hunt, 1888/1893. [Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 1907P132]
It’s debatable whether the name Ernest, used punningly by Wilde in his most famous play The Importance of Being Earnest, was chosen as a late Victorian code word for “gay”.
One the hand, the Wildean academic, John Stokes, suggests here this may be true “since the word ‘Earnest’ bears a euphonious relation to the [gender-variant] term Uranian”—presumably in the sound of its continental equivalents. On the outside1
Conversely, the actor, Sir Donald Sinden, who both knew and consulted Lord Alfred Douglas and Sir John Gielgud on the point, once wrote to The Times to dispute the suggestion.2
However, whether the words Ernest and Earnest are homosexual or merely homophonic, one thing is clear: the the name Ernest itself formed part of a gay literary subtext close to Wilde in the 1890s.
The 2018 Sundance Film Festival gets underway today, January 18th, and making its world premiere is The Happy Prince written and directed byRupert Everett.
It is the story of the last days of Oscar Wilde—and the ghosts haunting them brought to vivid life. His body ailing, Wilde lives in exile, surviving on the flamboyant irony and brilliant wit that defined him as the transience of lust is laid bare and the true riches of love are revealed. Or so it says here.
Expanding on comments made as a member of a panel discussion at the Oscar Wilde Festival in Galway, Ireland, 2014.
by John Cooper
(I) RISE AND FALL
Finding Oscar Wilde during his lecture tour of America in 1882 presented few difficulties. Throughout the year he made hundreds of appearances in public and thousands in the press. But his transatlantic sojourn was not merely prolific, it was a surprisingly formative time that saw Wildean firsts in all aspects of his career. Professionally, he nurtured the art of public speaking, began lecturing, and conducted his first press interviews. In his personal life he entered a new sphere of poets, writers, and statesmen; and he embarked upon a lifelong pattern of occasionally earning, but of always spending, large sums of money. Creatively, he became increasingly familiar with formulating his thought into thesis, while socially he was gathering material and honing epigrams for use in his early essays, short stories, and dramatic dialogues. Perhaps most surprisingly, it was in America that he staged the first ever production of a Wilde play.1 And lastingly, it was in New York City that the predominant image we have of him was formed with a series of photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony. After America, one might say, Oscar had become famous for more than just being famous.
Not surprisingly, given this degree of exposure and experience, contemporary opinion was that America had made a greater impression on Wilde than vice-versa. Supporting this view is the fact that his audiences, although they had attended his lectures, came to see rather than to hear him; and even though he was often personally liked, he was more often publicly ridiculed. Wilde’s maligned persona was so widespread that the ability to locate him in the abstract sense, even for those who had not seen him, also presented few difficulties. In sum: the breadth of his presence made Wilde familiar in person, and the stereotype of his character provided the measure of him as a personality.
We now see that Wilde cannot be so easily pigeon-holed.
