Oscar: A Life

"I was surprised that a book could say anything new about Oscar Wilde , but it does. It’s just a wonderful all-round picture of this extraordinary, complicated man. It deals with his finances—which he was thinking about half the time and then not thinking about at all the other half of the time. But to understand his extraordinary explosion of creativity and then the terrible fall and all that came after, you’ve got to have an idea of how his genius made him money. I thought that was fascinating. “I was surprised that a book could say anything new about Oscar Wilde, but it does” The book goes well beyond the old Richard Ellmann biography, which for years seemed to be absolutely authoritative. It delved into his early life, which is fascinating. He came from this extraordinarily unusual family, which had its own share of scandal, and then made it from the Irish Protestant Ascendancy into an English world where he was clearly determined to be exotic. I think the author has to demonstrate that it’s important. It’s always interesting when people show that a subject we hadn’t noticed is important. Of course everyone knew about Oscar, and Oscar made sure that everyone knew about him. So the challenge of a book like this is illuminating a subject which we thought we all knew about. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The importance of Oscar Wilde is the writing at the middle of it. It’s the extraordinary brilliance of some of the best writing and the variety of it: The Happy Prince at one end, which makes you cry, and then The Importance of Being Earnest which you can laugh at, even if you’ve experienced the play again and again and again. Then there’s the way in which a great figure can be so self-destructive in a particular culture. All that seems to me to be hugely important. Then there is his posthumous significance as a gay icon, but he’s really not a very good example, not someone you could quote to young gay men as the way to go. But, still, it tells you a huge amount about sexual attitudes of his time and ours. Yes. That’s one of the great arts of historical biography, that you have to get past the self-perception of the subject and also the self-presentation of the subject. Oscar was all self-presentation; the whole life was a huge performance. So Oscar: A Life is very good at taking a cool look at Wilde and revealing just how self-destructive he was and how destructive he could be to those around him."