In Our Time - Oscar Wilde

Episode Date: December 6, 2001

Melvyn Bragg examines Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes. In February 1895 Oscar Wilde was at the height of his powers, he was known on both sides of the Atlantic, he was feted in London society and celebrated in the West End where An Ideal Husband continued to play to packed houses as The Importance of Being Earnest opened to ecstatic reviews. “The man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world” he is reputed to have said, and he seemed on course to do just that. But in April that year he was arrested for the crime of ‘gross indecency’ and his swift decent from omnipotence began; it ended five years later, when exiled and humiliated he died, famously ‘beyond his means’, in a Paris hotel.Wilde’s reputation spent a long time in the wilderness but just over a century after his death his stock is higher than ever before. Now that his rehabilitation seems complete how should we understand his legacy? Was Wilde a reactionary - the last of the romantics - or was he the midwife to modernism? Was there a coherent philosophy behind those beguiling epigrams or was there little more to aestheticism than dressing up and showing off? With Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, Regenia Gagnier, Professor of English at the University of Exeter and Neil Sammells, Dean of Humanities at Bath Spa University and author of Wilde Style.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in February 1895, Oscar Wilde was at the height of his powers. He was known on both sides of the Atlantic. He was fated in London society and celebrated in the West Zone

where an ideal husband continued to play to packed houses as the importance of being earnest open to ecstatic reviews. Quote, the man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world, unquote, his reputed to have said. And he seemed on course to do just that. But in April of that year, he was arrested for the crime of gross indecency, and his swift descent from omnipotence began. It ended five years later, when exiled and humiliated,

he died famously beyond his means in a Paris hotel. Wilde's reputation spent a long time in the wilderness, but just over a century after his death his stock is probably higher than ever before. Now that this rehabilitation seems complete, how should we understand his legacy? Was wild a reactionary, the last of the romantics,

or was he the midwife to modernism? Was there a coherent philosophy behind those beguiling epigrams, or was there a little more to his aestheticism than dressing up, or, as Wyndham Lewis bitterly put it, exercising his one trick of reversing conventional morality without saying anything very interesting about it? With me to discuss our school,

Wilde in the East Seats is Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University. Regina Garnier, Professor of English at the University of Exeter, and Neil Samuels, Dean of Humanities at Bath Spa University, an author of Wilde style. Valentine Cunningham, could you set the scene for us? Oscar Wilde's the most famous of his group, but who are his contemporaries in the 80s and 90s? Who are the East Thetes and how did they come together? I suppose the most important thing to think about Wilde is as a kind of... case, of course, famously, but also as a kind of convict really, he is at centre really a kind of pivotal person in the transmission into British consciousness and English literature of things that were going on in France, what you might call the sort of Baudelaire-Gotier

tradition, and becoming a sort of centre in Britain for a kind of art for art's sake, a highly east. aesthetic vision of writing. And of course he's surrounded by a whole group of young men particularly who are also looking to France, John Gray, Arthur Simmons, Ernest Dawson, Lionel Johnson, some of them not so young, of course, who are trying to, as it were, be decadent, highly urban conscious, highly kind of, well, no, there's no other word for it, highly modern, bringing, as it were, the city into literature, bringing a kind of post-Christian amorality, even immorality,

into their writing, and standing up for the rights of art, as opposed to morality or realism or the external stuff. Thank you very much. Neil Samuels, in his introduction to his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wildrides, books are well written or badly written that is all and he adds all art is quite useless which is an extension in a way of art for art's sake

in its way can you untangle what does he mean by this and is this a key statement for these seats I think it is and I think it goes back to to Peter and beyond that to Gautier and the preface to Mamazzo Mopin in 1836

and it's a key statement because it's trying to liberate literature from all kinds of utilitarian concerns and from being read simply for its moral content. Wilde is interested in

surfaces and in style. When he says all art is quite useless, it's what he's leaving out. You know, all art is not moralistic. At the same time, what separates Wilde from some of the other esthetes

of the period and from predecessors like Whistler is the fact that Wilde does have a very strong sense of the political implications and efficacy of art. And I think that makes him very distinctive and very important. Wilde's reach was extensive. This little dispute that's been going on, discussion over the last 10 years about high and low art and so on.

I mean, he was across it a hundred years ago. He was interested in the way women dressed, in interior design, in the decoration of the houses of working people, as well as being interested in translating from the French, writing in French, and so on and so forth. How can you just tell us how he, what impact that had? Well, I think it's Janus faced. He looks back deep into his own century

to these predecessors in England and France, like Peter, and Baudelaire and Gertier. He also looks forward into our century, and he does anticipate some of the central tenets of contemporary cultural theory. But to understand that that, that, Ban of his reach, I think you could take a touchstone. I find it quite possible to imagine

Wilde enjoying the Sopranos in a way that I can't of Thomas Hardy. The Sopranos, Chicago mobsters who spend their time watching the Godfather and behaving as if they're in a Martin Scorsese film. Martin Scorsese is in that film, never mind. But that interest in images and image making, wild is in at that very early.

at an age which is becoming saturated with advertising imagery. And Wilde wants to enjoy that and engage with it intellectually. He wants to exploit it. He treads a thin line, I think, between salesmanship and subversion. When he went to the States in the early 1880s, I think as Virginia says in her book, that costume, that be-nicobockered costume, which becomes an icon of aestheticism,

was actually a contractual obligation. He had to wear that in order to meet his, what, the Doily Cart Company, demanded of him. I've got to bring Virginia you in, but it would be a brave intellectual estate these days for advised women on how to dress, which he did very firmly, out with a whalebone, on with a loose shoulder dress, liberation through that sort of thing. That's as far as I can go on that. I'm lost on that, carry on. Virginia, I'd like to go to the two people behind Wilde, from Peter, who wrote famously a book on, that's got the

book on the Renaissance. He was a great influence on Wilder Dox. And Roskin was they those two see are very opposed and out of those two very crudely Wild got the basis for his thrust as an intellectual could you bring them in I can bring Peter in for science particularly one of the things that Peter did was to talk about the Mona Lisa as the culmination of evolution he was actually taking what he called the Darwinian idea and bringing the Mona Lisa her face the line in her face were written in centuries and centuries of evolution. And this led into the way the esthetes talked about human psychology. The esthetes, and then leading into the decadence,

human psychology was something that was a culmination that worked through time. And so psychology was complex. It was not Victorian in the sense that it was not always moving to a particular end. One's desires could be undermined by one's personal history. They thought about psychology in complex ways, which led directly into aestheticism in the sense that it is a particular moment, a particular picture of human personality.

Pater was introduced the idea of surfaces, the idea of style, the idea of, in a sense, art for art's sake and so on. Ruskin and the idea of a public-spirited morality. Let's play with those two, Peter and Ruskin behind this movement. If Peter is the sort of very complex psychology that takes on psychology, then Ruskin was the political economist of art. One of his most famous works is called the political economy of art.

And he took a particular idea that you could understand human history by seeing artistic works, by seeing the architecture around you and by looking at the visible surfaces of things. In that, you could actually read politics, you could actually read ethics, and that too was very much a part of what Wilde thought about. Art was so significant

that you could actually understand the history of politics and ethics in it. Do you think the Wilde found it difficult to bring both those influences to bear? Do you think he found himself shuttled between one or the other, or did a synthesis come easily to him? I think a synthesis came fairly easily to him. He was extremely intelligent.

He saw in the visible world the history that Ruskin was talking about, the history of social relations, particularly. He said that he made no social distinctions in his private life, and that is often taken as a kind of joke. But in fact, he was. a natural teacher in that he thought that people were equal. And Ruskin also thought that. Ruskin's whole project was to improve society.

And he thought that one way you could see improvements in society was by looking at the quality of the architecture around you, of the work around you. Neil Samuze, do you think that you can say Peter, Ruskin, when you look at Wilder, or if Peter and Ruskin become wild, have they made him sort of thinker he was? I don't think he really did form a synthesis. I think he collapsed the distinction between the two.

I think you have Ruskin representing an ethical approach to art, pay to insisting on the aesthetic approach, and while somehow managing to collapse the distinction, if we look at the picture of Dorian Gray, when he defends that novel against the attacks that it's immoral, he ends up talking about its ethical beauty. And I think that's a very brilliant insight into his own processes, because what he does in that novel is give us ethical content,

but make it an element of the novel's design, so that if Dorian isn't punished in some way, there's no closure, and we as readers feel cheated. He gives us that moralistic appearance of a moralistic ending, but it's cancelled, and it's partly cancelled, I think, by the pater-ease of the preface, because you read the novel through the preface, and there's a sense of a kind of,

deconstructive energy between this amoral preface and the moral shape of the narrative of Dorian Gray. Well, that implies that our listeners are deeply aware and have in front of them the preface of Dorian Gray and so forth. I'm not moving on swiftly because it's difficult to be while moving on swiftly to make it a little bit more general. I'm going to move on to the business of romantic or modernists in a sense whether he was looking back or whether it was looking forward. How did Wilde view himself and how did you view the view of himself, Virginia, has a reality. The actionary is a progressive. I certainly think he's a progressive, but I think the thing that you want to say about Wilde and modernism

is that he actually was making art a way of life. And I think the interest in Wilde is ultimately about making one's life a work of art more than making a work of art. As he said, he put his talent into his work, but he put his genius into his life. And I think that is a very modern idea. I think he's anti-romantic because he rejects, humanist notions of the deep, integrated, authentic self.

He releases into a world of self-fabrication and role-playing, and that looks forward. If he has any affinities with romanticism, it's with the sensuality of Keats and with the overreaching diabolism, almost, of Byron, I think. He certainly has nothing in common, in my view, with Wordsworth, who he really ridiculed in a number of places for turning the world into...

a kind of moral gymnasium. One of the several things you got wrong. Valentine. Yes, I think that's more or less right. And there's that lovely poem that he wrote about the sale of Keats' letters. And he was deeply involved, I think, emotionally, in the kind of image of the lovely life of the poet Keats, which ends in such kind of horror and disaster. And it is true, isn't it?

I agree very much that the sort of vision of the self which comes through in all of Wilde's kind of writings of every kind of kind of the idea of the self as being unstable, which leads directly forward into T.S. Eliot and Proofrock and so on, a very kind of 90s sort of character and it leads forward, of course, to the, the vision of the self, which you get in, I suppose, Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and there are whole pages of pages of page which sound exactly like a description,

like Virginia Woolf describing James Joyce describing the importance of the self in the one of who's unstable impressionistic and figuring. So you think there's no... You think that it is basically almost wholly looking forward. We're not talking about a figure who we can say this is the end of. We're talking about somebody who says this is the beginning of. Would you agree with that? I think he's precisely a transition.

I think that he brings up a lot of the stethicism of the 1860s, the 1890s, into the modern period. He's not formally, I mean, when you think about modernism as a formal movement, he's not formally like the modernist because he doesn't have the same breakups of narrative. He's known for his wit, and he's known for storytelling, and high modernism is not known for either one. It breaks up the stories. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, was a high modernist. was very, very dismissive of him indeed.

He was very dismissive, but that was largely because of Wilde telling stories and Wilde being a wit. Lewis breaks up the narratives. He has high modernist form in ways that Wilde does not. But Wilde's wit is extremely modern in that it breaks up the ideology. It breaks up the fixed ways of... He does this in reactionary forms. Not reactionary, he does this in traditional forms, doesn't it? I mean, he takes very traditional forms.

French play form when he does the importance, the ideal husband. So in fact, his second or third play Salome is written in French. So he uses the traditional forms and inside that he subverts the form. Doesn't subvert the form. He puts in different ideas. I think conventionally the way that Wilde was seen is someone who is trapped in those conventions and trying to break free and only really finds his authentic voice in the importance of being earnest. and the plays that precede it,

the social comedies in particular, are seen as failed attempts to establish a kind of authentic wildian voice. I think that's a bit misleading. I don't think he's incarcerated in those conventions. I think what he's doing is displaying them in a certain way with a certain style. He's borrowing deliberately and openly,

and his audience is expected to pick up on those borrowings, not to think he's simply a magpie who is purloining material, because he can't invent his own. But it is interesting that in his comedies, in his players' comedies, he's drawing on traditional French comedy, and in his great novel, as he's drawing on the traditional Gothic novel.

And so we're taking traditional forms. I'm just not... That's very modern. That's what T.S. Eliot does, right? It's the idea of borrowing from everywhere as putting together the tradition. It's a tradition that is not insular. It's a tradition that is cosmopolitan.

I mean, Wilde is not original, I think it has to be said. He is a great borrower. He's a great magpie. influences stick on him like mad. And we also have to reflect that the plays that were great successes on the London stage were written, of course, to make money. And of course they played with the conventions.

Otherwise, it wouldn't have got them produced. And it does seem to me that one should say that his most important play is the one that was first performed in France and in French, Salome. That seems to me the most important. of his dramas and it goes along with the picture of Dorian Gray and so on. I mean, you know, I think it's misleading to focus on wild, even the wild of the importance. Why do you think there was shaking effects going around the table.

Just a second. One of the time. You think Salome is the most important, pray. First to you. I suppose I think the importance of being earnest is when Auden called it a verbal opera. I think he was putting his finger on the way that Wilde uses. language and the importance of being earnest as being almost unique, that it is a language that makes you stop and think about the ideas. It's witty, it's very, very funny, but when

he says charity creates a multitude of sins, when he uses the language that makes you stop and think about all the cliches, that ends up being a very critical take, and I think Wilde's known for that kind of critique. I think his most important play is the importance of being honest. I think it's his most stylised, I think it's his most stylish, and I think it's his most political in a very indirect way. Salome, I think,

is a failed experiment. I think after Lady Windermere's fan when he made about £7,000 in the first year, and it was commercially successful, he tried to signal that his real affinity was with the European avant-garde, and he tried to plug into that. And what he produced

is a play which he thought was cutting edge, which now seems to me to be very dated. I mean, Lady Markby, in an ideal husband, says there's, you know, the danger with being very modern is you're going to become old-fashioned very quickly. We see that all around us. And I think that Stephen Burkhov's production blow-torched the text of all that 1890s, Brickerbrack and brought it alive, but it needs an approach as radical as that to save it from looking like something from...

It's an opera. I mean, it's known now primarily as an opera. I've got to go back to the guilty person, Cunningham, really, and the case has been made very strongly against. It's two to one on, and betting persons would say, you've got to run fast now, Valentine. I think my colleagues here are being deceived by the glitter and the flash. And as for a kind of moral force of the epigramatist, popular dramatist, well, I mean, it has no moral force at all.

I mean, the kind of simple inversions are just kind of games playing. It seems like a kind of verbal games playing. The charity creates a multitude of sins being a simple inversionist game's playing. Absolutely. And that's the kind of low side of, I think, Wilde's tremendous investment in what I suppose is one of the greatest and most impressive and daunting and moving subjects or visions of the self in and through the 19th century, and namely the sort of doppelganger motif, which Wilde pursues and nicely, it kind of takes the elements of that and gives us,

having said he's not original, it gives us the kind of original version of the doppelganger in the picture of Doreen Gray. And then, of course, at the same time, he's living this sort of story or myth by living in these two worlds, the world of the glitterality and also, the inverted world, the underworld, the world of the invert,

and so on which, of course, dragged him down. He put his life, if you like, where his imagination was. And I see the epigrammatist, aphoristic, Wilde, as giving the public a kind of, if you like, a kind of low version of the inversions of the doppelganger kind of myth and imagination. Let's talk now about it, tried to bring Wilde's life and his work together in a way. In the Renaissance, Walter Pater wrote, To burn always with this hard gem-like flame,

you've all heard this a many times, to maintain this ecstasy, success in life. What influence did that, Neil Samuels, do you think, have on the way Wilde lived his life, or did he just coincide with the way he wanted to live his life anyway? I think he was very heavily influenced by Peter, but I think what Peter does is give an intellectual justification

for Wilde's temperament and predilections. What it's about is, as Peter put it, forcing as many sensations and pulsations into every moment. And Peter's interested in the epiphany, in those moments which stand out, which have a kind of wholeness and a sense of form and a sense of value. And I think it's actually Peter's interest in the epiphany and through Wilde, that we get up to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

I want to come to Wilde's life and work in the last stretch that we've got. And Virginia, can I ask you, You quoted it earlier. It's fair. Everybody knows this. I put my genius into my life and my talent into his work. Well, did he and how did he? Yes, he did. I think he was very much torn about exactly the kind of material things that Neil is talking about. I think Wilde was very much attracted to modern life, to all the glitter of modern life. He's attracted to what we call commodity culture. He was part of a circle of young men who gave each other expensive goods. gifts and lived very well indeed. He was attracted to all that, but he was also extremely intellectual. And when he wrote from prison that the one thing he regretted was that he had been too materialist in his life. He didn't regret his sexual tendencies. He didn't regret any of that. He regretted being too attracted to the superficiers.

I don't answer the question. Can you give me some examples of how he put his genius into his life and his talent, which is a lesser thing than genius, into his work. He responded to... Or he just another of those inversions that has gathered attention for 100 years. Well, gathered attention to another 100 years, but when you actually try to crack it, it doesn't add up to much. He responded perfectly to different audiences. Well, lots of people do.

That isn't necessarily a genius. No, not lots of people responded perfectly. He wrote perfectly to different groups of people. He did the society comedies for a particular audience of people. He wrote the poems. He distinguished... He distinguished, Regina. I'm sorry, I'm probably being terribly for Dantica.

You mean this tragedy. You mean the so-called tragedy of his life. I'm trying to examine this sentence. I put my genius into my life. I believe that's to do with living. And my talents into my work. Now, your answer has always been he wrote this, that, and the other. That, for me, is work.

He tried to live freely. Right. He tried to live freely. And that is what he thought the aesthetic life was. The aesthetic life was he said, acting at the level of personality freed from the trammels of everyday life and he tried actually to live that way

and that would be a work of art I don't see his life as tragic many do many see his life as ending as a tragedy he had a fantasy of the beautiful life that could be lived by the highest and most engaged artists I'm just mildly interested

but what it would go to me knocked around like a lot of very talented rich glitter artist celebrities who do still now and then. It wasn't, though. He wasn't rich. I think that distinction. After 7,000 quid at the time for the lady, Winemier's phone was an awful lot of money. He spent a lot of money as well. He doesn't mean you're not rich. It means you spend a lot as well as being rich. Distinction between genius and talent is a rhetorical device. Well, that's an interesting answer. I think for sustaining his dandyism.

Because the dandy has to appear insoucant. The dandy can't be seen to. be trying hard. And he was repeatedly dismissive of his writing, I think, in order to get his, partly to get his retaliation in first, and partly to create the impression that he put no effort into it. Although in fact we know from looking at the manuscripts

that he revised and polished and worked hard through composition, emendation to performance. He was a professional man of the theatre. He worked very hard at that, but that doesn't fit with the dandy's poise, with the dandies noxulence, with the dandies cool.

Can I just draw you on this? When I said he had a fantasy of the beautiful life, I deliberately used the word fantasy, and I would go on to say, of course, you have to look at how beauty was defined for him. It was a matter of service, but dangerously, and this is where Wild put his life where his aesthetic doctrine was, beauty was for him always something below,

of what he could, scooped in, as it were, what in Dorian Gray is called the sordid shame of the Great City. It's a kind of spilted socialism. It was, of course, an anti-Christian gesture, an anti-conventional gesture, but the world of the rent boys and the male prostitutes and so on,

going down into the world of rough trade and so on, a world which had destroyed a lot of people, Wilde's friend, Simeon Solomon, went to jail for soliciting in public lavatories and so on, while knew, as it were, the dangers of all that, and yet he saw that as essential to the idea, it was the doppelganger, if you like, of the beautiful, glittering, dandy-esque surface world that he embraced also so eagerly. And that, in a sense, was partly where he put, he tried to build a kind of beautiful, not in any conventional sense, but in that sense, and that is, in fact, what this brought him crashing down.

Yeah, I think it's fascinating, because in a sense that the beauty allied with danger, which is the Pater idea, which leads onto the feasting with panthers, and that might be the sort of life, the hard gem-like flame, the life he wanted, that's where he maybe thought the genius was. He might be just thought that there was more quality of pleasure and imaginative satisfaction in leading this life, these forays to the east, which in his case was east London,

while he was a respectively married man in Chelsea and so and so forth. He might have thought that rather than the Tallinnitus's work, which had a sort of Ruskin-esque feeling of me. What did you say? I said, this is my Salome is so important and interesting to go back to that, because it is precisely a great image of the vision of loveliness as being also dangerous and destructive. He's always trying to find the relation of desire and taste

to larger motives. and that, I suppose, is Peter and Reskin. Thank you very much, Valentine Salome, Cunningham, Regina Garnier, Neil Samuze. We'll be back next week with Linda Partridge, Dawkinson, Steve Jones, talking about the gene. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

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