Amazon.com Review
Oscar Wilde's literary influence, while enormous, has usually been seen by critics as exerting itself mostly on the stage. Yet Wilde's sensibility and art has had considerable impact on other literary forms and figures as well. Jonathan Fryer's Andre & Oscar is a fascinating and beautifully researched account of the complicated relationship between the Anglo-Irish wit who died in disgrace and the distinguished man of French letters who would eventually win a Nobel Prize for literature.
The Wilde/Gide friendship was intense even if their meetings were intermittent--they met only a handful of times (and Gide's career only began after Wilde's death)--and Wilde's influence on the younger writer was both paradoxical and formative. Fryer is an astute commentator on each writer's career and output (as well as their complicated personal relationship with lovers, mothers, wives, and critics), but his most original thinking is seen in the analysis of how the gayness of both Gide and Wilde--which manifested itself in radically different ways--lay at the heart of their writing. Andre & Oscar is a remarkable work of literary criticism and an important new addition to queer and cultural studies. --Michael Bronski
From Kirkus Reviews
Sticking to biographic routes rather than real literary parallels, Fryer (Dylan: The Nine Lives of Dylan Thomas, 1994) retraces a decade of crossed paths between the notorious playwright and the future Noble Prizewinning novelist. They had first met when Wilde was revisiting Paris after boosting his literary reputation with The Picture of Dorian Gray and relentless self-promotion. The young salon-hopping Gide, still wrestling with his Protestant upbringing and launching his own career in letters, was fascinated and dazed by Wilde's aesthetic doctrines, decadent paradoxes, and hedonistic habits. Fryer spends little time on their first intellectual exchanges or on those in later encounters, but duly examines the example that Wilde's life held up for Gide. Gide would later cast Wilde as Mephistopheles to his Faust in his novel Les Nourritures terrestres, but the francophile Wilde simply enjoyed the younger man's conversation and company (even for teasing). Wilde, however, had already discovered his own homosexual nature, while Gide would only come out to himself when he visited Algiers a few years later. When he encountered Wilde and his young lover, Alfred, Lord Douglas, on a subsequent trip there in 1895, Gide called Wilde in his diary ``the most dangerous product of modern civilisation,'' though this time he was referring to both Wilde's artistic celebrity and his open courting of scandal. The sordid scandal soon broke while Gide was still accompanying Lord Douglas and Wilde was back in London for The Importance of Being Earnest. The two men of letters would not meet again until after Wilde's release from Reading Gaol, with Wilde more a cautionary case than a role model. Reviewing Wilde's familiar rise and fall from Gide's perspective, Fryer finds a few intersections of the two mens interests, and biographical similarities in such matters as that each man indirectly injured his wife. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
