Customer Reviews

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For many years Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde was considered the definitive work on Wilde. Having recently finished Ellmann's book and just now having read McKenna's book, McKenna offers many new insights. He is not afraid to delve into many of Wilde's "uranian" <read "gay"> views. Ellmann has a sense of the straight outsider trying to understand a gay man's motives. McKenna offers a sympathetic view of Wilde's passion for "rent boys" and his loves for Bosie Douglas and Robbie Ross. McKenna is often sympathetic toward Bosie, but suspect toward Ross. By the end of McKenna's book Wilde is seen as a greatly flawed genius whose passions led to his destruction. "When the gods want to punish you, they give you what you want."

This well written and painstakingly researched biography offers a fascinating glimpse into the private life of Oscar Wilde. Wilde's witty plays and daring novels ("The Picture of Dorian Gray") elevated him as a darling and "dandy" of Victorian society for a brief period of time before his arrogance and brazen homosexuality brought his career to a screeching halt and sent him to prison. Wilde discovered that he was gay late in life and despite his marriage to Constance Lloyd, he made up for lost time with a succession of "rent boys," and acquaintances from the Uranian Society. The author quotes extensively from the letters of Wilde, his lovers, contemporaries and friends to exhaustively trace his wanton ways. What is most remarkable about this book is that it not only paints a vivid portrait of Wilde but the other characters in his life are not glossed over. As compelling as Wilde are also the stories of his unhappy wife Constance, the great love of his life Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas), Bosie's brother Drumlanrig and his doomed relationship with Lord Archibald Rosebery, Wilde's devoted friend (and former lover) Robbie Ross, and Bosie's vile father, Lord Queensberry, who brought about Wilde's downfall. The author also paints a vivid portrait of Victorian life and shows how Wilde's actions were a shock to the antiquated mores of the time. Gay audiences would be wise to read this book to gain an appreciation of Oscar Wilde's noble stance as well as be thankful that the attitudes of the world are at least not as bad as they were then.

It's my own fault. I wanted to read a biography next, I scanned the biography offerings on Kindle, saw one about Oscar Wilde and clicked "Buy Now" instead of "free sample". So let me make something quite clear: the "secret life" in question is Oscar Wilde's sex life.

Neil McKenna makes the case that no single biography can do justice to the whole life of any subject and proceeds from here. He set out to tell the story of Oscar Wilde as a homosexual man in Victorian England and most else in Oscar's life takes a back seat to that. This isn't the book I set out to read but I'm not disappointed to have read it. Somewhere along the way I received the wisdom that Oscar Wilde was just another metrosexual Victorian man until Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) rolled onto the scene. McKenna makes it clear that was not the case.

There is a whiff about this book of "reclaiming" Oscar. Yes, I'm convinced Oscar was a gay man and I'm certainly interested in rereading some of his work in light of McKenna's interpretations of Dorian Gray and Willie Hughes. On the other hand: Who knew reading about another person's sex life in such detail could be a chore? When Bosie and Oscar aren't bedding rent boys or other fetching creatures, they're racking up charges at five star restaurants and hotels. Unfortunately, that's all they seem to do a lot of the time and it gets a little dull. Maybe it's the mindless promiscuity involved, maybe it's that I'm not a gay man or maybe my Puritan roots go stronger than I realize but by the time the bailiffs came for Oscar I admit I was relieved.

McKenna is a tad myopic. Anything and everything is examined for tell tale signs that Oscar was gay and writing for a gay audience. Not surprisingly, he always finds signs. From Dorian Grey - ok, that's an easy one - to the Happy Prince, McKenna will have you seeing hidden messages everywhere. Bless his heart there isn't an inanimate object in your house that isn't a "code word for" for "Uranian love" when McKenna's on the case. This can lead to some giggle-worthy interpretations, my favorite being the "persistent rumor" that Saint Sebastian wasn't shot through with a hundred arrows but gang-raped by the entire Praetorian Guard and bled to death. Where do you even start on a theory like that? I'll start with the fact that I've never, ever heard that before nor does it make a lot of sense especially since the fact that the "arrows" didn't kill Sebastian is one of the reasons he was made a saint. He was actually beaten to death. (Unless I'm once again behind on the rumors.)

Still, I can't write this book off as all agenda and no substance. McKenna does a create a compelling portrait of Oscar Wilde as a man who accepted his sexuality and genuinely loved Bosie. Now why he loved that mess of a human being is anyone's guess. Bosie may have been the cat's meow in his day but that's no excuse to letting him in the house. Selfish, bratty, vindictive, nasty, and way too interested in young boys, Bosie nearly single-handedly creates the scandal that destroys Oscar and then tops all this by going straight in later life. You'll be hard pressed not to side with Oscar friends who want to keep him away from this human wrecking ball.

This is an interesting book. Not the definitive biography of Oscar Wilde but an interesting exploration into a relatively unknown aspect of Victorian life. Just bear in mind that sometimes a cigar is a cigar even when the smoker in question is Oscar Wilde.

To me one of the saddest tragedies of a literary figure was the downfall of Oscar Wilde. At a time when his play _The Importance of Being Earnest_ was delivering its initial laughter on the London stage, Oscar was arrested for his homosexuality, imprisoned, and ruined. In his last years, he never stopped making people laugh, but he never wrote for humor again, and he died at forty-six. As an outstanding literary figure of his age and a real celebrity, he deserves and has gotten fine biographies, especially that of Richard Ellmann in 1988. But Oscar was more than an author and celebrity. Neil McKenna's new book, _The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography_ (Basic Books) looks not only at Oscar's homosexuality, but at his commitment to the cause of the rights of homosexuals. "Gay Rights" in our time may still be controversial, but no one is shocked to learn that there is such a movement. In Oscar's time, homosexuality was criminal, a crime some thought worse than murder, and to have insisted on legal and social rights for homosexuals would have instantly brought on all the ostracism the Victorians could muster. Nonetheless, along with being unable to repress his own homosexuality, Oscar was unable to refrain from flaunting it, making it at least a subtext within his works, and campaigning in his fictional prose and poems for acceptance of homosexuality as a way of life. Oscar was a sexual revolutionary, a leader of others in the cause, and this large and well-researched biography concentrates on this aspect of an astonishingly complex, flawed, and lovable figure.

Oscar's short life was entirely encompassed within the reign of Queen Victoria, a time when the first homosexuals were coming out, often in the Uranian cause, that being the term by which he (and eventually Oscar's cohorts) would designate themselves. Toward the end of the 1870s, Aestheticism promoted a new gospel of beauty through art, idealism, and politics, and Oscar and others turned to this cause as well, with the idealism and attention to beauty permanently identified with the Uranian cause. The movement had nothing like an elected leadership, but since Oscar wrote and was widely quoted, and since he wore his tonsure and clothes in the most exuberantly Aesthetic fashion, he was a beacon followed by many. Oscar married when he was thirty, and had two sons, but the marriage was a failure. Like many homosexuals, have been seeking marriage as a "cure". He was bored by marriage, but invigorated by the lust, frustration, and irritation that his great love Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") gave him through the rest of his life. The two of them shared mountains of fine food, oceans of champagne, and battalions of lovers; McKenna's descriptions of Oscar's sexual appetites (anatomical details are not spared) are positively heroic. McKenna shows that in his ill-judged counterattacks on Queensbury, Bosie's father, Oscar was acting out "both an expression of his love for Bosie and an article of his Uranian faith," making him a martyr for love and for homosexual expression as well. He had chances to flee before his prosecution, and not only could he not abandon Bosie, but, as he wrote, "To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble."

We think of homosexuality in different terms now, but Oscar's battles have been largely won. There was no overt struggle for gay rights in his time, but even so, Oscar's efforts in the cause have been underestimated until now. He famously said, "I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work." The genius into life led inevitably to tragedy, and this is a great tragic story, the kind Oscar would have appreciated. He also would have appreciated the book's concentration on how he lived in his unparalleled way, always to excess. McKenna's is the book to read to bring Oscar the reformer and martyr to our times.

McKenna's book offers an interesting and thought provoking alternative to the view of Oscar Wilde presented in Ellman's biography - i.e., that Wilde did not come relatively late in life to homosexuality, that his early life and marriage was an intent at repudiation of a gay life that he had already begun to lead. This is a very intriguing view. However, I would respect McKenna and his work a lot more if he'd offered his theory as such instead of presenting it in flat-out statements of fact without references to back it up. If you're going to contradict a biography as well-researched as Richard Ellman's, then you'd better be at least as well-documented with your claims as Ellman was. Ellman presented careful bibliographic refences to every claim about Wilde's life that he made. McKenna makes claims about Wilde's life and the players in it (Frank Miles was homosexual...Ronald Gower was the model for Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, just to name a few) without citing any source for his allegations, which caused me to wonder if he was just making them up. Also, one of the sources that he DOES cite is Hiram Backhouse's memoirs, which even he admits have credibility problems. Yet despite this admission he cites them again and again in support of his theories, so that a great deal of his book is relying on the word of a man who claimed in the same memoirs that he was once fellated by the Empress of China.

My conclusion? The book is well worth reading fo Wilde buffs, but take the factual claims with a grain - no, a shaker full of salt.

Oscar, Oscar, Oscar. So witty and wonderful it still hurts.

In this terrific look at his life, author McKenna examines a side of Oscar that we've not been privy to before (at least not in this much detail).

Somehow, one comes away from the book with more compassion for the too-smart-for-his-own-good Oscar. Perhaps that is because we learn that he was, like the rest of us, subject to the pangs and pains that come with daring to live life on your own terms.

Excellent read!

After the disappointment of Selina Hastings's biography of Somerset Maugham, I didn't expect much from Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book that has served as an inspiration to Hastings. Still, I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, I really liked it.

For one, McKenna doesn't take on a task that would be excessively hard for him to carry out and never promises anything he will not be able to deliver. He makes it very clear from the start that this book is dedicated exclusively to Wilde's sexual biography and nothing else. Unlike Hastings, he doesn't attempt to cover every aspect of his subject's life or offer inane pronouncements on the subject of his literary work. Wilde's artistic production is discussed only in terms of its connection to his sexuality.

It is obvious that McKenna has done an incredible amount of research. However, he doesn't expose the readers to a barrage of irrelevant minute details of Wilde's existence. Every new personage he introduces is relevant to the culminating moment of the book: Wilde's trial. McKenna never forgets to attract the readers' attention to the information that will become crucial much later in the book. Every fact that the author mentions serves to advance the story, so it's easy to follow the narrative without getting distracted from the story-line. McKenna makes every effort to remain objective and never tries to offer inane judgements where none are needed. This is quite a feat for a biographer of somebody as controversial as Wilde.

In spite of McKenna's objectivity, Wilde comes off like a very disgusting individual who bullied underage boys into having sex with him and might have been on the verge of pimping his 9-year-old son to Lord Albert Douglas on the very eve of the scandal that eventually put him in jail. One of the reasons I rarely read writers' biographies is that I'm fearful of being so disappointed in them that it will prevent me from enjoying their work ever again. Of course, there are artists of such stature that you can forgive them anything. Francisco de Quevedo was an anti-Semite and a hater of women. Dostoyevsky was also a rabid anti-Semite who treated his wife horribly. Juan Goytisolo is a passionate misogynist. Still, they created works of art of such magnitude as to be enough to redeem our entire civilization with all its faults. In my view, Wilde is nowhere near that category.

Biographies are often boring, especially if they discuss people whose life journey has been written about and filmed many times. This is not the case with The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. McKenna offers some very interesting findings. I used to think that my knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Wilde's trial and incarceration was quite good. This book, however, proved me wrong. After reading it, I realized that the case was a lot more complex than I thought. The book really reads like a mystery novel.

Of course, I wouldn't be myself if I didn't find anything in this biography to make fun of. McKenna sometimes creates phrases that are quite heavy-handed. I will give you a few of my favorite examples:

Certain events were enough "to send him rushing towards the bacteriological sanctity and safety of marriage." You have to agree that the bacteriological safety of marriage sounds perfectly hilarious. Coupled with the general tone of the book that often borders on pompous, this turn of phrase is priceless.

"Oscar performed his husbandly duties manfully and to good effect. Just four months after her marriage, Constance found herself pregnant." It is highly debatable whether the appearance of children in such a loveless and miserable marriage was such a good effect, of course.

"The love of Oscar for Constance, and of Constance for Oscar, was a strangely arbitrary, ill-considered, precipitate sort of love." This sounds like there is love that isn't arbitrary or precipitate, which is hardly possible. A calculated and well-pondered sort of love is no love at all.

"The locus of Oscar's sexual interest in Constance lay in her virginity, and in robbing her of that virginity." I don't know how it's possible to "rob" anyone of their virginity, as if it were an actual object and not a social construct. It is especially difficult to do so within a fully consensual relationship.

"Pierre Louis is usually regarded as a red-blooded heterosexual." This, of course, immediately made me wonder what other kinds of blood heterosexuals might possess.

"The letters were from Oscar, Lucas D'Oyly Carte and others, and were indeed compromising. Wood knew that they were worth their weight in-gold." Given that letters don't weigh all that much (and here we are talking about pretty short letters, too), one is left to wonder whether their weight in gold was really that big of an amount.

"Charlie even accepted a preserved cherry from Oscar's own mouth. `My brother took it into his, and this trick was repeated three or four times.' It was quite clear to everybody that Oscar wanted Charlie to take more than just a preserved cherry into his mouth." We cannot possibly know what was clear to everybody who was in the room at that time or what Oscar wanted Charlie to take into his mouth. Thankfully, such heavy-handed attempts at guessing are very few in the book.

McKenna is, however, perfectly capable of creating a very powerful, pithy, incisive sentence. Consider this one, for example: "In the eyes of the Victorians, there was only one thing worse than a sodomite, and that was a proselytising sodomite." In spite of some minor slips, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde is a very good book that I enjoyed a lot.

I bought this book after reading a rave reviews in The Washington Post.

It is everything that it promised to be: brave, fresh, exciting, and

scrupulously researched. I have read most other biographies of Oscar

over the years and really thought that there was little left to say.

McKenna's biography has proved me wrong by proving not a wealth of new

and exciting material, but also a wealth of new insights and

interpretations. I cannot recommend this book too highly - it is a

beautiful and magical read. At the best part of 600 pages, it's a long

book, but for me it wasn't long enough. Incidentally, I don't

understand the comments of the latest reviewer about footnotes. In my

US hardback edition there are nearly 60 pages of notes which

scrupulously source every quote.

McKenna has carved his own niche among the Wilde biographies by concentrating on Oscar's homosexuality (too often marginalized or avoided by other writers), with emphasis on his long relationship with Bosie; McKenna considers theirs a great love affair, but it appears to have been something along the lines of codependency. It's quite remarkable how much detail is known about Oscar's antics through letters, journals and books, maybe too much, since this long read is at times a bit tedious as we move through one young man after another. McKenna has a couple of annoying habits as a writer -- all the young men couldn't have been quite as "breathtakingly" attractive as described, he makes a lot of suppositions about what someone must have thought, or might have done, and he's a bit melodramatic with the "but he would find out all too soon" chapter endings.

But these are quibbles. The book is important is several ways. Above all, it portrays Wilde as one of a group of early advocates of gay rights, a fervent believer that society and the law should treat homosexuals with equality and respect. It also provides a fascinating "decoding" of Wilde's most famous works by explaining the double, ie. homosexual, meaning of words, phrases and behavior on the part of his characters, who were often based on real people. The book paints a vivid picture of the seamy side of London's "Uranian" underground of rent boys, petty thieves and blackmailers and the "respectable" men who took their pleasure there. And it delves into his marriage, the ill-fated consequence of having to protect his reputation from the circling vultures.

Wilde is a fascinating, maddening subject, so sure of his own superiority that he considered himself above the law and the strictures of society, making him ultimately the instrument of his own self-destruction. This book will be of interest primarily to Wilde junkies and people interested in the sexual aspect of his life, but it should be read in conjunction with other bios, lest one get the impression that the great man did little but go at it like a rabbit.

Glenn Beck's superb biography of Truman Capote examines the writer's extraordinary literary gifts that, seemingly effortlessly, propelled him to fame and fortune before he engaged in a series of sordid affairs that made the end of his life (basically from the publication of "In Cold Blood" until his death) a mordid tragicomedy. After reading about the fascinating Capote, I looked to read about Oscar Wilde; I had read his "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "The Importance of Being Earnest" and thought the man a brilliant literary light. After reading the very lame "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde" I have changed my opinions of the man, and now think that Oscar Wilde may had been a genius but he was a glib genius (how's that for a paradox about the master of paradoxes?).

Like that of Capote, Wilde's literary ascension was natural and effortless. Neil McKenna's argument in "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde" is that Wilde's literary output was driven by his homosexuality. That may be true, but it may also be true that Wilde's literary output was also driven by his narcissism, his megalomania, and other psychological trappings of any genius. The author wants us to believe that Oscar's literary genius was propelled by trying to be a homosexual in a time that was violently suppressing homosexuals but all the evidence says that Oscar was perfectly comfortable with his homosexuality and he could care less what others thought of him.

The book is long and sprawling, and at the same time it's shallow and repetitive. Slowly the book builds towards a semblance of a plot. The sinister Lord Queensberry has two homosexual sons. The eldest is involved in a love affair with the British Prime Minister Lord Roseberry, and this son must kill himself in order to protect the political reputation of his lover. This drives Queensberry to persecute Oscar Wilde for having a love affair with his youngest son, Bosie. Wilde sues Queensberry for libel, and during the trial Queensberry's resourceful lawyers track down Wilde's numerous lovers, and it seems that Wilde is about to go to prison.

And at this particular point in the narrative Mr. McKenna must remind us of the historical import of the trial (or rather persecution of Wilde):

"Oscar's great transforming love for Bosie explains why he never took any of the chances he had throughout March, April and May to flee abroad...Oscar saw his trials and imprisonment as a 'monstrous martyrdom', but nevertheless a glorious one...Oscar sensed that his trial was historical, the first great battle of the modern age between Uranian love and an uncomprehending, persecuting world. Though he may lose the battle, Oscar hoped and prayed that he -- or his Sacred Band of fellow Uranians and their descendants -- would at last win the war." (pages 532-533)

Perhaps a more mundane explanation for Wilde's refusal to flee abroad was, even though homosexuality was a criminal offence, he naively believed he would not go to prison? And if he did flee would he not be cut off from his wife's income?

After the two years of prison Oscar Wilde elopes with Bosie to Europe, an elopement (actually, a drunken debauchery that involves paying for the services of a lot of boys) that lasts until both their families threaten to cut off their income. The threat of prison does not perturb our great hero, but the threat of poverty does? Clearly, our author does not have a good reading of his hero.

Glenn Beck's Capote biography was wonderful because he was loyal enough to his subject to tell the truth. Thus, Capote's death is pathetic and bathetic, a genius undone by his sordid alcoholicism and his petty love affairs. But, upon Wilde's death, McKenna chooses to simply elevate Wilde to sainthood: "A hundred years and many monstrous martyrdoms later, Oscar's men are outcast men no more and the love that dared not speak its name has at last found its joyful voice."

What lame writing, what a lame book, and what a lame life.