Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story Of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece [Hardcover]

Joan Schenkar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2000

A "born writer" who never completed the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination, Dolly Wilde was charged with charm, brilliantly witty, changeable as refracting light, and loaded with sexual allure. She made her career in the salonsand in the bedroomsof some of London's and Paris' most interesting women and men. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, she drenched her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs, and created continuous sensations by the ways in which she seemed to be re-living the life of her infamous uncle. In this revolutionary and very modern biography, Joan Schenkar provides a fascinating look at what it means to live with the talents but not the achievements of biography's usual subjects: those obliterating "winners"like Dolly's uncle Oscarwhose stories have almost erased riveting histories like Dolly's own. And she uncovers never-before-published evidence of the hidden life of the Wilde family and of the extraordinary salon society of Natalie Clifford Barney, Dolly Wilde's longest and most fatal attachment.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

She was lovely, sophisticated, and famous for her witty conversation, even in a social circle that was known for its fabulous talkers. The only child of Oscar Wilde's dissipated older brother Willie, Dolly Wilde (1895-1941) led a life as scandalous and glittering as her uncle's: she, too, loved her own sex, and her longest romantic relationship was with American heiress Natalie Clifford Barney, who was host of the most important Parisian literary salon of the 20th century. Unfortunately for Dolly's posthumous reputation, she "was an artist of the spoken word" whose only written legacy was her marvelous correspondence. Quoting liberally and perceptively from those letters, American playwright Joan Schenkar brings Wilde to life in a modernist biography that is written in prose as sparkling as Dolly's fabled bons mots. Schenkar eschews conventional chronology to consider Wilde's life thematically, from her lesbianism to her taste for smart society to her self-destructive identification with Uncle Oscar. She reminds us just how remarkable and accomplished were the women at Barney's salon (journalist Janet Flanner, novelist Djuna Barnes, and artist Mina Loy, among them) and how much they esteemed Dolly Wilde. Yet, her biographer downplays neither Wilde's addiction to drugs nor the sad loneliness of her death (possibly from a drug overdose) at age 45. This is essentially a tale of "squandered gifts and lost opportunities," Schenkar acknowledges, but she successfully provokes readers to share her admiration for Wilde's prodigal generosity with both her talent and her affections. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Dolly Wilde, born the year Oscar Wilde went to prison, bore a striking resemblance to her famous uncle and spent her life both burdened and animated by his legend. She inherited much of his charm, a portion of his wit and none of his genius. Consequently, she left behind little of substance save the fond recollections of her friends and lovers, among them salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, New Yorker Paris correspondent Janet Flanner and Russian actress Alla Nazimova, and several bundles of love letters. Such a dearth of achievement leaves a biographer at a considerable disadvantage. The playwright Joan Schenkar, who appears to have fallen as much under Dolly's spell as any of her contemporaries, resolves these difficulties by approaching Dolly's life thematically, inventing and dramatizing in the absence of fact, interpreting what facts there are from a variety of perspectives. Such an approach requires her to ignore chronology and with it whatever impact the larger historical and political context may have had on Dolly's development. What emerges is a flamboyant sketch of that glittering, often frantic, sometimes brilliant society of rich lesbians that flourished between the wars in London and Paris. In this milieu, Dolly seems a kind of lesbian Zelda Fitzgerald, self-destructive, addicted, often foolish and, by the end of her brief life, quite sad. Schenkar strives valiantly to make of Dolly's life a tragic work of art. While she is able to convey Dolly's charm and attractiveness, she is not quite as successful in convincing the reader that her subject is sufficiently consequential to merit a full-length biography. Illus.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 442 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Printing edition (October 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465087728
• ISBN-13: 978-0465087723
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,110,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars not just of interest to lesbians and Wilde fans, October 13, 2000

By 

Jesse Kornbluth (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story Of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece (Hardcover)

Dorothy "Dolly" Wilde was five years old when her uncle Oscar died in 1900 at the age of 46. But if anyone in the Wilde clan inherited his wit --- and his penchant for personal drama, sexual intrigue and an early death --- it was Dolly. She too died at the age of 46. In her case, though, a syringe and drugs were at her side.

Until Joan Schenkar wrote 'Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece," this fascinating woman was at best a footnote in books about chic lesbians. For Dolly never really did anything --- she drifted through salons and bedrooms, dispensing quips and sexual pleasure to the most celebrated lesbians in Paris and London. She was, says her first biographer, "an artist of the spoken word" --- and in 369 engagingly written, provocative pages, Schenkar proves it's possible to make us care about a woman who basically wasted her life.

Despite the fame --- okay, notoriety --- of her family, Dolly's early years were not promising. When she was very young, her father drank himself to death; her mother handed her over to an aunt and then a convent. That set her on a lifelong path in search of a stable home. What she found instead was Natalie Clifford Barney, a rich, wickedly witty American who seemed to welcome every artist of note into her Paris salon and every lesbian of note into her bed.

Barney's home --- and the London and Paris living rooms that Dolly loved --- was a stage set where Dolly shone. Someone asked: What will you do today? Her response: "Probably nothing but hesitate." A cousin wondered: What's made you so thin? "Requited love," she replied.

As a writer, Dolly's skills never really took her beyond letters. But what letters! Luckily for Dolly, Schenkar discovered 200 of her missives in an obscure library in Paris. In the absence of more sustained writing or accounts of Dolly's life by friends and lovers, these letters serve as an outline of her autobiography.

There was nothing ordinary about the life Dolly describes; she seems never to have done a single chore. Nor, for that matter, did she ever buy stationery --- she preferred the writing paper from the hotels and private homes she visited. "Darling, wait for me with open arms and let me fall breathless into them," she'd write. And you don't need much imagination to guess the reaction of her recipient.

Letter-writing was the closest she came to a discipline. In every other way, she was hot-wired to the moment and the pleasure it might bring. She lined her eyes with kohl and so impressed F. Scott Fitzgerald that he put her in a scene --- later, he cut it out --- from Tender Is The Night. She was a character: She ate the little knots off the top of a brioche. Was she constant about anything? Not really. Even when she was committed to a relationship, she never forgot that sex with others could be rationalized as "the logical conclusion to admiration." But a personality built on eccentricity, seduction and quips needs constant replenishment. Dolly took drugs to spark her conversation in the salon. And heroin to ease her loneliness after. The inconstancies of her lovers also took a toll. Dolly sometimes had affairs to get even with Natalie Barney (including one with Alla Nazimova, the brilliant Russian actress who would become the godmother of Nancy Davis, future wife of Ronald Reagan). And sometimes revenge was turned inward. When Barney "eloped" with an actress, Dolly slashed a vein in her arm. There would be three more suicide attempts before breast cancer and what may have been an accidental overdose of heroin ended her restlessness for good.

In the end, Schenkar writes, Dolly repeated Oscar's history. "I am more Oscar-like than he was himself," she said. Their uncanny physical resemblance was only the first similarity; more important was their shared penchant for excess, collapse and ruin. The key difference between Oscar and Dolly is that he cared about a career and she cherished the ephemeral moment that went unrecorded. "She seemed always to be in rehearsal for a final work whose contract she could not bring herself to sign," Schenkar concludes.

All of us, gay or straight, know people who are smarter and wittier than we are but who get nowhere in life. In an occasional flash of generosity and curiosity, we think that someone should pay more attention to them, that they could put their intelligence to some worldly purpose. They probably can't. Dolly Wilde was lucky in just one way --- her compelling, tragic life attracted a writer who is talented and dedicated enough to make her story matter.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A 6 Star Book, July 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story Of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece (Hardcover)

This is a sumptuous biography; innovatively written, beautifully researched, lavishly illustrated, and completely revelatory - but you'd never know it from some of the reader comments herein. Why is it that people who have apparent trouble with sophisticated writing and new forms for biography so love to post their misunderstandings?

I was working in London when TRULY WILDE was first published there. The media splash it made and the rave reviews it got - from such notables as Simon Callow, Jeannette Winterson, Edmund White, and Thomas Wright, to name a few - drew me to it immediately. But the Brits are used to experiments in biography; they have taken the form very far, and here in the States we seem to be plodding along with the same old linear forms to delineate the same old linear lives. Dolly Wilde's behavior was like mercury or lightening - she required whole new ways to describe her and Joan Schenkar has invented them. It is now our lucky turn to understand and appreciate Schenkar's methods and this is the kind of book by which readers themselves are judged.

What one reader mistakes for "repetition" in TRULY WILDE is the kind of variation poets play on a metaphorical theme. Schenkar tells Dolly's story but from many different angles and with many different techniques: it's a brilliant way to render this many-faceted character and her complicated era and Schenkar's use of innovative techniques provides us with with all the pleasures of Dolly's life and all the delights of a biographer's art. This is the kind of book readers will want to savor and re-read for years. It's exquisitely written - fully up to its fascinating subject - and if you had 6 stars available, I'd give TRULY WILDE all 6.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars meaning without words...a wisp of a shadow, July 1, 2004

By 

S. A Troutt (MURFREESBORO, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story Of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece (Hardcover)

How do you relate the life of someone who never stepped forward from the shadows of her disgraced uncle, Oscar Wilde? Someone who sparkled like a thousand shards of a broken mirror on a sunlit day?
Dolly was a wisp of a shadow, mesmerizing, bewitching permanently etching herself into onto one's memory with her mere presence. Those who knew her well, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Honey Harris - true wordsmiths all- struggled to explain her enigmatic aura. Captivating, enchanting - adjectives repeated over and over in a vain attempt to eplain her effect on all she met.
Her magic was her brilliant conversation, her charming turn of phrase, the impermanence of flowing dialogue that she wouldn't or couldn't commit to paper. She lived and died in 'The Moment' nothing else mattered. Her flame burned bright and then was gone - a willing(?) or fated victim to excesses she could not (and would not) control and the ravages of a body aged long before its time. Suicide? accident? Murder? The myth and truth of 'Wilde' consumed her all the same.
This biography isn't linear because Dolly didn't live her life linearly. Her life was moments of sight and sound and fury that the author captures completely.
How do you truly explain the unexplainable? This book is at it's best a series of half glimpses, whispered hints, or even dim reflections in mirrors (Dolly hated mirrors)of someone so busy 'living in the moment' that after that glorious moment she was gone with only the faint trace of pleasure and grace.
And somehow all that works and works well, this book recreates her life so much more then a dry recording of droning facts could ever capture of such a glorious spirit. No such dullness For Dolly Wilde! I highly recommend this book.