Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I never thought I'd review a book for Amazon, but TRULY WILDE is far too interesting a book to ignore. Joan Schenkar has brilliantly balanced in-depth research, a talent for evocative prose, and an ability to recreate Dolly Wilde's extreme era and haunting personality in ways I've never seen in more conventional biographies.

This is a book which flatters its readers: it speaks to us as though we are almost as smart and witty as Dolly Wilde was. It also assumes that we are as sassy and adventurous as Dolly by presenting us with something far more imaginative than the old cradle-to-grave biography formula. TRULY WILDE was a real pleasure to read and I recommend it with real pleasure.

I've read with some interest the previous reviews of "Truly Wilde," and am not at all surprised that the author and her book would inspire such diverse -- no, opposite -- responses in readers. In this review, I thought I would try to explore the reasons behind those responses, in others and in myself.

To be frank, it took me several months to work my way through this book, an amount of time I rarely dedicate -- or need to dedicate -- to any book on the first read (unless I'm being paid to read and review it!). I was frequently driven to verbal expressions of frustration with the repetitive, coy, repetitive, acrobatic, repetitive prose style used by the author. I would put the book down on the nightstand, swearing not to pick it up again.

Then curiosity would get the better of me. Dolly is, after all, a fascinating, complex person, one who clearly suffered personal, public, and familial demons with amazing grace, while failing to profit from the many natural advantages granted by her personality, wit, style and physical resemblance to her famous uncle. She had it all, yet she had nothing, and in fairness to her I somehow felt it important to keep reading and, thus, pay tribute to her place in history.

And in fairness to the author, her prose is often brilliant. Whether or not she sat down and wrote the book from first page to last, in that order, she certainly seems to find her mark by the second half of the book. Her initial, clumsy and often annoying verbal acrobatics become -- by the final chapters -- a graceful ballet. It's a style that isn't always successful even when done well, and the contrast between the early chapters and the latter chapters may go some way in explaining the varied responses given by the reviewers here on Amazon.

The author quite consciously and freely admits in the introduction to having defied the traditional, chronological method of biography. Her chapters are not arranged in order of the major events in Dolly's life; rather, they are organized according to various themes, and in some respects this works. Unfortunately, the themes are not always so different from each other that they justify a separate chapter. As a result, stories and events are often told more than once, gossipy tidbits about the primary (and secondary) personalities are repeated throughout the book -- as if we needed reminding -- and descriptions of Dolly's physical, emotional and mental characteristics and states are given again and again.

All of which gives the feeling that you're riding on a carousel. The scenery starts to look awfully familiar.

I understand that the author's desire to take this unique approach was inspired by Dolly's own 'mode de vie.' Dolly lived in the moment, and each moment was as valid as any other, regardless of when it occurred. I admire the author's willingness to take a risk and tell Dolly's story in a thematic, rather than chronological, fashion. However, this method places additional burdens on the writer to make sure that she is properly guiding the reader along on an unfamiliar ride -- and unfortunately, Shenkar's all-over-the-map, alternately-flying-and-crashing prose makes this trip a difficult one, at least at the beginning.

To sum up, I'd suggest that anyone who is interested in the story of Dolly Wilde should read this book. It IS a fascinating story, and a window onto a world of women artists that we have rarely been offered. Try to get past the repetition and fireworks until you're at least into the second half of the book, when the author really hits her stride.

On the other hand, if the topic alone is of only moderate interest to you, you are likely to find yourself quickly bogged down and disappointed. Summer reading this is not!

This biography of Oscar Wilde's tragically fascinating niece Dolly did for me what no biography in recent memory has done: it put me in the living, breathing, highly personalised presence of its subject, and then it introduced me to a whole era of brilliant women of extraordinary accomplishment. I'll be re-reading and thinking about TRULY WILDE for a long time to come; I couldn't recommend it more. It was absolutely fabulous.

This is a brilliant & creative book about a fascinating life & time. Schenkar's style is as riveting as her subject. Passionately recommended! -A Reader From Portland

This was one of the worst books that I've read in a while and I'm so glad that i got it from the library rather than actually paying money for it. I could not bring myself to finish this book or wade through the author's self indulgent twaddle.

This book was more about the author writing about herself writing about Dolly Wilde, who seemed quite incidental to the author's need to promote herself. My warning bells went off when the author implied that chronological narrative biography was some form of male construct and as such, because she was writing about a woman, she felt quite justified in abandoning narrative and chronological structure and for a large part of the book...facts. Instead this was fluffy headed nonsense with fiction masquerading as biography; what the author didn't know, (because she points out so often that there were no real facts about Dolly Wilde's life) she made up with ham fisted prose. She further felt the need to introduce at least six pointless French allusions per page. I am at a loss to understand what biographical or informational purpose a 6 pages long palm reading of Dolly Wilde's hand print is meant to serve, except to convince the reader that the author is a fruitcake. This palm reading section is preceded by, of all things, a French version of a chicken Maryland recipe. This was an exercise in self-referential, self indulgent, post modernist garbage that has probably made Dolly Wilde less accessible to the wider public rather than more.

If you like books that are well written, contain facts, are organised in a semi-sensible way and are actually informative, then this book isn't for you.

With "Truly Wilde," author Joan Schenkar has reinterpreted and redefined the possibilities of the biographical form. Her strategy in recreating the world of Parisian intellectual and artistic salons in which Oscar Wilde's niece Dolly flourished in the 1920s - most notably Natalie Barney's Academie des Femmes - is stunningly iconoclastic, deeply compelling, and brilliantly written. From a base of scrupulous and capacious research, from interviews with primary sources and access to original documents, illustrated with a fascinating array of photographs, Schenkar uses a thematic rather than chronological approach to bring Dolly Wilde and her world to life, and to follow with fierce attention the course of her descent to a lonely death in London at the age of 45. Ms. Schenkar does not feel bound by academic niceties. Her book is rich in the odd detail - a palm reading, for instance, or a favorite recipe - that make that era and those brilliant characters as luminous as real life. In her hands, Dolly Wilde becomes a memorable and ultimately mysterious force of nature.

This is without a doubt the worst book I have ever read. The author's cohorts seem to have agreed upon "experimental" as the operative descriptor for this abomination. In these tedious pages, however, "experimental" means only this: bad research, no facts, meandering/aimless prose, lack of direction, and disorganization. Oh, yes, how could I forget? It also means enormous amounts of filler at the end, including recipes and a handprint analysis-all, no doubt, in an attempt to meet contractual obligations to the publisher for a page count.

Don't take my word for it. Read the New York Times book review that appeared when this book was first published. It was written by a well-known lesbian feminist, and one would expect the reviewer to be sympathetic. Instead, she ripped this book to shreds. Deservedly so, in my opinion.