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Also this issue: It’s (not) a Living Culture Vultures Walter Mosley Children’s Books Book Quicks |
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March 27-April 2, 2003
cover story
Revisiting the legacy of Oscar Wilde, two very different authors find surprising common ground.
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." With these words, written in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, Oscar Wilde beckoned his readers to see his face in a work considered by some an allegorical vanity mirror but understood by others as a window on a life spent married to society’s prejudice.
Two new volumes aim to refract the reflection, each filtering Wilde's elusive legacy. Louis Edwards' Oscar Wilde Discovers America plays off Wilde's public persona while hanging on to a scrap of fact -- the existence of a young, well-educated black valet who accompanied him on a whistle-stop lecture tour of the United States. A Cheshire Cat Dorian Gray homage, Will Self's Dorian: An Imitation twists in another direction, shifting the setting to the gay scene of early '80s London and New York, where idealistic artist Baz creates a video installation based on pouting club kid Dorian, introducing him to a shallow, image-conscious social circle -- all grin, little substance.
Edwards plunges a fully fleshed characterization of the author into 1880s America, hopping from the newly invigorated cities to the introspective post-Civil War South. Traquair, assigned as Wilde's companion and selector of cravats, wears his internal contradictions on his sleeve: The son of former slaves who shares his house with liberal white family friends, his way of speaking emulates Wilde's exclamations. Yet his early enthrallment with Wilde, who appears to him as a "dazzling" sunflower with a "dense circle of ebonic intensity" at its center, acts as a disappointed judgment on society itself, which would rather fawn as Wilde delivers yet another dissertation on beauty than plumb its very modern prejudices.
In virtually the only factual incident included, Traquair is refused a sleeping-car berth on a Savannah-bound train on account of his race. Wilde's acknowledgment of the event is held until the end of the book (Traquair's narrative makes no mention of it at the time) and reflects the failures of Wilde's aestheticism: Can the purveyor of the belief in beauty in art turn away from condemning the moment when image trumps humanity? The question, for once, is not rhetorical: Wilde never forced the issue, and confesses as much to Traquair, expressing at the same time his passion for the younger man as he watched him face prejudice. Historically, we know Wilde's desires for younger men never end well; Edwards' account suggests that Wilde, cravenly, chose never to defend them from the prejudice he knew so well.
Self's Dorian, meanwhile, neither enshrines history nor skimps on the details of how humanity chases its tail. Dorian himself, greedy and borderline-demented, lives a fabled gay-scenester life until hedonism is challenged by the incipient AIDS epidemic. Henry Wooton, his chaperone into the frayed vestiges of aristocratic society, soon loses track of him, as Dorian dashes between Soho and SoHo in search of the best drugs, venal pleasures and murderous escapades.
Our extraction from this full-barreled decade comes when the manuscript of Dorian: An Imitation smacks on the table at the start of the epilogue, after Wooton has died of AIDS. What we've been reading, it turns out, constitutes Henry Wooton's imitation of Wilde, an inflated autobiography twisted to reveal the worst qualities -- the imagined greed, lusts and fear -- of his lifelong friends. Yet, like that pesky video installation whose tapes slowly degrade, aging Dorian's beauty to a not-very-good-looking corpse, this manuscript's creation had a purpose: The "real" Dorian Gray -- a Blairite champagne socialist whose self-satisfied charitable efforts include ostentatiously caring for his HIV-positive friends, avoiding the virus through pious clean living and hanging out with Princess Di -- is as repressed as Wooton's creation Dorian is morally unfettered. Yet, having read what his old friend sees in him, this Dorian's final struggle is to find which side of himself is more monstrous. The manuscript, like the portrait in the attic, nags at his beautiful existence.
That implication is left neatly in Edwards' tale, too: Many years after the tour has finished, Traquair comes across a published account of the tour, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, which makes no mention of his attendance. There's always a part of the whole locked away, dusty, ready to be revisited at a later date.
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