LOUIS MENAND
257
condescending, affection for Wilde, and there is enough truth in his remark to
make it clear why Wilde does not
rank
as a modernist. For
all
his insouciance,
Wilde could never bring himself to renounce the past. Though anti-Philistine,
his taste (like his prose) was Victorian. In conversation he was capable, as
with the famous remark about the death of Dickens's Little Nell, of memo–
rable put-downs; but in his published writings he rarely criticized, and often
praised with conventional praise-words, the accepted literary greats of his
century. There was much that Wilde hated about British culture, but it was a
kind of hatred he shared with Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin rather than with
Lawrence, Eliot, and Joyce.
On the other hand , no one would mistake Wilde for a sage, and the
deftness with which he ran intellectual circles around the earnest moraJisms of
his fellow Victorians makes him seem distinctly modern. Wilde's thought has a
streak of radical norninalism in it which sets him apart not only from conven–
tional Victorian morality but from Victorian literature generally - a streak that
once led Thomas Mann to compare Wilde (a little reluctantly, for the re–
semblance seems to have surprised Mann himself) with Nietzsche.
*
*
*
The object of Richard Ellmann's recent biography ofWilde: put
very simply, is the complete rehabilitation ofWilde as an important figure in
the history of our culture. Its strategy for reaching this goal is to downplay
whatever evidence there is that sustains the Bunthorne persona (in both its
negative and positive editions), and to reconcile Wilde's Victorianism with his
modernity. There is more to
Oscar Wilde
than this, of course. Wilde is one of
the small number of writers whose lives make consistently dramatic stories,
and the sureness and intelligence with which Ellmann moves, at just the right
pace, through familiar and unfamiliar episodes in Wilde's life have been justly
praised by most of the book's reviewers. The legendary undergraduate ca–
reer at Oxford, the wildly publicized tour ofAmerica, the fantastically ex–
panding bubble of fame, its sudden bursting, the final years adrift on the
Continent - EHmann gives each chapter a thorough telling. There is a fated
quality about Wilde's rise and fall that gives the life a literary shape - the
shape, for instance, of a story by Wilde's favorite novelist, Balzac. EHmann
manages to evoke that shape without letting it interfere with the freedom of
his
own narration.
StiH, this is not a book about British culture ofthe late nineteenth cen–
tury and Wilde's place in it.
It
is a portrait ofWilde. EHmann, sadly, suffered
from a degenerative illness in the last years of his life; he died shortly after
the book went to press. It may be that he had planned to
fill
in more of the
·Oscar Wilde .
By
Richard EHmann. Alfred
A.
Knopf.
$24.95.
