"I was the pariah dog...a problem
for which there was no solution." --Oscar Wilde
Illustration by John Kascht
Roasting the Pariah Dog
A Centennial
"(Oscar Wilde) was a man of the 19th century who sometimes condescended to play the game of symbolism. Like Gibbon, like Johnson, like Voltaire, he was an ingenious man who was also right." -- Jorge Luis Borges
Only a reckless fool would argue with the late Mr. Borges and I'm not reckless, though he was only two-thirds right. Yes, Wilde masterfully played the game of symbolism (he was doing it before most people knew that there was such a game), and he was ingenious, at least. But was he a man of the 19th century, or more truly a displaced citizen of the 20th -- the Age of Symbols & Irony?
Like Mark Twain, Wilde not only possessed greater depth than is usually acknowledged, he was a world media figure at a time when mass communication was still in its rompers. Also like Twain, he understood that saying one thing and meaning another might be an effective way of making art -- as well as making sense -- in an increasingly kaleidoscopic society. He was, perhaps, the first artist to use the details of his own life to build a theater inside the public's imagination. Too bad he cut out in 1900; he could really be doing well right now.
This year is the 100th anniversary of Oscar Wilde's trial in London for "committing indecent acts." I didn't want to let 1995 end without making note of it. The trial was a tragic mess for which Wilde was largely responsible; he was given ample opportunity to walk away. It came at the zenith of his career and destroyed him, though it was also a third act worthy of his genius. Why he let events unravel as they did is a more complex subject than I'm willing to get into here. Let's just say that, among other things, Wilde seriously underestimated (or ignored) the mad-dog litigiousness of the man he choose to tangle with, the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his college-age lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
It began when the Marquess left his calling card at Wilde's club, the Albermarle. The card was inscribed "To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite" (sic). Shortly after he received the card, Wilde filed slander charges against the Marquess, who was tried and found innocent. The Marquess then filed charges against Wilde for "consorting with a minor." Wilde's first trial produced a hung jury, but at the second trial he was found guilty and sentenced to two years at hard labor. While he was in prison, he suffered from dysentery, hunger and, it seems almost certain, a nervous breakdown. Three years after his release, he died in Paris at the age of 46. The best that could be said of that ugly judicial exercise was a remark made a half a century later by Sir Travers Humphreys, who, as a young lawyer, was a participant in the trials: "One fact is plain beyond argument. The prosecution of Oscar Wilde should never have been brought."
Next page: A time-travelling secret agent?
