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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING WILDE | PAGE 2 OF 2 But did Wilde identify himself as gay? No, I don't think he did. He talked about his nature -- he was aware of what people's natures were, to have sex with their own kind. He wasn't an idiot -- he was fully aware there was such a sexual orientation, but the noun "homosexual" did not yet exist in the English language. I think Wilde had that advantage that he lived in a time when people were not nouns. You didn't ascribe labels to them. While he was aware of his nature and never apologized for it, he didn't shout it from the rooftops in the manner of a modern actor with a Larry Kramer sort of gay sensibility. And I think those who try to read that into Oscar won't find it there. You might as well wonder why Oscar didn't have a Web site. He was more mature than our age is. I mean, he had very little interest in sins of the flesh, or he realized that it isn't very important whether you call them sins of the flesh or not. The only things that matter are sins of the spirit. In that sense Oscar was quite religious. That's what so ironic -- the religious complain about sins of the flesh, but sins of the flesh are not the kind of thing that Christ would object to. What you do with your penis or your bottom or anything else is so supremely irrelevant in a moral sense. It's what we do with our personalities and other people that matters. When you decided to write a novel that suggested that the world might have been worse off had Hitler not been born, you knew you would offend some people's sensibilities. Michiko Kakutani's review of "Making History" in the New York Times, for example, seemed to dismiss it on moral grounds -- Which makes it an immoral review, in my opinion. The problem with our age is that it's all moral dogmatism but intellectual apathy -- and that to me is immoral. I was upset [with the New York Times review] not because it was an unfavorable review -- she had every right not to like it. I was deeply upset with the intellectual weakness of her argument, and the ethical weakness of it. For one thing, my publicist had asked that I put somewhere on the label that I was Jewish, and that a large number of my family had died in the Holocaust. And I said no, I really don't think that it's necessary to wear that as a badge to make the book acceptable. And I have a horrible feeling that if I had put that, she wouldn't have written that review. I never thought of the book as the least bit comic, and she's going on about "trying to do Mel Brooks" and so on. I don't think it's a comic book -- it's a book that has moments of comedy in it, because life has moments of comedy in it. The paradox of people who have no sense of humor is not that they don't find things funny, it's that they find things funny that aren't funny because they're so used to having no sense of humor that they overcompensate. So what were you trying to do? There were a number of things I was trying to do -- some of them deeply personal. Like most Jewish people, I've grown up looking at family photographs, and seeing certain relatives -- "There's your Uncle ___. Hitler killed him." It's a thing Jewish people say: "He was killed by Hitler." So the hero tries to make history, he tries to alter it. It's the kind of thing a junior-year philosophy student would be asked when studying ethics or philosophy. Twentieth Century. Genocide. Six Million Dead. One sperm hitting one ovum -- is that what did it? If that sperm didn't hit that ovum, can we be sure the world would be better? Humor is obviously tantamount to much of your work. Americans are often accused of having a less sophisticated sense of humor than the British -- do you think this is true? The English like to hug themselves in a very self-congratulatory manner with this thought that Americans simply have a gland missing when it comes to irony. There's truth in it, inasmuch as an ironic manner is somehow built into being British. American humor -- it's concretion, it's immense precision, whether it's a sitcom or a funny writer -- is so involved in the absolute. That's a very Wildean quality. People ignore sometimes how linguistically precise the great American comedians are. Americans will often castigate themselves for being sloppy in language but it's not true. American humor can be brilliant. When it comes to literature , though, in the desire of American novelists to prove their literary place in the pantheon next to the Flauberts and the Dickenses, they forget that Dickens and Joyce were humorists, comic novelists. Jane Austen was a comic novelist. Shakespeare was primarily a comic writer. Americans think the more serious you are, the more artistic you are. And that's actually a terrible mistake to make. That's one of the problems with the rather Mick-of-the-Thick style of Hemingway, who wouldn't have recognized a joke if he'd gotten home and found one in bed with his wife. SALON | May 7, 1998