Alex Ross on Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray Rewrites

In this week's New Yorker, music critic, sometime DJ, and married gay Alex Ross looks at Oscar Wilde's full career and zeroes in on the pivotal changes he made prior to submitting The Picture of Dorian Gray: "Even before Wilde sent his manuscript to the typist, then, he was hesitating over its homoerotic content, and especially over the pages devoted to Basil’s desire." He says the downshifting revisions "betray a rising anxiety, an urge to lower the emotional temperature."

Ross finds the two recent biographies to be "almost comically contradictory portraits."

Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde presents "Wilde is an intellectual dreamer who rarely steps outside the literary realm" and "even suggests that Wilde discovered his sexuality in the pages of Plato."

Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde presents him as "a largely sexual being who reads in order to find a language for his desire and writes in order to speak that desire aloud...McKenna, by fixating on Wilde’s sexual life, arrives at an oddly unflattering portrait. Preying on young literary fans, paying off rent boys, picking up lads as young as fifteen—Wilde is stripped of his charm."

Later, Ross argues:

"The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man. In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence. Anarchists of the fin de siècle, especially in Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (“There is no reality in things apart from their experiences”) and that various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde (“We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”). Nietzsche and Wilde were, in Mann’s view, “rebels in the name of beauty.”

Readers may find the timing of the piece curious, as if the editors had sidelined it until the slower August stupor. Parsing these Dorian Gray changes was a literary pasttime four months ago, with the April publication from Harvard of the "uncensored" version, which alas only restores 500 words. Music fans may wonder how Ross can work in Neil Patrick Harris and Tony Kushner while excluding The Smith's many references to Wilde and, most important, Pet Shop Boys' quote from his sentencing, And I, my Lord, may I say nothing? in "DJ Culture." Devastating and danceable.

Comments

[Skye Winspur]

Ross says Wilde's aspirations for gay men did not include "the right to join the military or to marry in church." How the hell does he know?

He also misidentified Antinous as the emperor Hadrian's "slave."