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Overview
An entirely new kind of biography, Built of Books explores the mind and personality of Oscar Wilde through his taste in books
This intimate account of Oscar Wilde's life and writings is richer, livelier, and more personal than any book available about the brilliant writer, revealing a man who built himself out of books. His library was his reality, the source of so much that was vital to his life. A reader first, his readerly encounters, out of all of life's pursuits, are seen to be as significant as his most important relationships with friends, family, or lovers. Wilde's library, which Thomas Wright spent twenty years reading, provides the intellectual (and emotional) climate at the core of this deeply engaging portrait.
One of the book's happiest surprises is the story of the author's adventure reading Wilde's library. Reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges's fictional hero who enters Cervantes's mind by saturating himself in the culture of sixteenth-century Spain, Wright employs Wilde as his own Virgilian guide to world literature. We come to understand how reading can be an extremely sensual experience, producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429935098 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2010 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Thomas Wright was educated at Saint Thomas More School in Bedford, England. He lectures frequently on Wilde, and has written countless articles about him. The author of Oscar Wilde's Table Talk, Wright lives in Genoa and London, and sometimes writes about subjects unconnected with his hero.
Thomas Wright was educated at Saint Thomas More School in Bedford, England. He lectures frequently on Wilde and has written countless articles about him. The author of Oscar Wilde's Table Talk, Wright lives in Genoa and London, and sometimes writes about subjects unconnected with his hero.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
'Hear the song of Oscar!'
When Wilde made his entrance on to the world's stage on 16 October 1854, his mother came up with a name that produced intensely romantic vibrations: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wilde. Christening was a matter of the utmost importance for Wilde – like one of his fictional heroes, he believed that 'names are everything'.
Lovely names, he thought, could make even the ugliest objects beautiful: cigars were vile things, but when called 'nut-brown cigarettes' they became charming. Wilde's friends too, were altered forever when he baptised them anew with names drawn from books. What unimaginative people referred to as the 'real' world could be transformed, apotheosised, and endowed with meaning through words, which took its brazen objects and magically turned them into gold.
It was imperative then, that the bloody, screaming baby boy was licked quickly by language into shape and significance, and elevated from the mundane and formless world of nature to the golden world of words. Wilde's mother, a famous poetess, proved equal to the task by conferring on her second son a name both marvellous and musical (Wilde's elder brother, Willie, had been born in 1852).
Two of Wilde's names, 'Oscar' and 'Fingal', were drawn from James Macpherson's celebrated eighteenth-century Ossian poems, which were based on ancient Celtic mythology; O'Flahertie was the name of a famously fierce Irish clan. Fingal is Macpherson's name for Fionn MacCumhaill, the legendary Irish poet and warrior king. Oscar is Fingal's grandson, and the son of the poet Ossian. According to one Celtic legend, a version of which Wilde would narrate years later, Ossian is enchanted by a fairy woman called Niamh, who carries him over the seas to Tír na nOg, the Celtic country of the eternally young, where the fairy child Oscar is born. After three hundred years, Ossian yearns to revisit the land of his fathers. Niamh warns him never to dismount from his horse in the land of mortal men – if he does, the three hundred years he has spent in Tír na nOg will suddenly catch up with him. But alas, when he returns, Ossian's foot does touch the earth; his three hundred years suddenly fall upon him, and he is bowed double, and his beard sweeps the ground.
Macpherson's reconstruction of Celtic mythology, which draws on the rich oral folk traditions of Ireland and Scotland as well as on ancient manuscripts, has an epic flavour. It is full of archetypal stories concerning warriors, bards and women of ethereal beauty, who people a misty landscape haunted by ghosts and memories. The style too, with its solemn and plangent music and its extravagant formulaic epithets, has an epic grandeur. The young warrior Oscar is hailed as 'the chief of every youth', 'the King of many songs', 'Oscar of the future fights', and 'Oscar of the dark brown hair'. His father and grandfather continually exhort him to heroic deeds: 'O Oscar, pride of youth ... Pursue the fame of thy fathers ... Their deeds are the songs of bards.' Oscar takes up their challenge, and resolves to seek renown. Though he may fall, his death will be fully recompensed, so long as some future bard shall announce at the feast, 'Hear the song of Oscar!'
Lady Wilde, who liked to be referred to by her pen-name Speranza, chose the names precisely because they were 'grand, misty, and Ossianic'; she doubtless hoped they would inspire her son to deeds of greatness. She had glorious plans for her two boys, describing them as 'all I have to live for'. She looked forward to the time when Wilde's brother Willie would be 'a Hero and perhaps President of the future Irish Republic'. She harboured similar ambitions for her second son, later urging him to take the English parliament by storm as an MP; failing that, he must become the most celebrated writer in English since Byron.
Speranza encouraged her youngest boy to emulate his legendary namesake by dressing him in the garb of an Ossianic hero. In the earliest surviving photograph of Wilde, taken when he was about two, he wears what appears to be the costume of an ancient Celtic warrior. The infant looks out with his dark and heavy-lidded eyes; his expression is serious, his physique robust and his bearing stately. Even at that early date, he seems to have no difficulty in living up to his heroic name.
Speranza often read poetry to her children, and her fondness for Macpherson, as well as for other versions of the Oscar legend, makes it highly likely that Wilde imbibed the myths surrounding his name from his mother. Perhaps he heard them as he lay in bed in the Wildes' grand house in Dublin's fashionable Merrion Square, or in the nursery there. He would not, of course, have understood all of the words, but they would have enchanted him like a magical incantation or a piece of marvellous music. Wilde was described, by a visitor to the house, as 'an affectionate, gentle, retiring, dreamy boy', and such boys are often susceptible to poetry's sound and suggestiveness.
The fertile fancy of the dreamy boy was doubtless fired by the heroic images, as his mother declaimed Macpherson's sonorous phrases: 'O Oscar!' (she pronounced the name 'As-car') 'be thou like the age of Fingal. Never search thou for battle; nor shun it when it comes.' And with what delicious melancholy must she have read the passages that narrate his death. 'Ossian, carry me to the hills!' the blood-soaked warrior whispers at his last. 'Raise the stones of my renown ... place my sword by my side.'
Speranza would have performed the poem with gusto. Flamboyant, exuberant and innately theatrical, she described herself as 'wild, rebellious' and 'ambitious'. 'I wish,' she told a friend, 'I could satiate [myself] with Empires, though a Saint Helena were the end.' Instead, she satisfied herself by writing the fervent Irish Nationalist poetry that made her famous throughout Ireland, and by creating a grand personality. As part of her self-fashioning, she continually improved on 'facts' by lying about her age and ancestry; through such means, she kept her two bêtes noires, nature and the 'real' world, at a safe distance. Children often regard their parents as all-powerful sources of comfort and authority, but Speranza, who thought of herself as 'first cousin to Aetena and half-sister to Vesuvius' must have seemed goddess-like to the young Wilde. He worshipped and adored her.
Wilde was, in a sense, born out of a book and, when he looked back on his baptism, he was well pleased. He delighted in Celtic mythology, which, he said, revealed 'the loveliness of the world ... through a mist of tears'; his renditions of some of its famous episodes formed part of his repertoire of spoken stories. He also adored the 'passionate melancholy' of the Ossian poems. Macpherson's verse, he argued, had revolutionised 'dull' eighteenth-century literature and offered the Romantic poets of the succeeding century a 'well of undefiled pure poetry' to draw from.
Most of Macpherson's first readers accepted his claim that the poems were collated from the writings of the ancient bard Ossian. Historians of ancient Ireland quoted them as authoritative sources; archaeologists dated their finds according to the events they described. By Wilde's time, however, Macpherson's 'hoax' was quite exploded: it was widely known that the poet had conflated ancient oral and written sources with many passages of his own invention. The fact that Ossian was a 'forgery', or what might be called a 'bastard' book, did not concern Wilde in the slightest. He defended the poet, on the grounds that 'to censure an artist for forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem'.
Wilde was delighted by the sound of his name as well as by its provenance. As a two-year-old, he entertained a group of drawing-room guests at Merrion Square by reciting it repeatedly: 'Oscar, Fingal, O'Flahertie, Wilde ... Oscar, Fingal, O'Flahertie, Wilde'. While his school companions later laughed at these romantic appellations, Wilde relished them. He signed his early poetical publications, and autographed many of his own books, with all of his names; in later life, he lamented the fact that he was forced to drop some of them. 'A name which is destined to be in everybody's mouth must not be too long,' he explained. 'It comes so expensive in the advertisements ... All but two of my names have been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as "The Wilde" or "The Oscar".'
CHAPTER 2'The Irish imagination'
The 'golden book' of Wilde's early childhood was not really a book at all. The boy grew up surrounded by the traditional Irish folk tales his parents told him, the bulk of which were not published until long after his infancy.
In the nineteenth century, Ireland possessed one of the richest oral cultures in the world. The ancient Bardic schools, in which Irish poets were taught the elaborate art of Gaelic oral poetry, had been forcibly closed by the British plantation settlers of the seventeenth century, as part of the suppression of the culture of the native Catholic population that had accompanied their appropriation of its land. Yet the indigenous culture, and the spirit of the Bards, endured in the performances of traditional peasant story-tellers known as seanchaí who specialised in popular folk tales, which they narrated in Gaelic or English.
Wilde's parents, and many members of their Merrion Square circle, were fascinated by Ireland's native oral tradition. Their interest is noteworthy because they belonged to the Anglo-Irish elite, which had, in many instances, ancestral links with the British settlers and strong cultural ties with England. Educated, English speaking, and almost exclusively Protestant, the Anglo-Irish comprised the overwhelming majority of Ireland's urban middle and upper class, and formed its professional and governing establishment. They ruled the country under the English Union, which had annexed Ireland to the United Kingdom in 1801.
The Wildes' interest in Ireland's Catholic peasant culture was a corollary of their Nationalism. Notwithstanding their Anglo-Irish background, both of Wilde's parents were passionately committed to the Nationalist cause, which campaigned for the abolition of the English Union. Speranza, who had been brought up a Protestant and who had English blood, vehemently denounced the Union in the fiery words of her verse. She also took the exceptional step of having her children baptised twice – first as Protestants, then as Catholics. Her son's famous penchant for enjoying the best of both worlds, and for entertaining opposite, and often contradictory, positions, was thus fixed at a very early date.
Wilde's father, Sir William Wilde, was the finest eye and ear surgeon of his generation, a keen amateur archaeologist and a leading Irish antiquarian. He was also one of the country's first folklorists. He collected tales from the peasants who came to him for medical treatment, sometimes accepting a story as payment for his services. Many of these tales were recounted in English, but some were narrated in Gaelic, a language in which he was fluent. Sir William garnered hundreds of traditional yarns on his frequent tours of the West of Ireland, from the renowned seanchaí of the region and from the labourers who worked on the estate he owned at Moytura, on the shores of Lough Corrib. During family holidays there, young Oscar often listened to the peasants' tales in the company of his father. The stories entranced father and son, taking them back, according to one of their neighbours, 'to the dawn of time, which in Ireland began the day before yesterday'.
Sir William committed many of the tales he heard to paper, and published a small selection of them in magazines and in the volume Irish Popular Superstitions (1852). Speranza wrote a favourable review of one of his magazine pieces, and it may have been her article that first brought the couple together. Sir William wanted to publish as many of the stories as he could because he believed that print would preserve Ireland's oral culture, whose existence was seriously threatened by the depopulation caused by the Great Famine of 1845– 49. At his untimely death in 1876, at the age of sixty-two, Sir William's monumental labour of love remained unfinished. Speranza completed his work, editing and revising the remainder of the transcribed tales, perhaps with the help of her son, for publication, in two books, in the 1880s and 1890s. The adult Wilde owned and cherished both volumes. He penned an anonymous notice of one of them in which he described Speranza as an 'Irishwoman telling Irish stories, impelled by ... tradition ... and with a nursery knowledge at first hand of all characteristic moods of the Irish imagination'.
The folk stories published by the Wildes comprise a teeming, grotesque and luridly coloured world. The chief protagonists are the little people, or the fairies, who are mischievous or malevolent, according to their mood or race. Sometimes they are content simply to upset a milk churn, but woe betide the farmer who takes away their dancing ground, because their retribution is swift and lethal. They take a devilish delight in stealing the most beautiful newborn babes and substituting them with demons. The only means of discovering if a child is a fairy changeling is the terrible trial by fire, in which the baby is thrown on to the flames. In one of the Wildes' stories a child is hurled into a fire, where it turns into a black cat, then flies up the chimney with a terrifying scream.
It is a typically gruesome and bizarre episode from tales which articulate the very real fear of the fairies then still prevalent among the Irish peasantry and shared perhaps even by high-class Dubliners such as the Wildes. The tales record the fate of many children who have been carried off by the little people. They are usually whisked away to fairy palaces of pearl and gold, 'where they live in splendour and luxury, with music and song and dancing and laughter and all the joyous things, as befits the gods of the earth'. If the fairies are of the Sidhe race they transport their child captives to Tír na nOg, where they pass their lives in pleasure until Judgment Day, when they are annihilated.
The folk tales Wilde imbibed as a child form an autonomous fairyland, making little concession to the 'primary' or everyday world. They eschew ordinary rationale for the weird logic of dreams. Like inventions of the unconscious they are fragmentary, and move swiftly from horror to comedy; they also contain episodes of extreme violence and thinly veiled eroticism. Powerful human desires and impulses are personified in a cast of exemplary and mythical beings including witches, leprechauns, banshees, saints and talking animals. This is, in other words, a literature concerned with the inner landscape of man's fears and desires. Its realism does not lie in its accurate representation of the external world but in its articulation and excitement of intense feelings and sensations. Wilde's mother later expressed this idea when she congratulated her son on one of his own fairy stories: 'no matter', she said, 'how strange and fantastic the incidents, yet the pathos, the human pathos is always real'.
Wilde later objected to works of conventional realism in part because they made little appeal, or reference, to man's inner world. They offered instead an objective picture of nature, uncoloured by the unconscious or the imagination, which only addressed the reader's reason. He praised, instead, those artists (and writers) who see the world 'not merely [with] actual and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose'.
Wilde believed that the external world became more significant and familiar when viewed in a 'mythopoetic' rather than an objective fashion. Nature, he claimed, is brought to life, and becomes identifiable to us, through the stories we tell about it: thus the Greeks, in their myths, 'peopled the grove and hillside with beautiful and fantastic forms', in order 'to make Nature one with humanity'.
The folk tales that cradled Wilde performed precisely this function. Some of the legends in his parents' anthologies inspired the place-names of modern Ireland; they include stories in which the deeds of the little people leave indelible marks on the Irish landscape, such as the hollows that are still known in Ireland as 'fairy glens'. Most of the tales are attached to a particular place: it is as though they have grown up, irresistibly, from their native soil. Wilde loved the legends associated with the area around Lough Corrib, near Cong, in County Mayo, where his family had their country home. As a boy he was told that Finvara, the King of the Fairies, held his court at the Lough; he heard too, that weird female figures, carrying flames in their hands and thought to be the genii loci, haunted the summits of the rocks. Sir William decided to have the Wildes' holiday home built at Moytura because of a tale connected with the place. The house marks the site of the legendary Battle of Magh-Tura fought between the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha-De-Danann tribes. At that bloody clash, at which the sworn enemies contended for lordship over all Ireland, the giant magician Balor was slain when a stone was hurled into his evil eye.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Built of Books"
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Copyright © 2008 Thomas Wright.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Chronology of Wilde's Life,
Introduction: 'One of the greatest of the many worlds',
PART I Built Out of Books,
1 'Hear the song of Oscar!',
2 'The Irish imagination',
3 'Words that are winged with light',
4 'Soul-forward, headlong',
5 'A good book and a good fire',
6 'More than real life',
7 'At home with Lucien',
8 'Minute and critical',
9 'How to love Greek things',
10 'How to grow',
11 'The true liber amoris',
12 'The despotism of fact',
13 'Such a strange influence',
PART II The Library,
14 'Spirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile',
15 'Holy of Holies',
16 'The falser is the truer',
17 'More than usually revolting sentimentality',
18 'The vulgar beast',
19 'The look of a book',
20 'Sensuous and intellectual',
21 'Smoke and talk',
22 'Mirror of perfect friendship',
23 'Touched by other lips',
24 'Unseen ideal',
25 'Mysterious by this love',
26 'The heavy odours of the hothouse',
27 ''Arry!',
28 'Ribald titles',
29 'Queensberry rules',
PART III A Library of Lamentations,
30 'May I say nothing?',
31 'Humanity's machine',
32 'Silence',
33 'Books in his hand',
34 'The greatest consolation',
35 'Words of grace',
36 'Dazed with the wonder',
37 'Infamous Saint Oscar',
38 'There they lie',
39 'Interested in others',
40 'Rest peaceably',
Afterword: 'Tutti gli angeli',
Appendices,
Appendix I: Wilde's Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Subject of 'The Best Hundred Books',
Appendix II: Lists of Books Requested by Wilde, 1895–97,
Bibliographical Note,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
General Index,
Index of Authors,