KEY POINTS:
First there were histories told through man's trade in commodities - for example, Mark Kurlansky's Cod and Salt. Now we have a biography told by way of a brilliant man's reading.
Twenty years ago Anglo-Irishman Thomas Wright embarked on a mission to read everything Oscar Wilde had ever read. A passionate Wildean since the age of 16, Wright faced a Herculean task.
In his lifetime Wilde was famous for being able to read a dense novel in three minutes. He would begin always at the end and justified this with characteristic wit: it was the same as overhearing a conversation in the street and wishing to know more. Legend has it that when he was quizzed on plot, he could answer with convincing detail.
Intimate devotee though Wright is, he suggests we side with modern science on this one - that it is an impossible feat. It was also just a party trick; a side show to a voracious intellect and lifelong hunger for words and stories. Wilde's consumption began as a small child, the beloved son of a fiercely Nationalistic Irish poetess and leading surgeon who entertained leading minds and wits from all over Europe.
It remained with him all his life, he even managed - thanks to the liberal MP Richard Haldane - to have books sent to him as his only luxury while in prison. He read in English, French and German - not only the classics and literature but also contemporaneous pulp.
In short, lively chapters Wright gives us the writer and his times. Like many a Victorian gentleman, Wilde prided himself on his extensive library. This was the time of 400 booksellers in London and the phenomenon of bibliomaniacs fainting at the sight of a favourite volume.
The library, in the house he occupied while he was married, was broken up and sold, a tragedy he perhaps never recovered from. Wright must be congratulated for tracing many of these books and including in his biography fascinating marginalia and details of wear and tear.
Like our own intellectual and writer Lydia Weavers, Wilde nibbled on the corners of pages. He also broke spines and spilt wine - he was not a gentle reader. One of the two books that had the greatest effect on Wilde were Walter Pater's The Renaissance, which caused a huge scandal on its publication in 1873.
Wright notes that it became "the bible of a whole generation of aesthetes" including W.B. Yeats, and that Wilde took strongly to heart Pater's "injunction to burn with a hard gemlike flame". The second and greater influence was Symonds' Studies of the Greek Poets.
At Oxford, Wilde was the centre of a revolutionary group known as the Oxford Hellenists who discovered Plato through that work. In the symposium homosexual love was presented as part of a natural progression - a man proceeds from the love of beautiful boys to the love of beauty and abstract virtues. The love of women was presented as sensual and degrading.
In a footnote, Wright buries the information that Symonds and Wilde differed from many contemporaries who enjoyed same-sex relationships in their brave attempt to develop a language for their passion, and for placing homosexual love at the centre of their lives. Wilde showered his friends and lovers with books. His first significant male love, Robert Ross, and later, Lord Alfred Douglas, were both recipients of books with loving inscriptions. The dust jacket of Oscar's Books announces that Wright's work "wears its scholarship lightly".
Occasionally it is perhaps a little too light - he tells us the story of Wilde's infamous, plagiarised Chatterton lectures twice and is prey to stating the obvious. For example, "Wilde's love of French culture was intensified and perhaps even prompted by his reading". There is also a fair amount of affectionate conjecture, which could annoy purists.
Since the 1980s contemporary readers have been exhorted to anticipate the Death of the Book. Wilde would rage at the very idea. For him, it wasn't only the contents that mattered; it was every detail - the binding of the book, the cover and paper quality, the margin and the font. Wright dubs him a "book dandy" who was furious when his own publishers failed to meet his high standards.
Oscar's Books should have a wide appeal - Wilde's aphorisms are scattered throughout. "An excellent man," he said of George Bernard Shaw, "he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."
The opposite could be said of Wilde both during his lifetime and afterwards. At the end of his life, his health and eyesight compromised by the bitter months in prison, he wandered Europe and continued to give and receive books.
A few years before his death he remarked, "I represented the symbol of my age and was only interested in myself. Now, in an age to which I do not belong, I find myself interested in others."
Intrinsically, reading is both a private and public activity. By sleuth, grit and no little flashes of inspiration, Thomas Wright has achieved a vivid and intimate portrait of a writer who continues to enjoy mythological status.
Oscar'S Books
By Thomas Wright (Chatto & Windus $49.99)
* Stephanie Johnson is an Auckland writer.
