Neil McKenna: The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Reviewed MICHAEL LARSEN

The rise and fall of the great epigrammatist is well known to anyone with a literary bent, with Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest having rightfully been judged among the great works of English literature. Wilde is known even to those who haven't read him by a series of witty comments that have passed into lore. The antics of singer Morrissey and his gladioli fetish, and Stephen Fry's portrayal of the great Irishman on celluloid have contributed to flesh out the details. To a point.

As with any great figure, however, there tends to be more myth than truth, and so this detailed, somewhat scholarly tome fills in some of the blanks, correcting misconceptions, and chronicling in superb, nay exhaustive, detail the whirlwind life that Wilde led. McKenna's agenda is to detail Wilde's sexuality, his love of boys, his tempestuous relationship with Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) and how his love of the love that dare not speak his name, his belief in art as the great redeemer and his unassailable hubris, all led him from the salons of Europe to the dingy confines of Reading jail.

McKenna is exceptionally literate, and The Secret Life shows a passion for research one rarely encounters. McKenna leaves no stone unturned, unearthing lovers, letters and details of Wilde's life that are utterly absorbing. While his love of his subject is obvious, McKenna in the end leaves us to form our own opinions of the tragedy.

Was Wilde a true artist who used his belief in the Uranian movement and the acceptable tradition of Greek paiderastia as a basis for his insatiable passion for young flesh, or a manipulative Svengali who, by employing a policy of tag-and-release, ensured he satisfied his sexual urges without the complication of emotional entanglement?

You decide. Wilde was certainly arrogant, egotistical, a user whose wife and family suffered intolerably at his own selfish hand, a genius with a childlike belief in the healing power of beauty, and a man with the blind courage of the unerring believer who went to prison for his art, his lover and his cause.

A fascinating account of one of literature's great figures, filled with the genius of his published and personal writings, and tragic in its somewhat sorry outcome.

"Why is it that one runs to one's own ruin?" Wilde asks himself towards the end of his life. Why has destruction a fascination?

Resigned to his fate he concludes: "Nemesis has caught me in her net: to struggle is foolish."

* Random House, $29.95