The Importance of Reading in Earnest

BUILT OF BOOKS

How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde

By Thomas Wright

Henry Holt. 370 pp. $27

When he was 16, Thomas Wright happened upon a collection of Oscar Wilde's writing in a Cambridge, England, bookshop. He bought the book and later the same day began to read Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray," that languidly diabolical novel about the seductive young man who sells his soul for eternal youth. Wright was simply overwhelmed. "Wilde's elegant prose and his agile intellect dazzled me; I was thrilled, too, by his effervescent, Mozartian wit. . . . I was so enchanted by the novel that I read it fifteen, or perhaps even twenty times, sometimes finishing it and beginning it again on the same day." Having fallen under Wilde's spell, like so many others before him, Wright conceived of his "great literary mission. In a moment of quixotic madness, I resolved to read all the books my hero had read."

Twenty years later, the result is this exploration of "how reading defined the life of Oscar Wilde." For most people today, Wilde (1854-1900) is remembered chiefly as a wit or a martyr. Entire books have been assembled of his seemingly frivolous yet disorientingly astute quips and paradoxes: "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself." Certainly Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" rivals or even outshines William Congreve's "The Way of the World" for sparkling, ever-fresh comedy. Nearly every exchange, virtually every sentence, approaches the condition of perverse aphorism: "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. . . . No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. . . . The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."

While outraging middle-class values in plays and essays brought Wilde applause and wealth, his infatuation with Lord Alfred Douglas produced only notoriety, disgrace and imprisonment. Convicted for "gross indecency" in 1895, the social and cultural gadfly was sentenced to two years hard labor. By the time of his release, Wilde was a broken man. He never wrote anything important again, with the partial exception of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." (Partial because one must possess a heart of stone to read this long poem and not find it repetitive and maudlin despite the haunting refrain: "Each man kills the thing he loves.") Wilde's last years -- at loose ends in Europe, drinking steadily, utterly burned out -- were, in effect, a long, lonely suicide, and he died at only 46. His (probably apocryphal) last words were "Either this wallpaper goes, or I do."

Such was the desolate end to an always flamboyant life. As Wright reminds us, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wilde grew up in a privileged Anglo-Irish household, his father being the leading eye and ear surgeon of the day and his mother a poet, folklorist and translator. At Ireland's Portora Royal boarding school, the gifted boy excelled in French, learned the Bible "almost by heart," and began the training in Greek and Latin that would ultimately lead to academic triumphs at Trinity College, Dublin and a double-first at Oxford.

From an early age, Wilde also read widely on his own, starting with Gothic romances like "Melmoth the Wanderer" and "Sidonia the Sorceress" (translated from the German by his mother), but soon progressing to the witty society novels of Benjamin Disraeli and the tragic masterpieces of 19th-century French fiction: Balzac's "Lost Illusions," Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." Still, the young aesthete was particularly drawn to the lusciousness of Keats's poetry and the sensuous, luxuriant prose of Flaubert's "The Temptation of St. Anthony" and "Salammbo."

While an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde discovered in Plato, and especially in "The Symposium," an explicit justification for high-minded homosexuality. "Uranian" love, as it was sometimes called, was further defended in the influential Greek studies of John Addington Symonds and, more tacitly, in the impassioned essays of Walter Pater, then a teacher at Oxford, who called upon his readers to burn always with a "hard, gem-like flame." Wilde called "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" his "golden book," in part because it evoked, in Pater's words, the "subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence."

All these works found a place in Wilde's ground-floor library on Tite Street in London. Here he had the walls painted yellow and the wooden trim a reddish brown. Furnishings included a Persian carpet, a sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace, three mahogany Chippendale chairs, a bust of Hermes, vases of roses or narcissuses and a writing desk that had once belonged to Thomas Carlyle. In all, Wilde possessed approximately 2,000 books, about a quarter of them French fiction. It's not surprising that he also owned studies of Japanese art and decoration, "The Orchid Grower's Handbook," and volumes devoted to mythology and the occult, as well as standard works of classical literature, including that particular favorite, "The Greek Anthology," the repository of late antiquity's most elegantly risque poems. There was even a guide to mixing American-style cocktails.

Despite frequent ecstasies about sumptuous bindings and beautifully designed pages, Wilde clearly intended his library for use not ostentation. "Surviving copies of his books are generally in extremely poor condition," Wright explains. "Their spines are often fragile and their corners knocked and bumped." Pages show wine stains and inky marginalia, and sometimes entire sections have been cut out (when needed for lectures in the age before photocopying). By all accounts, Wilde could tear through a novel in just three minutes, then answer detailed questions on its plot -- a useful gift for a young writer, who supported himself by reviewing for Woman's World and other magazines. Later, in prison, Wilde said that the books sent by friends kept him from going mad.

Given its subject, "Built of Books" couldn't fail to be fascinating. Sometimes, however, its descriptions of certain works can seem jejune or slightly off-key: A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad," for example, is called a poem instead of a collection of poems, and Tolstoy's "In Pursuit of Happiness" is referred to as a novel instead of a book of stories. As Wright virtually admits in his last chapter, he didn't actually read everything he mentions and has sometimes passed over writers important to Wilde, among them Petronius, Mallarmé and Edgar Allan Poe. Even Ruskin is given little more than a footnote, though Wilde once listed him as his favorite prose writer (along with Plato).

Still, "Built of Books" is thoroughly entertaining and useful -- even though this American edition leaves out an entire suite of colored plates. When you read about the glories of an edition of Wilde's "The Sphinx" "bound in vellum and gold from a design by Ricketts (see plate 9)," you will have, quite literally, nowhere to turn.

Dirda -- http://mdirda@gmail.com -- writes in Style on Thursday.