We Go Wild(e) for Oscar

We recently got a sunny day here in Dublin. Well, not an entire day, more like a half day. Actually, if we’re being perfectly honest, there were just a few hours when the sun shone. A little bit. Last month was the wettest July in Dublin in 140 years. While much of the world bakes, we marinate. So making hay while the sun shone, we took a familiar walk into the historic centre of Dublin, arriving at 1 Merrion Square. The house that sits on the northeast corner of Merrion Square Park is today the site of the American College Dublin, which specialises in creative writing and the performing arts. But that’s not the reason you see lots of tourists there every day. It’s Oscar Wilde, whose childhood home this was.

In a country that has produced so many great writers over the last nearly two hundred years – Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, and Beckett – Wilde nonetheless stands out. He was not so prolific as those other writers, though his early death at the age of 46 surely has something to do with that. He is so iconic perhaps because, although born before any of the others (in 1854), he has come to seem the most modern of all. And this is particularly striking given that he died before the twentieth century really started.

He was born (at 21 Westland Road, a stone’s throw from 1 Merrion Square) to Anglo-Irish parents. His father was a leading surgeon and a philanthropist, and his mother had artistic leanings: convinced that she was of Italian descent, she wrote poetry under the name of ‘Speranza’. She supported the cause of Irish independence. Wilde’s family home featured paintings and sculptures of classical Greece and Rome, and the dinner guests were often artists and intellectuals.

Wilde studied Classics at Trinity College, and then won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. Already at Trinity he had become known for his aestheticism (which emphasised beauty over function). And he cut an unusual figure at Oxford. Stories of his time there abound. We’ll tell only one, in the hopes that it’s true. At his examination at Oxford, a tutor who disliked him and wanted to show him up gave him the passage from the Greek New Testament describing the shipwreck of St Paul in Acts of the Apostles. It’s a difficult passage because it has a lot of technical language in it. Wilde proceeded to translate flawlessly (he was excellent at languages), at which point the disgusted tutor told him he could stop. Wilde then asked if he might continue, because he wanted to see how it all turned out. He graduated with a double first.

He returned to Ireland briefly but left for good in 1878, going to London. By 1882 he scheduled an American tour, where he gave a series of lectures. It lasted a year and was successful, though the American press ridiculed him mercilessly. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd and they had two sons. His marriage had already begun to unravel when he met Robert Ross, a 17-year-old determined to seduce him. It is thought that this was his first experience with a man.

Wilde’s most famous work is his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, but there are also a slew of plays, mostly written and performed from 1892 to 1895. These include The Importance of Being Earnest, Salomé, Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband. People especially enjoy his wit and famous one-liners, many of which have become part of everyday discourse. Here are some: ‘The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about’. ‘I can overcome everything except temptation’. ‘We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’. And he supposedly said to a customs when arriving in the United States that he had nothing to declare but his genius.

His fall from grace is perhaps as well known as his wit. He had met Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891 when the latter was twenty-one and they began a long affair. Bosey’s outraged father, the Marquess of Queensbury, accused Wilde of sodomy. Wilde decided to sue for libel, but the Marquess was able to prove the charge and that left Wilde liable for the Marquess’ hefty legal expenses. Wilde was then himself brought up on charges of ‘gross indecency’. The first trial ended in a hung jury. At the second he was found guilty and sentenced to hard labour for two years. Released from prison in 1897, he left for France and spent his last years in poverty and with declining health. He died of meningitis on 30 November 1900.

Oscar Wilde is buried, of course, not in Dublin or London but in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris at a grave always thronged with visitors. (We’ve been there!) Before 2011 you could go right up to the white monument, and many did, leaving graffiti and innumerable lipstick kisses. Today, a glass barrier around the tomb keeps admirers at a distance – though it now too is full of graffiti and kisses.