Wilde About Oscar

By Walter Kirn

All that's missing, it seems, are the dashboard statuettes and the black velvet portraits--but they will come. Almost 100 years after his death, in a multimedia postmortem comeback spearheaded by a Broadway play and a feature film (both British imports that hit U.S. shores this week) and including countless books and websites, Oscar Wilde, the infamously persecuted--some say martyred--gay Irish playwright, poet and novelist, is threatening to become the aesthete's Elvis.

The comparison with a redneck superstar might outrage bluestocking Wilde partisans, but it isn't quite the heresy it seems. Like Elvis, Wilde was a fiercely ambitious hinterlander who took the cultural establishment by storm ("I am not English, I am Irish--which is quite another thing," he stipulated). And here's the coup de grace: reviled as the leading bad influences of their day, both the King of Rock and the King of the Epigram have been resurrected as secular saints, albeit with slightly different constituencies.

But unlike Elvis, Wilde was one of his era's foremost men of letters, inordinately well-read and a master of irony. He was also a man of notoriously reckless appetites--for young men, fine things and controversy.

And yet, "there's a heroic generosity about the man that I find enormously appealing. He literally never passed a beggar in the street without giving him money." The softhearted populist is Oscar, not Elvis, and the quote is from English playwright David Hare, whose play about Wilde, The Judas Kiss, opens in New York City this week. Starring Liam Neeson, Hare's play examines the aftermath of the episode when words finally failed Wilde: the trials for "gross indecency" (1890s British legalese for homosexuality) that ended in his imprisonment and ruin but also assured his permanent status as a gay-rights icon.

Still, it's not Wilde's sexuality but his "mystery" that Hare says inspired him to write The Judas Kiss. (The play received mixed reviews during its London run.) By bringing a doomed libel suit against the Marquis of Queensberry--the outraged, decidedly macho father of Wilde's bratty, poetic young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas--Wilde unleashed the forces that in time consumed him. "There was an element of hubris," says Hare. "He may have thought there wasn't a situation that he couldn't talk himself out of."

He tried, of course. For a pitch-perfect record of the proceedings, rather than Hare's imaginative reconstruction of their aftershocks, audiences need only go off-Broadway to Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Taken entirely from courtroom transcripts and excerpts of Wilde's and Douglas' writings, the play opened 14 months ago as a sleeper hit and has since become a small New York City institution--The Fantasticks for humanities majors.

Wilde, the movie, starring British actor and writer Stephen Fry, examines Wilde's life from a wider angle and puts more emphasis on the sex. Fry is an uncanny Wilde look-alike, all droopy languor and portly insouciance, but the scene in which he slouches in a chair watching Douglas make love to a young hustler is a cinematic invention that has already drawn boos in England. Writer Merlin Holland, Wilde's only grandchild (Wilde's widow changed the family name to Holland to avoid scandal following his death), has made the scene Exhibit A in his indictment of Wilde as "gay-obsessed." "This is a film which at best leaves those people unfamiliar with Wilde with an impression of him as a man who jumped in and out of bed with young men," Holland told a London paper.

Perhaps to correct this view of the wit who said, "One should always be in love. This is the reason one should never marry," and yet did just that and even fathered two children, Holland has contributed his own book to the springtime flood of Wildeana. Published in the U.S. this month, The Wilde Album (Henry Holt; $19.95) weaves a biographical commentary around a collection of drawings, paintings and photos, some from private family archives. Besides portraying the flamboyant fop (whom doltish period cartoonists caricatured sniffing flowers) as a closet homebody, the compact volume provides yet more fodder for the Elvis theory. It documents Wilde's American lecture tour of 1882, when he was mobbed like a pop star by eager fans while speaking on two less-than-galvanizing topics: "The Decorative Arts" and "The House Beautiful." Wilde might not have gone in for Presley's blue suede shoes, but he certainly rivaled him for charisma.