A New Love...

though I know there's no such thing as true love. Once, before it's time to bid adieu, love, one sweet chance to prove the cynics wrong!

Okay, the above quote from Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical, has next to nothing to do with Oscar Wilde, but get me started on a show tune, and I can do nothing but finish the phrase.

I am about halfway through Wilde's Complete Short Fiction (loaned by a friend who assured me that The Picture of Dorian Gray was one of the five books essential to life) and loving every minute of it. Its satirical didacticism reminds me strongly of my beloved Lewis Carroll, an association that may mean little to most folks, but to me is the highest recommendation.

There are, perhaps, five writers in this world who I can barely comment on except to say that I like them so much there is nothing else I can say. Lewis Carroll is among these ranks, along with Russell Edson and Virginia Woolf. Similarly, there are books about which I can do little more than ooze affection. Among these: I Capture the Castle, The Secret History, and The Once and Future King. For me, these books and authors are absolutely essential to life.

Oscar Wilde has yet to ascend the ranks of those I can't breathe without, but I have already accumulated a great affection for him, mostly based on his children's stories and his odd little piece, "A Portrait of Mr. W. H."

Of his stories, well, if I were a repressed Victorian child, constantly berated and punished, forced to read book after book with heavy-handed morals and characters of the most boring Aesop's Fables variety, I would long to read his witty stories. They tell of delusional fireworks, self sacrificing nightingales, poor overly generous Hans, and many more paradigms of virtue and sin. I can see how parents would mistake his stories for the typical morality tales widely published at the time--and how greedily the children would hoard them, keeping the secret of his sarcasm for themselves.

I went to learn more about Oscar Wilde, and I found a bewildering number of accounts. Something I find very interesting, in light of my soon-to-be trip to Dublin, is his loss of his first love, famed beauty Florence Balcombe, to the far more successful writer, Bram Stoker (author of Dracula, who attended Trinity College around the same time as Wilde)

Something else that (only in a purely Academic and Scholarly way, I assure you) interested me was Wilde's description of his sexual orientation as pederastic, a very interesting tradition, which I will have you research for yourself. I believe the term he personally used was Socratic--oh, those aesthetes.

But back, briefly, to Wilde's work. I loved "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.", a passionate portrayal of a scholar and his utter devotion to a literary theory, namely that Shakespeare's Sonnets were all addressed to a young boy in his theater company, for whom he wrote Juliet, Desdemona, Imogen, Ophelia, etc. He created this theory in a way that made it inscrutable, impossible to deny, except for one loophole--there was no such actor. It is a fascinating, darkly funny story, and I must only entreat that everyone read it.

Well, we've Wilde enough time away here... (I know, terrible.)

Molly