WILD ABOUT WILDE

I have just finished reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Not having read any of his work before - he only wrote one novel and this is it - I found it was like going from black and white reading to technicolour! I have now borrowed John's copy of Wilde's Complete Works and after I re-read Dorian Gray I plan to move on to his plays and poetry.

The book is full of witticisms, repartee and all those quotes you see on postcards and coffee cups:

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

*****

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

He is the master of revealing truths through paradox. He states: "The way of paradoxes is the way of truth." Absolutely.


Frank Delany in his James Joyce Re:Joyce at Series No. 42 [see side bar RE:JOYCE] talks about this very thing: "Paradox - statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth."

One example from the book: I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

Wilde personified the aesthetic movement. His life and writing was all about art for art's sake. He loved beautiful things. His writing reflects this and his life-style did too. It is he who, in the way of things, started the idea of having a "house beautiful" of which there is a whole industry devoted to this now. Every day, he said, he found it harder and harder to live up to his blue china.

There are some great salon conversations in the book about American women vis-à-vis British women, also witty observations on American culture. (We are talking just before 1900.)

A whole century later Gaby Darbyshire of Gawker summarises exactly the same subject (and in the same voice as Wilde) in the February 2011 issue of Tatler magazine:

"The best way I ever heard it put was by a professor at Cambridge…He said that for Americans, the most important thing is to be sincere and the worst is to be pretentious. For the British, the most important thing is to be witty, and the worst is to be boring. But for Americans, English witticisms are pretentious and, for the British, American sincerity is boring."

_________________________________
Photos: Wikipedia and Tatler magazine