The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. Fourth Estate, 1,270pp, £35 in UK
On the last day of November, Oscar Wilde will have been dead for a century. Dying obscurely, bankrupt and almost alone in a shabby hotel in Paris, his wife and mother dead before him, his name doomed to decades of ignominy, even Oscar could not have foreseen the elaborate commemorations that attend his centenary. In London alone, three exhibitions are playing: at the British Library, the Barbicon, and the Geffrye Museum. In Dublin, RTE's Imprint series devoted a prime-time half-hour special to Oscar Wilde on October 30th. RTE Radio One has scheduled an intensive "Oscar Wilde Season" which began earlier this week and continues until December 10th, featuring lectures (some replayed) and readings from Wilde's work.
The actual day will be marked by a ceremony at his birthplace, followed by the posting of his poems on the DART. Over the coming weekend, the Oscar Wilde School of Creative Writing at Trinity College will host a major conference on "The Wilde Legacy". But none of these events is as significant as the publication of the centenary edition of The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde.
One of the editors of the present volume is the late Sir Rupert Hart-Davis. When no one knew much about Oscar Wilde and the biographies were scant on verifiable fact and Wilde's general reputation was as an intellectual featherweight, Hart-Davis published an astonishing almost-1,000 pages of Wilde's letters. Appearing in 1962, that edition of The Letters of Oscar Wilde transformed Wilde's estimation forever. Meticulously edited, intelligently annotated, the letters were a biographer's dream.
Here was an Oscar no one had seen before, dashing off letters to everyone, particularly the great and the good; Oscar the social butterfly, Oscar the charmer, Oscar the lover of society hostesses, lordlings, actresses and boys. Oscar the passionate campaigner for the autonomy of the artist and his art. Then, Oscar the martyr, who, from Reading Gaol, wrote to his former lover that astonishing letter, known only in part under the title of De Profundis: it was in this edition that the text of this letter was at last published in full.
That edition is the father to this final, authoritative one, whose very title - The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde - stakes its claim. Here its original editor, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, is joined by Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde's grandson, who completed the work after his colleague's death. Everything about this book is big. It is almost 1,300 pages and contains almost 1,500 letters, addressed to a staggering range of recipients: from W.E. Gladstone to Walt Whitman, from W.B. Yeats to Stephane Mallarme. I had forgotten how bold Wilde could be, packing off copies of his latest books to whomever might have influence: to Lord Houghton or Ellen Terry or Alice, Princess of Monaco, with a well-turned inscription. But the real charm is in Wilde's letters to his intimates.
For the first time in this volume, one has the complete script, along with an endearingly inept drawing, of an early letter from boarding school to his mama, Speranza. There are the notes written con brio to Robbie Ross, Reggie Turner, More Adey, and "The Sphinx", Ada Leverson. And the gilded love-letters to Bosie, which darken into the harsh cries of betrayal and loss. Open any page, and you are in the company of Oscar, laughing, ebullient, whose large mind wears its learning lightly, dashing off a phrase in Greek here or a letter in French there, as equally charming and erudite to friends as to fellow writers - and scorching to his critics. Not since the publication of the letters of Johnson or Byron has a reader so effortlessly entered the company of a writer or shared the moods of his mind.
For the scholar, there are now the pleasures of completeness. It is in the name of completeness that so many trivial pieces were included, such as telegrams and business letters. But these will be a help to future biographers, who need to fix a fact or a date - significantly, Wilde seldom dated his letters, so the dating of things in Wilde's life often assumes the finesse of an art-form. The footnotes are models of their kind; one could spend a day reading them alone, and from such a reading construct an entire picture of the society in which Wilde moved. In the interests of completeness, too, the editors have included such pieces as the fragment of a letter from A.C. Swinburne to Wilde.
Yet there is a difficulty. As one who has used the previous volume for the last 30 years, I believe that the new letters or parts of letters should have been flagged by one means or another. As it is, I stagger through the pages, hoping to be surprised. And, still, even while entering that complaint, I recognize that not flagging such entries is the editors' way of staking a claim for the authoritative and final status of this volume.
Let the scholars quibble. The true pleasures await that most desirable of readers, the intelligent browser. For that reader, there is a real story here. He will weep and laugh, and, while startled by Oscar's metamorphoses, still recognize that all that unfolds is, as Oscar once remarked, already inherent in his character and thus fated. Wilde writes as he talked, so one often finds in his dispatches the first trial of a paradox - or a philosophy - in a phrasing so fresh it seems the ink has scarcely dried.
In short, what the letters offer is the next best thing to Wilde's own presence. Opening this book, one walks into the company of a spirit so large and generous, of such dash and charm, that one is grateful such largesse has been captured at the very moment it is being distributed - to those recipients who were once as eager, as amused, as captivated as the readers of these letters will be today.