Oscar Wilde According To The Epistles. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, June, 2001 by Richard Whittington-Egan

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, editors. Fourth Estate. [pound]35.00. 1270 pages. ISBN 1-85702-781-7.

As sea-salt is to spume, so letters are to conversation, solidifying and preserving the froth of wit and wisdom, fret and fume, which would otherwise have died still-born on the air of their delivery. But more than that in the case of this gigantic bundle of the collected epistles of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde: the letters track his life. They are, as Merlin Holland, his grandson, points out, the autobiography that he never wrote', charting his footsteps from Irish nursery and school, through undergraduate days at Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen, Oxford, his aesthetic tour of America, which ate up 1882, and the brief candle-flare of success and fame before the setting of his feet on the via dolorosa, leading to prison, disgrace, exile and early mysterious death.

As these letters amply show, to think of Wilde as a greenery-yallery, light weight, green-carnationist teller of fairy-tales, and tell-taler of Society comedies, is to be naive. He was a first-rate classical scholar -- Classical Demy at Magdalen -- a highly refined, heavy weight, intellectual artefact.

It is fascinating to watch the character of Wilde change, chameleon-like, according to the features of the surrounding landscape of his life. As he sets forth to ascend the ladder, there is a leavening of respectful epistolary seeking after favour from those whom he identifies as potent providers of a leg up. Success brings a speckling of pomposity, a soupcon of arrogance -- both so tempered with humour and sagacity as to be overall unobjectionable.

After the fall, the veneer of art, artifice, paradox, epigram and metaphor grows progressively thinner, the underlying substance of the 'decent man' glows through. Out of Reading Gaol emerges the piecemeal De Profundis 'letter' addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas -- the full original manuscript printed in ninety-seven pages here. Finally come the letters of a penitent but unreformed remittance-man in exile, their sheets peppered with pound-signs, tirelessly plainting for funds.

The first major edition of Wilde's letters -- 'a landmark in modern scholarship' Ellmann called it -- was published on 25 June 1962. Work on it had begun in 1954, under the editorship of Allen Wade. He died suddenly in July 1955, and Rupert Hart-Davis grasped the nettle. For seven long years he slaved away, sporadically chronicling in his to-be-published correspondence with George Lyttelton, news of the netting of fresh letters and the progress of his obsessional, no-pains-sparing composition of thousands of hardwon, enlightening footnotes.

Hart-Davis collected 1,298 letters. In his The Letters of Oscar Wilde, he printed 1,098, discounting the other 200 as 'brief notes, often to unidentified people, of no literary, biographical or other interest'. In 1985, he published More Letters, containing a further 164. The grand total represented by the two volumes was, therefore, 1,262. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis died in December 1999.

This new centenary Complete Letters adds a further 300, that is, a total of 1,562 letters. But mere statistics aside, what is just as -- even more --important, is its remedial provision of the full texts of many letters previously culled from mere fragments in catalogues or typescripts disfigured by myriad inaccuracies. Thus the originals of the six letters to the English composer and pianist, Dalhousie Young, published in Resurgam (1917), edited by Clement Shorter, have come to light, and their sound texts are published here. Likewise, the twenty-five constituting Some Letters from Oscar Wilde to Alfred Douglas (1924). have had the results of A. C. Dennison and Harrison Post's inaccurate editing corrected. Similarly, errors of transcription which appeared in Sixteen Letters from Oscar Wilde [to William Rothenstein] (1930), have all been corrected by publication here of text taken from the discovered originals.

More importantly, it transpires that the thirty letters printed by Ada Leverson in her Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde: with Reminiscences of the Author (1930), had been heavily cut and doctored. Only eighteen of the originals were hitherto available for textual verification. Now, all but five of the originals have been found, and these, along with others which Mrs. Leverson did not print, are included.

The widespread deliberate destruction, or at least determined squirrelling away, of what were in the persecutory climate of 1895 thought of as incriminatory documents, in conjunction with the discreet sale of others outside the public arenas of the sale-room and the book dealers' catalogues, has made the garnering of the dispersed harvest timeously protracted and practically difficult. What does not help either, is the manifestation of a disturbing new trend: the keeping of Wilde's unpublished letters from being published, with an avaricious eye on future commercial gain.