A Certain Genius
Barbara Belford
500pp, Bloomsbury
£25
Buy it at BOL
Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Neice
Joan Schenkar
457pp, Virago
£20
Buy it at BOL
Oscar Wilde famously claimed for himself a symbolic relationship with his historical epoch. And with some reason: for more than 10 years, certainly from 1890 to 1900, what you thought about Wilde was a reliable indicator of what you thought and felt about a whole range of emotive issues, ranging from specifics such as sodomy, interior decoration and the West End to more obscure yet fundamental notions of cultural and personal identity. His rise and fall made a front-page drama out of the meanings of masculinity and effeminacy, respectability and fashion, and modernity itself. This symbolic status has not faded over the intervening 100 years. Wilde has continued to function as a kind of cultural litmus test, his name a shorthand for all kinds of surprising allegiances.
Every decade of the last century found a different way of using Wilde to express its own concerns. In the era when his name was literally considered unspeakable, at least in this country, paperback copies of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Soul of Man under Socialism were badges of political radicalism. Meanwhile Strauss's operatic Salome of 1905 maintained Wilde's reputation as the ne plus ultra of decadence. EM Forster's Maurice, cowering unpublished in the closet in 1914, miserably branded himself "an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort". Each of the very different theatrical and film Wildes reinvented him in turn as the image of their own times. In the 1970s, his name was taken in vain by a new kind of badge-wearer; a popular button among stroppier queens of Liberation-era London read simply "Avenge Oscar". In our own time Stephen Fry, launching a film that, despite noble intentions, gave us the Wildean pill sugared with a 1990s mix of cost-free sympathy and celebrity, unblushingly compared Wilde to Christ.
So to what new uses will this brilliant and fascinating artist be put in our new, millennial and - as you have no doubt noticed - centenary decade? Who is Wilde now, in the year 2000? Sadly these two new titles, optimistically published to cash in on the festivities, fail to discover any new echoes or resonances in the magic name. The only sound generated is the rather ugly one of the barrel being scraped. Greedy publishers and lazy editors, rather than the poor besotted authors, must, I think, take the primary blame for this. Both Barbara Belford and Joan Schenkar have, in their different ways, fallen under the Wilde spell; but Virago and Bloomsbury might have done well to dampen or at least discipline their infatuations.
The idea of a new biography so soon after Richard Ellmann's magisterial heavyweight has an appealing chutzpah. Indeed, Belford is right to take him to task for his omissions, and my hopes rose when she promised to illuminate Wilde anew by grounding him securely in the context of both homosexual life and theatrical practice in the late 19th century. The problem is, she doesn't deliver. Although she repeatedly mentions that Wilde had sex with other men, she does nothing with the available historical facts. Picturesque but unsubstantiated speculation that things may have been rather neoclassical between the sheets - early exposure to Graeco-Roman statuary in the National Gallery of Ireland having led directly to intercrural copulation with Robbie Ross in the study at Tite Street in 1887 - really won't do.
Her account of late Victorian theatre is hopelessly clogged with irrelevant detail. I was happy to be told that the New York theatre was revolutionised in 1882 by Steele Mackage's invention of the tip-up seat, but unsure what this had to do with Wilde's attempts to stage a hit there. The effect of ill-digested research is pervasive: there are lots of things that need to be said about Wilde's father, but was such a dramatic account of his illegal acquisition of a set of mummified ibis ("sacred, long-legged, white wading birds") while on holiday in Egypt really necessary? Despite the promise that this is a "fresh look" at Wilde, the only really distinctive thing about this book is Belford's occasionally startling turn of phrase. I was frankly amazed to learn that in fin de siècle Algeria "boys showed their availability by scrambling up men's trousers". Belford claims that she has spent five years "getting to know the inner Wilde", and that the familiar material is delivered "with a new, centenary spin". Truth is, this is just a rehash: she has nothing new to say, and says it clumsily.
Joan Schenkar can at least claim to be first in the queue. Her contribution to the Wilde centenary is an oblique one: the first biography of Oscar's previously undocumented niece, Dolly. Although Dolly is the ostensible subject, Uncle is named at least once on every page; the constant comparison and overshadowing matches that which dogged Dolly all her life. By the time she hit the saloons of 1920s Paris, she was the last Wilde. This was her entrée, and she made a point of talking and looking like her uncle whenever she could. She was, according to girlfriends, both a notable wit and an uncannily convincing lookalike when in Oscar drag. Trouble is, she was precious little else; she took a perverse pride in never writing a word of fiction despite constant assurances that she was destined for literary greatness by virtue of the family aura. True, she dined with, borrowed from, insulted or slept with almost everyone in the astonishing rue Jacob lesbian salon, sliding into major addictions (fast cars, drink, drugs and "emergency seductions") before ending up face-down in a rented Belgravia flat at the age of 46. But while simultaneously injecting under the table and dishing the dirt on duchesses may have been chic, it hardly adds up to a career.
Schenkar tries hard to argue that this absence of achievement is itself significant, and that underneath the surface dazzle of proto-It Girl outrage there is a serious book about how the Wildean iconography of self-destruction was replayed in a feminine, feminist, modern and modernist world. I wasn't convinced. The opening chapters are spirited and inventive, but although this biographer is commendably besotted by her subject, and often stylishly successful in evoking an extraordinary lost world of Vionnet frocks and detox clinics, Dolly quickly began to pall. Her uncle's achievement was to lodge himself, for better or for worse, permanently in the public imagination. Dolly lived off his myth, rather than substantially elaborating or elucidating it. The same, I'm afraid, might be said for both these biographies.
• Neil Bartlett's new play about Wilde, In Extremis, is at the National Theatre.
