Oscar Wilde

For anyone interested in the life of Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann's biography Oscar Wilde is well-written and exhaustively researched.  One learns that, for Wilde, his life was his primary work of art.  He wrote mostly poems, plays, and aesthetic diatribes.  But he worked hardest at creating himself and what he produced was an amusing fop who ruined his life and his genius by falling in love with Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensberry.  Douglas excelled at all the wrong things:  ingratitude, intemperance, and over-indulgence.  He spent Wilde's money without hesitation.  Queensberry, pugnacious and unforgiving, came to hate Wilde for what he perceived Wilde had done to his son and a prosecution ensued charging Wilde with indecent acts.  Douglas had participated in the same acts with some of the same boys.  In fact, it was Douglas who'd procured some of the boys for Wilde.  But Douglas, son of the wealthy Marquess, was never prosecuted, nor did he ever seem to recognize that it was Wilde, not he, who suffered most over the whole messy affair.  Wilde got the maximum sentence: two years at hard labor.  It destroyed him.  Douglas huffed and puffed and played the wounded poet but, as Wilde once recognized but chose more often to forget, Douglas was neither wounded nor poet.  He did nothing more than try to live off Wilde and his celebrity.  Wilde lived but 3 1/2 years after his release from prison and wrote only one thing:  his poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."  He disintegrated into bad times and disrespectability.  His former acquaintances shunned him either because of his homosexuality or because of his constant pleas for funds.  Always the spendthrift and high liver while gaining fame, he was reduced to begging and suffered repeated social affronts as those who once enjoyed his company now avoided it.  Ellmann writes that "Wilde's final illness was almost certainly syphilitic in origin." 

My final impression is of a brilliant mind wasted and ruined by what Ellmann refers to as "a berserk passion" for Alfred Douglas.  Even after being destroyed by his prosecution and imprisonment, Wilde could not resist a return to Douglas.  A less deserving recipient of Wilde's love and largesse cannot be imagined.  Once the Marquess died and left a fortune to Douglas, when Wilde was in bad straits and needed financial help, the cruel and greedy Douglas refused him. 

"My existence is a scandal," Wilde once said.  It was a scandal he willingly, powerlessly and indulgently rode to his premature death.