Defining the undefinable Oscar
"The truth is never simple," Wilde had written in The Importance of Being Earnest. And it is this hypothesis that forms the core of Gary Schmidgall's portrait of an intellectual giant whose literature looked beyond the parochialisms of pun for mere frolic. Written with compassionate can-dour, the work talks of an 'invisible' doing the 'impossible'—as Wilde might have said about himself.
In this book, Schmidgall seeks to establish Wilde as an intensely sensual being. Pinioned by Victorianisms, the writer's topsy-turvy convictions about creativity formed the basis of his literary thought: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim." By talking of a line of demarcation between art and the artist, Wilde seemed to be thriving on the edge of an ideology peculiarly his own. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent was still to come. But there was Wilde, ruminating ahead of his time, a visionary responding to queries unasked.
Yet, what was he? As Schmidgall asks, a jester or an acrobat, a Falstaff or a Hamlet? Indeed, he could jest at will; play a Hamlet while see-sawing between what was moral and what was not; be a Falstaffian Oscar while being naively self-daunting; an acrobat while he juggled with paradoxes in his creative prose.
With the support of extensive research, the writer lays bare a fact about Wilde's creativity: that his homosexual orientation fashioned his thoughts being as true as "Dorian Gray" itself. More important was the content of his conviction: "Nothing," he had said, "is serious except passion." Tragically, he died for it.