Tag Oscar wilde

Sing me all your memories (from Oscar Wilde’s poem The Sphinx)

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

We’re supposed to be going to Paris again in April. Work related and for an entire week’s worth of meetings. It’s like any other week of uninspiring meetings and yet, it’s Paris so it won’t be like any other meeting week. Going back to Paris is a chance to revisit old memories, search out the traces of old friends and maybe even to explore beyond the Périférique, that 35 km of noisy and chaotic ring road that mostly seems to get you to where you need to be. That’s part of the beauty of Paris though, at least for me: it somehow always delivers, always gets you someplace unexpected, but where it turns out you want to be. It’s a city you know you will always return to and if you don’t manage the return, you know you always will want to. Unless there is something profoundly wrong with you. Paris is like a lover from years gone by, full of promise and shot through with the tantalising scent of maybe, the enticing edginess of the unknown. Images of lovers known in Paris are obscured by images of the city. They get lost in the city stink, a blend of burnt cheese from the streetside crêpe sellers, the fading fumes of cars and lorries and the unexpected wafts of human scents, some lovely and some not so much.

Top of the list of my fave places is the Gare du Nord immense with memories of arrivals and departures, loaded with the possibility of the improbable. Right down to not being able to get the metro you want because they’ve closed some station or another. You raise your eyes in disbelief to an open vault of fake, glazed sky. The Gare du Nord’s roof shines light and bright and so far up that even tall people are impressed. The metro isn’t my favourite place to be, not in London and not in Paris. The noise has always been faint inducing, and the sudden gusts of train driven breezes always make me feel as if I am somehow on a path to somewhere otherworldly. But what gives the Paris metro the edge over the world’s other metros is the thrill of getting a train with the little handle you have to lift to open the doors. It requires a slightly silly little movement and for people with small hands the handles are the perfect size. For people with normal sized hands the little handles are probably annoying. I hope there are still trains like that when we go.

The metro is an easy way to reach the Père-Lachaise cemetery located in a scruffy bit of Paris where the traffic runs around the cemetery in what feels like a constant state of screaming hysteria. Hardly restful for the resident corpses. It’s where, along with other notables, Oscar Wilde rests. His friend and executor Robbie Ross moved Oscar’s remains to Père-Lachaise from Bagneux some fourteen kilometres away, in 1909. Myth has it that after nine years at Bagneux he was basically intact and that he had grown a beard. Hardly likely since he had been covered in quicklime as an aid to decomposition. Apparently it preserved him instead. It’s hard to think of what bodily remains of Oscar’s lie there under all that deco limestone. It’s sculpted into a flying angel by Jacob Epstein who said it’s “a vast, winged figure … the conception of poet as messenger”. It’s wonderful entertainment to watch the parade of tourists coming to visit Oscar, most of them because he is on a list of some sort. Box tickers. Or maybe it’s just about the selfies and they know only that Oscar is infamous and nothing of his work or his infamy. He’d love that, that unqualified, nonjudgemental homage, those marvellous pointless vanities.

Last time I was in Paris, en route to visit friends somewhere near Le Mans, I went to the studio of an artist I had come across. Frédéric Belaubre has a working and living space in Montmartre that is smaller than our kitchen (granted it is a biggish kitchen). Canvasses stacked above and at the foot of a double bed and alongside the walls where there was a small kitchen set up, or an intimate dining space. Guitars and violins hanging in the spaces between his canvasses on the walls. A violin on the wall with broken strings looks a little horsefaced, like him. He only has a few horsey pictures and those have limited movement. But they are lovely, sometimes hostile, violent, especially the ones with people in. The people are usually being bucked off. Does he take commissions? Only if he’s inspired. Oh dear. I like the horse pictures, but no one else seems to. Maybe they aren’t all that good.

After the artistic interlude, smug and clutching my new pictures, I went to the nearest place I could find for something to eat. This is the other thing about Paris, rarely is a place disappointing although it can happen. Maybe that rarity is another reason to always want to go back. Onion soup and cheese and thick bread and water and quiet in the noise of Montmartre. And of people smiling, polite, local.

If you’ve been going to a city for decades it is tempting to think it has nothing much more to show you. You’ve been there, done it all before and you know how to get about. So much blah blah. But that is how old people think and behave, so do not fall into that laziness, don’t think old.  Just like Paris, everywhere is constantly changing, fomenting some new concoction of something unforeseeable and intriguing. And that’s why I am excited to be going back to Paris, again.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde at the Noël Coward Theatre in London – a review

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

Oscar would’ve loved it! And we did too. Having seen or read this play so very many times, I expected to enjoy it, but not to be in absolute hysterics throughout. Max Webster’s direction and the incredible cast delivered a performance that for me is unmatched. Wilde’s tale of entangled double lives, money, desire and connivance was delivered in extravagant and raunchy style. All levels of this story, at once superficial and profound, were explored and the result was a mad and earthy delight.

I loved the boldness of the direction and acting, which have usurped my previous favourite version. This was the 1993 staging at the Aldwych, when Maggie Smith delivered the handbag line with such mild, quizzical disbelief, almost a sympathetic whisper. And her pronunciation of “profile” as “profeel” and her slight hesitation over the line ‘he is an … Oxonian’. Such undertones!

There were very few unexplored undertones in the energetic burlesque at the Noël Coward. The play was explicit in every dimension from Stephen Fry’s Lady Bracknell’s shrieking of the handbag line, through to Kitty Hawthorne’s Gwendoline’s lust filled gestures and delivery.

What made this such an outstanding rendition of an already funny play? Wilde called this, his last of four so-called drawing room plays, ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’. And on the page you can find all sorts of seriousness: being sexually frustrated, broke, poor, unloved. There’s old age and loneliness, guilt, deception, and hypocrisy. On stage such frailties make us laugh, but rarely do we see or laught at explicit sexual frustration and ambivalence. Until now. 

It is the outstanding Kitty Hawthorne playing Gwendolen Fairfax who sets this tone from the start. She almost, but not quite, steals the show. At once bossy and demanding and charming – how she manages this I have no idea – you at once dread what she’ll say and do next and eagerly anticipate it’s impact on her fellow players. Sometimes she’s growling and lascivious and sometimes prim and bossy. Priceless. Coming hot on Kitty Hawthorne’s heels is Hayley Carmichael’s Merriman/Lane performance. This too almost, but not quite, upstaged the rest of the cast. Her Lane was at once aloof, nonchalant and disrespectful, and her confused and slightly demented Merriman has surely never exhibited such enormous personality. Hysterical and transfixing.

Back to Kitty Hawthorne, played loud and determined, her Gwendolen is the perfect harbinger of her older self (yes, like her mother Lady Bracknell). She’s determined to have a man called Earnest, and Jack is the perfect choice: she’s fallen in love on hearsay, with an idea, with a suitable candidate she has decided will meet her needs. That he’s a liar and broke is irrelevant. She wants Algernon Moncrieff even more once she lays eyes on him. Her frantic use of a fan to cool her face and thighs as she nearly snarled the lines that the name Earnest ‘produces vibrations’ and ‘I am fully determined to accept you’ brought the joyous tears streaming.

Wilde and sex have always been equated on his personal level, but not so much in his plays. But in this performance sex is as important as earnestness; maybe it is earnestness. It’s wonderful to see Wilde’s work taken out of the society comedy box and put on as portrayal of how people might actually feel about one another. The only gripe I have with the presentation of sexuality is the few lesbian interactions in the stage direction. There is no need to show us Cecily and Gwendoline licking at one another – it’s already there in the lines: ‘I already like you more than I can say’ et al. The incidences of gratuitous lesbian posturing were a completely unnecessary distraction that went absolutely nowhere. They can be done without.

I have always wondered why it is that the two young women in this play are often played as much the same character, when on the page they are immensely different. Jessica Whitehurst’s Cecily Cardew is spoilt, loud and clear and not just a bit of ballast for the plot. She’s naughty and wayward and Whitehurst brings a wonderful unpredictability to the role. Jessica Whitehurst gives us a Cecily Cardew of a much more distinct character. She’s also sexually ambitious, holding onto Algernon tight and leering at him when other characters are speaking. So funny.

Olly Alexander is, for me at least, an unexpected delight as Algernon Moncrieff. He balances campy skittishness with almost drooling desire to perfection. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett’s Jack Worthing brings a bizarre underlying neurosis to the part, alternatively wanting to be in control and stressing at the tension of it all. Stephen Fry is nothing short of monumental as Lady Bracknell. Tightly upholstered she is hugely present, without conquering all before her. Everyone gets to shine and each player really does own it: Shobna Gulati’s Miss Prism and Hugh Dennis as Reverend Canon Chasuble create a subplay all their own. Another rendition the sex theme, this time for older people, is visible in their understated mutual attraction. Their interactions are devoid of anything like carnality or lust. But they are touchingly infused with longing and tenderness and the hint that such feelings are probably a first for both of them. 

Both the play’s opening prologue scene and the closing one were musical performances involving lots of noise, dancing and the whole cast. Drastically different, they provided an introduction the players and then gave the audience an utterly wild and unconventional encore. Everyone was dressed as a giant lily or suchlike, the diameters of which varied with the scope of the actors’ parts. The spectacular costumes for the finale echoed the joyful vibrancy, timeliness and currency of both the performance and Wilde’s play. His words resonate still as do his perceptive insights for his own and our own times. His understanding of our frailties, our vanities, wants and desires is as astute today as when the original production was staged in February 1895. Director Max Webster told The Stage magazine last October that he wants to make work that “speaks to as many people as possible”. At the intimate Noël Coward Theatre, the perfect venue for this most perfect of plays, he has succeeded admirably. 

Oscar Wilde’s 170th birthday dinner

Laurel Lindström 1 Comment

Guests at Oscar’s 170 th birthday bash shimmered and shone. They were stars in Oscar’s very own firmament, mingling together for delicious pre-dinner snacks and generous quantities of fizz. And it was real champagne, not the dreaded Prosecco! Robert Whelan (Deputy Chairman, Editor of ‘The Wildean’) welcomed us and James Liu performed “Serenade (for music)” a piece with Oscar’s lyrics and FH Cowen’s music. This wonderful song is a early plea from Paris to Helen to flee with him across the Aegean to Troy. She declines, preferring instead to let Paris abduct her sometime later. Much more fun. After the song, there followed more champagne, more snacks and glamorous hobnobbing. We were a small riot of sparkling colours, feathers and sequins, offset by just the right amount of two tone penguin formals.

Midmingle our Hon. President Gyles Brandreth made a very special welcome and presentation to Joan Winchell, thanking her for supporting the newly published collection of selected articles from The Woman’s World. He pointed out that “if it wasn’t for her this wouldn’t be happening …” adding that “without her we would not have had this book”. He reminded the happy crowd that it had been an ”exciting Oscar Wilde week for many of us, culminating in this evening”. As he handed over the gift to Joan, Gyles explained that, “we are all about to bow or curtesy to you … it’s a British tradition …[you have] been a true friend to us and to the memory and to the genius of Oscar Wilde”. Joan responded with gracious acceptance of the lovely photo and an invitation for Gyles to blow a kiss from her to the crowd. The crowd happily accepted and returned kisses of their own in number.

From the grandeur of the National Liberal Club’s (non)Smoking Room, some 100 + guests moved to the equally auspicious David Lloyd George Room for dinner. Properly warmed up with predinner drinks and canapés people took their seats in keen anticipation of what came next, having no real idea of what that might be. Anticipation is everything, bringing to mind Oscar’s observation that ‘the suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.’

We didn’t have to wait too long for Vanessa Heron (Chairman and Editor of ‘Intentions’) to extend her own warm welcome to everyone, especially those who  had travelled long distances to this dinner. And Vanessa tipped an appreciative nod to her predecessor, Don Mead (Hon. Vice President), “who has almost certainly attended more of these dinners than anyone else”.

Merlin Holland, Oscar’s grandson and archivist, then proposed the toast to to his grandfather. Merlin describes himself as the “keeper of [his] family flame”, and shared family memories touching on what his grandmother Constance had gone through after Oscar’s fall. She faced “an appalling social problem” so horrible that she had to distance herself and her children from all things Wilde, and she did so by changing her name. The change of name was wise, because Oscar never did listen to advice or try to avoid notoriety. He particularly ignored the many requests to keep away from Bosie. Sadly or maybe not, he welcomed Bosie back into his life to sow yet more sorrow and disharmony. Merlin explained that “only this time it happens in slow motion which is worse”. Oscar’s view was that he needed “an atmosphere of love … I need to love and be loved … I still love him, how could I not love him, he wrecked my life?”

In De Profundis Oscar explains that he “was no longer the master of my fate, the captain of my soul” (the reference is to William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem Invictus). Merlin reminds us that with these lines in De Profundis Oscar had recognised the depths of his collapse and could begin to “come up out of the depths”. He ended his toast preliminaries with a quote from Frank Harris’ 1916 biography of Oscar Wilde where he relays a conversation Frank once had with Oscar. With considerable prescience Oscar had predicted that “a hundred years hence, no one will know anything about Curzon …  whether [he] lived or died will be a matter of indifference to everyone; but my comedies and my stories and ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ will be known and read by millions, and even my unhappy fate will call forth worldwide sympathy.” How right he was about this and so much more. We shared Merlin’s toast: “my grandfather at this, his 170th birthday”. Happy birthday Oscar.

Guests then tucked into three courses of lovely food and more wines. Conversation flowed in a glittering, joyful, sometimes unexpected and definitely noisy torrent. We clearly all shared the unmatched joy that is love of Oscar Wilde, the man, his life and his amazing achievements. Oscar would’ve loved it.

Eleanor Fitzsimons (Hon. Patron) rounded off the evening with a few profiles of the contributors to The Woman’s World. The likes of Elisabeth of Wied, first Queen of Romania, Marie Corelli the English novelist, and Dr Mary Marshall, who along with six other women was forced to campaign to be allowed to graduate as a medical doctor. Wilde championed many women of ambition, ability and courage, using The Woman’s World to give them a platform and visibility. Copies of the book were available for sale at the dinner, but did not last long. The moment for purchasing a copy passed too fast, and like the evening the moment was over much too soon. Drifting home sleepy on the train, I am certain that over us all Oscar’s bemused spirit was surely smiling.

© Laurel Lindström 2024

Welcome to the Oscar Wilde Society

The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Theatre Royal Haymarket – a review

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The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel. When its initial version came out as a story in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890, the critics were not kind. It was declared an immoral book to which Wilde responded in the preface to the book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray that, “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”

In its presentation at the Theatre Royal Haymarket The Picture of Dorian Gray has a curious morality, an honesty resonant for our times. Sarah Snook stars in a one woman presentation of a novel that has never previously transferred well to the stage. There’s not much of a plot or structure and the brilliance of The Picture of Dorian Gray is in its intermingling of the witty dialogue for which Wilde is so justly famous, and the inner contortions we all suffer as we try to live the lives expected of us, while dealing with inner secrets and our quotidien moral dilemmas.

The basic story of Dorian Gray is not lost in this stage version: artist Basil Hallward paints the portrait of an exceptionally beautiful 20 year old man. His friend, the hedonistic Lord Henry Wotton, admires the painting and is keen to meet the sitter. Gorgeous Dorian arrives at the studio dripping innocence and very soon is fascinated by Henry Wotton’s talk of youth and beauty and the tragedy that is aging, amongst much else. Dorian’s first sin, vanity, comes on quickly and enthralled by Lord Henry’s quips and chat Dorian promises his soul, if he could remain ever youthful. In return for Dorian’s soul his aging will only be evident in the portrait which no one will ever see. Basil doesn’t ever want to exhibit the picture because “I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.” The portrait ends up in Dorian’s attic where its beauty soon starts to deteriorate.

Wilde put much of himself and his philosophy for life into The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s his personal manifesto of sorts and this added layer of intimacy makes it even harder to present the story on stage. But at the Theatre Royal director Kip Williams, artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, has managed it in spades. He does so by using unconventional methods: videography and what I suppose are film or television cameras and a single actor, Sarah Snook. Five cameras buzz about the stage throughout the two hour performance. The picture of Dorian Gray is a giant screen in portrait orientation hanging centre stage with constantly changing images of the book’s characters, according to who’s doing what. We never see the deteriorating painting. Snook plays all 26 characters, with the less central ones prerecorded. The main characters are filmed live on stage as Snook changes wigs, facial hair and clothes with the assistance of the people doing the filming, to shift from one character to another and talking all the while. It’s an extraordinarily powerful and demanding performance.

The Picture of Dorian Gray connects ideas about influence and individualism to Dorian’s vulnerable innocence, with pretty sorry results. On stage the drawing of this link is all a little chaotic and unsettling. This is precisely the point: identity and sense of self is fluid, a little chaotic and unsettling. Numerous screens convey the characters as Snook narrates the story, sometimes in competition with herself, as more than one character overlaps to tell the tale. Oscar’s gorgeous words dominate throughout; so much of the presentation is him that Oscar’s almost there, an unseen adjunct to the cast. It’s wonderful.

As Snook narrates the story she works with the cameramen and works with her own image on a mobile phone. As she describes what’s going on, she uses image filters to share different versions of her face as Dorian, projected onto the larger screens. It’s a brilliant mimicry of the ridiculous online clichés of beauty, with the huge pouty lips, the superhigh cheekbones and the perfectly arched brows drawn on skin as taut as a drum. And there are the hideous distortions when things go very wrong. Very funny, but also very disturbing.

Wilde’s awareness of the nature of influence, obsession with youth, constant reinvention of oneself and the need to be seen, is just so current, so contemporary. For Wilde all influence is immoral. He says in the novel (and Snook as Lord Henry says on stage) that to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul, instead of letting a person be themselves. Influencing is immoral because the aim of life is self-development, not allowing others to tell you who to be. In an age where influencers are recognised as a sort of profession, Wilde’s reminder is profoundly reassuring. Only about 1% of influencers are self-supporting, so maybe enough people understand that they should be their own person and that the whole influencer thing is an invention to drive advertising and product sales.

Dorian soon falls in love with actress Sybil Vane, but Sybil is too distracted by her love for Dorian to perform well when Lord Henry and Basil are in the audience. In the Theatre Royal production, Sybil’s performance takes place on a tiny model of a stage filled by some filmic wizardry, with Snook’s head and a mass of golden curls covering the tiny stage. Sybil gurns and squints, alternatively mumbling or rattling off her lines whilst constantly glancing at Dorian, almost blowing kisses. Dorian is horrified at her poor performance and, declaring that he is no longer in love with her, ends the relationship. Days later Dorian’s feeling lonely and plans a reconciliation with Sybil, but Lord Henry arrives to tell Dorian that Sybil is dead. She has taken her own life. In taking solace in his own image Dorian notices the first changes in the portrait: “cruel lines around the mouth”. It all goes downhill from there with Dorian committing murder and living a life of inimitable corruption and yet never aging a day. His face belies no sign of the dreadful life he leads. Read the book if you want to know the rest of the story.

Oscar Wilde’s life, philosophy, his defiance of convention, his platforming, it’s all there in the book and miraculously on the Theatre Royal’s stage. Sometimes it’s a bit lost in a surfeit of production cleverness, which can leave the audience slightly numb and disengaged. But maybe that excess is deliberate: just like Dorian as he progresses to ever deeper depths of depravity and all around nastiness we the audience start to feel slightly deadened, alienated.

What happens in this amazing stage version is an extraordinary exposition of modern individualised egocentricity. Murderous stabbing with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons loud in the background. Donna Summer’s I Feel Love booming out in an opium den with Dorian and his gross friends. In every screen on the stage we see different aspects of Dorian’s corruption, his selfishness, vanity, greed, envy, all of it relentlessly engorged in vicious dissolution. Individual expression is taken to horrible extremes in this production, and there are reminders that much of what is in The Picture of Dorian Gray foretells the life and tragic downfall of Oscar Wilde himself. In Dorian’s ultimate demise we have an early whisper for The Ballad of Reading Gaol: each man kills the thing he loves. And Basil reminds us that we “shall suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly”. Somewhere in the book and somewhere in the chaos of screens and rapid fire narration on stage Wilde tells us that genius lasts longer than beauty. This astonishing production and Snook’s fantastic performance are proof that whatever beauty Oscar crammed into his life, his genius is what endures.

“Only the shallow know themselves.” —from Oscar Wilde’s “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (1882) 

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

You don’t know me.

You don’t see me.

You can’t find me.

You don’t know me.

And of this I am certain.

Being old is useful in these days of death and desperation. Death because of Covid and Brexit, stealing lives and lifestyles. Desperation because everyone is so obsessed with being noticed, with being included, recognised, acknowledged. It’s a curious thing this obsession. For those of us who’ve been around awhile, it looks like disease.

The online echo chamber amplifies and distorts, and social media platforms put you, and only you, you, you, you at the heart of every message. Seeing it is mostly boring, if compelling. Being seen is wonderful for those frantic to shine in gleaming limelight and get lost in virtual applause, acclaim. Except that the social media platforms must put all of us at the centre of attention regardless of our mediocrity, so we are none of us individuals just data sets. Yet if the platforms don’t prioritise everyone on some individualised basis, advertisers won’t be happy.

In this saturated and anonymous environment a defined identity is necessary to concepts of self, no matter how arbitrary and divisive. Individual identities must be categorised, celebrated and yelled about, to confirm that we know who we are, that we are entitled to recognition, that we exist at all. Without the platforms and classified identities, we are apparently nobodies. But coming to terms with one’s own ordinariness is part of growing up. Maybe you cannot see that until you’ve finished doing it and only then can recognise the curious paradox that we are all ordinary, and yet extraordinary too. The social media collective thrives on this paradox. Advertisers want maximum engagement and frequency in order to sell more stuff. Definitions and categories provide the platforms with data to help them do that. And we all participate.

But identity is a fragile thing, a thing in constant flux. It is not caged. Identity is vulnerable and frail and it should not be trivialised. Nor should those craving acknowledgement and recognition use identity to bully others into sharing their point of view. Identifying a target to blame for inequalities and unfairness, does not justify attack. Responsibility for being nasty about perceived slights does not go away just because you find someone to blame. The whingers share far more than being victims of generic, universal unfairness. They truly suffer cruelly. White male supremacy, imperialism, sexism, racism, accentism (it’s all the latest rage), genderism (coming to a paranoia near you soon), heightism, fatism, abilityism or some other -ism is the root of their undoing. How about I-don’t-care-ism?

We cannot thrive in a world where a group’s collective identity is considered to matter far more than anyone else’s. Such vanity combined with victimhood stifles interaction and debate. It’s toxic and poisons all chance of dialogue, discussion or inclusion. It excludes those beyond the group, those who challenge the party line, or who step unthinking onto tender toes. Blocking the transmissions we all send out and receive, leaves only static monotony on a single unrelenting channel.

Identity and knowing who and what you are is not about priviledge or advantage. Knowing who and what you are isn’t even a fact for hordes of people. Identity is often a latecomer to the character party. We could call it a very twenty-first century problem, this idea that we all have to be secure in our own identities and that everyone else has to recognise and celebrate those identities. Let’s instead strive for a little more humility, a little more kindness and greater breadth in our world views. Let’s have a little more appreciation of where and how the lines are drawn, so that they mark a point of connection and not of divergence. 

You don’t know me.

You don’t see me.

You can’t find me.

You don’t know me.

And of this I am certain.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phrases_and_Philosophies_for_the_Use_of_the_Young

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

Oscar Wilde in the 21st Century. What would he say?

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment
What would you say?

The Oscar Wilde Society recently held a competition for members to come up with aphorisms and epithets that a 21st century Oscar Wilde might have said. One of my submissions made the short list of 20 out of 300 submissions. 

Since then I have come up with a few more. But can you guess which one made it to the list? Answers on a bee’s wing please. Enjoy!

Restraint of speech and imagination enslave ideas to the bondage of the masses.

Being told what to think, is the greatest luxury of 21st century life.

To explain my absence I tell my friends I am having issues.

The art of the influencer is not the same as the influence of art.

That subjects and topics could have ownership is fundamentally undemocratic.

Restrain imagination and all progress will cease.

Self-obsession, the 21st century’s favourite disease.

Health and fitness are vastly overrated.

Beauty and deception are natural partners.

In the digital age, opportunity and responsibility have become irreconcilable.

Morbidities are ambitions for the unrestrained appetite.

A convenient alternative to an alert intelligence is to be woke.

To label one’s sexuality is to confine it.

An agile mind may lurk behind a lardy physique.

Sex and labels are both so exciting, but not necessarily in the expected ways.

Diet at your peril.

Social media is neither social nor mediating.

Trump and Johnson are delightful entertainers. They take satire to a whole new level. 

Being fat is one of life’s great joys and its greatest sorrow.

Climate change is the planet’s way of telling us we’ve gone too far.

Having issues is a mysterious way to admit that there’s a problem. And problems are so much easier to address than issues.

What does should of mean? I should’ve asked before.

Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis (not a review in the end) – if you want to know more about Oscar Wilde go here:

Laurel Lindström 3 Comments

https://oscarwildesociety.co.uk

Dear Oscar,

My hero.

I am writing to tell you about the latest big fat biography of yourself, you, Oscar Wilde. You’ve probably already read Oscar: a Life by Matthew Sturgis, but if not do. It’s a vast catalogue of your life, a huge collection of facts all gathered together in a single volume and narrated with lively enthusiasm by historian Matthew Sturgis. Even for people not inclined to read or to learn more about your sainted self, it’s an easy page turner. Like you, the book is an astonishing achievement, exhaustive, charming and compelling, and only minorly flawed by the publisher’s sloppy production.

The book tracks the timeline of your life with immense detail. Your upbringing in Ireland and time at Portora School are carefully documented, along with masses of skinny on your relatives, family, friends and contemporaries. Your brilliance and sometime (fleeting) sportiness are shared, as are the details of your move to Trinity College Dublin and thence to Oxford. It was at Oxford that your identity as an artist started taking tangible shape, along with your previously under-developed abilities to command attention, involvement and direction. You’re soon drawn to London and its fashionable society, a larger and more demanding stage where you continued to thrive rising slowly through the soup. But you had no readily accessible means of earning a decent living, despite winning the Newdigate Prize for Ravenna in 1878 and publishing Poems in 1881. Transition was needed from poet, to performer, author and playwright, and was soon in motion.

The brilliant idea of an American tour was almost a disaster following your first performance in New York City in 1882. D’Oyly Carte had wisely hedged his gamble with only a single booking for the preening society aesthete with unproven oratory skills. Subsequent tentative dates were only to be confirmed following responses to the initial outing. Despite a rough start, the lecture and the jokes worked out and you grew over the coming months into a polished and popular performer.

It was clear from the outset that Oscar Wilde’s outwardly shifting persona would respond to the demands of audience as it did throughout the 1882 US tour. But persona and audience morphed in tandem throughout your life. Aspiration and vanity, victories and collapses, your evolving sexuality from heterosexual, bisexual to homosexual, shaped your identity and presentation. A pattern in others’ of cautious or bold risk-taking, mirrored your own mercurialism. It traces across your life: diminished risk to publish or stage your work as your reputation grew; increased risk to commercial ventures of your notoriety and attendant outrageousness. No rules. 

Mr Sturgis presents a clear picture of your obvious brilliance and magic, and also of your vulnerability to flattery and beauty. No surprises there. And throughout his work Mr Sturgis energetically corrects errors in literary critic Richard Ellman’s definitive biography, published after Ellman’s death in 1987. But the huge numbers of typographic errors publisher Head of Zeus has allowed in Oscar: a Life rather undermines one’s confidence in these corrections. I am sure someone has already pointed them out, but throughout the text’s 720 pages there is barely a chapter without mistakes: your funeral was on the 3rd December, not the 3rd November. Is it Salomé or Salome? And shouldn’t pronouns and verbs agree? 

We learn that intellect untamed searches always for innovative ideas, insights and perspectives no matter how grungy their habitats or philosophy (remember the Decadents?). Pushing the ideas of others to their limits, challenging social convention and expectations whether in poems or fashion or home décor began with you, you, Oscar Wilde. And it’s what all of us now aspire to. Aesthetic traditions, their particularities, expression, are conversely universal and unique, for individuals are simultaneously ordinary and exceptional. Whatever the green eyed James Whistler charges, your aesthetic persona and expression are more than a reworking of someone else’s philosophy. Thankfully this comes through in Oscar a Life.

It’s also clear that your genius morphs with your humanity, kindness and individualism subverted, or glittered, with vanity and ego. The emergence of the Oscar Wilde persona began early, grew as your genius became apparent, was amplified by fame and then started to distort. But never, ever did your brilliance, underlying decency and generosity of spirit diminish. Throughout the public scenes, trials and imprisonment, consideration for others was always there. It too often got lost in the torrent of passion for Bosie and his evil influence and subculture corruption. Denial and shame made you spiteful sometimes, as guilt and embarrassment periodically trumped kindness. This was particularly and horribly evident in your dealings Constance and others whom you should have trusted more. But you know this.

Knowledge, carnal or otherwise, was always your fuel but sadly wisdom too often lingered a little too long, as it does for most of us. Our shared frailty is why people still read and enjoy your work, why love for Oscar Wilde is spread so far and wide. You are not forgotten and your influence persists, variously cloaked in notoriety and hero worship. It’s acknowledged by those who know you. It’s obviously unacknowledged by those who are unknowingly beholden to you, but they are many.

You show us the origins of much that distresses modern life: performance and identity, the need for audience and attention, the desire to be heard and taken seriously, understanding what it is to be as one and as one of many. The paradoxes in which you so delight are clear in both biographies. Truth and lies, male and female, brutality and gentleness, hypocrisy and faith, the secptic and the trusting, mirrors all. But the paradoxes are clearest in your works. They veil our ugliest traits, our vanities and deceits, ignorance and denials. In the darkly radical The Picture of Dorian Grey and the evanescent humour of The Importance of Being Earnest our own hypocrisies are played out.

You were not self-destructive (too vain for that), but rather caught in a vortex of events, shocked and horrified at your own reversal, that your gainsayers really did mean it. That this time there was no chance of rebounding. You knew disaster was coming but instead stood fast, brave, and faced it. It was a matter of honour and truth, of the artistry of life in black and white and of your own integrity in the dock. You stood on a stage of your own construction and were not cowed when enemies tried to dismantle it. Not then, not now.

Ever yours,

– A Woman of Even Less Importance.

PS “…No longer now shall Slander’s venomed spite 
Crawl like a snake across his perfect name, 
Or mar the lordly scutcheon of his fame. …”

Discontent leads to progress

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” (Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance (1893
― Oscar Wilde https://oscarwildesociety.co.uk/

Without discontent there can be no progress, which is probably how I have ended up here, doing this, writing blogs about writing and fiction. Not that life’s been an endless series of gloomy torments, because it hasn’t. But discontent is a powerful driver borne of dissatisfaction and suffering. I did all my suffering a very, very long time ago. Ever since, I’ve struggled to keep it in a strongbox, chained, padlocked, buried in some dark and chilly recess. Mostly that is where it stays, ice cold, frigid. Occasionally I unlock the padlock, loosen the chains, lift the lid and stare into blackness that only gets lighter, if I have the courage to keep staring for long enough. This was never often, but it’s getting more frequent and slowly the blackness recedes.

So it is with all of us, although too soon we slam down the lid, grab at the chains with wet, tearstained hands, and clasp tight to shut the padlock once again. This is a bad idea, because the next time you open the box the blackness is deeper and denser. Next time, if you let it the blackness starts creeping out of the box, stealing its evil way into your head and heart. When this happens, brutal exercise can help but only if followed by a long and lazy bath, preferably with someone you love. And if this doesn’t work, the box must once again be opened. This time make a diamond of your head and heart, take hold and scream as loudly as possible the names of all those terrible demons who want to own you. The diamond head will add the necessary light and the diamond heart won’t be broken again. Where were we?

Ah yes, discontent and progress. Discontent that leads to progress is something other than the agonies of our personal black worlds. This wider discontent is borne of anger and frustration, of an awareness of universal frailty and vulnerability, frustration with the lazy belief that individuals can make no difference, that we are all sad and passive players in some abstract horror story. The list of reasons to be discontented is long, from climate change and the environment, to the suffering of so many displaced and untethered people in so many contexts.

So what’s to be done? Nothing much in truth. It’s as it ever was. But each of us can still take tiny steps, no matter how miniscule they are towards a more positive world. Far better than bleating about whatever and moaning and looking for scapegoats, people or histories to blame. Far better than wallowing in our own wonderfulness or victimhood. Put it behind you and accept that the why of the what isn’t always the point: mostly the why is beyond us or our capacity for understanding the what.

Yes something can be done to make a difference. Engage, recognise and own your own truths with harsh honesty. Have compassion for those willing to listen to you and do not judge. Be more than your audience. Embrace as wide a view of the world as you can manage, and do it with patience and kindness, with sympathy and empathy in every part of your day. Without complaint, without blame, without recriminations, harness discontent so that it really does lead to progress no matter how small the step.