At this stage is there anything new to be said about Oscar Wilde? Joseph Pearce certainly thinks so. His book is written as a corrective to other books, particularly to Richard Ellmann's biography Oscar Wilde (1987), which Pearce says was "not a true picture of its subject".
It is now generally acknowledged that the Ellmann biography is, indeed, a flawed book, the work of a magisterial critic-biographer who was already terminally ill. But like his other biographies: James Joyce and Yeats: The Man and the Masks, his Oscar Wilde, whatever its faults, is filled with the kind of insights into the relationship between the life and the art which only a great biographer can command. Indeed, Pearce's book would seem to accept this, since his footnotes show how dependent he is on Ellmann. Whatever he means by "a true picture", his book is simply not comparable to Ellmann's.
It would have been far better if this book had been offered to the public as what it is, a decently written, popular biography with a particular interest in Wilde's Catholicism. At that level it does raise interesting questions.
So we have, once again, the story of the child Oscar's baptism by Father Fox in the Wicklow Mountains. We're told about Oscar's failure to turn up, over 30 years later, at Brompton Oratory to be received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Bowden. Oscar sent a bunch of lilies instead, presumably to decorate Father Bowden's altar. And, of course, we are given the death bedside scene, the voiceless Oscar with raised hand, the conditional baptism and Extreme Unction administered by Father Dunne. Three priests, then, across a lifetime, trying to cope with an extremely complex aspirant to Rome.
Part of the problem with this book is that it makes this inner journey of Oscar Wilde simple rather than complex. For Joseph Pearce it seems to be a tale of conflict between Decadence and Catholicism with the One True Church winning out in the end. (He has also written books on Solzhenitsyn and Chesterton.) Here the Decadents become a kind of black-shirted football team that are knocked off one by one. "Another nail was hammered into the coffin - or the cross - of the decadents in September 1898 with the death of Stephane Mallarme."
Commenting on the deaths of Wilde, Verlaine and Dowson, Pearce sees their conversions as evidence of the victory of Catholicism over degeneracy. This simplistic idea is not helped by the tabloid titles of some of the book's chapter titles with some awful punning: Poison and Passion, Malice through the Looking Glass, Hounded by Heaven, and so on.
That said, however, the book does place Wilde's Catholicism exactly where it belongs, in the line of French Decadent Catholicism of the late 19th century. In other words, while Wilde may have been influenced by the Catholic revival in England, following Newman and the Oxford Movement, it was to the much more deliciously dangerous examples of Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly and Huysmans that he turned. This offered a via negativa, a spiritual quest in and through degradation, a simultaneous pursuit of Christ and Satan, of spiritual terror and sensual gratification. Joyce, who knew a considerable amount about such matters, once talked about Wilde's embrace of "the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin". Pearce gives a clear, readable account of this side of Wilde. It is marred by the fact that he finds much of what he is writing about distasteful, even offensive. And he fails to deliver the full complexity of Wilde's profound attraction to suffering and victimhood which is found in the work, in numerous meditations on the subject and in the way Wilde acted out the later years of his life.
When he came out of prison Wilde said to Reggie Turner, one of the remaining disciples (the quotation is in Ellmann): "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do." As so often with the man, flippancy carries a heavy weight. The shaping of a sentence has a finality that encloses not only an immediate meaning but the aspirations of a whole, complex life.
Thomas Kilroy's play The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde will be performed at the Barbican Theatre, London, in the autumn.