Wilde the Irishman edited by Jerusha McCormack Yale 205pp, £25 in UK
The first part of this book is entitled "Appropriations", and in her excellent introduction the editor, Jerusha McCormack, explains that the contributors have been appropriating Wilde for Ireland and Irish studies, after a century in which it has been assumed that Wilde belonged to England. Following on the appearance in recent years of two books (by Davis Coakley and myself), this is the first collection of essays "by divers hands" to make such an attempt. Unfortunately, as McCormack explains, "they were given no brief". While in some cases this has facilitated discursiveness on Wilde's Irishness, in others it has left the writers sadly unfocused (Owen Dudley Edwards's "Impressions of an Irish Sphinx" seems to me to ramble unnecessarily) and the diversity which they, as a collective, bring to their subject leaves the book as a whole somewhat shapeless - a fault which a more rigorous editorial control might have avoided.
Of the real successes here, John Wilson Foster on "Science and Oscar Wilde" is well researched, well argued and revelatory; Victoria White is provocative and compelling in her assessment of Wilde's misogyny; Alan Stanford on "Acting Wilde" gives us a rare insight into the actor/director's perspective of Wilde and makes an importantly contentious statement when he asserts that "Irish audiences have never really understood Wilde." These do what such a collection should do - they open up the subject for further exploration and discussion.
Others, however, seem out of place. Declan Kiberd's "The Artist as Irishman" is reprinted from his Inventing Ireland and, regardless of the undoubted intrinsic merit of the chapter, one wonders why it was necessary to do so. Similarly Derek Mahon's review of Richard Ellmann's biography of Wilde makes a questionable reappearance, and the inclusion of a section of Thomas Kilroy's The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde has been overtaken by the play's production and publication.
In her introduction, Jerusha McCormack judiciously makes the point that the complexity of being gay and being Irish raises many questions in common, and this provides a basis for much that follows. In her own essay on Wilde as "Aesthete and Anarchist" she correctly identifies him as an agent provocateur, and pinpoints Wilde's Modernist use of the figure of the dandy as someone who subverts the empire of the colonist in order to hand over control to the colonised. In literary terms (as Wilde demonstrated in some of his more subtle essays) this means querying the "notion of authorship" and the relation of writer to reader or, in the case of the playwright, to the audience. And this, in turn, shows us just how modern Wilde is, and why volumes such as this are so necessary, because they re-evaluate a figure whom we are inclined to categorise merely as (in his own description) a "lord of language".
But it does more: McCormack tells us that "it is daily becoming clearer that simplicities no longer respond in any way to the complicated fate of being - or becoming - Irish". The concept of "Irishness" or "the Irish mind" has had its critical highs and lows in recent years, but the issue of multiple identities, not just in one community but also within one personality, is one with which everyone on this island and on its neighbour will have to deal, if a political and social solution to our troubles is to be found within a multi-cultural Europe.
Wilde attended Portora School in what is now Northern Ireland; his father wrote cogently about the Boyne; his mother wanted to rewrite Irish history. Both Oscar and his brother Willie (as partially explored by W.J. McCormack in this collection) were absorbed by the Parnell Commission (which the latter reported for the Daily Telegraph). Many Irelands met in this extraordinary family, which typified in so many respects what I have called "Middle Ireland", a grouping of mid- to late-Victorians who had a common ground and understood the deeper significance of the boundary. (One of these was Samuel Ferguson who is noticeable by his complete absence from consideration by any of the present contributors.)
In his oration at the unveiling of the Wilde widow in Westminster Abbey, published here, Seamus Heaney spoke of the unmasking of the distinction between English and Irish, between heterosexual and homosexual, and of Wilde as a harbinger of "our nascent tolerance of diversity". It's still a long road, but this uneven book, perhaps because of its bumpiness and discontinuities, takes us a good distance.
Richard Pine is the author of The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (1995); his biography of Wilde (1983) will be republished by Gill & Macmillan shortly