by Gore Vidal
Currently, our rulers are tightening the screws; too much sexual freedom is bad for production and, even worse, for consumption. Sex is now worse than mere sin; it is murderous. In the selfish pursuit of happiness another may die. One understands those paranoids who think that AIDS was deliberately cooked up in a laboratory, for the idea of plague is endlessly useful, transforming society-persecutor into society-protector: urine samples here, blood tests there. Come along. Sick behind that fence. Keep moving.
Although Ellmann certainly did not set out to recast Wilde for our dismal age, he was, like the rest of us, a part of the way we live now, and his Wilde is more cautionary tale than martyr-story. There is the obligatory Freudianism. Cherchez la mère is indulged in, legitimately, I suppose. Jane Wilde, self-dubbed Speranza Francesca, was, if not larger than life, a good deal larger than average. A Protestant, Lady Wilde kept a literary salon rather than saloon in Dublin, favored an independent Ireland, wrote thundering verse worthy of her son (anent child-nurture: “Alas! The Fates are cruel. / Behold Speranza making gruel!”). She loved sensation-making and came into her own at a treason trial in Dublin, where she was gaveled down by the judge as she tried to make herself, rather than the defendant, the fount of sedition. Later, she endured the trial for seduction, of her husband, Sir William, an oculist. Trials were, rather ominously, her ice cream. Son deeply admired mother and vice versa. But Ellmann controls himself: “However accommodating it is to see a maternal smothering of masculinity as having contributed to [Oscar’s] homosexuality there is reason to be skeptical.”
Although Ellmann has not worked out that homosexual is an adjective describing an act not a noun descriptive of a human being, he has been able to assemble data which he then tests against fashionable theory; in this case he finds theory wanting. Oscar was a brilliant creature neither more nor less “masculine” than anyone else. What he learned from his mother was not how to be a woman but the importance of being a Show-off and a Poet and a questioner of whatever quo was currently status. He also inherited her talent for bad poetry. In due course, he re-created himself as a celebrity (a terrible word that has been used in our sense since the mid-1800s), and he was well known long before he had actually done anything at all of note. The Anglo-Irish gift of the gab, combined with an actor’s timing, made him noticeable at Oxford and unescapable in London’s drawing rooms during the 1880s. He invented a brand-new voice for himself (the Irish brogue, no matter how Merrion Squared, was dispensed with), and Beerbohm reports on his “mezzo voice, uttering itself in leisurely fashion, with every variety of tone.” He also took to gorgeous costumes that set off his large ungainly figure to splendid disadvantage. With the death of Sir William, he possessed a small inheritance, expensive tastes and no focused ambition other than poetry, a common disease of that day; also, as Yeats put it, “the enjoyment of his own spontaneity.”
What is most interesting in Ellmann’s account is the intellectual progress of Wilde. He is particularly good on Wilde’s French connection, much of it unknown to me, though I once asked André Gide several searching questions about his friend, and Gide answered me at length. That was in 1948. I have now forgotten both questions and answers. But until I read Ellmann I did not know how well and for how long the two had known each other and what an impression Wilde (“Creation began when you were born. It will end on the day you die”) had made on Gide’s tormented passage through that strait gate that leads the few to life.
As a result of a collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince (a revelation to at least one American child forty years later), Wilde became famous for writing as well as for showing off, and Paris stirred, as it sometimes will, for an Anglo (the Celtic distinction is unknown there). With the publication of the dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde took note of a change of direction in literature, and the French were both startled and delighted that the cultural wind was coming from the wrong side of the channel. Ellmann writes,
In England decadence had always been tinged with self-mockery. By 1890, symbolism, not decadence, had the cry, as Wilde acknowledged in the preface to Dorian Gray. “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” These aphorisms were a bow to Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he had visited in February 1891, when he was writing the preface.
Wilde then proceeded to conquer Parisian literary life in much the same way that he had the drawing rooms of London and the lecture halls of the United States. Incidentally, Ellmann’s list of the number of places where Wilde spoke is positively presidential. In hundreds of cities and towns he lectured on the Beautiful, with numerous household hints. In his two chats “The House Beautiful” and “The Decorative Arts,” he foreshadowed today’s how-to-do-it books. He was a sensation. My twelve-year-old grandfather (during Reconstruction, southern boys were bred early and often) recalled Wilde’s performance (July 15, 1882) at the Opera House in Vicksburg, Mississippi: “He wore,” and the old man’s voice trembled, “a girdle, and he held a flower in his hand.” Happily, my grandfather never knew that two weeks later Wilde was received by General Grant. (As I write these lines, I wonder how did he know that Wilde was wearing a girdle?)
The siege of Paris was swift, the victory total. Symbolism did not need to lay siege to Wilde; he surrendered to the modernist movement, now the world’s oldest vague, whose long roar shows no sign of withdrawing. Wilde also appropriated Mallarmé’s unfinished Hérodiade for his own Salomé, written in French for Bernhardt; but the play was admired. It is interesting just how learned the writers of the last century were: The educational system Greeked and Latined them; other languages came easily to them, cultures, too. Today’s writers know very little about anything. But then those who teach cannot be taught.
During the enchantment of Paris, Wilde himself was, significantly, overwhelmed by Huysman’s A Rebours, still a touchstone as late as the 1940s. The young Proust was impressive to Wilde because of his “enthusiasm for English literature, especially for Ruskin (whom he translated) and George Eliot…” But when Proust invited him to dinner, Wilde arrived before Proust: “I looked at the drawing room and at the end of it were your parents, my courage failed me.” Wilde departed, after the thoughtful observation to M. and Mme. Proust: “How ugly your house is.”
With the local cat-king, Edmond de Goncourt, Wilde was no less magisterial. In a newspaper piece, Goncourt had got all wrong Wilde’s remarks about Swinburne, while Wilde himself was sneered at as “this individual of doubtful sex, with a ham actor’s language, and tall stories.” Wilde chose to ignore the personal attack in a letter that set straight the gossip: “In Swinburne’s work we meet for the first time the cry of flesh tormented by desire and memory, joy and remorse, fecundity and sterility. The English public, as usual hypocritical, prudish, and philistine, has not known how to find the art in the work of art: it has searched for the man in it.” Tiens! as Henry James liked to write in his notebook. The biographer has license to go a-hunting for the man; the critic not; the reader—why not just read what’s written?
Wilde, the playwright, is duly recorded, duly celebrated. Ellmann has some nice greenroom gossip for those who like that sort of thing. It is interesting to know that when Beerbohm Tree addressed a “brilliant lady” on stage he did so with his back to the audience (a Bernhardt trick, too). But then when he had an epigram to launch, he would turn to face the audience, to their ravishment. For those who like such things, there is also a very great deal about Wilde’s love affair with a boring boy-beauty called Bosie. At this late date it is no longer a story worth retelling, and if Ellmann has added anything new to it I did not notice. The trial. Prison. Exile. The usual. I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting; the fictional meeting between Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempré at the coach house in Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is one of the most erotic ever recorded. But details of the real Oscar and Bosie in bed together or in c
ombination with bits and pieces of England’s adenoidal trade, more gifted at blackmail than ganymedery, create for the reader neither tumescence nor moistness; rather, one’s thoughts turn somberly to laundry and to the brutal horror of life in a world without dry cleaning.
Ellmann’s literary criticism is better than his telling of the oft-told tale. He is particularly good on Dorian Gray, a book truly subversive of the society that produced it—and its author. He is interesting on Wilde’s conversion to a kind of socialism. Of Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Ellmann tells us that it “is based on the paradox that we must not waste energy in sympathizing with those who suffer needlessly, and that only socialism can free us to cultivate our personalities. Charity is no use—the poor are…right to steal rather than to take alms.” On the other hand, Wilde was wary of authoritarianism, so often socialism’s common-law helpmeet. In the end, Wilde veered off into a kind of anarchy; and defined the enemy thus:
There are three sorts of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
Joyce was impressed by this and borrowed it for Ulysses. Inadvertently (I suspect), Richard Ellmann does make it clear that for all the disorder of Wilde’s life he was never, in the Wordsworthian sense, “neglectful of the universal heart.”
Yeats thought Wilde a man of action, like Byron, who had got waylaid by literature. When this was repeated to Wilde, he made an offhand remark about the boredom of Parliament. But Yeats did sense in Wilde the energy of the actor: of one who acts, rather than of one who simply, bemusedly is—the artist. But whatever Wilde might or might not have done and been, he was an extremely good man and his desire to subvert a supremely bad society was virtuous. Cardinal Newman, writing of their common day, said, “The age is so very sluggish that it will not hear you unless you bawl—you must first tread on its toes, and then apologise.” But behavior suitable for an ecclesiastical busybody is all wrong for Oscar Wilde, whose only mistake was to apologize for his good work and life.
THE TIMES (LONDON) LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
October 2–8, 1987
CHAPTER 20
PAUL BOWLES’S STORIES
Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams are, at this moment at least, the three most interesting writers in the United States.” A third of a century has passed since I wrote that sentence in a piece on contemporary American writing.
Later, when I reprinted those words, I felt obliged to add: “This was written in 1952. McCullers was a good and fashionable novelist of the day (I cannot say that I have any great desire to read her again). Paul Bowles was as little known then as he is now. His short stories are among the best ever written by an American. Tennessee Williams, etc….” All in all, I still see no reason not to support my youthful judgment of Paul Bowles. As a short-story writer, he has had few equals in the second half of the twentieth century. Obvious question: If he is so good, why is he so little known?
Great American writers are supposed not only to live in the greatest country in the world (the United States, for those who came in late), but to write about that greatest of all human themes: the American experience. From the beginning of the Republic, this crude America First-ism has flourished. As a result, there is a strong tendency to misrepresent or undervalue our three finest novelists: Henry James (who lived in England), Edith Wharton (who lived in France), Vladimir Nabokov (who lived in Switzerland, and who wasn’t much of an American anyway despite an unnatural passion for our motels, so lyrically rendered in Lolita).
Paul Bowles has lived most of his life in Morocco. He seldom writes about the United States. On the other hand, he has shrewd things to say about Americans confronted with strange cultures and…strange selves.
Born in 1911, Bowles was brought up in New York City and New England. He attended the University of Virginia. When he was seventeen, the Paris-based avant-garde magazine transition published some of his poems. Bowles went to Paris, met Gertrude Stein, was influenced by the Surrealists. He quit school to become a writer. Except for Poe, his writing derives not from the usual Anglo-American tradition but from such ‘exotics’ as Valéry, Roussel, Gide and, of course, the expatriate Miss Stein. Later, he was to put to his own uses oral Mexican and Moroccan folklore; he listened as much as he read.
I suspect that Bowles’s apparent foreignness has limited the number of doctoral theses that ought by now to have been devoted to one whose art far exceeds that of…well, name the great American writers of our day (a list that was as different yesterday as it will be tomorrow). For the American academic, Bowles is still odd man out; he writes as if Moby Dick had never been written. Odder still, he is also a distinguished composer of music. In fact, he supported himself for many years by writing incidental music for such Broadway plays as The Glass Menagerie. It is curious that at a time when a number of serious critics have expressed the hope that literature might one day take on the attributes of the “highest” of all the arts, music, Bowles has been composing music as well as writing prose. I am certain that the first critic able to deal both with his music and his writing will find that Bowles’s life work has been marvelous in a way not accessible to those of us who know only one or the other of the two art forms. Only Anthony Burgess knows enough to do him justice.
In 1972, Paul Bowles wrote a memoir called, Without Stopping. For those able to read between the lines, the book was pleasurable. For anyone else, it must have sounded a bit like Julius Caesar’s account of the wars in Gaul. Although there is a good deal of information about various commanders and troop movements, we don’t learn much about what the subject had in mind. But there are interesting asides, and the best sort of memoir is entirely to one side of the mere facts of a life.
We learn that Bowles originally wanted to be a writer, not a composer. But at a progressive school he had shown an aptitude for mathematics, cousin germane to music. Nevertheless, he preferred to arrange words rather than notes upon a page until Gertrude Stein read his poems. “She sat back and thought a moment. Then she said: ‘Well, the only trouble with all this is that it isn’t poetry.’ ” She found his images false; did not think much of his attempt to write in the Surreal manner, “without conscious intervention.” Later, she asked him if he had rewritten the poems. When he said no, “She was triumphant. ‘You see,’ she cried. ‘I told you you were no poet. A real poet, after one conversation, would have gone upstairs and at least tried to recast them, but you haven’t even looked at them.’ ” Bowles stopped writing. He turned to music.
Between 1929 and 1945 he made a name as a composer. He married the odd, brilliant Jane Bowles. She was a writer. He was a composer. Together and separately, they were much admired. During the late thirties and forties they became central figures in the transatlantic (and Pan-American) world of the arts. Although unknown to the general public, the Bowleses were famous among those who were famous; and in some mysterious way the art grandees wanted, if not the admiration of the Bowleses (seldom bestowed), their tolerance.
They lived in Mexico (the unknown Tennessee Williams made a pilgrimage to their house in Acapulco); they lived in New York, sharing a house with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. After the Second War they moved for good to Tangier where Paul Bowles still lives. Jane Bowles died in Spain in 1973.
In the spring of 1945, Charles Henri Ford asked Bowles to edit an issue of the magazine View. The subject was Central and South American culture. Bowles translated a number of Spanish writers; and wrote some texts of his own. In the course of “reading some ethnographic books with texts from the Arapesh or from the Tarahumara given in word-for-word translation…the desire came to me to invent my own myths, adopting the point of view of the primitive mind.” He resorted to “the old Surrealist method of abandoning conscious co
ntrol and writing whatever words came from the pen.” The first of these stories was written “one rainy Sunday”; it is called “The Scorpion.”
The story was well received, and Bowles went on writing. “The subject matter of the myths soon turned from ‘primitive’ to contemporary….It was through this unexpected little gate that I crept back into the land of fiction writing. Long ago I had decided that the world was too complex for me ever to be able to write fiction; since I failed to understand life, I would not be able to find points of reference which the hypothetical reader might have in common with me.” He did not entirely proceed through that small gate until he wrote “A Distant Episode” and found that if life was no more understandable to him than before, prose was. He now possessed the art to depict his dreams.
During the next thirty years Paul Bowles wrote thirty-nine short stories. They were published originally in three volumes: The Delicate Prey, 1950; The Time of Friendship, 1967; Things Gone and Thing Still Here, 1977. Even before the first collection was published, three of the stories caused a great stir in the literary world. “Pages from Cold Point,” “The Delicate Prey,” and “A Distant Episode” were immediately recognized as being unlike anything else in our literature. I have just reread the three stories, with some nervousness. After all these years, I wondered if they would still “work.” In my youth I had admired D. H. Lawrence’s novels. Now, I deeply dislike them. I was relieved to find that Bowles’s art is still as disturbing as ever. I was surprised to note how the actual stories differ from my memory of them. I recalled a graphic description of a sixteen-year-old boy’s seduction of his father on a hot summer night in Jamaica. Over the years, carnal details had built up in my memory like a coral reef. Yet on rereading “Pages from Cold Point,” nothing (and everything) happens. In his memoirs Bowles refers, rather casually, to this story as something he wrote aboard ship from New York to Casablanca: “a long story about a hedonist…” It is a good deal more than that. Both “The Delicate Prey” and “A Distant Episode” create the same sense of strangeness and terror that they did the first time I read them. “The Delicate Prey” turns on a Gidean acte gratuit: The slicing off of the boy’s penis is not only like the incident on the train in Les Caves du Vatican but also presages the driving of a nail through a skull in Bowles’s novel Let It Come Down. “A Distant Episode” seems to me to be more than ever emblematic of the helplessness of an overcivilized sensibility (the professor’s) when confronted with an alien culture. Captured by North African nomads, his tongue cut out, he is made into a clown, a toy. He is used to make his captors laugh. He appears to accept his fate. Something harsh is glimpsed in the lines of a story that is now plainer in its reverberations than it was when written. But then it is no longer news to anyone that the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. It was Bowles’s genius to suggest the horrors which lie beneath that floor, as fragile, in its way, as the sky that shelters us from a devouring vastness.