Jullian on Oscar Wilde

By Don A. Keister

Few literary lives are better known than Oscar Wilde's a life which, in an

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ironical way, is that "work of art" that Walter Pater used to urge his Oxford disciples like Wilde to make of their lives.

It has all the elements of high drama (tragedy, of course, but with lots of good comic lines): suspense, climax, denouement: settings ranging from the country houses of the great through disreputable "houses" in Soho to Reading jail: characters from royalty to riffraff; and great scenes aplenty, including the celebrated trial in the Old Bailey that led to Wilde's being sentenced as a homosexual.

Philippe Jullian brings to Oscar Wilde (Viking; $7.95) a Frenchman's wit, lucidity and point of view, as well as special knowledge of the years just before 1900 when new styles in art (Wilde helped create art nouveau) and living were developing. His recent biography of Count Robert de Montesquieu deals with a French leader of this movement.

WILDE was the precocious offspring of a philandering Dublin doctor and a mother with the bees of numerous causes buzzing in her bonnet. He went brilliantly from success to success, at Oxford, in London, on the continent. A "virtuoso conversationalist,” masIter of improvisation, paradox and put-down, he was, says Jullian, a kind of Scheherazade "ceaselessly weaving a marvelous tapestry of stories and thoughts, to stave off for yet another day that miniature form of death known as boredom."

After watching him perform. Max Beerbohm jotted down the following notes: "effeminate, but vitality of 20 men, magnetism au-

thority.

Hypnotic." Too bad that all that remains is the printed "works," glittering as some of the pages

are.

AN IMPULSE to self-destruction is the dark thread that runs through Wilde's life. A homosexual, he married, and fathered two children, but couldn't make a go of the relationship. especially after that late descendant of Scotland's heroic Douglas, Lord Alfred Douglas, crossed his path. Even then, he could at least have avoided public scandal and jail, but Jullian thinks "he sought abjection and through it attained exaltation." Artistically speaking, the ending was proper and inevitable. We remember it, as the scene fades on Wilde, exiled, in Paris, wandering from cafe to cafe.

This excellent, very readable and generously illustrated biography is admirably translated by Violet Wyndham, the daughter of Ada Leverson, novelist and friend of Wilde, who, unlike other "friends." did not desert him in the evil days he fell upon.