MILES KINGTON INTERVIEWS
1.OSCAR WILDE
Simon Callow played Oscar Wilde
MILES Oscar Wilde, you are best known for having written some of the most elegant best loved comedies in the history of the English stage. .
WILDE With respect, that is not true.
MILES You did not write some of the most elegant, best loved comedies in the historyof the . . . .
WILDE Oh yes, to be sure, I plead guilty to that. But that is not why I am famous. It takes more than the production of a few masterpieces to win fame in England. An attached scandal helps wonderfully. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if the scandal is sufficiently dreadful and colourful, the English public is quite prepared to forgive you for not writing plays and novels as well. I am best known in England alas, for being involved in certain private habits which, if I were alive today, would be perfectly legal, though, I fear, ruinously expensive. So expensive that I would have to give up smoking. It is ironic, I think, that of the two vices which kept me amused, that is, the love as that dare not speak its name and the love of smoking, it is the latter which has become more and more frowned upon, while loving relationships between men have moved out into the open.
MILES So you would prefer to live today?
WILDE I did not say that. I do not think it would suit me to be alive today. I do not think I would look good in denim suits and a droopy moustache. To be frank, I do not think anyone looks good in a denim suit and a moustache unless he is a real cowboy, and what good is it to him? Unless he has a fashion-conscious horse?
MILES Do you think morality has improved since your times?
WILDE Certainly not. It is like asking if human nature has changed. Public men are still being publicly whipped for what they do privately. In the case of President Kennedy, they are being whipped posthumously. Much to everyone's fury, President Kennedy died before anyone could openly accuse him of private peccadilloes, so they have compensated by accusing all his successors. One only has to declare oneself a possible candidate these days for an old sweetheart to fall out of the wardrobe clutching a tape recorder. This man would not make a good leader, we are told, because he has been in love. This is rubbish. The question to ask is not Was He In Love ?, but Was He a Good Lover?
MILES May I ask if you have ever taken a woman as a lover?
WILDE Is this the sort of question one gets asked in interviews?
MILES Very often, nowadays.
WILDE Then thank goodness, I took care to live in the 1890's. We were never asked to question unless we were under interrogation by a particularly brutal prosecution counsel at the Old Bailey. Indeed, your modern interviews remind me strongly of cross-examination in court, in more ways than one.
MILES Could you explain that?
WILDE In court, the counsel is well paid to ask the questions, and the witness or defendant gets nothing to provide the answers. In an interview the same is true. The man who asks the questions is being paid a good rate to ask them, no matter how obscure he is, and the subject of the interview, no matter how famous he is - and he is always more famous than the interviewer - receives not a penny for providing the answers, though it is the answers that people wish to read. I will not be so crass as to inquire whether you are being paid well for this. . .
MILES Yes, well enough.
WILDE It is a curious thing but I have always noticed that if you say to a man " I would not stoop so low as to ask you, " or " It is none of my business to inquire whether" , or " Far be it from me to pry into your private affairs, " then nine times out of ten the man will give you more information than you had set out to find. Incidentally, you set out by stating that I was best remembered as a playwright. I countered by saying that I was best remembered for a scandal. You hotly denied it, and have not asked me a single question about my writing since. I think my point is proved.
MILES Yes, that is true. Then perhaps I can ask you. . .
WILDE Incidentally, do you have a cigarette on you? It is so long since I smoked.
MILES We are not allowed to smoke here.
WILDE Then why is there an ashtray on the table?
MILES I have noticed often that where smoking is expressly forbidden, the management is secretly convinced that many will transgress the regulation and so they provide ashtrays to stop the building from being burnt down by secret smokers. In my experience, the presence of ashtrays is usually a signal that smoking is forbidden.
WILDE A pleasing paradox. This interview is beginning to improve.
MILES Then perhaps I can ask you which of your works, in retrospect, is your favourite.
WILDE This interview has just started to go downhill again. It is a modern illness, I have noticed to request people to number things in order of merit. People are always being asked to nominate the funniest story they know, or the most interesting person they met, or to say which political party they would most prefer next June. At least you have not asked me to name the ten musical recordings I would like to take away to a deserted island as even the prime minister is forced to. However, as you have asked me which of my works I would like to take to a deserted island, I will tell you: it is Salome.
MILES But. . . . .
WILDE But it is not one of my famous ones. Not even one of my good ones. Certainly not one of my performed ones. Is that what you were going to say?
MILES Something like that.
WILDE But that is precisely why I would take it. Dorian Gray. . . Lady Windermeres Fan. . . Ernest. . . they can all look after themselves. Salome is the runt of the litter, nearly an orphan, and needs all the help it can get. I made the mistake, too, of writing it in French, an effort on my part which was guaranteed to get it ignored by the English. The English always ignore anything written in French by Frenchman ; how much more so if it is written by an Irishman. That is why all the Irishmen who have settled in Paris in my wake to get away from the dead hand of Irish culture, all the Joyces and Becketts - none of them made the mistake of writing in French. Samuel Beckett, of course, was so aware of the problem of language that he almost did without one altogether.
MILES Do you foresee a time when the English will be good at languages ?
WILDE No. To be good at languages is to admit the possibility of other opinions and points of view. Besides, I was always very happy for the English to be ignorant of French and French authors. It enabled me to borrow, shall I say, a certain amount of ideas from the French, which were always thought to be original notions of mine.
MILES Far be it from me to inquire as to whether you could give me an example. . .
WILDE Delighted, dear boy. There is a writer called Theophile Gautier who is little-known to the English and with whom I found myself much in tune. Indeed, most of my ideas on Art for Art's Sake, can be found tucked away in his works long before Walter Pater is supposed to have put me on the trail. I once tested the waters by printing a poem called SYMPHONY IN WHITE MAJOR, in which all the images were of strange and beauteous white things. Not a single critic pointed out that forty years earlier Gautier had printed a poem in French called SYMPHONIE EN BLANC MAJEUR, in which all the images were of white things.
Encouraged by this evidence that there was, between us and the French, a large wall erected through which the English could not see, and through which the French did not bother much to look I proceeded to make raids on a novel written by Gautier called Mademoiselle de Maupin, for which he wrote a preface in which he wittily and perceptively enunciates the gospel of art for art's sake. The beautiful is the opposite of the useful, he says. Which is the most useful room in the house, he asks, the room to which we all have to go every day. Is it also the most beautiful ? Perhaps the opposite. That is a thought which so appealed to me that I would immediately have borrowed it, except that their houses contained lavatories. Again, you will remember that I once said: "Give me the luxuries of life and I can do without the necessities"
MILES I do indeed.
WILDE Gautier wrote in that self-same preface: "Nothing is necessary but the inessential. " Do you see a connection?
MILES Yes, a very close one.
WILDE And yet he thought of it forty years before I did.
MILES Which gave you forty years to find a better way of expressing it.
WILDE It is kind of you to say so. In fact, I had to find a way of expressing it which would appeal to the English, and what pleases them above all is something that sounds like a music-hall joke. When I defined fox-hunting as "The unspeakable in full pursuit of the inedible," I was halfway to the right formula, though still a little wordy. When I said that "Work is the curse of the drinking classes" , I got a hearty laugh from all over England and you can still see the saying hanging behind bars in pubs all over the country, though never of course ascribed to me.
MILES Do you not find it disillusioning that after having spent your life in the pursuit of beauty and ideas, you should be remembered for your jokes?
WILDE You can only be disillusioned if you had illusions in the first place. I do not think any Irish writer who comes over to England to work has any illusions about the English, except perhaps to over-estimate them. The chatter in the average Dublin pub is of a higher level than a conversation between the six Booker Prize finalists. It is just as well as Irish artists have no illusions about the English audience, as all Irish artists have to come to England to work. That is their tragedy. No English writers ever leave England to work. That is theirs.
MILES But it is always said that England is a literary country, a country of writers.
WILDE This is in order to disguise the fact that you have no composers or painters worth speaking of. A country always emphasises what it does well by ignoring what it does badly. When the Welsh call themselves a musical nation, they mean only that they have no visual sense.
MILES How exactly do the Welsh have no visual sense?
WILDE Everything that is beautiful in Wales was made by God. Any attempt to improve on his work by man has been disastrous. A picturesque Welsh village is a contradiction in terms.
MILES Yet they are a musical nation.
WILDE Name one Welsh composer.
MILES Yes, well, I am interested still in your perception that England is not a country of writers. Tell me more about that.
WILDE England is described as a nation of writers by tourist boards anxious to entice American travellers here and get them to spend their money. Wordsworth's Cumbria. . . . Hardy's Wessex. . . Dickensian London. . . these are the landmarks on the British cultural map, marking all the cash registers. An American who visits Shakespeare's Stratford is a man who has not read Shakespeare, surrounded by compatriots of Shakespeare who have not read Shakespeare since being taught to hate him at school in a town which William Shakespeare left as soon as he was legally and financially able to do so and never willingly returned to. Now, if you visit France you will not find the country carved up into writer regions, like so many cuts of an animal on a butcher's board: you will find it gently shading from one colour to another: La Cote d'Azur, The Emerald Coast and so on. It is just as fanciful an idea but a much more attractive one. You will also find that to a Frenchman a region of France spells out a taste. Say Provence, and he will taste garlic and tomatoes. I could go to Normandy to visit the land of cream and Calvados, but not to see Flaubert's Normandy. Flaubert's Normandy is all in his books.
MILES To come back to your works, I still find it remarkable that what you talked about – beauty, ideas, truth – is so very different from the humour and comedy for which we remember you. And which you seemed to hold of very little account.
WILDE Well, of course, I may have talked about poetry a great deal, but that was not necessarily because I liked poetry so much as because I liked being a poet. I spent more time giving a performance as a poet than writing poetry.
MILES Even at your trial?
WILDE Especially at my trial. I thought that a jury might think a poet could not possible do the things of which I was accused. I was wrong of course. The sort of people who sit on juries have no conception of what he does not do. But as far as my comedy is concerned, I think I may be said to have achieved a sort of poetry on the stage. Some of my jokes are exquisite enough to be poems in their own right. That speech about everyone's need to have a Bunbury – there is something rather poetic about that, I think.
MILES And even the brief appearance of a handbag in your
dialogue…
WILDE Ah, yes! to this day, most of the inhabitants of England will know you are trying to be amusing if you say the words, " A handbag ?" - it is that no other British playwright has dared to mention a handbag on stage since I did. It is the only known example of the mention of a lady's accessory being proof of intent to plagiarise.
MILES So you think poetry and humour are adjacent?
WILDE Certainly. I thought for a long time that Lord Alfred Douglas was poetic. By the end, I could only see him as laughable.
MILES One should not speak evil of the dead, perhaps.
WILDE Unless one is also dead.
MILES Quite so. If we could finish by discussing your posthumous
reputation, in fact, which has tended to fluctuate. . . .
WILDE But at least I have one. When I think back to those with whom I was connected in the public mind, the Marquess of Queensberry, Lord Alfred Douglas and so on - they are only remembered because of me. Ironic, I find it. I wish they were forgotten because of me.
MILES Your plays have never been out of the public eye, and are still performed regularly.
WILDE Especially in schools. Perhaps I am not so wicked after all.
MILES The Picture of Dorian Gray is still much remembered.
WILDE You mean, not much read?
MILES Well. . . .
WILDE You may be right. A novel in which an oil painting plays the lead role will never appeal to everyone.
MILES I remember reading " The Soul of Man Under Socialism" with much enjoyment.
WILDE So do I. You have good taste.
MILES And yet, as much as anything, it is not your books so much as your life that is remembered. You are a symbol of persecution and defiance. . .
WILDE And pig-headedness and ignorance, no doubt, and a death-wish. Yes, I have read all those books, and seen all the films.
MILES What was your opinion?
WILDE Well, I would like to have been portrayed more as a writer and less as a tragic victim. But I suppose to point a camera at a man writing at a desk for two hours, scratching his head and sighing, would tell you a lot about the writer's condition without guaranteeing a popular work of art. The public will always refuse to admit that writing involves any work.
MILES Do you have any feelings about the way you were portrayed?
WILDE I was delighted with the way Robert Morley played me in the film he made 30 years ago. I have been very disappointed with him since.
MILES Why so ?
WILDE Because he has in his old age lost his hair, gained a chin and become portly. He has thus suggested to the whole world that this is the way I, too, would have grown old.
MILES How would you have grown old?
WILDE With extreme reluctance and under protest. Old age would not suit me, and I did not suit old age.
MILES But surely that is true of everyone?
WILDE With respect, that is not true. There are some people who seem to have waited all their lives in order to blossom at a late stage into a glorious old age. There are pictures of Queen Victoria as a young woman, but nobody believes them. I do not think anyone would have believed in an old Oscar Wilde. I certainly would not have done. And yet old age does improve many things. Wine, for instance, and paintings. Furniture, books, houses - they all seem to become more radiant, as if they did not believe in death.
MILES You were not an old man when you left Reading gaol. . . .
WILDE . . . . but I was beginning to look like one. That was the terrifying thing. I always had a horror of physical ugliness, you know. I could not abide to be among malformed or diseased people, or even uncomely people, nor among tawdry and unlovely objects. I liked to be surrounded by beauty. Well, there is no point surrounding yourself with beauty if you do not also flee ugliness. And when I looked at myself in the mirror in Paris, I could not avoid the conclusion that ugliness was now following me around. I was becoming what I hated. So I had to go. I was, if you like, rejected by the world on artistic grounds.
MILES So your final departure was an aesthetic decision?
WILDE Yes, certainly. It was an enlightened critical decision to leave the world a fairer place.
MILES Are you in favour of euthanasia then?
WILDE Oh, yes, but only for people who look displeasing. At the moment merciful relief is given to those who are suffering intensely, by a panel of doctors. It should be given by a panel of art critics to those who look so distasteful that they are causing other people suffering.
MILES Mr. Wilde, thank you very much. It has been a delightful encounter.
WILDE Thank you. Next time, do not forget to bring some cigarettes.
ENDS
