Word: oscared
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...latest to tell the story of the pasty, jowly face, the gross, purplish lips, the great wit, great charm and great downfall is British Biographer Hesketh Pearson (Conan Doyle, G.B.S., etc.). "In January 1943 I mentioned to Bernard Shaw," Pearson explains, "that I wished to write a Life of Oscar Wilde." Shaw replied, "My advice is, very decidedly, Don't. . . . There is nothing more to be said." But Pearson went ahead anyhow, having long been interested in the complexities of Wilde's character. Although he had never seen him in the flesh, he knew and had talked...
...Genius," Oscar Wilde once said, "is born, not paid." His own limp-lily brand of Irish-Oxonian genius has been paid many times over, which is not necessarily to say overpaid. In the years since his death in 1900 (from cerebral meningitis, probably complicated by syphilis), he has become more & more renowned-a state of affairs which he would doubtless find amusing...
...this he has been only partly successful. To rescue Oscar altogether from the pathological fog is more than he or anybody else can do. Oscar's homosexual tastes and his literary personality are hardly separable, however true it may be that the mere heat of the one does not account for the light of the other. Pearson's explanations explain very little. He thinks that Wilde's emotional nature never developed "beyond adolescence"; hence Wilde always remained "an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate, half boy, half genius." Nevertheless, he adds, Wilde was "very much in love" with Constance Lloyd...
Never a Bad Day. Biographer Pearson's portrait of Wilde the conversationalist, critic, playboy and playwright is more convincing, though here too, at points, his admiration carries him away. Oscar, he insists, was an "innately happy" man, who "never experienced a day's unhappiness until he was 40 years old" (1894). Even his last years in exile on the Continent were reasonably happy; the "martyrdom has been made to look much meaner than it really...
Soprano Dame Nellie Melba said she met Oscar Wilde in the streets of Paris in 1898, shabbily dressed, with a "hunted look in his eyes." Lord Carson, his old schoolmate who cross-examined Wilde at his first trial, is reported to have seen him lying "haggard" and "painted" in a Paris gutter. Pearson laughs such stories off. Oscar, he declares, never painted his face except to edify American audiences during his U.S. lecture tour (1882). As for being shabby, he was "invariably well-dressed, well-shaved, self-assured...