Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris

Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who “knew” the subject more or less intimately, and the more objective or scholarly accounts produced by later generations.In the case of Wilde, as presented to us by Frank Harris, we are in a way doubly estranged from the subject. We meet with Oscar the charismatic talker, whose tone of voice can never be reproduced – even if a more scrupulous biographer had set down his words accurately – and we are perhaps already aware of him as Wilde the self-destructive celebrity who uneasily fills the place of the premier gay icon and martyr in our contemporary view.Neither of these images will do. We need to read as many accounts as possible. Harris, though himself a self-advertising literary and sexual buccaneer, takes a wincingly representative view of Wilde’s homophile activity: for him it is a patrician excrescence, the abominable vice of the few, contracted at English board...

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Episodes

Wednesday Dec 13, 2023

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris

Episodes

20 – XIXb. His St. Martin’s Summer: His Best Work – Part Two

21 – XX. The Results of His Second Fall: His Genius

22 – XXI. His Sense of Rivalry; His Love of Life and Laziness

23 – XXII. ‘A Great Romantic Passion!’

24 – XXIII. His Judgments of Writers and of Women

25 – XXIV. We Argue About His ‘Pet Vice’ and Punishment

26 – XXV. The Last Hope Lost

27 – XXVI. The End

28 – XXVII. A Last Word