Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius

Chapter 1 Lord of Life There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. --A Woman of No Importance Oscar Wilde's first public performance was in the drawing room of his Dublin home on Merrion Square, where the two-year-old entertained guests by reciting his name--Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde--over and over. Savoring the vowels, trilling the fricatives, he gulped for air, chanting away, faster and faster like an intelligent windup toy, precocious, brazen, and insecure, until applause quieted him. Wilde was later to assert: "Everyone is good until they learn to talk." His mother called him a genius, and he agreed but others misunderstood. "The public is wonderfully tolerant," Wilde said. "It forgives everything except genius." He mocked himself and society and made the world laugh at destiny. "My name has two O's, two F's and two W's," he later observed. "A name which is destined to be in everybody's mouth must not be too long; besides it becomes so expensive in the advertisement." Following his birth, Wilde's mother wrote a friend: "He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde. Is not that grand, misty and Ossianic?" "Names are everything," says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Oscar, who believed that his cradle was rocked by fate, had more than his share. "I envy those men who become mythological while still living," W. B. Yeats once remarked to Wilde, who replied, "I think a man should invent his own myth." That he did. The name Oscar was an auspicious beginning, for it honored the son of Osin of the Gaelic epics, who was born in the Land of Eternal Youth. Like his namesake, Wilde loved youth, even more than art. "The soul is born old but grows young," he wrote. "That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy." Fingal, Gaelic for "fair-haired stranger," goes back to Viking times and identifies a coastal region between the Liffey and Boyne Rivers. With the addition of O'Flahertie, recalling the Galway heritage of his father, whose ancestors had married into the clan of the pre-Norman kings of West Connacht, Oscar was linked to an ancient Celtic family. His father had been given the name Wills as a tribute to a leading Roscommon family that included the playwright William Gorman Wills. In fact, Wilde's father dedicated his first book, Madeira, to Wills, a notable eccentric who filled his room with abandoned animals he rescued. The name Wills was passed on to Oscar, who used it when it suited his fancy. His mother called him Oscar, with an imperious accented a; his relatives preferred "Ossie." At public school he was "Grey-Crow," and at Oxford "Hosky" or occasionally "O'Flighty." In London, the American artist James Whistler dubbed him "Oscarino." Henry James referred to him as "Hoscar." Identity begins--and sometimes ends--with nicknames. "How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me 'plain Oscar,' " Wilde later said. "When one is unknown, a number of Christian names are useful, perhaps needful. As one becomes famous, one sheds some of them...I started as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as 'The Wilde' or 'The Oscar.' " Brilliance and daring created "The Oscar," which led to C.3.3., his prison cell number, and finally to Sebastian Melmoth, his nom de plume in exile, when, without an identity, Wilde was deprived of his currency in everyday life. Before his death, he decBarbara Belford is the author of 'Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius', published 2000 under ISBN 9780679457343 and ISBN 0679457348.