Greek to Me

Oscar Wilde gives a rare interview and reveals he is somewhat baffled by his current popularity - and today's language. (originally published 1995 and collected in It's a Queer World ; performed Summer 2004 at GALHA 25th birthday party, Simpson as Wilde, Derek Lennard in the role of the eager gay interviewer))

by Mark Simpson

 

How does it feel to be the world’s most famous bugger?

OW: Hmmm. 1 may be hopelessly deluded, but I would prefer to think that my fame in the latter part of the Twentieth century is a result of my linguistic rather than my pederas­tic activities; that after the passage of time, when people talk of my legendary tongue, the image it conjures up is more associated with a theatre, a salon, or a first-class restaurant than a bordello.

 Yes, of course. But you’ve become a hero to millions of buggers...

OW: A hero? In what way?

 

As the first gay man, the one who gave gay men their sensibility, who gave them a name and a face.

OW: I can assure you I was not the first gay man. There were plenty other dissolutes, although, admittedly, I was for a while perhaps second to none in the sheer athleticism of my indulgence.

 

No, no, you misunderstand me. Today “gay” means homosexual, er, what you would have called “Uranian” or “Greek” love.  It’s no longer used to suggest vice. Well, not always.

OW: What? You have no other word for the greatest love of all than ‘gay’? How dreadful! How do you distinguish between the pure and noble and the filthy and depraved? Where is one supposed to Find ideals? In the gutter? Where is the love that inspired Michelan­gelo, Shakespeare, Alexander?

Certainly, I looked for love – and stars – in the gutter and that was my error; but since when have the errors of one individual been taken as a manifesto? Has the love that dare not speak its name really become the love that will not pull its pants up?

 

But surely your speech from the dock about the love that dare not speak its name and how it was intellectual rather than physical, cultural rather than carnal, was just a necessary sub­terfuge

OW: On the contrary, it was probably one of the most sincere moments of my life. Or rather, it was one of my least insincere moments. It moved the jury. It almost moved me. On the other hand, it was not my greatest work. All art, if it is to be art at all, must be quite useless. I was sincere, but it was bad art. That was the tragedy of my life after my ruin.

 

Well, nevertheless, you remain a hero to gay, er, Uranian men for bravely resisting the homophobia of the British State.

OW: I’m not sure what this “fear of the same” is that you refer to.  My Classics master always told me that one should never mix Greek and Latin – and no I don’t mean in THAT way –  clearly standards have slipped (and not just because of your laughter).

I was loathed for being an outsider, for being Irish, for being an upstart, and most of all for being clever. The English are a generous race; they can forgive you everything except being talented. I committed the cardinal sin of climbing to the top of the social ladder and parodying the conventions that took me there. People never bring you garlands for puncturing their illusions; they always come after you with knives. All the same, perhaps in me English society recognized itself all too well. You see, I was a fraud, a dissembler, a thief, and a charlatan—all the essential virtues which made England great.

 

Yes, quite, but I think you misunderstand me again. “Homo­phobia” is the fear and loathing of homosexuals, those attracted to the same sex.

OW: Ah, so “homophobia” is convention?

 

Yes, of a kind, but it can be challenged today. Today there is something called gay pride. Gay men show the world that they are proud to be gay, that they’re no longer ashamed. You helped to make that possible.

OW: Pride is something I know about. Pride is something I made a special study of. Pride is what led to my downfall. I invited disaster into my life and set up a table for it by my endless vain indiscre­tions, most particularly with Bosie. We were on and off more times than a tart’s knickers when the fleet is in. 

Yes, his father was quite mad, but in allowing the even madder Bosie to provoke him I was quite the maddest. I then sealed my fate by suing him for calling me what I was. In a plot development which Shakespeare himself might have penned, disas­ter descended on me when I tried to prove a fool a liar. Fools speak sooth—even the dimmest student of drama knows this. And the biggest fools of all—clerics—are also right when they say pride goeth before a fall.

 

But it is through gay pride that gay men overcome the oppres­sion and prejudice which ruined you.

OW: Rotting in prison after my sentence and ebbing away in Paris like a cheap watercolour in the rain after my release I had time to consider the hubris that was visited upon me and reinterpret it as a kindness. I thought myself the Lord of Language; I thought that I could breathe sense into clay such as Bosie, take meaning where I pleased, find beauty in any place I cared, no matter how sordid or polluted, that truth and falsehood were preoccupations of those without imagina­tion enough to tell a pretty lie. I saw insincerity as a way of multiply­ing my personality.

 

But today we celebrate you as a postmodernist, a playful wearer of masks, the pope of inauthenticity. You’re one of the creators of what today we call camp.

OW: I do not know what this “camp” is that you speak of. Aestheticism was my guiding principle. But I will tell you this about inauthentic­ity: pride is a mask. Behind it you will always find something else; sometimes another mask, more often than not merely sorrow. Sor­row is not a mask for anything, sorrow merely is. That is its truest hardship. lt is also its greatest virtue. In sorrow you have no choice but to see things and people as they really are. After my fall, sorrow was my only personality; realism my only companion.

 

But that is why gay pride is so important. Gay men come out to the world and announce who they really are and demand that the world accepts them, so that they cannot be pilloried as you

OW: Are you telling me that you do to yourselves, of your own volition, that which it took the full majesty of the law, the gutter press, the Marquess of Queensbury, and the Government of the day, to do to me? That you put yourselves in the dock and drag your own private life out for the world to see?

 

But you showed that visibility was the important thing. You gave the love that had no name a name. Within a few genera­tions, a movement had developed which was strong enough to encourage people to be open about their sexuality.

OW: Extraordinary. You admire my insincerity and yet with your strange ritual of “coming out,” you seem keen, like religious zealots, to strip yourselves naked before the world; a strange way for any debutante to behave. Suddenly Anglicanism seems quite appealing. My dear young muddled man, my “coming out” cost me everything I owned and valued. But most of all, it cost me my wife and my family.

 

Today, gay men don’t get married.  Or at least, not to women.

OW: You do not marry? There are no women in your lives? How do you propagate yourselves?

 

We’ll turkey basters aside, we don’t. We leave it to straights.

OW: To what?—Oh never mind. You don’t have children? But that is too terrible for words. Of all the incredible things you have told me about your time this is the one I find most shocking. My children were the most precious things in the world to me. When the courts took them away it was the bitterest blow—bitterer by far than the humiliation, imprisonment, and bankruptcy. No children! I take it, then, that these “gay” men today are all artists?

 

Well, no. Not the kind of artists you mean.

OW: And what do they leave for the world? If they have no children and no art, what do they contribute? What is their legacy for posterity? With what promise of immortality do they warm themselves in their old age?

 

Well, some teach straight men on TV how to use moisturiser and keep their underwear clean.  The Aesthetic Movement has become rather big these days.  Or small, depending on your point of view.  But most gay men just enjoy life and take each day as it comes. And a few try to make things a bit better for the next genera­tion.

OW: So pleasure is all there is?

 

Well, it’s part of being gay in the nineties. Pleasure is how gay men validate themselves and their sexuality in a world which has done much to denigrate them.

OW: I am appalled. Where does a concept of sin fit into this world of pleasure and superficiality? In the period before my arrest I allowed myself to become a slave to my own appetite. I betrayed my gifts, my country, my family, and my ancestors. I was utterly, utterly lost. My lust did not validate me or this thing you call my “sexuality”—it quite undid me. The Lord of Language was not even the Lord of his own soul. I grew fat and bloated on vice; like some Ottoman potentate I de­voured whole subcontinents but was left hungry. To cure the soul by means of the senses is a doomed project.  And I am that doom.

 

But didn’t you once say that the moralist is one who lectures on the dangers of sins of which they have grown tired? And that pleasure is what one should live for, since nothing ages like happiness?

OW: No, Lord Henry Wooton says it in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But, yes, Lord Henry was me—or rather, one of the masks I wore. However, these sentiments are pure style; only a fool would take them literally.

 

Is there any message that you would like to pass on to your admirers?

OW: If there is one thing that I would urge today’s generation of aesthetes to consider it is this: Do not, under any circumstances, make love to boys whose fathers cannot spell “sodomite.” Their education is likely to be very poor and their manners even worse.

 

 

© Mark Simpson 2004 (originally published in Attitude magazine in 1995)

 

www.marksimpson.com