Author's Life Was An Open Book

The Age

Saturday January 10, 2009

Owen Richardson

Owen Richardson finds that what Oscar Wilde read provides another way of looking at him.

Oscar's Books

By Thomas Wright

Chatto & Windus, $45

THOMAS Wright tells the story of Oscar Wilde's influences, not as if they were ideas floating in the ether, but through the objects themselves - the books he owned and made notes in and tore the pages out of.

This book is thus part inventory, part literary criticism, part intellectual biography, and the blend is an unstable one. It threatens to become trivial, or it gets fixated on red herrings.

When Wright puzzles over Wilde's ownership of this or that bit of Victorian trash, he is trying to get more from his approach than it can give him.

If you like books, you'll end up owning all kinds of irrelevant stuff, and Wilde's library, like anyone's, obviously included the odd ring-in.

Wright is also a diehard fan, an Oscar Wilde tragic, so he can't tell the difference between the products of Wilde's genius and the moments when he was just being affected in the standard fin de siecle way.

All up, though, Oscar's Books is so unusual and interesting that its failings are easy to overlook. And the story of Oscar's books, like the story of his life, leaps into a different register when he goes to prison.

Wright reprints the lists of the volumes Wilde requested from his jailers, and when he describes a tattered, stained copy of Walter Pater's Imaginary Portraits, it is as if the book were a seance.

© 2009 The Age

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