waiting for it." Oscar Wilde. A Woman Of No Importance.
Oscar Wilde wrote these words and they were first heard during the performance of his play a Woman Of No Importance. It might well have served as a rallying cry for the whole aesthetic movement and their obsession with all things beautiful.Certainly it may well have gone some way to inspiring a young a vital Oscar Wilde to take a trip to the Americas in search of a destiny still taking shape in his imagination. Not entirely sure what it was he was seeking, only that it would be beautiful, no matter how transient. Oscar sets off on a journey that spawns continents and in many ways centuries, or at least the period leading up to the end of one century and the beginning of another. The centuries turn, stumbling on calf legs into a new age of wonders, tumbling towards modernity or at least a semblance of such.
I have read other biographies of Wilde, looking at the course of his life from different perspectives and this one took me down a road I had not known off. Certainly not in this detail, examining in exquisite detail the gestation period in a foreign landscape of the artiste, of the Wildean figure self conjured and ready for the ages. Michelle Mendelsshon has indeed researched this detailed and beautifully crafted biography and in so doing unearths a treasure trove of lost and forgotten and probably deliberately neglected moments in the glittering foundations of his career, bits that twinkle and shine, buried beneath the weight of what was to follow. The Great British empire is beginning to totter while the new , and getting newer all the time, world of America is really coming into its own. The Babel like firmament being laid for a new empire with Oscar looking for a place in the court of the King.
Paradigms shift and change, Class and colour, old and new, the common and the unique, its a moveable feast on a star spangled table cloth. Wilde sensed it, sensed the potential of this new age and was determined to put a stamp on it. He just had not decided what that stamp would look like. Ever a work in progress, inventing himself as he went along, holding a mirror up to america, but only seeing his own face reflected back at him(Quite his favourite view, truth be told.) Michelle Mendelssohn has found a perspective, a way of looking back that does great honor to its neglected sources. wait til you see some of the truly provocative pieces of art she found, to better convey the complexity, and at times brute ignorance, of the times. They were harsh, judgemental, brutal and unforgiving. Guess the wheel has turned full circle. Its this area where the dream of the aesthetics always falls down for me. A hungry person standing in the gutter staring at the stars still has an empty belly. Every view of the world is vastly improved on a full stomach.
Some of the illustrations she has unearthed in this biography are truly eye popping, startling to me that I had never seen them before. they make for uncomfortable viewing and as such they should not be forgotten, . Some of the advertising artwork and posters for performances and products convey an unsubtle and unashamed racism and homophobia, quite hideously so. Such were the times. The continent may well have been re-inventing itself but old prejudices die hard and their death throes can last decades.
Wilde found a worldly nobility in the ordinary, elevating things to an unreaslistic level. He might well have have been sincere in his aspirations , but what place has sincerity in the hallowed arts of the aesthetes...
A great book though, travelling along the roads less traveled but in such company...
