Books: Oscar's Books

Wright is an acolyte – making no bones about his seduction by the master, when, having purchased Oscar's works at the age of 16, he fell under the spell of Dorian Gray, reading it "15, or perhaps even 20 times". This does not necessarily make for a fascinating survey, (which is exactly what Wright has produced – rather than a biography as we know it), yet Oscar's Books, an oblique means of entry into the life and mind of its subject, provides engagement and entertainment

OSCAR'S BOOKS

BY THOMAS WRIGHT

Chatto & Windus, 370pp, 16.99

Wright starts in the middle, during the drama of Wilde in prison awaiting trial on a sodomy charge. Wilde is devastated – not, as you might imagine, at the prospect of imminent scandal and long-term imprisonment, but at news that his London residence has been sold to pay off legal debts and, with it, every precious volume in Oscar's library.

"The entire collection, two thousand volumes or so," Wright informs us, being "sold for 130 – roughly the same as Wilde's weekly expenditure on food, drink, cabs and hotel rooms."

Wilde's extravagance in material terms was matched by his self-basting ego. Was he born thus, or was he massaged into being? Wright's theory is simple – that Wilde was in fact the sum of the books he read and imbibed.

Once this proposition is stated – that "Wilde did not so much discover as create himself through his reading" – it is tirelessly pursued, beginning with Oscar's Dublin childhood, continuing to boarding school at Portora – "The Eton of Ireland" as his mother too-grandly described it – and thence to Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen, Oxford. All the while he schooled himself in the Greek and Latin classics.

Wright attributes much to Wilde's mentors, such as the Reverend Doctor Mahaffy, a towering intellectual force at TCD, whose seminal Social Life in Greece upbraided Victorians for their puritan view of homosexuality. "They (the Greeks)…would have thought our sentimental (ie heterosexual) relationships…unnatural," he writes.

Mahaffy's Social Life in Greece may have emboldened Wilde to pursue homosexual affairs. What is less certain is that it shaped his predilection to such behaviour. In this it is typical of the volumes cited here. How much they penetrated his being, or finally shaped his personality, is pure guesswork. Wright's book is studded with "perhapses" and frequently qualified by "may well have beens". The enigma of Wilde lives on.

The big public events in his life are sometimes airbrushed out. Instead, Wright concentrates on more intimate matters – those dealing with Wilde's closest family, and with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Most movingly – and most comically – he is shown adoring his books so much that he ate them, chewing their pages in the privacy of his rooms.

For the most part, Oscar's Books is beautifully written. As a companion to the shelf-load of Wilde biographies claiming attention, it is a supplement, not a replacement. Its stunning end-papers add a flourish of which Oscar Wilde would have doubtless approved.