Frank Kermode’s Bury Place Papers, a collection of his essays for the London Review, will be out before Christmas, as will Concerning E.M. Forster.
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Biography and memoirs, Biography, Wilde, Oscar, 1800-1899, 1860-1879, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, Literature and literary criticism, Europe, Western Europe, Ireland
Vol. 9 No. 19 · 29 October 1987
pages 12-13 | 3572 words
A Little of this Honey
Frank Kermode
- Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann
Hamish Hamilton, 632 pp, £15.00, October 1987, ISBN 0 241 12392 5
Richard Ellmann’s Life of Joyce, generally regarded as the best literary biography of our time, was the work of his middle years. The last third of his own life was largely given to this biography of Wilde, which was in some ways a very different sort of undertaking. There were surviving acquaintances of Joyce, but nobody who knew Wilde is available for questioning; the material, though copious, must be sought in libraries. But Ellmann was an exceptionally gifted researcher, never bragging about his finds, just folding them quietly into his narrative, as he does in this book.
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[*] Since the book will obviously be many times reprinted it is worth pointing out such errors. The aesthetician Baumgarten is called ‘Baumgartner’ in text and index (pp. 31, 85, 596). The daughter of Herodias (Salome or Hérodiade) is called ‘Herodias’ (p. 320). ‘The cultivation of art apart from life is to build a fire that cannot burn’ (p. 300) is a sentence gone astray. I have also thought fit to read ‘tabus’ for ‘tabs’ in a sentence I proceed to quote, and to emend the punctuation of the last sentence of the book.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 20 · 12 November 1987
From Nicolas Walter
SIR: Frank Kermode mentions a few of the minor errors which have understandably but regrettably survived to mar Richard Ellmann’s posthumous Oscar Wilde (LRB, 29 October). A less minor error concerns the wording of the Marquess of Queens-berry’s famous card which was delivered at Oscar Wilde’s club in February and which precipitated Wilde’s prosecution of Queensberry and thus his own downfall. In his Acknowledgments, Ellmann says that ‘R.E. Alton deciphered for the first time the message on Queensberry’s visiting card’; in his Notes, Ellmann thanks ‘R.E. Alton for his study of Queensberry’s handwriting, which enabled him to read for the first time correctly the message on Queensberry’s card’; and in his text, Ellmann says that ‘what Queensberry actually wrote was “To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite”.’ It is true that virtually all commentators, from the trial to the present day, have got the card wrong, reading ‘posing as’ or ‘posing as a’, though all have agreed about the angry misspelling of ‘sodomite’. But Ellmann has also got it wrong. The actual card survives among the trial papers preserved the Public Record Office, where it was found by H. Montgomery Hyde in 1974, and a facsimile of it appeared on the flyleaf of his Oscar Wilde (1976). There is no doubt that the first word is not ‘To’ but ‘For’. There is some doubt about the middle of the message, but the most likely reading is ‘For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite’. Anyway, this was given in Richard Pine’s Oscar Wilde (1983), so even if Ellmann had been right, he wouldn’t have been the first.
Nicolas Walter
London N1
Vol. 9 No. 21 · 26 November 1987
From Mark Hearne
SIR: Frank Kermode (LRB, 29 October) persuasively justifies his correction of a few errors of detail in Richard Ellmann’s biography of Wilde on the grounds that the book is bound to be reprinted. Since, I imagine, Kermode’s own review stands a good chance of being collected, it is worth reminding him that it was not at Twyford station, where Wilde was taken after his release from prison, that he was famously spat at, but – as indeed Ellmann tells us – on the platform at Clapham Junction, where the handcuffed Wilde, in convict’s clothes, spent a half-hour waiting for the train to Reading.
Mark Hearne
Oxford
