Wilde File

I stopped buying books a little while ago—it'll be years before I finish the ones I have—but I couldn't resist The Oscar Wilde File, a collection of press clippings from the Wilde trial. Here's a satirical dialogue from the front page of Le Figaro (translated):

"My dear fellow, you can say what you like, I may be tired of this affair as an impresario, but as an Englishman I am proud of it."

"In that capacity I, too, am proud of it."

"If I had gone on presenting Oscar Wilde's play, there would not have been a single spectator in my theatre—and all the theatres are in the same situation. That's what I find so wonderful about this country of ours."

"It is the only country in which even scandals serve to highlight public morality. Oscar Wilde is not only finished as a gentleman but also as a playwright."

"In France, if such a thing had happened to a dramatist, it would have given his play enormous publicity."

The only American article excerpted is from The New York Times; below are three of ten paragraphs. Can you spot which crass American obsession is on display?:

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin about forty years ago. His father was a skilled surgeon-dentist, frequently called upon by the Queen for professional services. But somehow or other he never seemed to accumulate any money. He was a man of letters, a skilled statistician, and a man whose experiments in denitistry are still an authority in his profession; but he seemed to lack thrift. Oscar Wilde was the first one in the family to develop it, and the success he has achieved as a playwright and man of letters is mainly due to the devotion of his mother. She deprived herself of necessities in order that he might be liberally educated.

In a primitive school at Enniskellen, Ireland, Oscar Wilde was sent to get the rudiments of an education. He soon outgrew the school, and was sent to Trinity College, Dublin. Here, again, he distinguished himself with such marked success that he was sent to Oxford. He won prize after prize. This was ten years before he came to America as the apostle of a new "cult," and attained the celebrity that brought in the almighty dollar. Whatever personal humiliation the caricature in "Patience" involved, it put money in Oscar Wilde's pocket, and placed the entire family in a position of personal independence that it had never known before.

. . . Oscar Wilde never hesitated to say it was his American "experience" and the plump bank account that he was abe to take home after delivering more than 200 lectures here that taught him that it "paid" to be a crank with a "fad" that people were interested in, as he said once at a public dinner. With all his peculiarities, he was a shrewd business man, with a sharp eye to pecuniary results. He made money much faster than he expected, and it is only just to say that he was quite unselfish in sharing his prosperity with other members of his family who had not been so fortunate.

Of course the American newspaper would be preoccupied with his finances. For the record, the idea that Wilde was a "shrewd business man" is ridiculous.