Does the key to unlocking Oscar Wilde lie in the books he read?

Yes, but isn't that true for everyone?

I see via Literary Review that the newest biography of Oscar Wilde is framed as the story of Wilde the omnivorous reader. I'll save up and get a copy, of course, but the review is hardly promising. The author makes a great deal out of the books Wilde requested in jail, but doesn't mention how many books on theology there were. It's a very Catholic list; he had a KJV, as every prisoner does, but he requested a Douay-Rheims Bible anyway. (Those wanting more information know where to look.)

It's obvious that this new biographer is projecting a little. He was deeply affected by Wilde's books at a young age, therefore Wilde must have been the sort of man that was profoundly affected by books. My guess is that he was, but no more than any other man of letters.

I can afford to be this patronizing only because my own path to Decadence and Aestheticism was somewhat different. Huysmans was my gateway drug, not Wilde. I only picked up Dorian Gray after reading that Against the Grain was the "yellow book" from the end of chapter eleven. I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I copied down this passage from chapter two of AtG:

To tell the truth, artifice was in Des Esseintes' philosophy the distinctive mark of human genius. As he used to say, Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments. When all is said and done, what a narrow, vulgar affair it all is, like a petty shopkeeper selling one article of goods to the exclusion of all others; what a tiresome store of green fields and leafy trees, what a wearisome commonplace collection of mountains and seas!

In fact, not one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and so wonderful, which the ingenuity of mankind cannot create; no Forest of Fontainebleau, no fairest moonlight landscape but can be reproduced by stage scenery illuminated by electric light; no waterfall but can be imitated by the proper application of hydraulics, till there is no distinguishing the copy from the original; no mountain crag but painted pasteboard can adequately represent; no flower but well chosen silks and dainty shreds of paper can manufacture the like of!

Yes, there is no denying it, she is in her dotage and has long ago exhausted the simple-minded admiration of the true artist; the time is undoubtedly come when her productions must be superseded by art.

Still, the conceit of trying to read every book that Wilde read will no doubt help in understanding the man. The day I grokked Eve Tushnet was the day I learned of her special connection to the story "Man Without a Country." I know of at least four people who really believe I'm crazy—X. Trapnel, commenter Anonymous, and the Oxonians James met during his semester abroad to whom he described me as "a fag hag who thinks I'm going to Hell for being gay"—and I can only think that they would be more understanding if they, too, had grown up on Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby. (One hot summer in the 1940's, a stranger arrives at a small-town boarding house and claims to be "the novelist Charles Dickens," hiring the young boy who lives there to take down dictation for his "new novel," A Tale of Two Cities. It is eventually revealed that the man is a failed writer—"I never put two words together that sounded better than they had apart." In the end, Fake Charles Dickens runs away with the town librarian, whose hobby had been locking herself in her office and pretending to be Emily Dickinson; they live happily ever after in their make-believe identities.) Or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which I memorized, or Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, or, hell, Jaws II, which I've seen seventeen times.

To return to Wilde and Decadence, I'll offer my highly subjective judgment that Zola's The Sin of Father Mouret is the best introduction to Decadence for anyone who doesn't yet know whether it's a movement they'll find interesting. A young, neurotic priest convalesces on a secluded country farm, nursed only by the beautiful and blissfully ignorant Albine. Mouret falls in love with her as an embodiment of unstudied natural grace, but eventually realizes that her animal grace is morally and physically revolting. Zola had observed the fight between philosophical reason and Romantic natural passion and, by the time of Mouret, was ready to ridicule both sides. Reason is elevated but barren; nature is low and disgusting. Think of it as a Gothic novel minus the sublime.