Three Great Liars 3: Oscar Wilde

Portrait photo of Oscar Wilde 

by W. and D. Downey (1889)

I.

Ultimately, all studies of lying and great liars lead to Wilde and his observational essay published in Intentions (1891): 'The Decay of Lying' - a work many years ahead of its time ...

The essay is structured in the form of a Socratic dialogue between Vivian and Cyril and serves to promote Wilde's view that Aestheticism is superior to Realism. Vivian informs Cyril of an article he is writing which defends the former and blames the decline of modern literature upon the triumph of the latter, with the subsequent decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.

According to Vivian, if the monstrous worship of facts is allowed to continue unabated, then all art is done for - and without art, life will have nothing to imitate. It is vital, therefore, that lying - defined as the telling of beautiful untrue things (and the proper aim of art) - be revived as soon as possible.   



II.

The dialogue opens with Cyril attempting to convince Vivian to leave his library and sit outside in order to enjoy the lovely afternoon. The latter is less than enthusiastic however and reveals himself to be the very opposite of a nature lover. For not only is nature imperfect in its design - "her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition" - but it's also uncomfortable: "Grass is hard and dumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects."  

That's amusing, but the merits and disadvantages of nature are not my concern here: I'm interested, rather, in the fine lie as spoken by the true liar; i.e., a statement that requires no proof of any kind but is its own evidence. Such lies transcend the level of misrepresentation and are more than the base falsehoods and half-truths offered by politicians, lawyers, and journalists. Such lies belong to art - particularly to poetry, which, as Plato recognised, is not unconnected to lying:     

"'As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute."

Today, continues Vivian, the young man who would have once developed into a gifted liar (and perhaps a magnificent novelist), now often falls into careless habits of accuracy or develops "a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling". Literature requires distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power; in other words, it rests upon the ability to tell stories; in a word, to lie.

The modern novel - realistic in form and subject matter - is all too horribly true; true to life and true to nature - but false to art and ultimately such works become not only vulgar, but boring. It was not always thus. But, today, facts are not merely dominant within history, but are "usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance".

Fortunately, says Vivian, poets - with the exception of Wordsworth - have remained faithful to their high mission and are still "universally recognized as being absolutely unreliable". But, in every other domain and genre, the obsession with truth is dominant. If things are bad enough within European life and letters, they are even worse in the United States:

"The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature."

Vivian, however, is far from despondent. In fact, he is extremely hopeful for the future and, in a crucial passage that ends with a profoundly Nietzschean remark (that I have italicised for emphasis), he says:

"That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. [...] Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party [...] is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society [...] Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prisonhouse of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style [...]" 

Notes

Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying', Intentions, (1891). Click here to read online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. This essay was a much revised version of an article that first appeared in a literary periodical in January 1889.

To read the first entry in this series of posts - on Nietzsche - click here.

To read the second entry, on Mark Twain, click here.

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

But don't tell my heart / My achy breaky heart

I just don't think he'd understand

As Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, in so far as antithetical values exist, then things often originate in their opposite.

Thus, it's not surprising that the modern American success story is one rooted in the terrible failure of the original pioneers in conflict with the inhuman conditions of the continent itself. They eventually tamed the American wilderness, but at an appalling cost to themselves and it was later generations who reaped the reward of their efforts.    

D. H. Lawrence, who has a unique insight into American history and literature, identifies this cost, arguing that in order to break the back of the country, the early Americans had to sacrifice something essential within themselves: "the softness, the floweriness, the natural tenderness" [119].  

In other words, America was conquered and subdued, but only once the pioneers were heart broken.

This broken heartedness had two main consequences: firstly, the people became creatures of pure will; secondly, they (unconsciously) became physically repulsive to one another. With regard to the first of these consequences, Lawrence writes:

"The heart was broken. But the will, the determination to conquer the land and make it submit to productivity, this was not broken. The will-to-success and the will-to-produce became clean and indomitable once the sympathetic heart was broken." [120] 

Having repeatedly come up against the malevolent spirit of the American continent and been defeated by it, the early settlers lost their instinctive belief in the inherent kindness of other people and the essential goodness of the universe itself (a belief which, according to Lawrence, lies at the core of the human heart).

When this happens, the result is either "despair, bitterness, and cynicism" [120], or people make their hearts hard - hard enough to eventually shatter - and exercise a new (individual) will; a will-to-succeed if possible, but, ultimately, to persist no matter what and in the face of everything:

"It is not animality - far from it. [...] They have a strange, stony will-to-persist, that is all. [...] It is a minimum lower than the savage [...] Because it is a willed minimum, sustained from inside by resistance, brute resistance against any flow of consciousness except that of the barest, most brutal egoistic self-interest."[123]

Of course, they continue to worship a benevolent God and subscribe to a moral world order - continue to be good neighbours and upstanding citizens, etc. - but their faith and behaviour no longer comes from the heart and they are no longer genuinely connected by a shared warmth of fellow-feeling. They fall out of touch into wilfulness and idealism. And this leads to the second consequence:

"While the old sympathetic flow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another [...] They smell in each other's nostrils. [...] Once the blood-sympathy breaks, and only the nerve-sympathy is left, human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually." [121]

I don't know if there's any truth in this great psychic and physical transformation, but, amusingly, it helps Lawrence explain the American twin obsessions with plumbing and personal hygiene:

"The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American 'plumbing', American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and anti-septic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about 'halitosis', or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don't mind hideous litter of tin cans and paper and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement." [121] 
 
As Lawrence goes on to note, this repulsion for the physicality of others - and, indeed, our own bodies - has spread from America to Europe and the rest of the modern world, as our literature reveals:

"There it is, in James Joyce, in Aldous Huxley, in André Gide [...] in all the very modern novels, the dominant note is the repulsiveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh. It is the expression of absolutely genuine experience." [122]

Of course, Lawrence wrote this ninety years ago, so doubtless things have changed since then; though whether they have changed for the better or for the worse is debatable. Perhaps the inward revulsion for any kind of physical contact with other people has only intensified and extended - thus the triumph of social media.

For whilst there may be various forms of online abuse and trolling to contend with, at least friends don't smell on Facebook ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 117-24. All page refs. given in the post are to this work.   

It's worth noting that despite what Lawrence says here about the dangers of a broken heart, he had himself expressed a poetic preference for such: "For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack." See 'Pomegranate', in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923): click here to read online. It can also be found in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), on p. 231. 

The image used for this post is the Broken Heart Emoji on Apple iOS 11.2: see emojipedia.org for details.

The lyric quoted underneath is from 'Achy Breaky Heart', a country song written by Donald L. Von Tress and most famously recorded by Billy Ray Cyrus for the album Some Gave All (Mercury Records, 1992). The track was also released as a single on 23 March 1992. The lyrics are © Universal Music Publishing Group.

D. H. Lawrence's Vision of a Demonic America

Jasper Johns: Flag (1954-55)

moma.org

I. 

I've never been to America. But I have always loved all things American, including the people. Perhaps this is due in some mysterious way to the fact that my mother-to-be dated a GI during the War (he even proposed and planned to take his teen-bride back with him to New York, but my mother-to-be said no).

Whatever the reason, I've always thought of myself as, in some sense, American and I fully appreciate why so many Brits - including Christopher Hitchens and Johnny Rotten - are proud to become US citizens.

Despite his determination to remain English in the teeth of all the world, I also believe D. H. Lawrence would have made a fine American. Indeed, it's rather surprising that he didn't settle in the States and turn his back forever on the country of his birth, which treated him so poorly on so many occasions.*        

For whilst Lawrence despised many aspects of modern life in America - telephones, tinned meat, automobiles, indoor plumbing, incomes and ideals, etc. - he was fascinated by the spirit of place and the alien quality also of American art-speech that he discovered in the classic literature:

"The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it." [12]

I think that's true: which is why, for example, I think The Scarlet Letter a more provocative novel than L'histoire de l'œil.

I also think Lawrence might be right to suggest that the real American day hasn't dawned as yet. And that when it does, it'll surprise everyone - not least the pale-faced, apple-pie loving idealists who think of themselves as the true Americans of today. For the America to come will be one that has reckoned at last with the full force of the daimon that belongs to the American continent itself.   

Troubling as it is to contemplate, I admire Lawrence's queer dark vision of a demonic America, inhabited by a people whose destiny "is to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness" [81]. This doesn't mean primitive regression - Lawrence is clear that there can be no going back - but it does entail a dusky-bodied posthumanism with a rattle snake coiled at its heart.**  

II.

Even before he had made his first visit in 1922, Lawrence was pinning his highest hopes on America. In a letter of October 1915 to the American editor, critic and poet Harriet Monroe, he writes:

"I must see America. I think one can feel hope there. I think that there life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld. I must see America. I believe it is beginning, not ending." 

Lawrence's contrasting of American vitality with European deadness is a constant in his work from this period. Thus, it's not surprising to find that in a foreword written for Studies in Classic American Literature, he attempts to persuade Americans to get up off their knees before European culture and tradition and be thankful for their own barbaric freedom from the past.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is only interested in serving history to the extent that it serves life; when it becomes disadvantageous - i.e., when it merely instructs without increasing or directly quickening human activity - then he's happy to draw a line under it.

It's a pity, says Lawrence, that Americans are always so wonderstruck by European monuments: "After all, a heap of stone is only a heap of stone - even if it is Milan cathedral. And who knows that it isn't a horrid bristly burden on the face of the earth?" [381]

He continues:

"America, therefore, should leave off being quite so prostrate with admiration. [...]
      Let Americans turn to America, and to that very America which has been rejected and almost annihilated. [...] America must turn again to catch the spirit of her own dark, aboriginal continent.
      That which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognise again, recognise, and embrace. The devil [...] of our forefathers hides the Godhead which we seek. [...]
       It means a surpassing of the old European life-form. It means a departure from the old European morality [...] It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities. [...]
      [...] Now is the day when Americans must become fully, self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life. They must pass the bounds." [383-85]       

In a sense, as these lines indicate, Lawrence is transferring Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of all values into the wild west. One can almost picture the overman in a poncho, cowboy hat and spurs - a bit like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. (Readers might think I'm only teasing here, but, as Lawrence says, the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic ... and a killer.)*** 

 thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com 

Notes

* In a letter written to his friend Catherine Carswell in 1916, Lawrence makes it clear that he had, at this time, determined that he wanted to leave England for good and at the earliest possible opportunity, transferring all his life to America, a country in which he could "feel the new unknown". 

** See what Lawrence writes in 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 126-28. And see also his remarks in 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings and Mexico and Other Essays, pp. 119-20. The essential point is that whilst Lawrence advocates Americans picking up where the native peoples left off, he also wants those who accept this challenge to perfect the old way of being as a new body of truth in the future; not make a vain and naive attempt to simply return to the past: I can't cluster at the drum any more. 

*** Reading Eastwood's movies - particularly the Dollars Trilogy - in terms of a postmoral existentialism, is not an original move on my part; several scholars have produced interesting work in this area. See for example the collection of essays ed. Richard T. McClelland and Brian B. Clayton, The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood, (University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

 
Bibliography

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
 
D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II (1913-16), ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter 1028, to Harriet Monroe, 26 October, 1915.

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III (1916-21), ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), letter 1306, to Catherine Carswell, 7 November, 1916.

Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 


Many thanks to James Walker of The Digital Pilgrimage for use of the Lawrence as cowboy image.

On Moral Turpitude (with Reference to the Case of Sebastian Horsley)

Sebastian Horsley at home in Soho (Mar 2008) 

Photograph: Steve Forrest / Rex Features 

Having an immoral past or criminal record is bad enough. But flaunting one's queer and amoral dandyism in the faces of American customs officials is probably not the wisest thing to do if one is hoping to enter the United States ...

For whilst America is the Land of the Free, it retains a puritanical sensibility that has long required visitors to behave in a manner that doesn't threaten to gravely violate or undermine the accepted standards of decent society. They even have a concept - moral turpitude - woven into U.S. immigration law which specifically addresses this issue.

Whilst this concept eludes precise definition, it's clearly intended to keep out the base or depraved individual; i.e., the kind of man who don't respect the customary rules that govern civil society and feels no sense of duty to others; the kind of man who has worked as a prostitute, consumed copious amounts of controlled substances and had himself crucified in the name of art; the kind of man whose only concession to American sensibilities upon arrival was to remove his nail polish; the kind of man, in short, like Sebastian Horsley ...

One hundred and twenty-six years after Oscar Wilde breezed through customs at New York (declaring nothing except his genius), and thirty years after even the Sex Pistols were eventually allowed to embark on their ill-fated American tour (despite the authorities' initial reluctance to issue visas), Horsley found himself interrogated for eight hours at Newark before being refused entry, declared a persona non grata and deported back to the UK - on the grounds of moral turpitude.

Wearing his favourite outfit, which included a top hat and long velvet coat, Horsley wisely resisted the urge to unbutton his fly when asked if he had anything to declare (Nothing except my genitals), but couldn't resist being facetious when asked what he kept under his hat (My head). US Customs officials - be it noted - are not known for their sense of humour and do not appreciate irony, sarcasm, or flippancy.    

It's such a shame, because Sebastian was genuinely excited to be going to the USA - which he thought of as a friendly, generous nation - in order to promote his best-selling autobiography Dandy in the Underworld. "I have always felt American in my artificial heart," he wrote on March 12th (2008), but seven days later he was obliged to abruptly revise this feeling. And two years later he was dead ...

Anyway, here's Sebastian looking beautiful but slightly deflated having just returned from the US, addressing the American audience denied him. Sometimes, alas, taking civilisation to the barbarians isn't as straightforward as one might hope ...

Taking Civilisation to the Barbarians

Two Irish poets pictured whilst on tour in America: 

Oscar Wilde (1882) and Johnny Rotten (1978) 

When the Sex Pistols set off on their ill-fated American tour in January 1978, manager Malcolm McLaren had determined that the band would avoid playing major venues in New York and Los Angeles in front of audiences likely to be receptive and would, instead, head to the Deep South and perform in front of hostile rednecks in cities including Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Tulsa.

For Malcolm wasn't interested in building a new fan base, or simply increasing record sales; he wanted, rather, to cultivate hatred, incite conflict, and cause as much chaos as possible amongst the barbarians who invented rock 'n' roll: "The idea was to get lost in the swamps and the badlands, making it impossible for the myth of the Sex Pistols to be exposed", as he puts it in the Swindle. 

Of course, any one familiar with the above film or the history of the band, will probably know this already. But what fans might not know is how this idea - often mistakenly said to be ill-conceived - was inspired by Malcolm's love for Oscar Wilde, who in 1882 went on his own (far more extensive, far more profitable) US tour that also brought him into amusingly close contact with some of the colourful locals, including farmers, miners, and gun-toting cowboys.

For despite his pretensions and poses, there was nothing snobbish about Wilde and he took great delight in meeting such people and not just fellow authors, such as Henry James and Walt Whitman. Indeed, one of Wilde's most interesting trips was to a mining town, high up in the Rocky Mountains, called Leadville, the story of which Malcolm was fond of retelling ...

Back in 1882, Leadville was a genuine Wild West town of some 30,000 inhabitants; most of whom had recently arrived and all of whom were hoping to strike it rich following the discovery of thick veins of silver in them thar hills. Strangely, however, as well as the customary saloon and whorehouse, Leadville had (and still has) its own opera house and it was here that Wilde was booked to speak - dressed, according to contemporary accounts, in a purple smoking jacket, knee breeches and black silk stockings.    

His chosen topic for the evening: The Practical Application of the Aesthetic Theory to Exterior and Interior House Decoration with Observations on Dress and Personal Ornament. Unsurprisingly, the talk didn't go down very well. Depending on which account you choose to believe, either the audience eventually fell asleep or Wilde was pushed off stage into the orchestra pit.

Either way, Wilde himself was much amused when, after reading passages from the autobiography of the great Italian artist Benvenuto Cellini, the miners expressed their disappointment that the latter wasn't going to be making an appearance: "I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the enquiry 'Who shot him?'"

Like the Sex Pistols, Wilde liked to meet and mingle with his audience afterwards. When it was discovered that he was a man who not only liked but could handle his liquor - he manfully drank all of those who jeered at him for being a sissy under the table - Wilde became an instant hero in the town and the next day it was agreed to name a new silver vein in his honour.

This apparently involved a ceremony in which Wilde was lowered to the bottom of a mine in a bucket, where he proceeded to eat a meal and smoke a cigar. "I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in [the lode], but in their artless untutored fashion they did not."

Upon returning to the surface, Wilde and his new pals retired once more to the saloon where he saw what he described as "the only rational method of art criticism" he'd ever come across; over the piano there hung a notice reading: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

"I was struck", says Wilde, "with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt that in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music, my apostolic task would be much simplified ..."

Whether there's anything Wildean about the Sex Pistols is debatable. But there's certainly something punk rock about Oscar and his sexy, stylish, subversive aesthetic.  

Notes 

Photo of Oscar Wilde, by Napoleon Sarony (New York City, Jan. 1882).

Photo of Johnny Rotten, lead singer with the Sex Pistols, by Roberta Bayley (San Antonio, Texas, Jan. 1978).

To find out more about Wilde's American adventures, click here. 

To watch the Sex Pistols perform their song New York at Randy's Rodeo, in San Antonio, Texas, (8 Jan. 1978), click here. 

This gig is notorious for the fact that Sid Vicious hits a member of the audience over the head with his bass guitar. 

For a sister post that provides a kind of PS to this one and refers to the case of Sebastian Horsley, click here.