Recollections of Oscar Wilde

André Gide · Ernest La Jeunesse

jaan 2007 · Mondial

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Three men of literature - Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide, the French Ernest La Jeunesse and the German Franz Blei - present their "Recollections" of the last years of Oscar Wilde. --- Just as his letters from prison to Mr. Ross, printed as a book under the title "De Profundis," hint the tragedy of his prison life, a tragedy more of soul than of body, so does this present little volume disclose some few facts from the man's life after leaving prison. The author of "De Profundis," after all the resolutions and conclusions in that document, reverted to his baser self, and died with his life fallen far below the altitude marked in the prison letters. That knowledge of a few is set forth in concrete, intimate manner in the pages of this book... (Percival Pollard) --- Those who came to know Wilde only in the latter years of his life can scarcely, in view of that feeble and infirm existence, have had any conception of this wonderful personality. It was in 1891 that first I saw him. Wilde had at that time what Thackeray termed the most important of talents, success. His gestures, his look, were triumphant. So complete was his success that it seemed as if it had preceded him, and Wilde had nothing to do but follow it up. His books were talked about. (Andre Gide) --- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 - 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer. Known for his barbed wit, he was one of the most successful play-wrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years of hard labour after being convicted of the offence of "gross indecency" (i.e. of homosexual acts).

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Gide, the reflective rebel against bourgeois morality and one of the most important and controversial figures in modern European literature, published his first book anonymously at the age of 18. Gide was born in Paris, the only child of a law professor and a strict Calvinist mother. As a young man, he was an ardent member of the symbolist group, but the style of his later work is more in the tradition of classicism. Much of his work is autobiographical, and the story of his youth and early adult years and the discovery of his own sexual tendencies is related in Si le grain ne meurt (If it die...) (1926). Corydon (1923) deals with the question of homosexuality openly. Gide's reflections on life and literature are contained in his Journals (1954), which span the years 1889--1949. He was a founder of the influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise, in which the works of many prominent modern European authors appeared, and he remained a director until 1941. He resigned when the journal passed into the hands of the collaborationists. Gide's sympathies with communism prompted him to travel to Russia, where he found the realities of Soviet life less attractive than he had imagined. His accounts of his disillusionment were published as Return from the U.S.S.R. (1937) and Afterthoughts from the U.S.S.R. (1938). Always preoccupied with freedom, a champion of the oppressed and a skeptic, he remained an incredibly youthful spirit. Gide himself classified his fiction into three categories: satirical tales with elements of farce like Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio's Adventures) (1914), which he termed soties; ironic stories narrated in the first person like The Immoralist (1902) and Strait Is the Gate (1909), which he called recits; and a more complex narrative related from a multifaceted point of view, which he called a roman (novel). The only example of the last category that he published was The Counterfeiters (1926). Throughout his career, Gide maintained an extensive correspondence with such noted figures as Valery, Claudel, Rilke, and others. In 1947, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.