Constance Wilde believed, “No Art Without Morality. Not so for Oscar…

In The Wildes by Louis Bayard, the author has Oscar say, “To me, a work of art has no more value than a flower. A book is neither moral nor immoral, it is only well written or badly written.” His wife Constance replies that Dorian Gray has a moral.  Oscar retorts, “Which is its weakness, my love.  A bit of rawhide thrown to the hounds of commerce.” But Constance says and believes “things people do to each other—with each other—matter. On the page as in life.”

Here's to Constance, I say.

Why did I enjoy this 2024 novel in five acts?  Because I spent time with Wilde’s wife and sons, in various time frames, and enjoyed three acts with Constance’s point of view. The reader begins with an 1892 family holiday in Norfolk. Then in 1897, Constance and her sons, name changed to Holland, are in Italy. (Oscar Wilde’s famous trial and imprisonment are not portrayed. Who needs more about that, given it’s possible to buy a book that documents the trials, and Wilde wrote a lot about his imprisonment.)

In The Wildes, act three occurs in 1915 with Captain Cyril Holland in WW 1 in France where a sniper’s bullet kills him. A reader understands the damage done to Cyril because of his father. Ten years later act four occurs in Soho with younger son Vyvyan and a chance meeting with Bosie, Lord Douglas, the character the reader meets in act one. 

The fifth act returns to the same August 1892 setting at Grove Farm in Norfolk and posits how it might have ended differently for the Wilde family.

I zoomed through this novel without intermissions, enjoying the dialogue and escaping into another time and place.  This was a novel to read once. Which is to say I made no marks in the book and will pass it on to someone who needs an escape for the day. I can imagine Bayard’s novel being dramatized for Masterpiece Theatre.”

And I do think Bayard was gutsy to write this novel.  Imagine creating dialogue for the witty Wilde. I also appreciate when a novel makes me recall events I’ve not understood in the past, not unlike Oscar, who threw so much away, namely a lovely family, for the young man known as Bosie.  

This novel made me think again, why the British chide Americans for our use of the English language. And now with Trump returning to the White House, the Brits will enjoy a linguistic bash, mocking the elected felon for his moronic speech. I shudder to think what’s ahead with him. I say this because I can’t get my mind off Los Angeles and  the continuing fires. More than this, the emotions I felt during the funeral service for President Carter remain.  The morality of this man, his awareness of climate change then, his attitude toward women, as reflected in what he did while President. And now?

So yesterday I knocked off another book in a day, one I’d read before. The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe, by Paula Fox.  By next week I hope to unravel why I find this short memoir so captivating and timely.

The First Snow on the Sixth Day of 2025

What I’m sending  this New Year will be the first two lines and last stanza of a poem titled ”Begin” by the Irish writer,  Brendan Kennelly

Begin again to the summoning birds

to the sight of light at the window….

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending

that seems always about to give in

something that that will not knowledge conclusion

insists that we forever begin.

Salient words considering what will occur today at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

And to begin a new year of blogs, I would like to list the books the RCC-RILL-EFI book club chose for our four meetings this year.  The eleven members are all former students from my college literature & writing classes. They and I suggested double- novels and then voted on them, choosing four sets from eight. This is the order for this year’s selections:

Huckleberry Finn and James by Mark Twain and Percival Everett

Burma Sahib and Burmese Days by Paul Thoreau and George Orwell

The Magician by Colm Toibin and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy and The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov

Lastly, I whipped through a book I received from daughter Michelle for Christmas. One of those I opened and could not put down until I finished it.  

Next week I will write about The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard.  Until then, my best thoughts to you…Gail

Thank You, Mr. Truman Capote

Not for writing In Cold Blood, not for your memorable & endearing Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and not for being the “real” boy (Dill) in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. 

I thank you for “A Christmas Memory,” which I used each December in the 1970s when I taught high school English classes in California’s Napa Valley.  I no longer have Capote’s story, but earlier today a friend loaned me her copy.  On the internet, it is possible to hear the late Truman Capote read this non-fiction story from his youth about his friend (an older female relative) and her dog Queenie.

I opened the small book just now and heard in memory the first line from reading it so often decades ago.  “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago.”  Morning resonates with its dual meaning, as a time of day and a period of grief. “Both are implied in the opening and are understood by story’s end.

Why read “A Christmas Memory?”  For one’s heart. Which is why I read this story aloud to students each year before the Christmas break. The toughest kids from Rancho, home of Kaiser Steel, would ‘hear’ this story and not mock the boy Buddy and his best friend, a wonderful, wacky woman who makes fruitcakes each November and sends them out into the world.  “Buddy,” she says, “do you think Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt will serve our cake at (Christmas) dinner?”

I’m deeply grateful I recalled this story.  Post election, I have been feeling Scrooge-ish about Christmas this year. Yet reading the last words of Buddy’s friend gave me pause. “As for me,” she says, “I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”  I thank Truman Capote for this forgotten line, which I needed to remember.  I wish you a fine holiday and New Year. 

Ilona and I will return to our blog the second weekend in January.  Until then, my best thoughts to all.  Gail