Life is more inchoate than biography, which thrives on story lines but also founders on factitious narrative. Neil McKenna presents a plausible but not provable Oscar Wilde.

He would, of course, have us believe otherwise:

I wanted to find answers to some of the puzzling questions about Oscar’s life. When did he first realize that he was attracted to other men? If he knew himself to be attracted to men, why then did he marry Constance? How much did Constance know or suspect? And why, knowing that he was almost certain to be found guilty on charges of ‘gross indecency,’ did Oscar choose to stay in England and face imprisonment? I have, I believe, found answers to these and many other unanswered questions.

Biography is, indeed, a form of belief, which the skeptic naturally resists. Here, for example, is Wilde in action during one of his earliest assignations:

Oscar and Rodd [a young prize-winning poet] had a ‘richly impassioned friendship’ and – for the space of a summer – may have fancied themselves to be in love. Sex may well have entered the romantic equation, almost certainly at Oscar’s instigation. But it probably consisted of little more than fervid hand holding, snatched kisses and bed sharing in French lodgings with some attendant, fumbling mutual masturbation.

I am reminded of critic Stanley Fish’s attack on biography, a global assault on the genre for wasting our time with what we cannot know. Here Mr. McKenna advances from “may have” to “may well have” to “almost certainly,” before beating a retreat to “probably” – though the incorrigible biographer blathers on about “fervid” this and that. This is a novel that dares not speak its name.

The paragraph quoted above desperately clings to one piece of evidence (the “richly impassioned friendship” phrase comes from a Wilde letter). The biographer’s vivid description is for naught; it brings us no closer to what actually happened. Another biographer could employ different language, substituting, say, “tentative petting” for “fumbling masturbation,” and who would be the wiser?

Mr. McKenna does even less well with Constance. She is surrounded in this biography with a penumbra of supposition. Here is what happens when Wilde ceases having sex with his wife:

Women of the middle classes were not supposed to have sexual desires, let alone talk about sex. Constance may have shared her anxieties with her closest women friends, or she may have broached the subject with her doctor. It is more likely that she remained silent, wondering why her husband no longer wished to make love to her.

Biography has to be about the individual, and what this individual Constance thought and said is a blank. No amount of generalization about women of the middle classes will tell us what Constance did.

But hold on! Although Mr. McKenna has deluded himself that he has “found answers,” he has nonetheless probed the question of Wilde’s sexual identity more deeply than any previous biographer. In other words, if Mr. McKenna had claimed less for the results of his research, he would have achieved more.

It is the signal virtue of this book that it is passionately immersed in the sexual life of Wilde and his world. Weed out the “may have beens” and “probablys” and what remains is a penetrating foray into the psychology of sex. By the time I had read the first 10 pages, I was already absorbed in the trajectory of Wilde’s growing obsession with the male body, especially the virginal boy-man.

Read Mr. McKenna and you will get a profound understanding of why Wilde’s marriage went wrong. As soon as Constance got pregnant, she lost the aesthetic allure that her husband associated with trim bodies. He had an insatiable appetite for youth, which he first called “Greek love” and later “Uranian love,” a term coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who drew on Plato and other Greeks to describe a man with the soul of a woman. Such a man, Ulrichs argued in his books and pamphlets, expressed a love that transcended the heterosexual norms of conventional society.

The implications of Ulrich’s ideas were revolutionary. Uranians (the word homosexual had not yet come into common usage) not only should not be prosecuted for their sexual acts, they should be accorded equal rights. Poets such as Walt Whitman were hailed for writing boldly about the love of males for each other. Wilde visited Whitman in Camden and came away with what he regarded as a sacred kiss, a blessing on his conviction that in the future society would recognize the superiority of the Uranian man.

But the illicit side of Uranianism – what Mr. McKenna calls “the thrill of the chase,” the fleeting sexual contacts that Wilde had with young men – reflected a taste for living dangerously and for flouting the society Wilde satirized in his plays. Whatever his beliefs about sexual liberation, Wilde was also a man who wanted applause and appreciated the perquisites that becoming a celebrated playwright accorded him.

Hence Wilde’s contradictory behavior: He sued the Marquis of Queensberry for calling him a sodomite, but he could not help explaining to the court why he thought the love of young men was such a noble sentiment. He wanted to show a superior vision of love and yet could not help concealing it to preserve his status in society. Yet he would not flee certain imprisonment because he wanted to stand on his conviction. In his own eyes, he had done nothing shameful.

This biographer has been fortunate because Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, has recently edited his grandfather’s complete letters, which include much new material. It was also Mr. Holland who drew the biographer’s attention to Frank Harris’s crucial testimony. Harris has been denigrated for generations as a great liar, and though his reputation is well deserved, Mr. Holland has always insisted (as he did to me several years ago) that Harris on Oscar Wilde is a key source, one that has much to tell us about Wilde’s marriage and his resort to Uranian love.

Mr. McKenna is right that “no single biography” can ever “compass” Wilde’s “rich and extraordinary life and achievements,” and for all my reservations, I salute this biographer for presenting, as he puts it, “the story of one, and to me the most interesting, of Oscar’s many lives.”