Setting Stein and Wilde Straight

‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife‘By Francesca Wade Scribner, 480 pages‘After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal’By Merlin HollandEuropa Editions, 704 pagesSøren Kierkegaard’s famous formulation that “life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward,” takes on new meaning in two biographies. By showing what happens to a life once it has been portrayed in several biographies, Francesca Wade and Merlin Holland restore to Stein and Wilde some of the pristine power they enjoyed while alive.Both Ms. Wade and Mr. Holland establish their bonafides in first paragraphs that serve as précis of their epic-length achievements. Ms. Wade wrests her subject from decades of commentary in vivid prose that acknowledges the “Stein” that is the product of hoary legend:“She came to Paris, she said, to kill the nineteenth century. Her weapons were a pencil and a supply of softcover notebooks, her targets dullness and cliché. She chopped off her long coils of hair and dispensed with punctuation; she spent her mornings asleep and her nights writing furiously, tossing loose scraps of paper to the floor as she went. She rubbed her head with both hands when she was excited, and sat with her knees planted far apart, taking up as much space as possible. She loved driving fast cars, especially through tunnels, and stepped out into roads without looking, long skirts flapping in the breeze. She was a hoarder of papers, of words, of Catholic ornaments and antique figurines of kittens. Her favorite sound was a hooting owl, her favorite flowers were pansies, and her favorite color was salmon-pink. Her laugh, someone remembered, was ‘like a beefsteak.’ Stretched on a divan underneath her own Picasso portrait, Gertrude Stein was a myth and a monument, a larger-than-life figure whom friends and detractors viewed by turns with amusement, affection, and alarm. She was at once a celebrity and an enigma: everyone knew she was famous, but no one was quite sure why.”Gertrude Stein, alive and in retrospect, concatenates in this protean paragraph of a protean biography.Oscar Wilde photographed in 1882. Napoleon Sarony via Wikimedia CommonsMerlin Holland takes a different tack:“This is a book about revelations. A hundred and thirty years ago my grandfather was sent to prison for being homosexual but he also championed difference in an age of conformity which the Victorians found nearly as disturbing. He pushed his subversive ideas and his subversive behaviour to the limits of what they could tolerate — and then just a little further, which they could not. He painted that drab age of industrial power with forbidden colours and put people in touch with their feelings, revealing what the Victorians wished to conceal, until they said— All right, if it’s revelations we’re talking about try this for size—and over eight weeks in the spring of 1895 they revealed every last detail of his private life and placed him where he could do no further harm, then pretended that nothing had happened. It became one of the longest continuous acts of hypocrisy in British history, and in this book are many revelations which will make people (or their descendants) uncomfortable, and it is right that they should feel a flush of embarrassment for their own or for their ancestors’ hypocrisy.”Merlin Holland has been angry for a long time about what happened to his grandfather, as I realized more than thirty years ago when I interviewed him for my biography of Rebecca West, who had funded Mr. Holland’s college education. He settles a number of scores with biographers who have recounted Wilde’s flamboyant life, success on the Victorian stage, and his downfall, initiated in 1895 when the Marquess of Queensberry called at the playwright’s club, leaving a card accusing him of “posing as a somdomite.” The nobleman’s misspelling of sodomite led to the libel trial that Wilde lost, followed by his arrest and conviction for “gross indecency.”Mr. Holland includes fascinating behind-the-scenes revelations about how esteemed biographer, Richard Ellmann went about trying to sort out whether or not Wilde suffered from syphilis. Mr. Holland’s work reminds me a good deal of Hershel Parker’s “Melville Biography,” his scourging of biographers and critics who have not done the proper kind of investigatory work that makes Ms. Wade’s and Mr. Holland’s books so authoritative.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.”

Setting Stein and Wilde Straight

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