Thin soup stock into hearty stew: that's the alchemy of an overwrought
but rewarding biography by American playwright Joan Schenkar of Dolly
Wilde (1895-1941), the "unusual" niece of Oscar.
In this thematic (rather than chronological) story, we learn that Dolly
was many things in
her brief, somewhat squandered life: an amoureuse of Natalie
Clifford Barney, a dabbler in art, an effortless seductress, an
ambulance driver during the First World War, an arriviste self-groomed
for stylish salons, and a drug addict doomed by dissolution to
a young death. The daughter of Oscar's alcoholic brother Willie (himself
dead when she was just 4 years old), she shared many of
her uncle's proclivities, including a quick wit and a sharp way with
words, a propensity for emotional and physical self-indulgence, and
a hankering for her own sex.
But as her adoring biographer documents with some dismay and much
regret, she never matched her uncle's celebrated literary
output. She was an "artist of the spoken word" whose written legacy
derives from an intermittent but scintillating correspondence
unearthed almost by accident, by what little her contemporaries wrote
about her (particularly in a vanity-press booklet published by
Natalie Barney in 1951, In Memory of Dorothy Ierne Wilde:
Oscaria), and by what a handful of aged survivors of an era long
past had to say about her (including fascinating remembrances by Barney
housekeeper Berthe Cleyrergue, who was interviewed just before
her death in 1998 at age 94).
Schenkar, in the end, didn't have much to go on but a desire to perform
literary archeology, a feat she's accomplished with flair
and, given an obvious emotional investment in her subject's
resurrection, fairness -- there are truly unsettling chapters on Dolly's
persistent self-inflicted health woes and on her lonely last days. And
in the end, Truly Wilde does more than elevate Dolly Wilde from
footnote to full-length book; it also celebrates the near-60-year reign
in Paris of the remarkable Barney and her constellation of sister
artists and patrons of the arts -- among them Berenice Abbott, Mercedes
de Acosta, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Nancy and Victor
Cunard, Janet Flanner, Radclyffe Hall, Renee Vivien, and many dozens
more -- a dazzling salon society into which the distaff Wilde's
charismatic languor was a perfect if poignant fit.
-- Richard Labonté
Oscar Wilde has been the subject of a publishing frenzy lately.
Check out our roundup of titles.
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