Читать книгу The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde - Страница 10

Because he has been for over a century an artist whose life is as famous – if not more famous – than his work, Dorian is a story which audiences are keen to read autobiographically. This is not a modern phenomenon. As early as 1890, when the book first appeared as a magazine serialisation, the reviews unanimously accused it of betraying its author’s own immoral lifestyle. In 1895, the prosecuting council at Wilde’s Old Bailey trial quoted the book at length during his cross-examination in an attempt to prove that Wilde was guilty of his leading character’s crimes, chiefly that of practising homosexuality. Wilde himself encouraged this biographical reading. He famously said that Lord Henry was a portrayal of himself as the world thought him to be, but that Basil Hallward was how he saw himself. As ever, he was being creative with the truth. Lord Henry is perhaps a deeper portrait than his creator knew or intended. He may be fashionably paradoxical and superficial in both his conversation and daily life, but behind this verbal smokescreen he has a genuinely savage intellectual contempt for the bourgeois niceties and evasions of his society and (as he nears the end of his story) an almost tragic self-awareness that go way beyond the popular caricature of Wilde as an effete dandy and give us – with hindsight – perhaps the truest self-image of the great man himself outside of De Profundis. Basil, meanwhile, may share Wilde’s own vulnerability to unrequited love for good-looking young men who cannot possibly either understand or reciprocate his devotion, but there the similarities tellingly end – or rather, stray into wish-fulfillment. Wilde never dared, as Basil does, to cut himself free from his infatuation, pack his bags and set out for Paris in order to dedicate himself entirely to his work (the very steps, not at all coincidentally, that several of Wilde’s friends were to beg him to take in the twenty-four hours before his eventual arrest in 1895). Perhaps this act of moral and emotional courage was why Wilde saw fit to deprive Basil of his planned new life just twenty minutes before he starts it, and to finish him off with such a violent, horrible and curiously sexual death; he had to be punished for an erotic and emotional honesty of which his creator (and his century) were convinced they could only dream.

The oddest correspondence between Wilde’s life and fiction comes in the character of Dorian himself. Like Lord Alfred Douglas, Dorian is blond-haired, blue-eyed and redlipped; indeed, the very same hackneyed phrases used to describe the young Dorian in the novel reappear almost word for word in Wilde’s letters describing Douglas to his friends. Like Dorian, Douglas was upper-class Oxonian charm incarnate. Like Dorian, once he was launched into London Society he turned out to have an insatiable appetite for both working-class sex and upper-class luxury, to be a consummate liar, and to have a truly psychopathic disregard for the consequences of his actions on those close to him. The match is perfect. The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, was published in 1890, and Wilde didn’t meet his nemesis until the summer of 1891. Dorian is not a reflection of Wilde’s life, but an uncanny anticipation of it. He may be a complete fiction, but for the man who created him he turned out to be horribly and inescapably real. One of the reasons the story is so powerful, perhaps, is that we now know it to be the work of a man exactly imagining his own private hell of erotic and moral destruction, but unaware that he is doing just that.