![]() Wilde is celebrated as the center of a circle of unconventional poets and artists known as decadents and aesthetes. But his first act on his release had been to write to the Jesuits begging to make a six-month retreat at one of their London houses. When he emerged from prison, injured and in poor health, he fled across the channel to France to reunite with his lover. But his reading during his imprisonment included works by St. He was prosecuted for "acts of gross indecency with other male persons, " found guilty, and sentenced to two years in prison at hard labor. Yet this sad accounting fails to give us the whole of Oscar Wilde. The heart left unmoved by their story would be hard indeed. It was this young man, Lord Alfred Douglas, who in one of his poems called their desire "the love that dare not speak its name." The tale of their romance has classic, even operatic, features objections by the beloved's family, separation and exile, brief reunion before the lover's death. He was homosexual, promiscuously so, and his downfall was precipitated by his passion for a younger man. Many of these recent works do tell part of Wilde's story well. The centenary of his premature death in 1900 at age 46 was widely celebrated in the literary and gay communities with moving testimonies to Oscar Wilde, the persecuted genius and gay man, victim of a repressive and judgmental social order. There are stage plays about his life, a recent feature film starring Stephen Fry and Jude Law, and articles in the national press. Wilde's name is much in the air these days. And we can certainly perceive justice in the fact that the man who cracked such jokes also believed that life imitated art: ultimately, then, the joke was on him. ![]() Looking back over his life more than a hundred years later, we can be forgiven for seeing the irony in such statements, for Wilde's fascination with Catholicism, its mysteries and rituals, did set the stage for his death-bed conversion. ![]() ![]() Another example would be his jest that, of all religions, Catholicism is the only one worth dying in. "I am simply a violent Papist." This statement, like so many of Wilde's outrageous paradoxes, conceals a sober truth beneath its blithe wit. ![]()
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