A few years ago, when I was more active in literary circles, I was a prominent remember of the Oscar Wilde Society in Dublin. As our beloved playwright had failed to produce anything in such a long time (a writer's skill I worked hard on last year), our societal meetings began to get stale. New members dwindled, and those that joined offered no new insights into Wildean verse, only the tired quotations you would find in tourist shops here. The tedium eroded the society's prestige, and we decided to brainstorm some ideas that would enliven our organisation and generate a new interest in our hero. One member suggested 'Gone Wilde in the Park', an afternoon of running around in the Phoenix Park, dressed only in a pair of runners. As a bunch of libidinous young men, the prospect of being naked around the fresh female members greatly appealed to us.
It occurred to us soon afterwards that we were all in poor physical shape, and as we were short on cash, we decided to join the gym together, taking advantage of the large discount for a group membership. Our first day in the gym was a disaster. We quickly ran short on breath, and we had difficulty lifting the heavy weights. A beautiful, Lycra-clad woman passed our way, swaggering with aplomb. As she glided past us, we worked our faces red, trying to impress her with our feigned manliness.
We were all in a flutter, but some of us were looking at her arse.
It occurred to us soon afterwards that we were all in poor physical shape, and as we were short on cash, we decided to join the gym together, taking advantage of the large discount for a group membership. Our first day in the gym was a disaster. We quickly ran short on breath, and we had difficulty lifting the heavy weights. A beautiful, Lycra-clad woman passed our way, swaggering with aplomb. As she glided past us, we worked our faces red, trying to impress her with our feigned manliness.
We were all in a flutter, but some of us were looking at her arse.
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During those days, I had a depressing job in a DIY store. The sweet verse of Oscar Wilde that ran through my brain was the only thing holding back me back from ending it all under the crushing weight of a pallet of paint. Customers of the store usually fell into two categories: those who vexed you with their ignorance of DIY and those who depreciated you with belittling comments. One day, I had a customer who fit both those categories. It was in the middle of a snowy winter, and he was having trouble rolling his car safely out of his driveway. I showed him the section where we kept our sand and our salt. Not wanting to spend more money than he had to, he asked me a dozen questions, waiting for me to tell him what he wanted, namely that salt was sufficient for the job at hand. I explained at length how he could try it, but there was no guarantee of success and that the coarse sand was superior. He soon grew irritated, asking me questions about my experience of such things. The conversation eventually came around to my prominent position in the Oscar Wilde Society. The customer noted sardonically that such activities truly validated my advice on DIY matters. "Sarcasm near the lowest form of grit", I muttered under my breath.
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| Wilde was played by Benedict Cumberbatch during his thirties. |
In the summer break between my degrees and masters, I successfully applied for a J1 visa. I decided to use the opportunity to make a pilgrimage of Oscar Wilde's 1882 American tour. Wilde was well-received, but I had to work hard to find kindred spirits. I was lucky enough to start a conversation with a like-minded soul in a coffee shop in Leadville, Colorado (where Wilde had drunk whiskey with miners). The old man was a retired lieutenant who had fought in Korea and Vietnam, but it was his knowledge and love of a certain nineteenth century playwright that started a long and deep conversation between us. We conversed about everything, including poetry, songs, and love. He told me of how he had longed to see his sweetheart back home, when he was fighting overseas. In the Vietnam conflict, he had listened to love songs that reminded him of her, such as My Girl and The Way You Do the Things You Do. Returning home after a lengthy tour of duty, he was fortunate to become an enlisting officer, and he was able to stay with the woman he loved and eventually marry her. We spoke about certain elites who had skipped serving their country, and he told me that, if he had any say in it, no stratum of society would be immune to the draft. By this stage in the conversation, I was just listening, allowing him to perform his own personal soliloquy. With his own experiences at the forefront of his mind, he conceded that he probably couldn't bring himself to draft the singers and the poets, as their work served so well to maintain troop morale. "I can enlist anyone except the Temptations", he added with a wry smile.
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My career as a Wildean aficionado came to a tragic ending, when I was almost bankrupted by my own ingenuity. After years of devoted attendance and organisation of society meetings, I was beginning to be recognised as a leading authority on Wilde. As is the way of our universe, especially in academic or literary circles, great forces are counterbalanced by their opposites. Mine was called Terrence Giles Fogarty, a snide little creature and a man of inherited means. In the last year of my Wilde pursuits, we clashed sabres on many occasions, debating fiercely on the true character and relevance of the playwright's works. He was an utter charlatan, as demonstrated by his ownership of Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works, Illustrated, a book so huge and small-printed that one only buys it for show. The fearsome competition pushed us to work on our own definitive guides to the Wildean corpus. Fogarty's book, from what I heard, was as bland and predictable as he was, but he had the means to self-publish. My guide was an engrossing maze of information, written in the style of choose your own adventure books. The reader was offered page choices after reading a section, and they had to turn to the page that best matched their interpretation of the literature. If they chose correctly it would lead them to continue their exploration of the writer; if they chose incorrectly they hit a dead end, where the book would carefully explain how wrong they were. After finishing the final draft, I sought publication, but to no avail. A ray of hope appeared when a fellow society member informed me of an extremely cheap publishing house, where I could get several thousand copies made for a sum of money within my reach. I scrounged and saved until I had enough cash to go to the printers. I could have got a loan to hasten publication, but I stayed true to my principle of avoiding needless debt. When I arrived at the publishing house to collect my freshly printed books, I was greeted by Fogarty himself. He assured me that he was just here to wish me well, but the smirking look on his face made told me otherwise. I was horrified to discover what Fogarty and the publishing contract's fine-print knew all along: my book was printed without page numbers, rendering it useless. My devastation soon turned to fury, and I marched up to Forgarty in the car park of the publishing house. He had just enough time to declare that, "anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of pagination", before I socked him to the ground.1
1 Of course, my brain (as it always does) gifted me with the perfect comeback thirty minutes too late, where I would tell him that 'anyone who lives in their imagination suffers from a lack of means'.
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