Oscar Wilde Blog

by Jörg W. Rademacher

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Summer Blog Post Seventeen

 

Summer Blog Post Seventeen

Dear readers of my blog,

this being the last instalment of my World Cup Diary for 2014, I don't want to delay your reading of the final chapter by any current remarks other than that referring to the elimination of the German Women's Football Team from this year's World Cup in France at the hands of a strong Swedish side. The latter broke the deadlock after a series of defeats lasting more than twenty years. So it was their turn today, and from what I watched and read they well deserved it. The semifinals have now four physically strong sides facing each other: England vs. USA; Sweden vs. the Netherlands. Perhaps the US can be prevented from winning yet again or even reaching the final.

Leer, 29th June 2019

45

With just over two minutes’ delay we succeeded in leaving the apartment to find us half an hour later at the latter end of a not interminable queue of basically young and youngish people waiting for the “petit guichet” to open at 7.30 p.m. Only when we did arrive at the end of the queue and I discerned the figure of 95 seats with limited visibility was it clear after all that we would enter the Comédie française 1680 on the night. With tickets priced at 5 € per person you cannot complain if you have a wooden seat, half a seat or nothing at all to sit on while you try to bow across the railing to discover what is going on below. We are early, so that we can look leisurely at the gallery of busts of famous French dramatists which includes, of course, Molière and Voltaire.

The former’s last “comédie-ballet”, Le malade imaginaire, is on the play-bill tonight but I must admit that I have never read that play before, nor have I so much as attended the performance of a classical French play at such a prestigious venue. It is what the French call a “spectacle”, spectacular in the sense that everything seems calculated at achieving some effect but I’m not convinced of every single spectacular moment as a part and parcel of an organic whole.

 

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Summer Blog Post Sixteen

Summer Blog Post Sixteen

Dear readers of my blog,

“writing to the moment” is a sentence made famous by the essayist of partly Irish descent William Hazlitt, and it still makes sense – either for a diarist or a blogger. I have been keeping diaries since 1987, most of which lying in drawers or kept in chests and hardly ever looked at, let alone exploited systematically. At the moment, they are still only an arm's length away and could help solve some questions where memories either fail to exist or keep cropping up in an inconclusive manner. For the year 1994, however, the calendar I used only allowed for noting appointments and perhaps some cryptic remarks. So I rely on other sources. And memories of all shades start to accumulate once they had been triggered by one or two key-words.

Having browsed for the first time and for some minutes in the review copy of Aldous Huxley, a biography by Uwe Rasch and Gerhard Wagner (Theiss, 2019), the first comprehensive book of its kind to appear in German, I was immediately struck by the remark that – as opposed to most of his contemporaries – Huxley lost the largest part of his personal library as well as the MSS and TS of his works in a fire in California in 1961. This certainly is a serious impediment for any literary biographer. When working for the centenary Symposium held at Münster in 1994, I was of course aware of this but having moved on I must admit that I had completely forgotten about this tragic event in Huxley's life, though I later recalled that I also studied the typescript of Island a lot, the only novel that was still unpublished in 1961.

 

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Summer Blog Post Fifteen

 

Summer Blog Post 15

Dear readers of my blog,

Wilde's four years at Oxford ended in a “Double First”, and it is said everyone was surprised by this success. If today the last six months before the finals at Oxford are still without any tutorials and lectures, it is highly probable that this was already the case in his time. So nobody knew what he did when not socialising. Working seriously, as the authors of Bluffocracy (2018) is not encouraged in certain courses, least in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, PPE in short, which since 1920 has “created” quite a lot of Prime Ministers, not least David Cameron, the architect of the current catastrophe of Britain, while Theresa May had studied geography, also at Oxford University. The current favourite in the leadership contest, however, like Wilde read Greats but his degree was only an upper second class one.

 

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Summer Blog Post Fourteen

Summer Blog Post Fourteen

Dear readers of my blog,

summer time being football tournament time on several continents, I had reason to write my impressions both in 2010, 2014 and last year, in 2018, and this year I also recall what happened forty-five years ago, since the calendar is the same as in 1974, and suddenly the idea arose to think of the past in periods of five years.

In 1974, at age twelve,I watched my first World Cup taking place in Germany, and the day after the final in Munich we did a one-day-class trip to the Overseas Museum at Bremen when all the twelve-year-old children of 6e were packed in one carriage with four seats on each side of the narrow aisle, the boys all wearing shorts. While I fail to recall anything we may have said about the World Cup, I have always remembered the location of the museum just outside Bremen Main Station. Later in the summer, I would travel to Britain for the first time, taking the boat at Calais and becoming very seasick on the voyage out.

 

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Summer Blog Post Thirteen

Summer Blog Post Thirteen

Dear readers of my blog,

there was no procrastination on my part concerning no. 13, I can admit that without any remorse. On the contrary, for various reasons, unmentionable here, I rather like this number. My week since Tuesday has been so busy that I was simply unable to continue this blog.

Today, however, with the summer recess at school coming ever closer, and most of all duties now to be fulfilled when I am there rather than when staying at home, I again felt up to thinking of continuation. The poetic text I insert today before football takes over has been in the making for at least fifteen years, while I had the first idea when attending the 65th anniversary symposium held for Hans Walter Gabler at Innsbruck in late January 2003. At the time, though, I thought it might become a study. Now I am happy to see it has become a prose text consisting of short paragraphs rather than a poem which it was until early 2018 when one of the dedicatees had raised doubts about the justification I had for some texts to type them in the form of verse rather than prose.

Anglo-German relations:

An anthology of pen-portraits

 

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Summer Blog Post Twelve

Summer Blog Post Twelve

Dear readers of my blog,

working in several languages is my bread-winning job. Mostly, I change between German and English, German and French. Recently, however, a fourth language has returned, Italian. Eighteen years ago, I was delighted to spend about a mid-winter week in Bologna where a Ford Madox Ford conference was held which I attended realizing that among the forty odd speakers I was the only one in my late thirties not to have a proper university job. Since the publication of an illustrated biography and the translation of the first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in an uncensored edition had not allowed me to breathe more freely owing to a sharp increase of royalties, this insight into my economic situation as a translator and writer kept me busy for another few months until I realized that it was time to change professions.

 

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Wildes Hauptwerk

Alles über
"Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray"

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Über mich

Jörg W. Rademacher (*1962), born and bred in Westphalia. Attended university at Münster, Dundee and Lille. State exam in 1988. Ph.D. In 1993. Scholar, language teacher as well as writer and translator at Münster until 2002. Since 2002 secondary school teacher, writer and translator in East Frisia. Working on Wilde since 1988. Publishing on Wilde since 2000 as biographer and editor and translator, on a regular basis with Elsinor Verlag since 2012, since 2015 also editor and translator of Oscar Wilde calendars.

Der neue Kalender

Interesse an einem Kalender?
Kontaktieren Sie mich.

A calendar in progress 2023

Composing these reflections when offering, selling, and sending out the current calendar is still only a matter of weeks away, I do feel that this project has made another step: at long last, a balance has been found between word and image, with Günter Plessow the author of the verse translations into German, while I translated two of Egon Günther’s poems into English besides choosing, arranging, and, sparsely this time, commenting the poems. If you like, you can see the history of the Oscar Wilde calendars represented by their respective covers on my website: oscar-wilde-blog.de
In fact, it is only owing to Günter Plessow’s industry in translating what he calls “Lyrical Notes” into German in the year 2021 that a substantial selection of Wilde poems ranging from the 1870s through the 1890s, including “The Sphinx” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, are now available for re-publication as part of this calendar project. This is also why, compared to previous calendars, this Oscar Wilde Calendar concentrates on poetry on the one hand and focuses on verse in English and German on the other hand. Taking the poems chosen this time in turn, I also include miniatures of the collage work, so that it is possible to survey the complete calendar here.

January

Oscar Wilde
Ravenna


A year ago I breathed the Italian air, –
And yet, methinks this northern Spring is fair, –
These fields made golden with the flower of March,
The throstle singing on the feathered larch,
The cawing rooks, the wood-doves fluttering by,
The little clouds that race across the sky;
And fair the violet’s gentle drooping head,
The primrose, pale for love uncomforted,
The rose that burgeons on the climbing briar,
The crocus-bed, (that seems a moon of fire
Round-girdled with a purple marriage-ring);
And all the flowers of our English Spring,
Fond snow-drops, and the bright-starred daffodil.

“Ravenna”, in: Oscar Wilde, Poems and Poems in Prose, edited by Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 46- 54; here: p. 46.

Only issued separately in 1878 and first anthologised with Wilde’s poetry since 1908, “Ravenna” is a prize poem, winning Wilde the Newdigate Prize, partly recited by the author himself in the Sheldonian Theate Oxford on 26th June 1878 and dedicated to a lady that he had met in Rome in the spring of 1877: Julia Constance Fletcher (1858-1938). The latter published novels pseudonymously, among others Mirage (1877) containing a portrait of Wilde as Mr. Davenant (Oscar Wilde, Poems and Poems in Prose, pp. 247/248).

February

Maria Eger in memoriam
First & lasting impressions

I don’t know exactly but think it was her guttural laugh preceding
the first words she ever said to me or the answering machine
that established some kind of mutual liking when she
said the Zurich Joyce Centre people had given her my number.

Living still at Münster Westphalia with a red dialling phone to boot
I had to be called for in my study facing the busy suburban street
to tell her that what she was looking for was the Joyce Book with
13 poems set to music from Pomes Penyeach and given to Joyce

for his 50th anniversary in 1932 and lying in the Zurich archives
which made her laugh again for Fritz Senn had said for music
she’d rather ask Rademacher Radmachrees as Finnegans Wake
has it not him being the unmusical sort so the first call sent her back

to where she had been before but she not only took it with good humour
she also remained in touch for the next twenty-one years even asking
me to speak in January 2021 on the 80th anniversary of Joyce’s death
a talk I never finished writing owing to the second nationwide lock-down.

She did not lose hope encouraged literary & musical talents of all kinds
invited over to Nuremberg whoever had written sculpted composed &
painted drawn translated anything of importance organizing symposia
making friends meet across the cultural divide of East & West and

North & South digging deep into her own pocket to pay impolite actors
just as well as grateful young pianists frustrated journalists up-and-coming
teachers while teaching herself legions of enthusiastic readers of Joyce &
other difficult writers never tiring of finding yet another interesting project.

Until one day some time last summer or even before that it was the last time
she spoke on my answering machine or I no longer durst ring her to ask
would she like the new calendar the last edition of which I had sent off
to friends in her name then I only waited for the inevitable to happen

her Bavarian voice to join “all the dead voices” accumulating in my
ears’ memory chamber just as images of dear lost ones are kept in
one’s mind’s eye returning to life only when there is a trigger a dream
at night another wake at another person’s death bed.

JWR Leer, 4. März 2023

March

Maria Eger in memoriam
First & lasting impressions

I don’t know exactly but think it was her guttural laugh preceding
the first words she ever said to me or the answering machine
that established some kind of mutual liking when she
said the Zurich Joyce Centre people had given her my number.

Living still at Münster Westphalia with a red dialling phone to boot
I had to be called for in my study facing the busy suburban street
to tell her that what she was looking for was the Joyce Book with
13 poems set to music from Pomes Penyeach and given to Joyce

for his 50th anniversary in 1932 and lying in the Zurich archives
which made her laugh again for Fritz Senn had said for music
she’d rather ask Rademacher Radmachrees as Finnegans Wake
has it not him being the unmusical sort so the first call sent her back

to where she had been before but she not only took it with good humour
she also remained in touch for the next twenty-one years even asking
me to speak in January 2021 on the 80th anniversary of Joyce’s death
a talk I never finished writing owing to the second nationwide lock-down.

She did not lose hope encouraged literary & musical talents of all kinds
invited over to Nuremberg whoever had written sculpted composed &
painted drawn translated anything of importance organizing symposia
making friends meet across the cultural divide of East & West and

North & South digging deep into her own pocket to pay impolite actors
just as well as grateful young pianists frustrated journalists up-and-coming
teachers while teaching herself legions of enthusiastic readers of Joyce &
other difficult writers never tiring of finding yet another interesting project.

Until one day some time last summer or even before that it was the last time
she spoke on my answering machine or I no longer durst ring her to ask
would she like the new calendar the last edition of which I had sent off
to friends in her name then I only waited for the inevitable to happen

her Bavarian voice to join “all the dead voices” accumulating in my
ears’ memory chamber just as images of dear lost ones are kept in
one’s mind’s eye returning to life only when there is a trigger a dream
at night another wake at another person’s death bed.

JWR Leer, 4. März 2023

April

Lucky you Lucky Luke

Happy-go-lucky view of life
Lucky to have escaped the MCA
Lucky on Pozzo’s leash running on stage
in Waiting for Godot dog-like that is
another endgame of silences from which emerges
Jordan the rapper who can hardly read or write
suitable for waiting on stage walking around the bare tree
while being a lucky loser and unsuitable for the garrulous
Wilde talk of The Importance of Being Earnest
incapable of pulling off the lucky punch
you need to realise if you want to win
when facing someone from Ireland.

JWR

According to the title “Oscar Wilde & Friends”, it is here that a film version of Waiting for Godot based on a true story in Sweden when detainees produced the piece and ran off when the first night was looming and associations meet triggered by a life with Irish literature and theatre as played on stages in France. Last but not least an echo can still be heard of the amazement shown over the phone by a lady in the press office of a repertory theatre in Westphalia who inhaled and exhaled audibly on hearing that Samuel Beckett was Irish. She had simply never thought of where he had been born and bred.

May

“Mr. Wilde, what is your opinion of Harrisburg
from the little you have seen of it?”
“Well, one should not generalize about a place, having
seen as little as I have of your city. I came here in
the afternoon, and was engaged in writing a letter the
remainder of the day, and consequently am unable to
form any opinion of the ‘Capital City.’”
“How were you pleased with your audience this
evening?”
“I had a very charming audience, indeed, of perhaps
150 or 200 persons. They were quite attentive and
showed me the respect that the most sensitive lecturer
would desire. Of course, I don’t expect every one to
agree with what I say ‒”

From: “Oscar Wilde,” Harrisburg Telegraph (Harrisburg, PA), 5 May 1882, 4. In: Oscar Wilde. The Complete Interviews. Volume One, edited by Rob Marland, Jena: Little Eye, 2022, pp. 380-384, here: p. 380.

Latter-day readers of Oscar Wilde, who are unaware of the multiple occasions he faced an American audience live during his tour of North America in 1882, might know, however, of the incident at the nuclear power station Three Mile Island, closed down by now, on 28 March 1979 that hit the headlines the world over, as Wilde‘s lecture almost 97 years earlier had not. It took the research of OscarWildeinAmerica blogger John Cooper to discover the article with questions and answers about Harrisburg and the event to put an earlier Harrisburg on the map of literary America. Wilde is polite, if evasive, a diplomat if respectfully addressed. Yet one never knows what he may say if provoked.

June

Pain in June

Unlike drinking tea which is
one of the “simple pleasures”
not liked by Lord Henry Wotton
having a glass of French red wine
in Paris can be a both costly
and painful experience

the real one foreshadowing
the imaginary moment on the
terrace of an East Friesian
moated castle to celebrate
the teacher training college
head’s accession to an honorary

professorship when the head
of French in a rare outburst
of emotion said: “I can’t don’t
you see I’m wearing white pants.”
White jeans that is it was too in Paris
when an irascible sixty-niner

the conversion of 1968 being impossible
jumped up in the Arène de Lutèce
the Roman ruin in central Paris
where he’d just been at the receiving end
of a glass of red wine spilled by a student
who when at home and still at school

used impulsively to spill cold chocolate
at any time he sat next to his father
who it was who had to fulfill the lecturer’s
demand for complete compensation
by typing a letter to the insurance company
and announce the damage.

JWR

Paris is a place of where not only Wilde wished to be but also the Germans before and after 1968, a capital in the form of an island in France whose centre is the Île de la Cité, where both Notre-Dame de Paris as well as the book by Victor Hugo named after the cathedral as of 1482 find their factually and novelistically rooted place, particularly after the fire of 15th and 16th April 2019.

July

Lover's Lament

weakly luminescent silk veils
the statue of a woman
who on the edge of the wood calls her tawny owls

just like the dew fleeting ornament of an as yet young day
makes a string of pearls in places lived in by a sombre
desire
it is your aura filtered by crystals of salt
that puts bright spots into the looming dark of storm
in the revolutions of your temper
that shaking days start to falter
that sticks moved as if by the hand of ghosts civilly
begin a new game of cannon
using the balls completely adrift of universes
used since time of yore
to bowing to the laws of coincidence
which doubtless is your law
which you steer with the moue of your
lips
a furtive movement of your hand
or the unchaste signal of your breast tips
which command a whole range
of botanic correspondences
solstice plants
dancing in the feathered harmony of your breath
you swinging your strong sceptre
even in those icy regions which of all
sensations
is the stronghold primarily of pain
just as over the infinite vastness of space
partly already turned into rot
you at times feed petals sand and ice splinters
into the gears of the world
yet if you full of high spirits
chase a worn-out old nag
with the name of free will
once again over the world’s edge
remember the joyless clown of your dreams
that troubadour
that you once forgot in chains
on the world’s disk

Egon Günther; translated by JWR

Wilde did not fail to write about love and lovers. Indeed, it was one of the subjects he infinitely varied in all genres. There was much love’s labour’s lost in his work, too, since contrary to what he allowed the outside world to know when at Oxford he laboured hard to finish a work of art, let alone sit an exam successfully.

August

Is that all we can do

instead of giving all for everyone and more
it’s happiness that each one’s looking for

fear burning in the heart sweating in the furrow
suffering man’s lot in their social class burrow

fleeing from the shades of punishments looming
on the run like slaves in aimless flights erring

is that all you know and go for
cannot you offer more?

creatures plagued by shame and necessity
obeying their masters’ order with audacity

living as serfs in leviathan’s treadmill
vacation joys missed the worst of their fill

dreaming greedily of cockaigne
of sweet loafing on white sand

is that all we can do
cannot we offer more?

Egon Günther; translated by JWR

“To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling.
Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.”

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, ed. JWR, Coesfeld: Elsinor, 2021, p. 36.

Here are two brother souls at work. One laments the lack of laziness, the other laments the surplus of leisure, which also bars the way to recognizing what is essential.

September

Over night

over night
the old world was begone
drunken I must have put it away

or something evil came along
destroying truth & poetry
the debris lying all around
the ball of the sun running
fully against the grain

yesterday in the yard the weeds
were still lying bright and clear in his light

today until the new morning
laughingly dawns
remains darkened my sight

after a sombre night
world begone was lost
energetically we have put it away
for us a rough day was born

let’s grip the moment
swiftly at its forelock
(curses often breed blessings)
so that we do not miss the moment
while walking along evil roads

so tell me quickly
before everything ends:
who has some good advice
who knows the golden way to return
on which our lot will turn

tell me at once: who indeed
is so bright & good
who finds the key to happiness
who will give us courage again

over night
the old world (who knows whereto)
was all begone
the times being out of joint

Egon Günther; translated by JWR

Again and again, Oscar Wilde used the elegiac tone, also in his poetry, he may have had an inkling of what kind of life he led along the razor’s edge, his both private and public, not least political existence. Listening to a warning, however, was not his forte.

October

On "Portia"

“In your place I’d have discarded the poem.”
– “But then Wilde’s ‘every day anti-Semitism’
as you call it or his conventionally Christian
anti-Judaism wouldn’t have come to light.”

It is an occasional poem that to translate
you need to read in a much larger context
one reaching out far beyond the boundaries of
verse rhythm metre and rhyme not to speak of
semantics;

reaching out to the religious social moral
backgrounds in London of the 1870s and 1880s
couched in words the moment Wilde saw
and admired Ellen Terry as Portia on stage.

 

JWR

Not everyone reads poems. Fewer still read about poems. Even fewer are those who read, let alone write on, translations of poems. Still the few are happier than those who do not savour words but eat them, as they only know fat volumes. Wilde wrote for himself, then for the few, for sure when he created verses. Thus his life as a man of letters begins and ends with poetry. Whoever appreciates him whole can also live with the stain of his faults.

November

“The Oscar Wilde who made himself famous in America a few years ago is not the Oscar Wilde of today. The long hair has been cut and is now short and curly. The knee breeches have been put away carefully, the lackadaisical air is no longer worn, and the Oscar Wilde of London today is a straight, strong, broad-shouldered, athletic fellow, with no nonsense about him and an evident determination on his face to make fame and money. The Wilde craze, as far as England is concerned, is over. Mr. Wilde will question this – yet there are thousands of people, men and women, who believe that Wilde did much good in his late crusade, and he has still a very respectable following, but nothing like what one would be led to believe from a perusal of the satirical Gilbert’s ‘Patience.’”

 

From: “Oscar Wilde’s Hair Cut”, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, NY), 20 October 1889, 14. In: Oscar Wilde. The Complete Interviews. Volume Two, edited by Rob Marland, Jena: Little Eye, 2022, pp. 589-592, here: p. 589.

Outlining the change in the public image of Oscar Wilde from afar, this article, once again discovered owing to the research done by Oscar- WildeinAmerica blogger John Cooper, was reprinted in many American gazettes. So, about eight months or so before The Picture of Dorian Gray was published by Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine on both sides of the Atlantic on 20 June 1890, it is safe to say that Wilde was still somehow breaking news in the USA, with a New York City based paper blazing the trail.

December

“8. VIII. 65

Merlin Holland, petit-fils d’Oscar Wilde, est arrivé ici. Il ressemble à René Crevel. Une Irlandaise de Hampstead l’accompagne, les yeux pers de Minerve dans le masque de Junon, les jambes d’une poupée de son. Ils avaient le dessein d’aller à Pampelune, d’y acheter des ânes, de traverser les montagnes montés sur ces ânes, en admirant le cirque de Gavarnie, et de les vendre à Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Charles leur a fait remarquer que personne n’achèterait des ânes en France. Là-dessus ils sont partis à pied sur les causses, pour faire, sans ânes, les Travels with a donkey.”

From: Jean Hugo, Carnets. 1946-1984, Arles: Actes Sud, 1994, pp. 230/231.

This is the sort of diary entry anyone interested in literary life as led behind the scenes for most of the time would cherish. Not only does the greatgrandson of Victor Hugo meet the grandson of Oscar Wilde on his homeground in southern France. It is also the well-known son of Georges Victor-Hugo, the great writer’s neglected grandson, who had actually met Oscar Wilde when he attended one of Victor Hugo’s at-homes in Paris in 1883. Ever the painter, Jean Hugo depicts the accompanying lady rather than the Irish writer’s only grandson who, in later life, did much to redress the balance in the telling of the story of Wilde’s life.

January

“Mr. Oscar Wilde, though he may be considered to habe his career still before him, has already attained prominence as one of the elect in a certain modern school of which he is held to be not the least of the apostles. He is a believer in the religion of beauty, a marked figure among the newest group of aesthetics, a dweller in the high places of feeling. To take this position he is specially fitted by reason of a singularly enthusiastic temperament and an exceptional education.”

Anonymus, “Oscar Wilde”, in: The Biograph and Review, London, August 1880. In: Oscar Wilde. The Complete Interviews. Volume One, edited by Rob Marland, Jena: Little Eye, 2022, pp. 25-31; here: p. 25.

Whoever travelled like Wilde to create value for money by means of words, live on them, such a one always had to answer journalists’ questions, had to give interviews. This form newly emerged in the 19th century has much to do with the development of the mass media whose desire for news Wilde satisfied on almost any occasion wherever he came in the USA and in the UK. The newspaper reports of his lecture tours were edited and published some years ago, now someone else has done the interviews as well. What you can see is the as yet diffuse image of a public figure whose complexity has not been completely grasped by far. The language alone of this brief life, of which we only quote the beginning, suggests the lines of conflict the young man is bound to face: literature and the arts as a faith: “apostles”, “religion”, “enthusiastic temperament” to name just the most conspicuous terms.