Oscar Wilde (post #1): Childlike, Multiple Personality, and Liar with an Excellent Memory (like Mark Twain) 

My first impression of Oscar Wilde comes from Barbara Belford’s biography, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (New York, Random House, 2000).

Childlike

Wilde has adult accomplishments—a top student at college, gets married and has children, and becomes a very successful writer—but he is repeatedly described as being, at times, childlike (not childish, childlike):

“I discovered that his childlike nature extended to all his works—from The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Importance of Being Ernest” (from Belford’s Introduction).

“Wilde liked nothing better than to become a child again and play in the nursery with his sons” (p. 145).

“Wilde was little more than an overgrown child himself.” (p. 151).

“In a time of hirsute chins, a perpetually clean-shaven Wilde…” (p. 153).

“Following Baudelaire’s axiom that genius is the ability to be a child at will, Wilde created an atmosphere in which the whole household became children. Bosie [Wilde’s much younger male lover] said Wilde ‘exercised a sort of enchantment which transmuted the ordinary things in life and invested them with strangeness and glamour.’ He told his mother that Wilde was ‘as simple and innocent as a child’” (p. 221).

The significance of being childlike at times is that child-aged alternate personalities are common in multiple personality (because it starts in childhood).

Multiple Personality

“He needed a paradoxical nature to create his brilliant antithetical views…My aim has been to reclaim Wilde in all the brilliant details of his contradictions…” (from Belford’s Introduction).

“…sometimes multiple personae were needed [at college]. The actor in him composed the drama day by day, and before he even realized it, he had invented a new Oscar. The secret was insincerity. ‘Is insincerity such a terrible thing?’ Dorian asks. ‘I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities’” (p. 48).

Sometime Wilde “withdrew into his mythic self, a Celtic phenomenon known as a shape-shifter, one with the ability to become anything: a wave, an animal, another person. His favorite legendary warrior was Cuchulain…” (p. 69).

“‘There were two personalities in him,’ Ricketts said of Wilde: ‘the exhibitor of well-rehearsed impromptus, of which he had a stock, and the spontaneous and witty critic of Life”…He swaggered a lot, acting like his character the Remarkable Rocket, who proclaims, ‘I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself…’” (p. 161).

“Wilde wanted to tell a story of multiple personalities and succeeded in crafting a cautionary tale of his own many selves, making it easy for his enemies to remark behind his back: ‘Just like that Dorian Gray character’” (p. 171).

“…An Ideal Husband, with the fateful line ‘As a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else’” (p. 232).

A Liar with an Exceptional Memory (Like Mark Twain)

“…[Wilde] had an encyclopedic mind and a photographic memory” (p. 28).

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is about “the grand art of lying…Wilde frequently lied about himself” (p. 43).

In several past posts about Mark Twain, I reported that Twain was known for an exceptionally good memory, but also for a peculiar “absent-mindedness.” I speculated that Twain’s humorous admission to being a liar was his cover story for the amnesia that was part of his multiple personality and which caused him to be inconsistent and accused of lying. Wilde has the same combination of exceptional memory and making a joke about being a liar. It is a known feature of multiple personality that some people who have it get a reputation for lying, because of the inconsistencies between different personalities, which people mistake for lying because they are unaware of the multiple personality.