BIOGRAPHY:Thomas Wright's vow to read every book that Oscar Wilde had ever read has resulted in an engaging - and very revealing - study of the writer
BOOKS USED to be dangerous. Novels were snatched from the hands of young women. When Emily Dickinson's father brought home books, he begged her not to read them, lest (as she complained) "they joggle the Mind".
Books were routinely locked away or kept in the private (male) preserve that was the library. To admit your child to the library was the equivalent of declaring him (it was usually a him) an equal; a daring act in itself.
At the age of three, Oscar Wilde's unconventional parents sent him down to the library to fetch a book. From about that age onwards, between his reading at school and university, his reviewing work and his reading for himself, Oscar ate his way through the recognised canon of classical, English, French and probably Italian and German literature.
Books for Oscar Wilde were more than a drug; as Thomas Wright argues powerfully in this book, they were the stuff from which he literally constructed his life. For Oscar Wilde, it was not a question of "you are what you eat". For him it was " you are what you read". In fact, as Wright seeks to demonstrate, for Wilde the two acts were not separate: Oscar seems literally to have eaten his way through some of the books he was reading; first consuming tit-bits of page corners as hors d'oeuvresand then moving on to an entréeof whole pages at a time.
Further, as Wright's reconstruction of his reading habits demonstrates, Wilde was literally omnivorous, consuming trash as avidly as classical authors, pornography as well as philosophy.
At some point, he was bound to eat something fatal. Indeed, that there were "fatal" books was a confirmed belief among readers of this time. After reading a fatal book, everything you ever thought or believed in was changed irreversibly; you died to yourself and were reborn within its covers.
This was the case for Oscar Wilde. The book which was to poison him was called À Rebours(translated as Against the Grain). Known as the "breviary of the Decadence", JK Huysmans's novel describes how a French aristocrat, disillusioned with actual life, withdraws to his chateau where he conducts various experiments in living aesthetically. Living by proxy, as it were, through his literary imagination, the hero of the novel, Des Esseintes, discovers that reading Dickens is far more potent an experience than actually travelling to Britain.
What Oscar Wilde discovered in his novel turned out to be - in our times - the "poison" of virtual experience. So powerful was À Reboursthat Wilde replicates its effect on his hero Dorian Gray, whose discovery of an unnamed "poisonous" book puts him on his own fatal path. It was to prove fatal in two ways: first insofar as it prefigured his fate - to live as a virtual artifact, while his portrait aged. Secondly it was fatal insofar as it inscribed his own fate - that of inevitable self-destruction.
When, in an early poem, Wilde wrote of his life as "twice-written scroll", he was acknowledging that to live by the book is to permit it to dictate the plot. In this case, the plot not only conscripted Dorian Gray but his creator as well.
Nor is its fatal influence yet spent. The author of Oscar's Books, Thomas Wright, initially read Dorian Gray at the age of 16 - becoming so addicted that he consumed it again 15 or 20 times, sometimes beginning and ending the same day.
In the grip of fatal attraction, Wright (during a "moment of quixotic madness") vowed to read every book ever read by Oscar Wilde - despite the fact that the contents of that library has by now been scattered over many countries and several continents. To reconstruct its contents - never mind to read it - would, over the next 20 years, launch the author on nothing less than a heroic quest.
As to its outcome: perhaps no other scholar of Wilde has succeeded so well in moving into Oscar's head. To reread Wilde's books is not less than to seek to live as Wilde again, by retracing the path of his intellectual and emotional life. This takes more than skill - it takes real passion. Wright does so by following the trajectories of key life-events, allowing them to shape his summaries of multiple texts, some of them remarkably dense (as in Kant's philosophy). Wright also demonstrates considerable imagination - for instance, in the way he traces Wilde's excited marginal annotations through to their predictable appearance in his published writings.
On Wilde's habit of annexing passages from others, Wright notes that Wilde's "most heinous crime" was to cut out whole paragraphs from two 18th-century biographies of Thomas Chatterton to paste into his lecture on the poet. But the tone is one of indulgence; Wright contrasts this with other works of vandalism by such eminent scholars as Darwin.
In the end, such refusals to rush to judgment are liberating, allowing Wright to exercise a breadth and playfulness rare among Wilde scholars. Particularly engaging are digressions into such topics as how mid-19th century children were taught to read or the interior design of the Victorian private library. Most of all, it is liberating to read of Wilde's intellectual rather than his sexual life.
That the books and boys went together - and how they went together - is in many ways the theme of this unique essay into uncharted areas of Wilde's life. My only regret is that, through some improbable oversight (given the book's almost obsessive thoroughness), no mention at all is made of the key role of the Chinese sage Zhuangzi (Chuang -Tsu), whose works Wilde read in their first English translation of 1889, then reviewed, then stole wholesale for his key essay 'The Soul of Man under Socialism'.
• Jerusha McCormack is the author and editor of several books on Oscar Wilde and his circle. She was consulting editor for the recent RTÉ Thomas Davis Lecture series on China and the Irish
A Wilde Read: Oscar's Books. By Thomas Wright. Chatto and Windus 370pp, £16.99