THIS book claims to be the "first full length psychoanalytical biography of Wilde; any expectation, however, of an insightful reading into his complex mind will be disappointed.
The book seeks to provide an explanation of Wilde's work from a study of his childhood and youth but, unfortunately, falls short of this aim. The connections made between his life and art are at best implausible, and more often than not, farcical. Perceptions of his behaviour and relationships range from Freudian banality to the absurd, as in Knox's contention that Wilde's homosexuality was caused by his mother; that his appearance in court, where he was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years' hard labour, represents the fulfilment of his desire to sleep with his mother and so win his father's attention; while his mother's love of feminine clothes indicates her unconscious desire to be a man.
Knox's method of argument is to put forward a proposition, discuss some unrelated material along a general theme and then proceed to write of her hypothetical premise as though it were fact. One is reminded of Oscar Wilde's denial of Wordsworth having found his inspiration in nature - "He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there."
Isola Wilde was nine years of ace and Oscar Wilde twelve at the time of her death; the doctor attending her spoke of Oscar's "lonely and inconsolable grief" at his little sister's death. In one of her more bizarre intuitions, Knox proposes that Wilde experienced sexual longing for his sister which, formed the basis of his lifelong grief and supposed guilt at her death. Having made this suggestion, she compares Wilde's poem, "Requiescat", written when he was twenty in memory of his little sister, to a poem by Thomas Hood on the death of a young prostitute ("Bridge of Sighs") On the sole evidence of a partially similar metre, Knox makes the fantastic claim that Wilde thought of his little sister as a prostitute. She examines an entirely unrelated poem of Wilde's "The Harlot's House", where in her inimitable Through the Looking-Glass method of deduction she discovers "the hidden meaning of "Requiescat".
Having established nothing ink support of her hypothesis, Knox, nevertheless claims the authority of fact when she speaks of Wilde's "erotic attachment to lsola" and she little girl's "aggressively seductive qualities" - figments which remain the groundless fabrication of the author. It is an ingenious mind that can uncover such a theory from Wilde's "inconsolable grief" at the death of his only sister.
Knox arrives at a similar position in relation to her claim that Wilde suffered from syphilis. Regardless of having failed to establish the fact she writes of Wilde's hypothetical state of syphilis as actual, and upon this unsound basis proclaims: "The impact of Wilde's syphilis on his development as a writer is hard to overestimate." She lists a number of Wilde's works owing their genesis to his "syphilitic" condition,, among them The Importance of Being Ernest, written, we are told to "cheer himself up" by ridiculing his disease! "The Soul of Man under Socialism" is also seen as being indebted to syphilis as, "conscious of his inner ugliness, he became increasingly aware of the ugliness of industrialisation poverty".
There has been some academic debate on the question of Wilde having had syphilis, but no concrete evidence has ever been put forward to support it. Merlin Holland, in an article in The Spectator (December, 1988), convincingly demolishes the syphilis theory and again in his review of Knox's book in the Times Literary Supplement.
Many of the interpretations in this book appear somewhat ficile in their perception and surprising in their assumption: the casual conviction with which Knox asserts "Wilde's homosexual disgust with women"; John the Baptist's beheading in Salome translates as Wilde's "losing his head" over Lord Alfred Douglas; Constance Wilde's understandable explanation of her husband's homosexuality in her letter to Robert Sherard, - "He has been mad the last three years" - through Knox's vision becomes a proof of syphilitic deterioration; Wilde's humour is seen as "a defence against the despair brought about by his illness". Neither his "illness" nor his "despair" have been shown to exist. In a memorable final sentence to the book Knox moralises: "But although [Wilde] did not receive forgiveness and indeed his life was not forgivable, we have to forgive him because of all he has given us."
Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide is a highly subjective interpretation of Wilde, a law unto itself, accepting no responsibility for any burden of proof. While Knox might be commended for her individuality, the book adds, little to our knowledge of Wilde or of his works. Perhaps she has been too attentive to his admonition on "falling into careless habits of accuracy", for she has produced a work which wonderfully succeeds in presenting "the object as in itself it is not".