Vidal begins his essay on Oscar Wilde on a note of exasperation—not so much with Wilde as with the critics, social theorists and academicians who would once again pick and pry into his tortured life and homosexuality. However, he ends the essay on a note of praise for Wilde's work that it is strong enough to have endured decades of this kind of deconstruction.
The occasion for this essay is the publication by Richard Ellmann of a book ("Four Dubliners," with biographical essays on Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett) that revives Wilde as man and as artist. The late Professor Ellmann admitted there is little connection between the four writers, other than the accident of geography and an academic interest in bundling them together. Vidal notes "to.....
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