Marginalia

An entirely new kind of biography, Built of Books explores the mind and personality of Oscar Wilde through his taste in books This intimate account of Oscar Wilde’s life and writings is richer, livelier, and more personal than any book available about the brilliant writer, revealing a man who built himself out of books. His library was his reality, the source of so much that was vital to his life. A reader first, his readerly encounters, out of all of life’s pursuits, are seen to be as significant as his most important relationships with friends, family, or lovers. Wilde’s library, which Thomas Wright spent twenty years reading, provides the intellectual (and emotional) climate at the core of this deeply engaging portrait. One of the book’s happiest surprises is the story of the author’s adventure reading Wilde’s library. Reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional hero who enters Cervantes’s mind by saturating himself in the culture of sixteenth-century Spain, Wright employs Wilde as his own Virgilian guide to world literature. We come to understand how reading can be an extremely sensual experience, producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight.Oscar Wilde’s library was dispersed on April 24, 1895, while he was in prison awaiting trial on charges of sodomy and gross indecency. It was sold for nearly nothing, in carelessly assembled lots, and mostly snapped up by dealers at a raucous auction held to pay his creditors, primarily the Marquess of Queensberry, who was awarded £600 in court costs after Wilde had disastrously and unsuccessfully sued him for libel. It is only partially possible to reconstruct the contents of Wilde’s collection of some 2,000 books, through the incomplete auction catalog, booksellers’ receipts, lists of titles he had requested in prison, and references in his letters and writings. A few of the books were bought by his friends in secondhand shops and restored to him, but only around 50 are known to survive...

...What becomes clear to Wright in his attempt to read all that Wilde read is how cautious we should be of easy identification with him today. His “sexual rebellion,” as Wright chastely puts it, may make him appear modern, but “in intellectual and existential terms,” he is “utterly alien to us.” It is not just the “labyrinthine commentaries on Hegel” that stand in Wright’s way. It is Wilde’s thorough classical education. Before he knew rentboys intimately he knew the Greek writers intimately, and many more besides, from Augustine to Shakespeare to Pater. “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Wilde wrote in “The Decay of Lying,” and this may be less an aesthetic paradox than an admission of the extent to which, as Wright more prosaically puts it, “he always came to life via books, literally seeing reality through them.” Imitators beware: it was his great strength, until it wasn’t. ~ Full article from New York TimesWilde's doodles from his notebooks.
Obsession is an overused word, but in the case of Thomas Wright it seems like something of an understatement...

...He began to read all the books he could find that were by Oscar Wilde or about him, and then, in what he now describes as a moment of madness, he 'resolved to read all the books my hero had read'. As Wilde was one of the quickest and most voracious readers of his age - he claimed he could read both open pages of a book simultaneously - Wright was embarking on a project that he was unlikely ever to complete...

...It seemed to me that the great events of Wilde's biography, to adapt his own phrase, had taken place in his brain.' This is, of course, the trouble with all literary biography. The real life of any author takes place largely in his head, but it is only the secondary stuff - people met, places visited, opinions expressed - that is accessible to a biographer... ~ Full article Daily Mail

Obligatory Stephen Fry as Wilde.
Articles / Reviews:
New York Times: Wilde’s Library
Literary Review: BOOKS MAKETH THE MAN
Daily Mail: Wild about Oscar
The Independent: Oscar's Books