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The unrecorded life of Oscar Wilde
life of Oscar Wilde.
289 pages, Hardcover
First published December 31, 1972
About the author
Rupert Croft-Cooke
125 books5 followersRupert Croft-Cooke was an English writer. He was a prolific creator of fiction and non-fiction, including screenplays and biographies under his own name and detective stories under the pseudonym of Leo Bruce.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 29, 2024
3 stars…I think.
As with the previous book by this author I read, Bosie, I have mixed thoughts. I do think this one has fewer faults, but several of the limitations of Bosie are present again here. Fortunately, this one seems to be better edited, for grammatical errors were not really an issue (except for one typo I noticed but didn’t mark). Or that might be because this book is much shorter.
In terms of the faults, because I went into this book knowing the author was homosexual himself, his use of dated slang terms, of “queers” and “queens” and “camp”, came off very differently than when I thought he was a prejudiced heterosexual, so it wasn’t very jarring or offensive. However, I did still find it extreme at times, and rather biased or of questionable taste—this application of something that seems to me modern to people from far in the past. Occasionally, I thought he was stretching things to fit his preconceived notions, which is always unpleasant in a biography.
On the other hand, I did like how unafraid to be critical the author was, for there are a lot of myths and commonly accepted lies in the life of Oscar Wilde, and he was very unequivocal in rejecting tales that lack evidence or come from notoriously unreliable sources. There’s a whole section near the beginning of the book that goes over several common fables about Wilde that are either totally false or very unlikely, and I really, really enjoyed that section—if it weren’t so long, I would quote it all here.
I also really liked how much detail Croft-Cooke went into in recounting Wilde’s life at Oxford, his life during his American lecture tour, as well as his life in Paris, after prison, because these are sections of Wilde’s life that I feel are commonly skipped over or recounted extremely sparsely, perhaps due to a lack of information; Croft-Cooke quoted a lot of letters of Wilde from these periods and went over, thoroughly, Wilde’s little love-affairs, which I found fascinating (and much of it was new to me).
A negative: The quotations from letters. Yes, it was fascinating, and they gave me a lot of new information, but I think Croft-Cooke could have cut down on the huge blocks of quotations from letters; some of it surely could have been stated in his own words. Also, the way the quotations were formatted in this book were weird; there are big gaps between the block quotations and the rest of the writing, but they’re not indented at all (as in, the whole paragraph is not indented—I’m not referring to the indentations which are at the beginning of paragraphs, but proper indentation of a whole section of quotation as is proper formatting), nor are they in a smaller font, so it is confusing sometimes, because you think it is a time skip or a topic switch, but then you realize as you start reading that it’s a quotation. So, I suppose in this sense that this is one of those formatting errors I noticed in Bosie, which annoyed me so much.
Another negative: There are so many sections in this book which are literally copied verbatim from Bosie. Those sections of the book that go over things that are mentioned in Bosie are not restated or rewritten in slightly different phrasing but literally the same, word for word. It’s annoying, and, I feel, lazy—especially because it’s so frequent. But seriously, I think it’s just proper form in writing a biography that overlaps with a previous book of yours to rewrite any old material!
Yet another negative: There are several chunks of French in this book, which are quotations from letters, and they are left untranslated. I can’t read French. It’s annoying to have to word-by-word type these French paragraphs into Google Translate. This might be a “skill issue”, but it still ticked me off.
One more negative: I wasn’t sure how much to trust Croft-Cooke’s information in this book, because of what I feel is his bias. This is related to the first negative point at the beginning of this review; in some senses, it’s as if he’s got this fixed idea of who these people were, and he’s trying to stuff them into the boxes he’s made for them in his mind. So, there are some sections of this book, not where he gives concrete information, but where he sort of supposes what happened or what someone was thinking when there’s a dearth of information, and he phrases it like, “I imagine . . . because . . .”, and I don’t know whether to trust him.
A positive: Croft-Cooke has a quite good understanding of Wilde, though I would disagree with a few of his assumptions (such as him not being a great conversationalist(???)), and he paints a very vivid and entertaining portrait of this man, unafraid to be improper or unserious, and thus not portraying him, unrealistically, as this overly serious literary figure whose every action was a dramatic act of a long tragedy, which he was not.
That about sums up my thoughts; this book has some positives, some negatives. I don’t at all regret reading it, and it was eminently readable and entertaining, but it is far from flawless. I’m looking forward to reading Croft-Cooke’s book Feasting With the Panthers, for that is certainly on my to-read list.
Quotations:
As with the previous book by this author I read, Bosie, I have mixed thoughts. I do think this one has fewer faults, but several of the limitations of Bosie are present again here. Fortunately, this one seems to be better edited, for grammatical errors were not really an issue (except for one typo I noticed but didn’t mark). Or that might be because this book is much shorter.
In terms of the faults, because I went into this book knowing the author was homosexual himself, his use of dated slang terms, of “queers” and “queens” and “camp”, came off very differently than when I thought he was a prejudiced heterosexual, so it wasn’t very jarring or offensive. However, I did still find it extreme at times, and rather biased or of questionable taste—this application of something that seems to me modern to people from far in the past. Occasionally, I thought he was stretching things to fit his preconceived notions, which is always unpleasant in a biography.
On the other hand, I did like how unafraid to be critical the author was, for there are a lot of myths and commonly accepted lies in the life of Oscar Wilde, and he was very unequivocal in rejecting tales that lack evidence or come from notoriously unreliable sources. There’s a whole section near the beginning of the book that goes over several common fables about Wilde that are either totally false or very unlikely, and I really, really enjoyed that section—if it weren’t so long, I would quote it all here.
I also really liked how much detail Croft-Cooke went into in recounting Wilde’s life at Oxford, his life during his American lecture tour, as well as his life in Paris, after prison, because these are sections of Wilde’s life that I feel are commonly skipped over or recounted extremely sparsely, perhaps due to a lack of information; Croft-Cooke quoted a lot of letters of Wilde from these periods and went over, thoroughly, Wilde’s little love-affairs, which I found fascinating (and much of it was new to me).
A negative: The quotations from letters. Yes, it was fascinating, and they gave me a lot of new information, but I think Croft-Cooke could have cut down on the huge blocks of quotations from letters; some of it surely could have been stated in his own words. Also, the way the quotations were formatted in this book were weird; there are big gaps between the block quotations and the rest of the writing, but they’re not indented at all (as in, the whole paragraph is not indented—I’m not referring to the indentations which are at the beginning of paragraphs, but proper indentation of a whole section of quotation as is proper formatting), nor are they in a smaller font, so it is confusing sometimes, because you think it is a time skip or a topic switch, but then you realize as you start reading that it’s a quotation. So, I suppose in this sense that this is one of those formatting errors I noticed in Bosie, which annoyed me so much.
Another negative: There are so many sections in this book which are literally copied verbatim from Bosie. Those sections of the book that go over things that are mentioned in Bosie are not restated or rewritten in slightly different phrasing but literally the same, word for word. It’s annoying, and, I feel, lazy—especially because it’s so frequent. But seriously, I think it’s just proper form in writing a biography that overlaps with a previous book of yours to rewrite any old material!
Yet another negative: There are several chunks of French in this book, which are quotations from letters, and they are left untranslated. I can’t read French. It’s annoying to have to word-by-word type these French paragraphs into Google Translate. This might be a “skill issue”, but it still ticked me off.
One more negative: I wasn’t sure how much to trust Croft-Cooke’s information in this book, because of what I feel is his bias. This is related to the first negative point at the beginning of this review; in some senses, it’s as if he’s got this fixed idea of who these people were, and he’s trying to stuff them into the boxes he’s made for them in his mind. So, there are some sections of this book, not where he gives concrete information, but where he sort of supposes what happened or what someone was thinking when there’s a dearth of information, and he phrases it like, “I imagine . . . because . . .”, and I don’t know whether to trust him.
A positive: Croft-Cooke has a quite good understanding of Wilde, though I would disagree with a few of his assumptions (such as him not being a great conversationalist(???)), and he paints a very vivid and entertaining portrait of this man, unafraid to be improper or unserious, and thus not portraying him, unrealistically, as this overly serious literary figure whose every action was a dramatic act of a long tragedy, which he was not.
That about sums up my thoughts; this book has some positives, some negatives. I don’t at all regret reading it, and it was eminently readable and entertaining, but it is far from flawless. I’m looking forward to reading Croft-Cooke’s book Feasting With the Panthers, for that is certainly on my to-read list.
Quotations:
Displaying 1 of 1 review