Oscar Wilde's Influence on Stephen Fry and Morrissey
By David Pinching"All beautiful things belong to the same age":
To be a famous wit is to have a reputation and often infamy, especially in the sordid, absurd and pompous world of 'Art'. Beauty, style and elegance can rarely be sustained into old age. Therefore, if one good thing came of Oscar Wilde's early death, it was the sealing as if in amber of his elegance and charm. He made it into his early forties and no further, dying on November 30th 1900 (explaining our current obsession with the man and the spate of Wilde related mumbo jumbo: a volume of letters, new editions and so on). Dreadful though it is to say, he was probably born at the right time. Nowadays, his homosexuality is unlikely to have caused anything more than a headline or two - and then not even on the front page - but he is raised up as an icon of homosexuality and an example of the injustice its repression. Had he been born in 1956 we would be more likely to have had the Ballad of a Late Afternoon Tea Room than a Ballad of Reading Gaol. Besides, what would the twentieth century have been without Oscar? As the line goes in An Ideal Husband: "Life is never fair. And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not". Wilde may have died of cerebral meningitis before the close of its first year, but even in the 1990s, his influence was still quite apparent. I am not referring to his wonderful plays, although they have been brought back to life numerous times in the last few years on stage and screen (An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest spring to mind). Nor am I referring to his prose: the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his many short stories for children and adults. Set aside too, if you will, both his frequently appalling poetry and his influential criticism. What remains then? Ah… everything of importance: the character, the attitude, the wit and the suave image of a wilfully fey man in a smart velvet suit raising an eyebrow and a cigarette in an absurdly long holder down from the stars into the gutter.
This image abides, quite aside from the art. Wilde exists as an image and thank god for that. The man was in so many ways a failure, especially by his own standards. The hilarious arrogance of his sayings cannot help but turn a spotlight on his insubstantial output ("To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance" indeed!). His plays are hilarious, tawdry affairs with many of the qualities of Restoration comedies (see Wycherley, Congreve etc.) but some of their failings of shallowness and lack of substance. It was the witty dialogue, stuffed to the brim with pith and social comment, that survived best. The Importance of Being Earnest gave us "In married life three is company and two is none" and An Ideal Husband, "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike".
It is from this well-spring of wit and intelligence that two of his most vocal and talented admirers of the last half-century seem to have drunk. The first of these, born one hundred and three years after the man he played in the biopic Wilde in 1957, is Stephen Fry. The appearance of Fry in an article nominally about Wilde is no surprise and the former is likely completely sick of the comparison with the latter. That is understandable. Fry is certainly as versatile as Wilde was: writing a short play (Latin! Or Tobacco and Boys), comedy, journalism, novels, and acting. That Fry played the part of Wilde is no surprise. They look uncannily similar, and Fry's grace and style fits very well with the modern image of Oscar, how ever inaccurate it may be. It is more than this, though. Fry is a witty, camp and recklessly articulate human being (read Bibliomania's new interview with him if you need proof). His novels tend to explore the concept of the individual placed by circumstance, sexuality or both outside of society and convention. Ultimately, though, Fry himself seems slightly reserved and distant from the extremes of his hero. The extremes he reaches tend to be found in his prose. His shorter pieces, collected in Paperweight, contain some of his sharpest comments. Like Wilde, he tends to side with no one but laugh heartily at the absurdities of everyone: "A generation of citizens who buy red leather combination locked attaché cases and heated trouser presses while remaining ignorant of the metrical constitution of The Faerie Queene is not one ready to lead the world". There it is again, the grandiose statement as knowing as knowing can be without becoming a hermit and having one eyebrow surgically raised.
One man who has mimicked Wilde just as closely as Fry is Steven Patrick Morrissey. Lead singer of 1980s band The Smiths and then solo artist of note ("Everyday is Like Sunday", "Suedehead" etc.), Morrissey is now something of a recluse. In his art there was certainly the sense that his (incidentally very handsome) eyebrow was permanently raised: a hearing aid worn on Top of the Pops should have given that away immediately. In his heyday, though, his pithy responses to interviewers' questions and his simultaneously self-aggrandising and self-deprecating comments reminded all too clearly of a certain homosexual dramatist. In 1984, Morrissey claimed "Oscar Wilde and James Dean were the only two companions I had as a distraught teenager. Every line that Wilde wrote affected me so enormously". The fanaticism did not stop there. In the same year he noted the religious connotations of such reverence: "As
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