I get older the adoration increases. I'm never without him… It's like carrying your rosary around with you". Wilde is, as Morrissey suggests, not only a literary figure but also an attitude, a stance, a sexuality even. Wilde represents isolation within one's own world and at the same time a very grand set of theories about the most irrelevant or absurd things. Similarly, Morrissey says that, "Going into Ryman's [the stationer's] is the most extreme sexual experience one could have". Elements of his pithier statements obviously reflect the Wilde notion of the extreme and improbable aphorism that sets one apart from one's contemporaries and establishes one as something of a bohemian. Some of the more notable examples from interviews have been, "I think a sex symbol is possibly the best thing to be", "If you've got a grain of intellect you run the risk of making your critics seem dull. So people feel the need to adopt the most violent attitude, even when they like you", "I would never, ever do anything as vulgar as having fun". As in the case of Wilde, this catalogue of amusing statements that amount to nothing in particular except self- promotion can be and is compiled frequently into pretty little books of quotations to be read while doing one's teeth or washing the dog. Fry has added more than his fair share of pithy little wisdoms too, such as "I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself" and "You know what they say, if at first you don't succeed you're not the eldest son". The power of such statements in thi age of soundbites and spindoctors is to make oneself known even to those who have never and will never read your books.

Morrissey noted the problem inherent in his self-appointed position as a thinker and commenter on social matters and manners: "Because I come from a penniless background - a shack upon a hill - people find it fake that I come bounding down the hill clutching a copy of De Profundis. By rights I should be sitting here talking about Sheffield Wednesday or the length of Jimmy Hill's beard" (Nov 1984). To a similar end, Fry observed in The Liar that, "Sophistication is not an admired quality. Not only at school. Nobody likes it anywhere. In England at any rate". There lies the basis for all these writers' powers. It is hard to imagine any of them being less than one hundred per cent English. That two of them were Irish is of little concern. The point is that Wilde, Fry and Morrissey have the same peculiarly English attitudes of scepticism towards the press and their detractors while always giving good copy through endless witticisms and sheer dandyism that would not be amiss in the seventeenth century. They also all give the impression of being great romantics while maintaining their disinterest in women or sex or both.

All three of these arch, witty and camp men exist now as images as much as people. Disturbingly, Fry and Wilde in particular are near indistinguishable in the modern imagination. This situation allows, however, for the abiding theme of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to live on through his disciples. It has been observed that Anton Corbijn's photo of Morrissey putting together a jigsaw of Elvis (like his early habit of collecting photos of himself) is very suggestive of Dorian Gray staring into his mirror and becoming then destroying that image. Notice too the opening of "Rusholme Ruffians" that emulates almost precisely the Elvis song "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame". Genius doesn't borrow, of course, it steals. No less Dorianesque, and typically humorous is the video made for the unreleased single "Stop Me if You've Heard This One Before" where Morrissey rides around Salford in Manchester with a troupe of look-alikes on push bikes wearing Smiths T-shirts. Everything for these aesthetes who revel in the reflection of the self becomes a mirror. Morrissey has been as direct in his citing of Wilde's influence in his work as Fry has. In terms of his image, it has again been a case of direct visual quotation - the flowers and specifically gladioli that he paraded on television for instance were a homage to his hero: "I used flowers because Oscar Wilde always used flowers" (June 1984). In "Cemetry Gates", on "The Queen Is Dead" (The Smiths' best album and certainly one of the top five best albums of the 1980s), Morrissey sings, "Keats and Yeats are on your side but you lose because Wilde is on mine". Even in itself this seems to refer to Wilde's claim that, "More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read". The influence of Wilde was clear enough even in the lyrics to their first great single, "This Charming Man" two years earlier where Morrissey asks, "Why pamper life's complexities, / When the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?" Suggestive, beautiful, outrageously camp and pithy, Morrissey soon made himself the hero of every bed-sit poet and simultaneously established himself as popular music's equivalent of Wilde. Further, a voice murmurs the Wildean mantra, "Everybody's clever nowadays" in the background to their song "Rubber Ring" - which is in itself a celebration of the influence on a young mind of songs and lyrics.

Fry and Morrissey both spent much of their time in the public eye renouncing sex and proclaiming their own celibacy. In 1986, Morrissey asserted that he was "just dramatically, supernaturally non-sexual" and Fry - before and after coming out of the closet - spoke of a lack of interest in all things carnal. In an article for

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