They revel in the myth of the self, the heroic, distant poetic figure. It is no surprise that when Johnny Rogan's biography of The Smiths (Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance, a fine tome) threatened to cast light upon the goings on of his band, Morrissey said he hoped that Rogan would die in a motorway pile-up. Another similarity between these men lies in their disappearances, then. Morrissey wanted to hide himself, much like David Bowie in his many disguises, behind the protective veil of his heroes: his Wilde, his Elvis, his James Dean. His art and life needed to be separated like theirs. As Wilde writes in The Critic As Artist, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth". In the mind of the fanatic, Wilde did not become fat and lose the plot in prison, Elvis did not exist in his bloated later state, and James Dean did not crash and lose the beauty so fundamental to his appeal. They were preserved in their art and in that crucial image. So, his mask removed, Morrissey has disappeared now, escaping media attention totally after the court case where a judge famously ruled that he was "truculent and unreliable". How does the heroic aesthete and lyricist emerge from such a judgement pure and untainted? He does not, he resigns entirely. Fry too has taken some knocks. His disappearance from the stage play "Cell Mates" was ridiculed and his name tarnished. His public appearances since have notably been fewer, while in his latest novel, The Stars' Tennis Balls (see our review) the main character is catapulted away from real society to live in contemplation while the world believes him mad or dead. As Wilde wrote in An Ideal Husband, "Public and private lives are different things. They have different laws and move on different lines". For men who confront the world's pettiness and vulgarity with their intelligence, sensitivity, non-conformity and beauty, the fall must be greater and absolute. Morrissey said during his time in The Smiths that, "Television still has this mystical ability to separate you from the world and confer importance upon you". This is the precise problem they face. Fry, Morrissey and Wilde are all extremely well-known faces. So, they are distanced from reality by their inability to act normally within it. Their very anonymity is taken from them. These bookish recluses then become more like themselves, and like Dorian Gray start to become their own pictures from the past - incapable of changing. However, there lies their success. As Wilde said, "He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best".
The controversies, mostly sexual that have surrounded the lives of these men is unfortunate but typical of the British public and media. It is typical of Wilde's contemporaries that they would not accept his relationship with his young lover, Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas and found a way to throw him into jail for perversion. Many found Fry's exaggerated peek into public school life in The Liar (consisting of buggery and flattery, essentially) hard to stomach. English tabloid newspaper, The Sun, effectively forced a ban of The Smiths' early material (particularly "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" and "Reel Around the Fountain") from the radio by describing Morrissey as "sick", "evil" and all the rest for apparent references to child abuse in his songs. This is, of course, from the paper that prints photos of girls as young as 16 daily. Naturally, all three writers have courted controversy in their time, but it hardly stands to reason that they therefore deserve to be vilified as perverts. The infamous picture of Wilde dressed as a woman turned out to be of someone else entirely. Morrissey went from "the fabric of a tutu/ any man could get used to/ and I am a living sign" in the '80s to butch boxer imagery and fake scars in the late 1990s. But still, the implication is there: as Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest that, "All women become like their mothers - that is their tragedy. No man does. That is his." In the case of these three, though, that accusation will never quite stick. Of course, as Wilde says in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others".
There are differences too, of course, between these wits. Wilde is dead. Fry is an actor. Morrissey is a heterosexual (probably). Wilde hated sport; Morrissey says "I never wanted to get off P.E. - it was the only intellectual subject in school". Fry and Wilde wrote novels; Morrissey never wrote anything longer than a lyric. Morrissey and Fry were journalists; Wilde hated hacks. Fry and Wilde were Cambridge and Oxford graduates respectively; Morrissey
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