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Courtesy of The Letter Spontaneous Mind: Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece by Joan Schenkar, New York: Basic Books, 2000. $30 hardback. (Available in the region at Carmichael's, Crazy Ladies Bookstore, Out Loud Books, Out Word Bound, Pink Pyramid, Planet Proud, and other fine stores. Also in the Williams-Nichols Collection at the University of Louisville.)
That was the daunting task historian Joan Schenkar faced when delving into the life of Dolly Wilde, St. Oscar's long-forgotten lesbian niece. The toast of Natalie Barney's fabulous Parisian salon (and the love interest of many a lesbian member, including Barney herself), Dolly made a personal impact that was fondly remembered long after her untimely death from an accidental overdose in 1941 at age 46: the same age her uncle and father died. But she left little in the way of documentation. Had Schenkar not sleuthed out the obscure Parisian library where her letters were deposited after her death, she might not have had much of a book at all.
From a brief, sparkling period of favor in the Paris of the mid-20s, she descended miserably in the 30s into a suicidal life of alcohol and drugs, both prescription and hard. Eventually penurious and without a stable home, she became towards the end of her life little more than a sigh to her friends, who helped her even as they helplessly watched her slow dance with death. Schenkar has done a remarkable job with relatively little. Even when she takes on the awful task of having to reconstruct likely settings, probable events, and possible conversations, she doesn't go overboard, as other biographers have. They're all careful, intelligent reconstructions. What makes this biography a stand-out is its high literate quality. Schenkar's vigorous command of the language, and her philosophical insights into Dolly's personality and her relationships with others-particularly Barney--are enthralling. She does get stuck at times on an obscure word, repeating it over and over in a short space (what does "ruched" mean, anyway?), and occasionally she can't help showing off with exotic strings of little-known words that would cause an Oxford don to scurry to his dictionary. But overall Truly Wilde manages to bring Dolly to life like a finely carved marble statue that's just been kissed. Schenkar has achieved what few other biographers are capable of doing: making the reader wish they'd known the subject personally, flaws and all, and regretful they hadn't. In the end, we grieve just as much as if we'd been alone with her in that lonely London hotel room on the last night of her life. |
It's not easy writing a 300-page biography about someone who's left so little
of their personal life behind them. Just ask anyone who tries to write
anything about Shakespeare, Vivaldi, or that most enigmatic of men, Jesus
Christ. They may have left us plenty of plays, concerti, or parables, but we
have few clues as to what kind of persons they really were. Even people
who've been dead just sixty years prove problematic.
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