2015 read #22: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd.

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd
185 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 25 to May 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

"Time is eternal and simultaneous." Such is written on the endsheet of this particular library copy. This approximation of profundity was jotted down in response to a passage late in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, in which Ackroyd has his narrator Wilde recount,

'I will tell you a secret,' I said to him. 'I have told you that our age is primitive and terrible. Well, the next age will be primitive also, and then the next, and then the next.'

Dante walks in exile at the same time as Augustine speaks in market place of Tyre, and Samson is led into the air by a boy. There is a picture of a young man in the Louvre -- a prince, I believe, and his eyes are sad. I would like to see that picture again before I die. I would like to return to that past -- to enter another man's heart. In that moment of transition, when I was myself and someone else, of my own time and in another's, the secrets of the universe would stand revealed.

The beauty, and occasionally the frustration, of literary fiction is that few things are spelled out, and each reader fashions their own understanding from the impressions presented. I certainly would not extract some pop science pseudo-physics mysticism from the above passage. Hewing close to the obvious themes, I thought instead of the isolation of the artist and the critic of society, the "primitive" and "terrible" human society which, for all its cosmetic shifts, changes not at all in how it seizes upon and hounds the outsider.

I haven't read much at all of Wilde's actual work -- only The Picture of Dorian Grey, and that was eleven years ago. Ackroyd excels in his pastiche of Wilde's style and quickness with an epigram, as far as I can tell; the first half or so of the book had me giggling with every page. But, as is my common reaction to Ackroyd's recent history digests, I came away from this Testament not feeling I had learned anything much about Wilde as a person. Ackroyd's Wilde returns to themes of masks, of identity, of art and beauty as ideals, and either I'm too dense or my attention was too scattered to appreciate it, because I didn't feel like those themes got developed or elaborated beyond a Cliffs Notes sketch. The ending was affecting, and much of the early going was delightfully wry, but I just didn't click with this read as a whole.