Per Christum

I just found the essay The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde (by Andrew McCracken) today, and it is very interesting. I never knew Wilde became Catholic until recently, since he is often held up as a hedonist of sorts, a kind of proto-postmodernist in the area of morals. However as the excerpts below show, Catholicism had a great appeal for Wilde and his friends. These are the sorts of conversion stories I like, ones that are steeped in the reality of the struggles we endure in our sinful world. Wilde struggled a lot, and only became Catholic at the very end of his life. He reportedly said something to the effect that within Catholicism are great saints and sinners: respectable people have Anglicanism. I am sure he considered himself neither a saint, nor a respectable person.

…Wilde’s partnership with [Aubrey] Beardsley on Salome is notable, for the young artist was a match for Wilde in both prodigious talent and scandalous reputation. Beardsley’s illustrations for the play are replete with phallic imagery and sneering hermaphroditic figures. Even more so than Wilde, Beardsley wanted to shock: he once famously remarked that “Nero set Christians on fire, like large tallow candles; the only light that Christians have ever been known to give.” Yet Beardsley, soon diagnosed with tuberculosis and condemned to a slow, lingering death, became a Catholic in 1896…In Beardsley’s last letter to his family, which opens with the words “Jesus is our Lord and Judge,” he asked that his drawings be destroyed. Beardsley died in 1898, at age 25.

…In 1899 Wilde traveled in Europe, an exile. In 1900 he was briefly in Rome with his companion Robbie Ross. They attended Masses and papal audiences, and Wilde received a blessing from Leo XIII that, he thought, even had a physically curative effect on him. As he joked to Ross, he was “a violent Papist,” but he left Rome as he had come, still an admirer of sacred art and sacred ritual, of piety and the papacy, but not yet a Catholic. His health deteriorating and his drinking excessive, Wilde left Rome for Paris, where the final scene of his long conversion would be played.

On November 28, 1900, as Wilde lay dying on his bed in Paris, Robbie Ross called in a priest, an English Passionist, Father Dunne. Wilde was given conditional Baptism and was anointed. For a short time he emerged from delirium into lucidity, and Father Dunne, examining him, was satisfied that Wilde freely desired reception into the Church. Wilde died a Catholic on November 30.

The poet’s great antagonist, the Marquis of Queensberry, died in the same year. On his deathbed he too was received into the Catholic Church. And the object of the poet’s self-destructive passion, Lord Alfred Douglas, became a Catholic in 1911 and remained firm in the Faith until his death, though his later writings betray a conservatism that is distasteful and uncharitable.

Does life, then, imitate art? There is a satisfying symmetry to the story of Wilde’s celebrity, his arrogance, his fall, and his humble acceptance of redemption, but we should resist the temptation to turn his life into a moral allegory. There is but a little room here for Catholic triumphalism, just as there is but a little room for an interpretation of Wilde’s life that canonizes him as a gay saint. Unfortunately, most recent treatments of Wilde’s life reduce him to the latter category: Stephen Fry’s recent movie makes but one mention of Catholicism (and that entirely unconnected to Wilde himself). But if we can’t simplify Oscar Wilde for our own convenience we are left asking — what was he then?

All of these: writer, wit, voluptuary, gay man, failed father and husband, sensitive soul, laughing stock, broken heart, eleventh hour Catholic convert.