Oscar Wilde: Catholic, but not Irish

Mary Kenny
DESPITE THE best efforts of the Irish heritage industry, which commodifies him along with the rest of the canon of Irish writers, I do not accept Oscar Wilde as an Irish writer.
Wilde was born in Dublin and went for a time to Trinity College Dublin, but then the Duke of Wellington was born in Ireland too, and commented, upon that fact: "One may be born in a stable without being a horse." Oscar never showed the slightest interest in Ireland, in all his writings. The only place that really matters, in his imaginative life, is London (and Belgravia at that). Culturally, he also loved France and Italy, but his parents' affection for the west of Ireland completely passed him by.
In his most serious work, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he considers the plight of the wretched of the earth, but not once does he think to include the poor people of Dublin — in the 1890s among the poorest in Europe — in his canvas. Ireland just didn't figure in Oscar Wilde's preoccupations, and to describe him as an Irish writer is a sham. An Irish writer must care about Ireland: Ireland must figure in his imaginative concerns. Ireland was central to Joyce and to Yeats, and mattered greatly to Shaw.
Oscar Wilde does, however, qualify as a Catholic writer. For he died a Catholic, in November 1900, having been received into the arms of the Church on his deathbed by Father Cuthbert Dunne, of the Passionist Fathers in Paris.
Much earlier in his life, Wilde had wanted to enter the Catholic Church, according to Joseph Pearce's masterly study, Literary Converts. When he was 24 years of age, in 1878, Wilde approached Father Sebastian Bowden at the Brompton Oratory, with a view to instruction. The priest wrote Oscar a solemn letter in which he warned that he would have to renounce "bad influences, mental and moral, and positive sin". In short, becoming a Catholic, wasn't just a lifestyle choice that would ensure prettier ceremonies, more bells and smells. It would mean sacrifice. Oscar drew back, and instead of keeping his next appointment with the Oratory priest, sent him a beautiful bunch of lilies by way of an apology.
The interest in the Catholic Church had been there, appal
ently, since childhood, and never quite went away. Wilde introduces the attractions of "the Roman ritual" as a theme in his celebrated Picture of Dorian Gray, a kind of symbolic autobiography. He was also influenced by the French decadent writer, krisKarl Huysmans (who wrote a cult book called A Rebours, which depicted a character who perversely sought to do everything the wrong way around) and in the poet Baudelaire, both of whom took refuge in Catholicism — Huysmans entered a monastery. The fin-de-siecle artist, Aubrey Beardsley, considered shockingly decadent, also became a Catholic.
After his release from Reading Gaol, where he served two years hard labour for homosexual offences, Oscar Wilde lived on the Continent, paying a visit to Rome towards the end of the 1890s, where he was blessed by the Pope, and was much moved by the event. As he lay dying (of syphilis), one of his last epigrams was: "Catholicism is the only religion to die in." He told his friend Robert Ross that he wished he had been permitted to become a Catholic as a child. Ross summoned Fr Cuthbert just before the end and Wilde was given conditional baptism and then the last rites.
In an address last weekend at the Golden Hinde Bookshop in Deal, Kent, and subsequently, during the week at the National Portrait Gallery in London marking the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death, Lord Gawain Douglas, the great-nephew of Lord Alfred Douglas, who had been Wilde's lover, gave a moving recital of his greatuncle's poetry. Lord Alfred (Bosie) had also subsequently converted to Catholicism; Gawain Douglas is a devout Catholic himself.
Rather than being on the Irish Tourist Board's heritage calenders, (and represented in statue form in Dublin's Merrion Square, which Dubliners have wittily dubbed "the Quare on the Square"), it seems that Oscar Wilde is really among the communion of saints. Though he always said that the Catholic Church was the only church for sinners.
,N I IER early
letters to her mother, recently made public, the actress Vanessa Redgrave reveals a commendable sense of compassion for the poor — a compassion that would lead her to commit herself to the Socialist Workers' Party (widely regarded as batty). One of her first films was shot on location in the East End of London, and Vanessa wrote: "We have been in one of the saddest, dirtiest parts of London... There are hundreds of people for whom life is one squalid misery. A woman today told me she was glad to get a job [as an extra) because her wallet was stolen with £3 in it. And 1 thought to myself how far from reality I am in my position." I found this a generous-hearted sentiment from a young star, as she was then, suddenly made aware of her privileged position, and though it lead her to become a Trotskyist for some time, it might as easily have led her in the same direction as St Vincent de Paul.