New novel about Oscar Wilde offers an alternate ending to his story – San Diego Union-Tribune

By Wendy Smith

THE WASHINGTON POST

Constance Wilde knows how she appears to the public after the conviction of her husband Oscar in 1895 for so-called acts of gross indecency.

“Poor little blinker woman,” says Constance bitterly in “The Wildes,” a new novel by Louis Bayard. “How could I not understand that, oh, I think the usual phrasing is the true nature of her husband.”

But in Bayard’s empathetic telling of this story, Oscar Wilde’s true nature cannot be captured in a catchphrase such as a closeted gay man. When this “novel in five acts” opens in 1892, Oscar, seen through Constance’s eyes, is charmingly elusive, genuinely devoted to his wife and two children, but always in need of an audience bigger The fact that her favorite admirers are always attractive young men is not something Constance chooses to dwell on.

Louis Bayard is the author of “The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts. (Jim Coburn)

Two of Bayard’s earlier novels, “Courting Mr. Lincoln” and “Jackie & Me,” examined the complicated maneuverings of a man and woman tentatively headed for marriage with the intimate involvement of a another man who is a confidant of both.

Constance and Oscar have been married for eight years when the first act begins, and she is trying to minimize the number of visitors to her rented farmhouse in Norfolk, England, so that she can finish her play, “A Woman of No Importance.” Constance is happy to host Oscar’s mother, Lady Wilde (in Bayard’s amusing portrayal, an obvious prototype for Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest”), but is upset that she has also invited her old friend and lawyer Arthur Clifton and his new wife. , Florence, on honeymoon there. Constance is also not pleased with the imminent arrival of another admirer, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

Almost half of “The Wildes” is consumed by the turbulent weeks in Norfolk during which Constance realizes the precise nature of Oscar’s connection with Bosie. Bayard, a contributing writer to The Washington Post’s Book World, successfully established Constance as a fully fleshed-out character, and Wilde’s marriage as a love match between intellectual equals, interrupted by Oscar’s need to ‘something else. “I can’t imagine life without you and the boys and Mama,” he tells her in the painful and poignant climax of Act One.

Bayard’s nuanced portrayal of this complex relationship is surrounded by a wealth of set-up information: Constance’s ominous health problems; a blackmail attempt with Bosie; the desperate loneliness of the Wildes’ 7-year-old son, Cyril; the mystery of why Cyril’s younger brother Vyvyan has stayed behind with friends.

Oscar disappears from the action in the second act and remains offstage for the rest of the novel, which examines the psychic damage his behavior has inflicted on his family. In their own different ways, Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan have been devastated by the scandal that took them abroad and the knowledge that after being released from prison, Oscar chose his lover over his wife and children.

Bayard sticks to the known facts: Constance died after surgery in 1898; Cyril became a soldier and died in World War I; Vyvyan returned to England and became a literary translator, and enriches them by providing vivid inner lives to these wounded souls.

We have already seen that the happy family they remember from the days before the scandal was built on evasions and lies. Bayard, drawing on the contemporary recognition that there are all kinds of families, imagines in act five another way in which Bosie’s raid could have unfolded. On the one hand, the solution proposed by Constance would have been highly improbable in the 19th century.

On the other hand, it’s nice to see that the woman is generally seen as an unwitting victim with some agency and that her family has a chance to be happy, even if it’s not conventional. “The Wildes” gently portrays a complicated man, the family he loved and the man he loved with understanding and regret for the difficult decisions forced upon them.

“The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts” by Louis Bayard (Algonquin, 2024; 304 pages)