A Wilde City
by Glen Draeger

Audio Version / 2 MB / 12 minutes (Requires Flash / download here).
Printable Version (opens in new window).

Hello Happy Students,

You can't always go where you want to go when you want to go there. This is particularly true about The World of Literature. I've been there many times with my guide, Iris, but I never know when I'm going to end up there. So when I climbed into my attic to find something I stored there and then looked down through the small, square hole that serves as our attic entrance only to see Iris standing there at the foot of a now wooden ladder made from the branches of trees, I was not surprised.

Iris smiled at me. I noticed that she wore a coat and shoes, something she rarely does. "Come down," she said in her characteristic English accent. "We must get going."

"Where?" I asked.

"To a city."

"A city? What city?"

"A city with no name—just a city."

The room I arrived in was in the top of the giant tree where Iris lives, the tree she calls, Trajjus. We looked out a small opening and I could see that we were higher than any mountains that surrounded us. Iris pointed. "Over there," she said. "Do you see it?"

I nodded. It was a city, but it was a strange city. As I looked at it it first looked like the skyline of New York, present day and then it looked as I imagined New York might have looked a hundred years ago, then it looked like a completely different city, Paris, I think, then London, then Tokyo, Berlin and Mexico City all in different decades and centuries. Some of the cities were from the future—tall, shiny, silver spherical buildings and around them hundreds of flying vehicles. But although I noticed that the city had changed I never noticed it changing. Suddenly I would realize that I was not looking at the same city I had been looking at only seconds before—but it was the same city.

We arrived in the city a few days later. As we walked down the streets the buildings changed around us—at times modern, ancient, futuristic and even the vehicles changed, metamorphosed before our eyes into cars or horse-drawn carriages or simply people walking down an unpaved, dirt street. But as I said earlier, I didn't exactly notice this happen, it was just something I realized if I took the time to think about it. After a while, though the city continued to change, it all seemed quite normal.

More startling than this, I think, were the people. I knew who they were without asking. I don't mean I knew their names, but I could look at them and say, "He's a city worker, she's a secretary, he's a doctor, she's a lawyer, he's poor—without a job, that child has a rich father, that child has no father or mother"—every person I looked I knew their story and I knew I knew even though I didn't know how I knew. Their clothes would change just as the buildings did, but so would their faces and their height and weight, their skin color and language—but again, and I know it sounds unbelievable, I didn't notice that unless I consciously tried to think about it and even then it felt normal—it felt as if they had stayed the same I would have thought it to very peculiar.

"What is happening?" I asked Iris. "I'm confused about not feeling confused."

"Do you know where we are?"

"No," I answered. "It's like you said, this is a city without a name—it's like every city I've ever been in, every city I could ever think about."

"Yes—but which city—think."

As I was thinking I heard a man behind me say: "I am glad there is some one in the world who is quite happy." I turned around and he was staring up at something and when I looked up I saw it was the Happy Prince.

"We are in the city of the Happy Prince," I said with realization, "but I still don't understand. That city seemed to me like London a hundred years ago."

"That's because Oscar Wilde wrote it. He lived in London for a time," Iris said.

Then a little Swallow landed on my shoulder. I jerked back slightly and was about to brush it off when it spoke to me. "The Happy Prince would like to talk to you," it said in a high, sing-song kind of voice. As you will recall, the Happy Prince stood on the top of a very, tall column. I expected and half hoped that I might be just whisked up to him by some kind of magic, I mean I was in the World of Literature, but that was not to be.

"You'll have to climb up there," Iris said.

I don't like heights—well, that's not exactly true—I don't like heights when there is a substantial possibility that I might fall. It was an old column that had deteriorated so there were some places to get a footing and to grab with my hands. Slowly I began to climb. I kept stopping to catch my breath and plan my route, but finally I made it to the top and found myself standing on the pedestal next to the Happy Prince. We were about the same height. We could see the entire city.

"Remember," he said to me, "my story is a fairy tale. That's what Wilde called it. When things happen in this city, it is about things that happen in every city."

"You are sad because of what happens in every city?"

"Yes, you could even say that Oscar Wilde is sad because of what happens in every city. But I am sad for more than that. I am sad for Oscar Wilde."

"But why? He was a great playwright and a great wit, extremely funny. I've read lots of his quotes and they make me laugh out loud."

"From here we will be able to watch his life. Look over there," he said. "That's his father, Sir William Wilde, a famous eye surgeon and he's with his mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, a well-known poet. She called herself 'Speranza.'"

"So far, so good," I replied.

"There's Oscar. He was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854. His full name was Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wilde. By the time he'd graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, he had studied Latin, Greek and Ancient History. He left with First Class Honors and had also won the coveted Newdigate Prize for poetry."

"That sounds good," I said.

"He continued to write and in 1881 went to America on a lecture tour. There, look," the Prince said. He's in customs coming into America." Then it was like I had powerful binocular eyes because I could see Wilde talking to a custom's officer. He wore a fancy coat and had long hair.

"Mr. Wilde," the custom's officer asked, "do you have anything to declare?"

Wilde thought for a moment and then said, "I have nothing to declare except my genius."

I laughed out loud. "Now that's funny," I said.

"Wilde," the Prince continued, "lectured at 140 different places and when he returned home he was a celebrity both in America and Europe."

"Wow," I said.

"Then he married and had two sons. He wrote my story and others for those sons in his book, The Happy Prince and Other Tales. He wrote plays and a novel and essays and was a popular man in London. He was the editor of a magazine, The Woman's World and lots of people came to his plays."

"Look over there," the Prince said. I saw Oscar Wilde between two policemen.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"He's going to prison."

"Prison? Why?"

"In 1895 in England you could go to prison for being a homosexual. Oscar Wilde was convicted for his homosexual activity and sent to prison for two years of hard labor."

"Two years?"

"Yes, he spent two years in prison. He once wrote, 'The two great turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.' But even after that terrible experience he wrote, 'Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.' He moved to Paris after Prison, adopted the new name of Sebastian Melmoth and wrote a long poem about his experience in prison called, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He never saw his wife or sons again."

"When did he die?"

"Three years after he got out of prison. There, see him? Listen."

Suddenly I was next to him. A doctor was telling him that he would need to have an operation, an expensive operation.

"Ah, well, then, I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means," Wilde said. I laughed out loud. Everyone looked at me.

"Who are you?" they asked.

I was speechless. Honestly, I didn't think anyone could see me.

Then Oscar Wilde said, "He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing."

I laughed and so did the doctors, but then one of them said, "No, really, who are you?"

I was so flustered I blurted out, "I'm from another world, from the future I think."

Everyone looked at me with confusion until Wilde said to me, "The advantage of the emotions," my dear man, "is that they lead us astray."

Okay, I shouldn't have told them where I was from, but I didn't know how to get out of there and I wasn't getting any help from Iris or the Happy Prince. "I'm sorry, hopefully I can profit from this experience."

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes," Wilde said, and again the doctor's laughed. I wasn't laughing.

"Who are you, anyway?" a doctor asked with a bit of irritation.

I lied again, not a good decision. "I heard you were dying, Mr. Wilde, and thought maybe I could talk to you about it. Maybe help you deal with it."

He laughed loudly. "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about," he said to me and again all those doctors laughed. They were starting to annoy me. You don't meet a lot doctors who laugh.

"The simple truth," I said, "is that—"

"The truth," Mr. Wilde interrupted, "is rarely pure and never simple."

"Well, let me be as sincere as I possibly can," I said.

Again Mr. Wilde jumped in. "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

Then a doctor said, "I bet you're some newspaper reporter trying to get a story here."

"I promise," I said, "I won't write or even talk about this."

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about," Wilde said, "and that is not being talked about."

"Mr. Wilde has lots of enemies," the doctor said. "I bet this guy is one of them."

"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies," Wilde said.

"I can assure you I'm not an enemy—I don't even have any enemies."

"He hasn't and enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him," Wilde said.

"Look," I said, "I'm a teacher of literature," thinking this might impress Wilde.

Mr. Wilde sighed, then laughed and said, "Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching." This time the doctors laughed loud and long.

Not knowing what else to do, I turned and left. When I exited the door I found myself in my study.

Oscar Wilde was accepted into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. He died in 1900 at the age of 46.

Regards,

Mr. Draeger

Note: All the words spoken by Wilde in this story are real quotes taken from his works.

Bibliography:

The Avenel Companion to English & American Literature. David Daiches and Eric Mottram, editors, Avenel Books, New York, 1981. pp. 533-555.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition. John Bartlett, Justin Kaplan, editors. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1992.

Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia: Third Edition. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1987. p. 1064

The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation. Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle, editors. Dorset Press, New York, 1978

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, Ill., 1988, 15th edition, Vol. 12, pp. 656-657

The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Margaret Drabble, editor. Oxford University Press, New York, 1985. p. 1067

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, fourth edition. Angela Partington, editor. Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1992

The Quotations Page. www.quotationspage.com <http://www.quotationspage.com/search.php3?homesearch=Oscar+Wilde&startsearch=Search>

©2005-2008 Glen Draeger (all rights reserved)
Millstone Education: World Literature / http://www.millstoneeducation.com/worldLit