The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

This book is better than you remember.

Wilde was a classical scholar, a prodigy and savant who could read two pages at once, one eye per page, and go through a book in minutes--something I've only seen in a TV special about a man with the world's highest IQ. You could read this 1891 novel in similar parallel fashion.

On one side is the story about a young man whose purity is (with comical ease) corrupted by a jaded and hedonistic lord.

“After a time the bee flew away. He saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus. The flower seemed to quiver, and then swayed gently to and fro.”

All you need to know about this description is that, hitherto, Dorian has been repeatedly compared to a flower.

We first hear of him through the words of artist Basil. Basil pleads movingly for his licentious friend Lord Henry not to influence Dorian, and we watch as he does just that. Henry, despite everyone repeatedly telling him he's at bottom a good person, is quite evil. “'What nonsense you talk, Harry!'" Dorian cries at one point, "taking a light from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table.” He’s unaware of the real serpent in his midst. The Faustian bargain at the heart of the tale is continued in imagery clearly conjuring Mephistopheles:

“[Dorian] drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture, smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was already waiting for him. An hour later he was at the opera, and Lord Henry was leaning over his chair.”

Lord Henry "Decay fascinates me more" Wotton is also the excrescence of a broader, aristocratic world about which Wilde can be equally brutal, as in this sly aside in a story about the tragic death of Dorian's father:

“They said Kelso got some rascally adventurer, some Belgian brute, to insult his son-in-law in public—paid him, sir, to do it, paid him—and that the fellow spitted his man as if he had been a pigeon. The thing was hushed up, but, egad, Kelso ate his chop alone at the club for some time afterwards.”

Soon after--behind all the flippancy, the novel's pacing and structure are very considered--the author introduces one possible victim of Dorian's corruption, the poor trusting beauty, Sibyl Vane, whom the reader watches with a sense of impending doom. And then we meet her brother, whose murderous pledge raises the stakes for Dorian himself.

This then is the story supporting the basic premise of the aging painting. It's couched in a lot of clever nonsense, endless discoursing and compulsive bon mots, which now and then score a direct hit. “But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting.” The portrait as literary alter ego seems likely inspired by Stevenson's still recent Jekyll and Hyde. Hyde allows Jekyll to live out his life of sin as the portrait does for Dorian.

Wilde's intellectual brilliance and dramatic abilities aside, he's a very good but not great stylist. The chapter where he glosses over the years in a catalogue of exotic riches and colorful Italian lore is strange and somewhat irrelevant. And his vision of the art world is not entirely convincing. Basil's work sounds bourgeois. But who cares. The whole thing is just pure aesthetic entertainment, wonderfully indulgent, an instantly addictive philosophical puzzle.

“Poor Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!”

And the ending is engrossing. Rather than copping out with the Gothic, Wilde treats Dorian in a way that manages to feel darkly realistic even as his fiendishness increases. His cracking up is wonderfully done, especially when, afraid of lurking enemies, he ponders living out on his yacht, because, "On a yacht one is safe.” The final conversation between Dorian and Henry is masterful.

Now, the other story, the other way to read the novel is the one that borrows from Wilde's life. In this, the book is his unconscious made manifest, a guilt-ridden mind transmuted into a confession.

Early on, Basil attests that there is too much of himself in the picture. He means that his mad, "perilous" worship of Dorian is the real subject. Wilde tries to pass all this off as a "romance of art," a platonic tale about an artist and, I suppose, his muse, but not even Victorian readers were buying it. Nevertheless the point is that this is a painting of Basil's soul, not Dorian's. This foul, decrepit portrait is a reflection of the artist's unholy love, his debauched thoughts and tortured soul on display for all to see. Basil wants to never exhibit the work for fear of the world learning his shameful love. I mean: come on. Was Wilde deep down so disgusted and appalled at his own homosexuality that it came out in his novel in this monstrous guise? Is there, as there was for Basil, too much of the artist in his art? But the poignancy of this human-interest reading would be abhorred by Basil (and probably Wilde), who laments that Art is becoming autobiography.

Of course you also can't help but imagine Wilde's gay lifestyle creeping into the work. All the characters are incredibly gay, no matter how straight they are for the story's sake. “'It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian,' said Lord Henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice.” This, after Henry hears of Dorian liking a girl. He's heartbroken. He needn't have despaired. Dorian's liaisons at the docks are 100% gay. His paranoia over the observations of his placid valet seems derived from Wilde's life, too.

As a cultural artifact the novel is endlessly fascinating. I kept wondering how it was read by Wilde's contemporaries. I do know that the poor magazine editor who, during one famous dinner, commissioned the work along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four, had to pull all the copies from stores because of the reaction. (Both Wilde's and Doyle's works, incidentally, touch on the sublime, from Sherlock's musing on Man's smallness to Dorian's terrifying beauty).

“There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.”

What both ways of looking at the novel have in common is their concern over sin and temptation. After making his dreadful wish, Dorian exchanges places and becomes the work of art. (It's suggested by Basil that the young man is himself a new medium in Art). Wilde prefaces his book by saying that Art is amoral, then commences to tell a grotesque nightmare of a wicked work, in the person of Dorian. (Dorian is indeed "poisoned" in part by a novel). For all Wilde's free talk--talk which helped land him in prison--and despite the fact that his prosecutors used The Picture of Dorian Gray as evidence against his character, what the author has written here is a very damning tale about immorality.

[Note: Can't recommend this book enough, but particularly Simon Prebble's audiobook narration, itself a work of art].