The eloquence of Oscar Wilde

A cartoon of Oscar Wilde at the end of his visit to America in 1882, The Judge magazine.

[UPDATE - Martin Amis on the perfect paragraph rhetoric of Hitchens here and below]

Christopher Hitchens was a man of inimitable intellect and staggering, effortless eloquence. I've often pondered how he possessed such mastery and control of the language and rhetorical flair. I feel that James Joyce, speaking to Vanity Fair in Paris in 1922, gives a hint:

"All the great talkers have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift, or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde. He studied the restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening."

George Bernard Shaw on his Irishness, Edward Carson and Home Rule

George Bernard Shaw by Alick P.F. Ritchie

George Bernard Shaw is the venerated and revered Irish man of letters, and a protestant Irishman to the very narrow" of his bones at that. Like all Irish he proclaimed his Irishness but unlike the Irish, he also proclaimed his unIrish roots:

"I am a traditional Irishman, my family came from Yorkshire."

In sharing this Wildean aphorism, Shaw touches on a truth that many on the island can relate to, even if it's uncomfortable in doing so. Shaw also proclaimed his unionism as a protestant Irishman. In a letter to The Irish Statesman, January 10 1920, George Bernard Shaw said:

Jonathan Jones - Art is theft, Ctd

Rembrandt, Self Portrait at the Age of 34.

Jonathan Jones wrote an article in the Guardian, 'Contemporary art isn't original – even copying has been done before.' He said:

"Good artists copy, great artists steal," said Pablo Picasso. Or at least he gets the credit for saying it. Perhaps he pinched the words from Oscar Wilde. For there truly is nothing new under the sun, or not entirely new, anyway. Originality does not burst from an artist's head like an alien entity, but is a subtle game of variations and transformations out of which, once in a while, comes the shudder of true artistic surprise.

Unhappy when working. Unhappy when workless, Ctd

I often feel guilt for my bohemia. Guilty that I can sit in a coffee shop and read and practice my art while others have to slave around. Guilty that I can go to a Live Drawing event for a few hours and get paid what those coffee shop works get paid in a few days. Northern Irish poet Nick Laird said:

"I still feel a deep sense of guilt about writing. At least when I was a lawyer I felt useful, now I can waste whole days not doing much at all."

He also said:

"The writing life can be difficult. Time just dissolves away to nothing some days, and it is sometimes hard to believe in the validity of the enterprise."

Oscar Wilde wrote about the contrast between the bohemian and the lower echelons that make their bohemia possible. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he wrote:

"The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." 

Kevin Drum wrote an article in Mother Jones, 'We Shouldn't Denigrate the Diginity of Work, Even Accidentally'. In it he said:

"Even people who hate their jobs take satisfaction in the knowledge that they’re paying their way and providing for their families. People who lose their jobs usually report intense stress and feelings of inadequacy even if money per se isn’t an imminent problem (perhaps because a spouse works, perhaps because they’re drawing an unemployment check). Most people want to work, and most people also want to believe that their fellow citizens are working. It’s part of the social contract. As corrosive as inequality can be, a sense of other people living off the dole can be equally corrosive."

Eric Stough, producer and animation director for ‘South Park, said:

"The key to a great life isn’t just happiness. It would be a boring life if it were."

Previous post in the series here.

The Original Sin: "Being Boring"

William Giraldi said in the Daily Best that Oscar Wilde regarded "being boring" as the ultimate, inexcusable sin:

"For Wilde, to be boring was the only unpardonable sin."

The passage drew a tangent out of a narrative discussion on modern literature that came to discuss Martin Amis, among others. The nexus being that Oscar Wilde was the hero of Martin Amis.

Moving on, this Wilde idea of "being boring" echoes directly the stance of Christopher Hitchens, who himself is the self-proclaimed best friend of Martin Amis and self-professed hater of boredom. Hitchens said to attendees at the Hay Festival in 2003 that he regarded "being boring" as the one thing that "frightens him the most. Watch that here.

It would be wrong not to mention the linkages here, between Wilde, Amis and Hitchens. Three literary giants which shows the incestuous circularity of the writing world. And by that you can tell that I'm not sure if this triumvirate is a good thing or not.