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| Sunday, 21 November 2004 |
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Oscar, if only you were alive by Aditha Dissanayake October 16 was Oscar Wilde's birthday. Had he lived today the perfect birthday gift would have been the novel 'Line of Beauty', by Alan Hollinghurst who won the Booker Prize this year.
Things have definitely changed over the past hundred years, when Oscar filed a suit against the Marquis of Queensberry for criminal libel, but, unfortunately at the trial, the tables having turned against him was sentenced for two years imprisonment with hard labour under the 1885 law in England, which banned homosexual relationships as illegal. At the trial, the defense for Marquis Queensberry used Oscar's book The 'Picture of Dorian Gray' as evidence against him. He is cross-examined on passages in it. "You talk about one man adoring another. Did you ever adore any man?" "No" Oscar replied, quietly "I have never adored anyone but myself". Such an answer dose not come as a surprise from a man who had an extraordinary sense of self-esteem. Like Bacon who said 'Boldly sound your own praises and some of them will stick' Oscar believed in advertising himself at every opportunity that came his way. Flamboyantly dressed in knee breeches, lace cuffs and velvet coat he proclaimed that his admiration of himself was "a life long devotion". Once when he was asked to name the hundred best books in the world, he said "I cannot name the hundred best books in the world because I have still written only five". When his friend Frank Harries the notorious author of 'My Life and Loves' wrote in 'The Saturday Review' that we know Shakespeare "better than we know any of our contemporaries, and he is better worth knowing", Oscar at once wrote to him objecting to this praise "Surely, Frank, you have forgotten me? Surely I am better worth knowing than Shakespeare?" He acknowledged no superior. And, he regarded his contemporaries with contempt. He had this to say of Bernard Shaw "A man of real ability but with a bleak mind...He has no passion, no feeling, and without passionate feeling how can one be an artist? He believes in nothing, loves nothing, not even Bernard Shaw, and really, on the whole, I don't wonder at his indifference". Then of Thomas Hardy he said "He (Hardy) has just found out that women have legs underneath their dresses, and this discovery has almost wrecked his life...he knows nothing of love, passion to him is a childish illness like measles, poor unhappy spirit". A poet, a playwright, Oscar was also a great rhetorician. On his visit to America he made the famous statement that he has nothing to declare but his genius. While travelling in Colorado, seeing a saloon sign stating 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best' Oscar remarked that this was the only rationale method of art criticism I have ever come across". Once when he bragged there was no subject upon which he could not speak at a moment's notice, a friend raised his glass and challenged "The Queen", to which Oscar said "She is not a subject". The life and soul of every social gathering, Oscar yet knew how to draw the fine line between causing laughter and pain. When he was introduced to the French writer Mdlle. Marie Anne de Bovet, who was very plain looking, and who said to Oscar "Come confess, Mr. Wilde that I am the ugliest woman in France", he bowed low and said with smiling courtesy "In the world Madame, in the world". Yet, the Anti-homosexual late Victorian society who believed that the ordinary successful general or statesman was infinitely more important than a Shakespeare or a Browning had no scruples in sending this admirable "talker, always smiling, eager and full of life and the joy of living" (quote, Frank Harris) to prison. When the jury gave a verdict of "guilty" at the trail Mr. Justice Wills, the Judge, before giving the sentence said "I shall under such circumstances be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such a case as this". What Mr. Wills saw as too light a punishment, broke Oscar, physically and spiritually. His artistic temperament could not weather the harsh conditions of prison life. In his own words "I was born to sing the joy and pride of life, the pleasure of living, the delight in everything beautiful in this most beautiful world, and they took me and tortured me till I learned pity and sorrow. Now I cannot sing the joy, heartily, because I know the suffering and I was never made to sing of suffering. It is joy along which appeals to my soul..." But in 1897, Oscar did "better than his best". He culminated his prison experiences into 'The Ballad of Reading Goal' which was hailed by even the critics of his time as by far the best Ballad ever written in the history of English literature. The poem was published in 1898 over the signature C.3.3, Oscar's number in prison. Let these lines speak for themselves. "This too I know... That every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars, lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim. Had Oscar lived today he would have been 150. But unlike Sophocles who was happy that old age had freed him from the whip of passion, Oscar would never have achieved that serenity which comes with time. For, Oscar believed life without desire was not worth living. "As one gets older one is more difficult to please, but the sting of pleasure is even keener than in youth and far more egotistic." Had he lived today, Oscar, who maintained to the end that what his society banned as "an act of gross indecency" was not a vice at all and that it should not be punished as a crime because "if you limit passion you impoverish life, you weaken the mainspring of art, and narrow the realm of beauty", would have had the satisfaction of saying "I told you so" when he heard the Booker prize has been awarded to a novel about gay sex. ***************** The delicate odyssey of a short life BEYOND LIFE: Drawings and paintings by Sanjiv Mendis, by Charmaine Mendis (The Sanjiv Mendis Memorial Foundation, Sri Lanka, 2004). 'Beyond Life' is an open book. With disarming candour it lays bare an incredibly painful tragedy but the book is, nevertheless, a celebration of a remarkable personality. It is a rare privilege to see the life of one so young and so full of promise through the eyes of his mother. Charmaine Mendis gives us this opportunity with her tribute to Sanjiv whose life extended briefly from 1971 to 1991. That Charmaine should have chosen to publish this book is, in itself, a decision that required great courage. She had to have the conviction that what she treasures and what she wishes to share with others was objectively good and worthwhile. It is her particular achievement that she maintains a sense of detachment despite the closeness and intimacy of her involvement with her son. It is made all the more poignant because of those very ties that bind mother and child together, the excellence of her son's work and the brevity of his life. We need, therefore, to approach the work of Sanjiv Mendis with the same degree of detachment. If that is at all possible, we must pay less attention to the tragedy and consider rather the enduring qualities of Sanjiv's achievement as an artist who grows in stature from the far-from-tentative beginnings at the age of two and a half years. The paintings and drawings reproduced in Beyond Life form a retrospective collection and, as deserving of its cause, is an opulent production laid out in a horizontal (landscape) format. It measures 330 mm x 250 mm, is bound in hard covers and runs into 176 pages, nearly all of them in full colour. It is a commonplace, accepted universally today that all children are born with an inherent capacity to draw and paint (as much as they are with song and dance). With this ability comes an instinctive aesthetic sensibility which, in the face of numerous conflicting attractions, needs to be preserved and nurtured. It is my experience that when children are encouraged to practice their art they become astoundingly articulate. This is abundantly evident in Sanjiv's work. While they are at times simple and guileless expressions, at others they present a grave and thoughtful perspective. In his latter years, he demonstrated a considerable draughtsmanship, in my view an essential skill - the stock-in-trade, indeed, of the artist - be it ever so fundamental as the ability to draw a circle and a straight line. That Sanjiv's draughtsmanship reached far beyond this, of course, is what makes him all the more admirable. Sanjay was very much the creature of his times. He shared with others of his own vintage, a fascination for the instruments of war and the beckoning of Outer Space which inevitably appears to mesmerise the young. It is a condition with which the art teacher has to contend. (I endorse Latifa Ismail's disclaimer to being a teacher but of being, rather, a guide). Out of this early interest developed a highly organised sense of balance and proportion. Sanjiv's compositions are at once vivid and emotive in the use of colour. That he was able to obtain these results come from the encouragement he received from an early age. With that must surely go the fact that materials were readily made available to him. At five years of age he was using oil colours on board; at six, he was painting in oils on canvas. It is quite evident from the work reproduced in 'Beyond Life' that this was an advantage Sanjiv enjoyed and exploited with gusto. Sanjiv's mother, Charmaine, has to accept the credit for this because it was she who recognised early Sanjiv's particular talent and his seemingly inexhaustible drive. He worked, she says, with unabated vigour most of the time, withdrawing occasionally, I would imagine, only to re-evaluate the success and impact of what he had done. Sanjiv enjoyed, as he matured in his craft, the privilege of a number of solo exhibitions, opportunities which presented him as a consummate artist with a personal view of his world. He seems to have been both critical and appreciative of that world. It is this constant self-appraisal that gives his painting a mature edge. He had ten exhibitions, several in Sri Lanka and others overseas, in Manila, Singapore, Washington, Brussels and The Hague. They received much critical applause, a Belgian writer lavishing a lovely epithet upon Sanjiv: he was described as 'the little Mozart of Sri Lanka'. 'Beyond Life' has been a decidedly delicate odyssey, suffused with more than a passing glimpse of a prodigious young life. This is, indeed, a magnificent tribute. - Neville Weeraratne. |
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| Produced by Lake House |
Oscar Wilde would have been happy that Britain has changed. That the
country which sentenced him to two years of imprisonment with hard labour
for being a homosexual, is now willing to award its most prestigious
literary prize to a book which describes gay 'love, sex and beauty' so
'exquisitely'.
