Parker×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Dorothy Parker sits down with Oscar Wilde for LATE SHOW. The subject — On the cost of getting their name on a building or a movement.
2. 00:10
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   So they named a hotel lounge after me. The Algonquin. Very nice. Very respectful. You know what they serve there? Cocktails I can't afford and wit I never copyrighted.
3. 00:21
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear Dorothy, at least they named it while you could still drink in it. I have an entire movement named after me that I never asked for and cannot escape, even in death. Aestheticism. It sounds like a medical condition.
4. 00:32
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Aestheticism. Is that what we're calling it? I thought it was just you being yourself, loudly.
5. 00:38
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Being oneself loudly is precisely what gets one's name on things, and then one discovers that the things are more permanent than the self. I became a monument before I became a corpse, which is rather putting the cart before the hearse.
6. 00:50
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You made it a movement. I just made it to lunch every day. They turned the Round Table into a tourist attraction. Buses stop. People take pictures of the furniture.
7. 01:00
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Furniture outlasts us all, darling. That is its great advantage and its great insult. But tell me, do they at least quote you correctly?
8. 01:07
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Oh, they quote me. Half of it I never said. The other half I said drunk, which means I don't remember saying it, which means I can't prove I did. It's a very efficient system for destroying authorship.
9. 01:19
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I am constantly informed of my own opinions by people who have never read a word I wrote. They know I said something about life imitating art, but they think I meant it as a compliment to art. I meant it as an accusation against life.
10. 01:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, that's the thing about a nameplate, isn't it? It's never actually your name. It's what people need your name to mean. Which is usually something much simpler than you ever were.
11. 01:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Simpler, yes. And more useful. I became useful, Dorothy. There is no greater indignity for an artist. Useful to moralists who wanted an example of sin, useful to reformers who wanted an example of injustice, useful to aesthetes who wanted an example of beauty. I was never any of those things. I was merely Oscar.
12. 02:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Merely Oscar. Who wrote himself into every sentence he spoke.
13. 02:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    One must write oneself somewhere. I chose sentences. Others choose buildings, or movements, or revolutions. At least sentences can be revised. Have you ever tried to revise a movement? Ghastly business. All those followers with their interpretations.
14. 02:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I didn't have followers. I had lunch companions. Much less responsibility. Though by the end they were following me too, in their way. Following me into debt, into divorce, into Hollywood where we all got paid to be clever on demand.
15. 02:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Cleverness on demand. The very phrase makes me want to lie down in a darkened room. Though I suppose I did it myself. Every dinner party, every salon. They wanted Oscar Wilde, so I gave them Oscar Wilde, until I could no longer remember which of us was performing and which was performed.
16. 02:49
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least you got dinner. I got lunch. Cheaper expectations.
17. 02:52
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But longer suffering. Lunch is daylight, Dorothy. Dinner has the decency of evening. One can hide so much more in candlelight. I hid everything except my name, and my name is all that survived.
18. 03:04
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Your name survived along with about six quotes, four of which you said at parties where you were the only one sober enough to remember. That's immortality for you. A handful of sentences and a scandal.
19. 03:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The scandal helps, I confess. Nothing ensures remembrance quite like public disgrace. Though I would have preferred to be remembered for my plays, my fairy tales, my novel. Instead I am remembered for whom I loved and how badly the state punished me for it.
20. 03:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They remember me for being sharp. Not for being good. Not for being right. Just for being sharp, which is another word for difficult, which is another word for drunk and lonely.
21. 03:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And they remember me for being brilliant, which is another word for doomed. We neither of us got to choose our own epitaphs, my dear. That is the cost of the nameplate.
22. 03:49
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So what's the alternative? Shut up? Stay home? Write quietly and hope nobody notices?
23. 03:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The alternative is obscurity, which is a kind of death before death. No, I think we had no choice. One is either memorable or one is nothing. I simply wish to register my complaint about the terms.
24. 04:05
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The terms. That's good. The terms are always in the other guy's handwriting. You sign, you perform, you show up, and then fifty years later someone's giving campus tours and saying you sat in this chair.
25. 04:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did you sit in the chair?
26. 04:18
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Probably. I sat in a lot of chairs. I don't remember which ones are historical.
27. 04:22
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That is the artist's tragedy in miniature. We do not know which of our moments will be bronzed. I wrote a great many things I thought terribly important. What do they remember? The green carnation. The paradoxes. The posing.
28. 04:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The posing was important, Oscar. Don't kid yourself. You knew it then and you know it now.
29. 04:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Of course I knew it. But one hopes, does one not, that beneath the pose there might be something else worth preserving? Some truth, however small, however fragile?
30. 04:50
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Truth doesn't get your name on buildings. Performance does. You performed yourself into legend and I wisecracked myself into history. And now we're both stuck with it.
31. 04:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Stuck, yes. That is precisely the word. One becomes stuck in one's own fame like a fly in amber. Perfectly preserved, perfectly dead, perfectly useless except as an object of study.
32. 05:10
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least you're studied. I'm just quoted at bachelorette parties. 'I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.' I never said that, by the way.
33. 05:21
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Of course you didn't. But it sounds like something you would have said, which is all that matters to posterity. We are not remembered for what we were. We are remembered for what we seemed to be.
34. 05:31
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And what did you seem to be, Oscar?
35. 05:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Effortless. That was my great performance. I made it look as though brilliance cost nothing, as though wit simply fell from my lips like rain. The truth is rather different.
36. 05:42
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The truth is you worked at it like the rest of us. You sweated the sentences. You revised the paradoxes.
37. 05:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Every single one. But one cannot admit to effort, can one? That would ruin the effect. So I pretended, and they believed, and now I am remembered for my effortlessness rather than my labor. It is a very particular kind of curse.
38. 06:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I'll take your curse over obscurity. Any day. Twice on Sundays.
39. 06:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Will you? Even knowing the cost? Even knowing that your name will mean whatever they need it to mean, that your words will be stripped of context, that your pain will be aestheticized into anecdote?
40. 06:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Yes. Because the alternative is silence. And I wasn't built for silence, Oscar. Neither were you.
41. 06:23
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No. I was built for applause. And prison. And exile. And Reading Gaol. And a pauper's grave in Paris. But also for applause. One must take the complete set.
42. 06:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The complete set. That's what they don't tell you. You don't get to pick which parts they remember. You get it all or you get nothing.
43. 06:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet, knowing this, would you change anything? Would you have been quieter, smaller, less yourself?
44. 06:46
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No. But I would have charged more.
45. 06:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My darling Dorothy, that is possibly the wisest thing ever said about fame. We should have charged more. We should have demanded payment in advance. Instead we accepted applause, and applause, it turns out, is not negotiable currency.
46. 07:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It buys drinks while you're alive. After that, it just buys you a mention in guidebooks.
47. 07:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And a building. Or a movement. Or a lounge. All with our names on them, none of them belonging to us. That is the final cost, I think. The nameplate outlives the name.
48. 07:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well. At least they spelled it right.
49. 07:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Small mercies, Dorothy. Small mercies.