Parker×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Oscar, I've been thinking about students. The ones who learn everything you teach them and then have the gall to use it better than you did.
2. 00:06
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear Dorothy, surely you mean the ones who mistake imitation for inspiration? I've never met a pupil who surpassed me. Though I confess I've met several who believed they had.
3. 00:15
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Of course you haven't. You died at forty-six. Give them time—they catch up when you're not looking.
4. 00:20
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How unkind. And how typical of you to measure genius by the calendar. I suppose you think Shakespeare would have been better if he'd lived to ninety?
5. 00:28
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I think Shakespeare didn't have to watch lesser talents win the prizes he deserved. That's the real test—watching mediocrity collect your mail.
6. 00:36
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, but we're not discussing mediocrity tonight, are we? We're discussing the gifted student who eclipses the teacher. Quite different. Rather mythological, actually. Reminds one of Zeus swallowing his children to prevent the prophecy.
7. 00:47
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You would go Greek on me. I'm talking about the kid at the Algonquin who listens to your best lines and files them away for later, improved.
8. 00:55
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   And uses them in some dreary publication for the masses? Dorothy, that's not surpassing—that's stenography with aspirations.
9. 01:02
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   No, I mean when they take your weapon and sharpen it. When they learn your timing and then speed it up just enough to make yours look arthritic.
10. 01:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I remain skeptical. Style cannot be taught, only admired from a distance. One can teach technique, certainly—the placement of a comma, the Turn of phrase. But the essential thing? The spark? Either one is born with fire or one spends one's life describing it to others.
11. 01:23
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Pretty speech. Did you rehearse it before you died or after?
12. 01:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    One doesn't rehearse truth, darling. One simply utters it and watches the world adjust accordingly. But tell me—who is this prodigy of yours? This student who apparently learned cruelty at your knee and improved upon the recipe?
13. 01:39
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I don't have one. That's the worst part. I taught nobody and influenced nothing. I just wrote clever things until I ran out of clever, and now here I sit, in radio purgatory with you.
14. 01:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Now that is genuinely sad. Not the purgatory bit—that I find rather stimulating. But the idea that you believe you taught nobody? My dear, every American who ever wrote a short, sharp sentence about a long, dull marriage owes you money.
15. 02:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They owe me nothing. They took the trick and made it theirs. That's how it works. You hand somebody a knife and if they're any good, they cut you with it.
16. 02:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How biblical. How terribly Old Testament of you. Though I confess I prefer the New—better production values, more interesting protagonist.
17. 02:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Stop deflecting. You're telling me you never worried? Never saw some young wit at a London dinner party and thought, 'Christ, he does it better than I do'?
18. 02:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Never. Primarily because I was always the young wit at the dinner party. I perfected that role early and refused to relinquish it even when the calendar suggested otherwise.
19. 02:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Until you couldn't afford the dinner parties anymore.
20. 02:37
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Well. Yes. There was that. But even in exile and poverty, I remained more quotable than my successors. Shaw tried, bless him. All that beard and socialism. But he lacked the essential lightness. He wanted to improve people. Fatal error.
21. 02:52
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Shaw outlasted you by half a century and won a Nobel Prize. I'd call that a successful student.
22. 02:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Shaw was never my student! He was my—my contemporary. My rival. Entirely different category. Though I grant you he learned the value of paradox by observing me. His were simply heavier, more Germanic somehow.
23. 03:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So he learned from you, refined it, and got richer and more famous. That's surpassing, Oscar. That's exactly what we're talking about.
24. 03:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    He got older, Dorothy. He got older and repeated himself and accepted every honor a grateful nation could pin to his lapel. I burned out like a comet and left only beauty behind. Which of us do you think literature remembers more fondly?
25. 03:29
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Both of you. That's the problem. There's room for everyone in the pantheon except the people who are still alive and trying to get in.
26. 03:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Now you're being maudlin. And I suspect you're thinking of someone specific. Some young Parker who watched you work and thought, 'I can do that, but without all the drinking and disappointment.'
27. 03:45
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Without the drinking? Then they weren't paying attention. The drinking was half the style.
28. 03:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Was it style or was it survival? I ask without judgment—I spent my final years on absinthe and regret. Not a recommended combination, though it does make one's last words rather memorable.
29. 04:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Your last words were about wallpaper, Oscar. Let's not gild the lily.
30. 04:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The wallpaper or me—one of us had to go. Still a perfect exit line, whatever the context. But we're evading the question again. Do you actually fear being surpassed, or do you fear never having mattered enough to be worth surpassing?
31. 04:18
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the same question wearing better clothes.
32. 04:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Is it? I think one is about pride and the other about legacy. I never doubted my legacy—I was far too busy constructing it. But you Americans, you're always so anxious about the future. As if the present weren't sufficient punishment.
33. 04:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The present was fine. I got paid, I got printed, I got laid. It's the afterward that's tricky. The part where people decide whether you were necessary or just entertaining.
34. 04:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And if a student surpasses you, you reason, then you must have been only the latter? Darling, that's terrible logic. The teacher who produces a genius is more necessary than a dozen mediocrities who produce nothing but more mediocrity.
35. 04:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Unless the genius would have happened anyway and you just got in the way for a few years.
36. 04:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Now you're being deliberately perverse. Tell me—would you rather have had no influence at all, or would you rather have shaped someone who eclipsed you? Because I suspect there's a third option you're ignoring.
37. 05:10
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Which is?
38. 05:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That you were never meant to have students. That your work was complete in itself, like a perfect poisonous berry. Beautiful, self-contained, not requiring propagation.
39. 05:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the loneliest thing you've said all night, and you've been dead for over a century. Congratulations.
40. 05:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Lonely? Perhaps. But also rather magnificent. Not everything needs to reproduce itself, Dorothy. Some things exist purely to be admired and then vanish. Fireworks, for instance. Or my plays during their first production.
41. 05:39
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Your plays are still produced. That's the opposite of vanishing.
42. 05:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They're performed, yes. But by people who can't possibly understand the original effect. The shock of it. The way we laughed because we recognized ourselves and were appalled and delighted simultaneously.
43. 05:52
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So you did have students. Every director who mounts one of your plays is trying to learn from you. And some of them probably do it better than you imagined.
44. 06:01
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's not surpassing me—that's interpreting me. Entirely different. One cannot surpass the source material. One can only vary it.
45. 06:08
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile Shaw got the Nobel and died at ninety-four, beloved and rich. Your best student won the game.
46. 06:15
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My best student would have been me, if I'd lived longer and loved more wisely. But yes, I concede your point. Shaw succeeded where I did not. Does that please you? To hear me admit it?
47. 06:25
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Not really. I was hoping you'd fight harder. I'm disappointed in you, Oscar.
48. 06:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And I in you, Dorothy. You've spent this entire conversation pretending to discuss students when what you really want to know is whether you mattered. The answer is yes. You mattered. You still matter. Even in this absurd afterlife, you matter. Satisfied?
49. 06:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No. But it'll do until something better comes along. That's what I always put on my tombstone anyway—'Excuse my dust.'
50. 06:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perfect. Modest, dismissive, and utterly memorable. You see? Even in death, you remain instructive. Somewhere, someone is learning from that.
51. 06:59
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    God help them.
52. 07:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Indeed. Though I suspect God gave up on both of us decades ago. We'll have to help ourselves.