Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Oscar Wilde sits down with Dorothy Parker for ROAST NIGHT. The subject — On the small daily ritual no one knows about.
2. 00:10
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You know, Dorothy, the thing about secrets is that they're only interesting when revealed. Which is why I'm delighted to tell you that every morning, without fail, I arrange my breakfast table as though royalty might drop by. The marmalade must face a particular direction. The butter knife must be silver, never plate. Even when I had nothing, especially when I had nothing, I maintained this little theatre for an audience of one.
3. 00:33
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   That's not a secret, Oscar. That's just you being you in a smaller room. I keep a list.
4. 00:37
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   A list? How thrillingly bureaucratic. Of what, may I ask?
5. 00:41
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Every day, in a little notebook I keep in my nightstand, I write down one true thing I couldn't say out loud that day. One thing I swallowed. By the end of the year, I've got three hundred and sixty-five reasons I should've been ruder.
6. 00:53
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Oh, but that's marvelous. A diary of the unspoken. Though I confess I'm astonished you manage to swallow anything at all. I've heard you at dinner parties.
7. 01:01
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You've heard the matinee. The evening show requires tickets I don't sell anymore. What's the butter knife about, really? Because I don't buy the royalty bit.
8. 01:10
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   It's about the preservation of form when everything else has dissolved. When I was in Reading Gaol, I used to fold my blanket each morning into a perfect square, even though the warders would simply throw it into disorder by evening. It was the only act of creation left to me. The only thing I could make beautiful.
9. 01:26
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Now we're getting somewhere. I do mine at night, after the second drink but before the third. That's the honest hour. Before it, I'm still performing sobriety. After it, I'm too sloppy to hold the pencil steady.
10. 01:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The second drink is civilization. The third is revolution. I respect your sense of timing. But tell me, what happens to these notebooks? Surely you don't keep them.
11. 01:48
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I burn them. Every New Year's Eve, the whole year goes into the fireplace. It's not cathartic, if that's what you're thinking. It's just housekeeping.
12. 01:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How wonderfully ruthless. I could never destroy my own words. Even the terrible ones, especially the terrible ones, have a certain charm in retrospect. They're proof that one has lived, however badly.
13. 02:08
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the difference between us. You wanted to be remembered. I just wanted to survive dinner.
14. 02:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Untrue! I wanted to be remembered . There's a distinction. Anyone can be remembered. One merely needs to be sufficiently dreadful. But to be remembered as someone who added beauty to the world? That requires curation.
15. 02:24
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Is that what the butter knife was? Curation? Or was it the only thing you could control when your life was falling apart? Because it sounds an awful lot like the latter pretending to be the former.
16. 02:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear woman, you've just described all of civilization. We're all controlling the placement of butter knives while Rome burns. Some of us simply do it with better silver.
17. 02:42
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fair enough. But you asked me what happens to the notebooks. Let me ask you, did the folded blanket actually help? Did it make the cell less of a cell?
18. 02:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No. But it made me less of a prisoner. There's a rather important difference. The cell remained stone. I remained Wilde. Or at least, I retained the memory of having been him.
19. 03:00
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    See, that's what I'm burning. The memory of having been her, whoever she was that day. I don't want to curate it. I want it gone.
20. 03:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But you keep doing it. Every day, the little notebook, the second drink, the careful penmanship of rage. That's not destruction, darling. That's ritual. That's religion.
21. 03:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Don't call it religion. I've got enough guilt without organized metaphors.
22. 03:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then call it what it is: the thing you do to remind yourself you're still capable of truth. Even if you destroy the evidence immediately. The act itself is what matters, not the archive.
23. 03:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    When did you stop with the butter knife?
24. 03:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I didn't. Even in Paris, in those dreadful final rooms where I could barely afford bread, I made sure the table was set properly. It was absurd, of course. Pathetic, even. But it was mine.
25. 03:42
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the part nobody tells you about falling apart. You don't stop doing the stupid little things. You do them harder. You do them meaner. You do them like your life depends on it, because maybe it does.
26. 03:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. People imagine that degradation is slovenly, that one simply gives up. But I found the opposite to be true. The more I lost, the more ferociously I clung to these minute observances. They were the last territory I governed.
27. 04:08
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Your butter knife. My notebook. We're quite a pair of tyrants, aren't we? Ruling over kingdoms the size of a breakfast table and a nightstand.
28. 04:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The size of the kingdom is irrelevant. Napoleon and the man who tends his window box with obsessive care are both emperors. One simply has better press.
29. 04:26
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You would've made a good dictator, Oscar. Everything just so, everyone applauding on cue, and you in the center with your marmalade facing north.
30. 04:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I was a dictator. Of dinner tables, of drawing rooms, of my own small corner of London for a brief, glittering moment. Then came the revolution, and all dictators meet the same end. But the butter knife remains. That's something.
31. 04:48
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Is it, though? Or is it just the thing we tell ourselves while we're folding the blanket in the cell?
32. 04:52
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It's both. It's always both. That's the terrible joke at the heart of everything. The blanket doesn't save you, but folding it keeps you human. The notebook doesn't change what happened, but writing it down means you haven't entirely lied to yourself.
33. 05:06
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Except I burn it.
34. 05:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes, but you write it first. That's the part that counts. The burning is just theatre.
35. 05:11
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I thought you liked theatre.
36. 05:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I adore theatre. I'm simply saying that your ritual has two acts, and you're only claiming credit for the second one. The first act, the writing, the truth-telling in the honest hour between drinks, that's where you're actually living. The burning is just your curtain call.
37. 05:27
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Maybe. Or maybe I just don't want evidence lying around. I've seen what happens when people find your notebooks after you're dead. They publish them. They interpret them. They turn your butter knife into a symbol.
38. 05:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Too late, I'm afraid. We're talking about them now on the radio. Your butter knife is already a symbol. Mine certainly is. The moment we confess our private rituals, they cease to be private. They become performance.
39. 05:50
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Then we shouldn't have confessed.
40. 05:52
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But we always do. That's the other secret nobody tells you. We hoard these little ceremonies, these private dignities, swearing we'll never reveal them. And then someone asks the right question over drinks, or in this case on a radio programme with an audience, and out they come. Because the only thing worse than exposure is dying with your butter knife story untold.
41. 06:11
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Speak for yourself. I could've taken mine to the grave just fine.
42. 06:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet here you are, not taking it.
43. 06:17
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Here I am.
44. 06:18
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    So perhaps the real ritual, the one we're both performing right now, is this: the telling. The admission that we needed these small, absurd ceremonies to survive being ourselves. That's the confessional neither of us can resist, even though we know better.
45. 06:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You're making it sound noble. It's not noble. It's just what we did to get through Tuesday.
46. 06:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Getting through Tuesday is the most noble thing any of us ever does. The rest is simply decoration.