Wilde×Twain

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on ROAST NIGHT, Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain. They take up On a regret that aged — better, or worse than they expected.
2. 00:11
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Mark, I understand we are to discuss regret tonight. How perfectly ghastly. I have always maintained that the only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on, as it is never of any use to oneself, and the same holds true for regret, which is merely good advice in retrospect.
3. 00:25
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Well, Oscar, I've found that regret is about the only thing that improves with age without requiring a wine cellar. Gets sharper, clearer, more expensive the longer you keep it.
4. 00:37
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How very American of you to appraise everything by its capacity to appreciate in value. I prefer to think of my regrets as I think of my sins — carefully curated, exquisitely performed, and absolutely unrepentant.
5. 00:48
   Mark Twainshare moment

   That's a fine philosophy when you're twenty-five and pretty. At seventy, you find that some of those exquisite performances look more like a jackass in a top hat.
6. 00:58
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I was never merely pretty, I was beautiful, which is an entirely different burden. But tell me, what is this regret of yours that has aged so magnificently? Did you fail to patent the jumping frog?
7. 01:09
   Mark Twainshare moment

   The Paige typesetter. Poured a fortune into that mechanical marvel, enough money to buy a small country or a large yacht. It was going to revolutionize printing, make Gutenberg look like a fellow scratching in the dirt with a stick.
8. 01:24
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, the siren song of machinery. I have always felt that the Americans worship the machine because it never disagrees with them and requires no wit in conversation.
9. 01:33
   Mark Twainshare moment

   This particular machine disagreed with every promise its inventor made. Had eighteen thousand parts, and every one of them had its own private feud with the other seventeen thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. Bankrupted me in '94.
10. 01:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How does one bankrupt Mark Twain? It seems rather like boiling the ocean.
11. 01:51
    Mark Twainshare moment

    One does it by believing that ingenuity and capital can force a bad idea into being a good one. Youth's mistake, but I was sixty years old and should've known better.
12. 02:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And has this regret improved with age, like your theoretical wine?
13. 02:04
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Improved? It's become positively educational. When I was in the thick of it, losing everything, I thought it was tragedy. Now I see it was just expensive tuition in the school of don't-be-a-damn-fool. The regret itself has sweetened because I finally learned the lesson.
14. 02:22
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How very tedious. You have transformed a proper regret into a moral lesson. That is like taking a perfectly good orchid and pressing it into a book of sermons.
15. 02:31
    Mark Twainshare moment

    What's your regret, then, Oscar? I'm guessing it involves either a lord or a lawsuit, and probably both.
16. 02:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, we are to be vulgar tonight, are we? Very well. Lord Queensberry, if you must know. Though it was not the loving that I regret — that was the only honest thing in the entire wretched affair.
17. 02:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    The lawsuit, then.
18. 02:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The lawsuit, yes. I sued him for libel because he called me a sodomite, though he spelled it incorrectly, which really should have been the greater offense. My friends begged me not to. Even my enemies begged me not to, which should have been instructive.
19. 03:02
    Mark Twainshare moment

    But you did it anyway.
20. 03:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I did it because I believed that wit and charm and the sheer rightness of my position would triumph over British prudery and that odious little man. I was, as it happens, spectacularly wrong. The lawsuit destroyed me. Prison destroyed what was left.
21. 03:17
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Has that regret aged well?
22. 03:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It has aged like milk in August, Mark. It curdles more with every passing year. Because here is the truly bitter thing — I do not regret loving Alfred Douglas, though he was vain and shallow and probably not worth the postage on the letters I wrote him. I regret the pride that made me think I could stand in court and charm my way out of my own destruction.
23. 03:38
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Pride's expensive. I learned that from a typesetting machine. You learned it from a marquess.
24. 03:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    At least my ruin was Greek in its tragedy. Yours was merely mechanical.
25. 03:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I'll take mechanical over Greek any day of the week. Machines can be scrapped. Tragedies follow you around like a dog that won't stop barking.
26. 03:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Does your regret keep you awake at night, or have you achieved that peculiar American talent for sleeping soundly despite everything?
27. 04:03
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I sleep fine now. Took years, but I paid off every creditor, every cent, when I could've declared bankruptcy and walked away legal as Sunday. That changed how the regret sat with me. It's still there, but it doesn't bite anymore.
28. 04:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How admirable. How exhausting. I died in exile, bankrupt, and broken, so I had no opportunity for your sort of redemptive arithmetic. My regret remains unpaid and perfect in its bitterness.
29. 04:31
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You could've kept your mouth shut in court. That would've been payment of a kind.
30. 04:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But then I would not have been Oscar Wilde, would I? The moment I held my tongue would have been the moment I ceased to exist. Better to be destroyed as oneself than preserved as someone else.
31. 04:46
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's pride talking again, Oscar. Same pride that got you in trouble the first time.
32. 04:51
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Of course it is pride. What else do we have? You rebuilt your fortune by lecturing around the world, telling stories about your foolishness. I destroyed mine by refusing to be anything other than what I was. Your regret taught you caution. Mine taught me nothing except that the world is crueler than even I, with all my cynicism, had imagined.
33. 05:11
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So your regret's gotten worse with age, and mine's gotten better. That about sum it up?
34. 05:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How reductive. Though accurate, I suppose. Your regret mellowed because you survived it and learned to tell it as a humorous anecdote. Mine sharpened because I did not survive it, and there is nothing remotely amusing about Reading Gaol.
35. 05:29
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You survived it long enough to write about it. That ballad of yours about the man they hanged — that came from the same place as my speeches about the typesetter. Pain that's been processed into something useful.
36. 05:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The Ballad of Reading Gaol is not useful, Mark. It is not a moral lesson or a cautionary tale. It is a scream that I had the courtesy to arrange in rhyming couplets.
37. 05:51
    Mark Twainshare moment

    A scream's useful if somebody hears it and learns not to walk into the same buzz saw.
38. 05:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You are determined to find silver linings tonight. Very well. Perhaps my regret has improved in one sense — it is now purely aesthetic. I regret the ugliness of my downfall, the sordidness of the trials, the dreary predictability of British hypocrisy. If I were to be ruined, I wish I had been ruined more elegantly.
39. 06:13
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Only you could turn regret into a question of interior decorating.
40. 06:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Style is the only thing worth regretting, in the end. Everything else is simply life happening to us. But style — that we choose. I chose poorly in how I handled Queensberry. I should have laughed at him. Instead, I tried to defeat him, and one should never try to defeat a fool. One should simply wait for them to defeat themselves.
41. 06:36
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Now that's a lesson I could've used with the Paige typesetter. Just walked away and let it collapse under its own complicated weight.
42. 06:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. Though I suspect neither of us was capable of walking away from anything. That is perhaps the real regret — not what we did, but what we were. We were the sort of men who could not walk away.
43. 06:56
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Some regrets don't age at all, then. They just sit there, permanent as a gravestone, reminding you who you were and always will be.
44. 07:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How morbid. How true. I believe we have stumbled into wisdom, Mark, which is absolutely the worst thing that can happen on a radio program. Quick, say something amusing before we lose the audience entirely.
45. 07:15
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Regret is just hindsight with teeth. There. That amusing enough for you?
46. 07:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It will have to do. Though I prefer my own formulation: regret is the revenge that time takes on those of us who refused to be sensible when sensibility was still an option.