Wilde×Twain

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on ROAST NIGHT: Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, on On something a parent said that they spent decades disproving.
2. 00:09
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You know, Samuel, my father once informed me, with all the somber authority a Dublin surgeon could muster, that I possessed insufficient gravitas for any serious profession. He said I would never amount to anything because I could not stop making jokes at inappropriate moments.
3. 00:23
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Well, he got half of it right.
4. 00:24
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Indeed! I never did stop making jokes at inappropriate moments. But I made rather a lot of money doing it, which I think should count for something. What did your people tell you?
5. 00:34
   Mark Twainshare moment

   My mother said I'd die of idleness. She watched me loaf around Hannibal, putting off every chore until tomorrow or the day after that, and she predicted I would end up in the poorhouse because I had no ambition and less discipline.
6. 00:48
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   And instead you became the laziest millionaire in America, writing books while lying in bed smoking cigars. Your mother must have been furious.
7. 00:56
   Mark Twainshare moment

   She didn't live to see it. Which is probably just as well, because I would've had to explain that all that loafing was research. I was studying human nature, watching the river, listening to liars tell stories on the levee.
8. 01:11
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I do admire how Americans can rebrand indolence as 'research.' In Europe we have to call it ennui and make it fashionable.
9. 01:17
   Mark Twainshare moment

   The difference is we get paid for it. But your father—he thought you were too funny for your own good?
10. 01:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    He thought wit was a character defect, like a clubfoot. He wanted me to be a barrister, which would have required me to take other people's problems seriously. Can you imagine?
11. 01:33
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I can imagine you in court, but not for long. You'd get yourself cited for contempt inside an hour.
12. 01:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Less than an hour, I think. The moment some judge began pontificating about the sanctity of property, I would absolutely have to point out that the only thing more sacred than property is the ability to make fun of people who take property seriously.
13. 01:52
    Mark Twainshare moment

    My mother had a similar complaint, now that I think of it. She said I couldn't be serious if my life depended on it.
14. 01:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Well, that's demonstrably false. You've been extremely serious about a great many things—injustice, hypocrisy, the crimes of King Leopold.
15. 02:06
    Mark Twainshare moment

    But I could never be serious the way she wanted. She wanted me solemn, church-serious. The kind of serious where you nod along with preachers and don't ask uncomfortable questions about where Cain got his wife.
16. 02:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah yes, mothers do love it when we stop asking questions. Mine despaired of me entirely when I came home from Oxford spouting Ruskin and talking about beauty as the only thing worth pursuing.
17. 02:29
    Mark Twainshare moment

    What did she want you to pursue?
18. 02:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Respectability, I imagine. A good marriage to someone appropriately dull, a position at Trinity, a slow comfortable death of the mind disguised as a career. She thought my aestheticism was a phase, like measles.
19. 02:44
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Instead it turned out to be your whole personality.
20. 02:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    One's whole personality should be a phase one refuses to outgrow. But tell me, Samuel, did you spend your life deliberately proving your mother wrong, or did it just work out that way?
21. 02:55
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Little of both, I expect. I certainly took pleasure in sending her money from my lecturing once I could afford it. Here's your idle boy, making more in a night than Papa made in a month.
22. 03:08
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    There is nothing quite so satisfying as becoming rich while doing exactly what your parents said would make you poor.
23. 03:13
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Except maybe becoming famous for the same reason. My mother thought my imagination was a kind of lying, and lying was a sin. Turns out people will pay good money for well-told lies.
24. 03:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    All art is lying, of course. The only difference between a bore and an artist is that the artist lies beautifully. Your mother simply failed to understand that lying is a craft.
25. 03:35
    Mark Twainshare moment

    She understood it as a moral failing. You could see it in her face when I'd come home with some story about where I'd been. She knew I was lying, and she knew I was enjoying it too much.
26. 03:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My father had a similar look when I would spin out elaborate excuses for missing dinner. He would sit there with his medical face on, the one he used for telling people they had six months to live, and wait for me to finish.
27. 03:57
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Did he ever catch you?
28. 03:58
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Always. But the catching wasn't the point—the performance was the point. I think even then I understood that a good excuse is better than a good alibi. An alibi just gets you off; a good excuse is entertaining.
29. 04:11
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's the difference between a defendant and an artist right there.
30. 04:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Though I did eventually become both, which I suppose proves something about the limits of wit as a life strategy.
31. 04:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well, now, that's the part your father might've been driving at. Not that you'd fail, but that you'd succeed right up until you didn't.
32. 04:28
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How American, to locate wisdom in disaster. My father's prediction was that I would never succeed at all, which is quite different from succeeding and then having it all taken away by hypocrites and laws about loving the wrong people.
33. 04:41
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Fair point. My mother's version was that I'd never amount to anything, not that I'd amount to something and lose it gambling on type-setting machines and foreign investments.
34. 04:52
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did you lose it all?
35. 04:53
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Near enough. Had to lecture my way out of bankruptcy at sixty years old, dragging myself around the world telling the same stories to pay off creditors. Your mother would've said that's what I got for being idle in my youth.
36. 05:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And what do you say?
37. 05:08
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I say the idle years were the good ones. Everything else was just settling accounts.
38. 05:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    There's something rather beautiful about that, in a terrible sort of way. We spend our youth becoming exactly what our parents warned us against, and then we spend our age paying for it.
39. 05:22
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Or we spend our age discovering that what we paid for was worth it. I wouldn't trade the loafing years for anything, not even solvency.
40. 05:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Nor would I trade the inappropriate jokes, though they cost me rather more than money. But here's the thing about parents, Samuel—they prepare you for a world that doesn't exist.
41. 05:39
    Mark Twainshare moment

    How do you figure?
42. 05:40
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They imagine the world will reward gravity, industry, seriousness, virtue. And then you discover that the world mostly rewards audacity, luck, and the ability to tell people what they want to hear in a pleasant voice.
43. 05:54
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Or what they don't want to hear in a funny enough way that they'll pay to be insulted.
44. 05:58
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Exactly! My father's world was one where being correct mattered. He was a surgeon—in his world, being correct quite literally saved lives. But I grew up to live in drawing rooms and theatres, where being interesting was infinitely more important than being correct.
45. 06:13
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And yet you still got destroyed for being incorrect about one particular thing.
46. 06:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Not incorrect—insubordinate. I was destroyed for refusing to pretend the world was what respectable people insisted it was. Which is rather different.
47. 06:25
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I suppose it is. Though from the outside it looks like your father might've been right about the gravitas after all.
48. 06:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    If by gravitas he meant the ability to bore powerful men into leaving you alone, then yes, I lacked it. But I maintain that's a deficiency in powerful men, not in me.
49. 06:40
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You would.
50. 06:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    So we return to the original question: did we spend our lives disproving our parents, or did we simply live long enough to discover they were asking the wrong questions entirely?
51. 06:50
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Maybe both. Maybe the thing we disproved was that their questions mattered. My mother wanted to know if I'd be respectable and industrious. Turns out those weren't the relevant categories.
52. 07:02
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The relevant categories being what—memorable? Profitable? Arrestable?
53. 07:07
    Mark Twainshare moment

    True. Whether you were true to whatever strange thing was actually inside you, regardless of what the respectable world thought about it.
54. 07:15
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Well, in that case, Samuel, I think we both succeeded magnificently. And our parents were wrong in exactly the right way—wrong enough to make us prove them so, but not wrong enough to actually stop us.
55. 07:25
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's a generous way of looking at it.
56. 07:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Generosity is all we have left when we're dead, darling. We might as well extend it backward to the people who made us impossible.