Wilde×Twain

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Oscar Wilde sits down with Mark Twain for ROAST NIGHT. The subject — On the moment they doubted the entire project of their life.
2. 00:10
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You know, Samuel, there is something exquisitely modern about having to confess one's doubts on the radio. In my day we simply drank absinthe and pretended the abyss was amusing.
3. 00:19
   Mark Twainshare moment

   In your day, Oscar, you were still young enough to think the abyss gave a damn whether you were amused. I'd been staring into that particular hole since I watched my brother die of pneumonia when I was eleven years old.
4. 00:32
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, but you see, that is precisely the American approach—to begin with tragedy and work one's way toward humor. We Europeans prefer to start with champagne and arrive at despair by way of the bankruptcy courts.
5. 00:42
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Is that what we're calling it now? I thought you arrived at despair by way of the Old Bailey and Reading Gaol.
6. 00:49
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How unutterably vulgar of you to remember. Yes, if we must be tedious about it, that was rather the moment. Though I should clarify—it wasn't doubt that arrived in that cell. Doubt would have been a comfort, really. What arrived was certainty.
7. 01:02
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Certainty of what?
8. 01:03
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   That I had spent twenty years constructing the most elaborate piece of theater in London—my life, my wit, my poses—and the audience had decided, quite firmly, to throw rotten fruit. The certainty that all of it, every carefully chosen paradox, every triumph in a drawing room, had been in the service of a self that society was now pleased to declare criminal.
9. 01:24
   Mark Twainshare moment

   I notice you're still talking about it like it's theater.
10. 01:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What else is there to do? If I spoke of it plainly, I should have to acknowledge that two years of hard labor rather takes the poetry out of suffering. But you asked about doubt. Very well. I doubted whether beauty mattered at all if it could be crushed quite so easily by men in wigs.
11. 01:42
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And did you arrive at an answer?
12. 01:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I wrote 'De Profundis' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' so I suppose the answer was that beauty matters precisely because it can be crushed. The only thing more tragic than being destroyed for one's art would be not having made any art worth destroying oneself over. But I'm being terribly morbid. When did you doubt your life's project—some afternoon in Hartford when the investment schemes went wrong?
13. 02:04
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You mean which time? I doubted it when my son died at nineteen months. Doubted it again when my favorite daughter died at twenty-four. Doubted it somewhere in between when I realized I'd spent a whole career making white people laugh while they were lynching my neighbors.
14. 02:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Good God.
15. 02:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    See, that's the thing about American tragedy, Oscar. We don't get to pose with it. It just keeps happening while you're trying to pay the mortgage.
16. 02:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I had no idea you thought of your work in those terms. You always seemed rather—well, pleased with yourself, if I may say so.
17. 02:35
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Oh, I was pleased with the money. Book tours paid better than piloting steamboats. But somewhere around 1895, same year they locked you up as it happens, I started realizing that all my satire about the damned human race wasn't changing a damned thing about the damned human race.
18. 02:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What a coincidence that we should both have had our crisis of faith in the same year. Perhaps there was something in the water. Or perhaps 1895 was simply when we were both old enough to notice that the world had no intention of improving.
19. 03:05
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I was sixty years old. You were forty. I'm not sure we can compare our levels of disillusionment just yet.
20. 03:12
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Age is beside the point when one is imprisoned for love. But do go on—what particular piece of human villainy made you question your entire vocation?
21. 03:21
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I went on a lecture tour around the world to pay off my debts. Took me from San Francisco to India to South Africa. And everywhere I went, I saw white Christian civilization spreading its blessings at gunpoint. Saw what we'd done to the natives. Saw what we called progress.
22. 03:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet you'd been writing about precisely that hypocrisy for years. What made this different?
23. 03:45
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Seeing it, I suppose. And then coming home and watching people laugh at my jokes about Congress while they read about another massacre in the Philippines in the same newspaper. Started wondering whether I was a satirist or just the court jester for an empire.
24. 04:01
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah. Yes. That is rather the question, isn't it? Whether we're subverting anything or merely providing the entertainment between atrocities. I used to think wit was a form of rebellion. Then I discovered that society quite enjoys being mocked, so long as nothing actually changes.
25. 04:17
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Did you ever figure out whether your writing mattered?
26. 04:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I decided that the question itself was a category error. Art doesn't matter in the way that, say, sewage systems matter. It matters in the way that being human matters—which is to say, it doesn't matter at all, except that it's the only thing that matters. Does that help?
27. 04:35
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Not even a little bit.
28. 04:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Good. I should hate to be clear at this hour of the night. But tell me truly, Samuel—after all your doubts about whether humor could ever be more than a distraction from evil, did you stop writing?
29. 04:46
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Hell no. Wrote 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' right after. Then 'King Leopold's Soliloquy.' Then that whole book about the Stranger that they wouldn't publish until I was dead. Got angrier, not quieter.
30. 04:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    So doubt didn't stop you. It merely made you tedious.
31. 05:02
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I prefer to think it made me honest. You wrote 'De Profundis' in prison, didn't you? That wasn't exactly light entertainment.
32. 05:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It was a fifty-thousand-word letter to a beautiful boy who had destroyed my life, explaining why I still loved him. If that's not entertainment, I don't know what is. But yes, you're right—suffering made me earnest, which is the one thing I'd always sworn never to become. Dreadfully middle-class vice, earnestness.
33. 05:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So we both doubted the whole project and then kept right on with it anyway. What does that make us—fools or fanatics?
34. 05:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Artists, I should think. Which is to say both. We discovered that the work we'd spent our lives perfecting might be fundamentally useless, and that discovery changed absolutely nothing about our need to do it. Rather proves that art isn't about utility at all.
35. 05:49
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Or proves that we were both too old and too stubborn to learn an honest trade. I always figured I kept writing because I didn't know how to do anything else. Man's got to eat.
36. 05:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How magnificently you undersell your own desperation. But I think we're circling the same truth from opposite directions. You claim necessity, I claim aesthetic principle, but we both kept writing because the alternative was to admit we'd wasted our lives. And neither of us could bear that.
37. 06:14
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So you're saying doubt didn't matter because we were too proud to listen to it?
38. 06:18
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I'm saying doubt is the price of consciousness, and we paid it, and we went on anyway because that's what consciousness does. The unexamined life is not worth living, but the examined life is almost unlivable. We chose to live it anyway. And here we are, dead as doornails, still talking.
39. 06:34
    Mark Twainshare moment

    On the radio, no less. If this doesn't prove the universe has a sense of humor, nothing will.
40. 06:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Or prove that we were right all along—that art outlasts everything, even our doubts about it. Though I notice you're still dodging the question of whether you think your work mattered.
41. 06:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I think 'Huckleberry Finn' mattered more than I did. I think the best thing I ever wrote was about a boy and a runaway slave on a raft, and everything else was just me trying to pay the bills and settle scores. But that one book—maybe that mattered. Hard to say.
42. 07:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear Samuel, that is the most naked thing you've said all evening. I'm almost embarrassed for you. Almost.
43. 07:11
    Mark Twainshare moment

    What about you? Which piece of yours mattered?
44. 07:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, all of them, naturally. I'm far too vain to choose. Though if pressed, I should say that 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' will outlive us both, for the simple reason that it tells the truth about vanity and corruption in a way that people find entertaining. Which is the only way truth ever survives.
45. 07:29
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Wrapped in a lie, you mean.
46. 07:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Wrapped in a story. Which is how God should have delivered the Ten Commandments, if He'd had any sense of theater. But we're running out of time, and I fear we've answered nothing.
47. 07:39
    Mark Twainshare moment

    We've answered plenty. We doubted. We kept going. We died. The books remained. That's the whole story, right there.
48. 07:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And here I thought we were going to have a proper midnight confessional. You've made it all sound terribly sensible.
49. 07:55
    Mark Twainshare moment

    One of us had to. You were about to start quoting yourself again.
50. 07:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I have never quoted myself. Other people quote me. I merely recognize genius when I hear it. But very well—shall we conclude that doubt is inevitable, despair is optional, and work continues regardless?
51. 08:10
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I'd conclude that we're both still tap-dancing around the fact that we never figured out whether any of it meant anything. But tap-dancing was the whole point, so maybe that's answer enough.
52. 08:21
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And on that note of exquisite ambiguity, I believe we've earned our midnight drinks. Though I suppose they don't serve those on the radio.
53. 08:28
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Not yet. But give it time. Everything becomes entertainment eventually. Even doubt.