"Dolly" Wilde Oscar Wilde's niece was intelligent, witty, and enchanting, dying exactly as she had lived: vividly, rather violently, and at a very good address.
She attracted people of wealth, taste, and talent as she burned up her opportunities in flamboyant lesbian affairs and numerous addictions,
"She seemed to be reliving the life of her infamous uncle,
interesting biography of an interesting individual, unfortunately poorly written Leído en español, de la Editorial Lumen,, 'La importancia de llamarse Dolly Wilde' es un acertado y dramático acercamiento a la figura de la sobrina de Oscar Wilde, que tuvo la mala suerte de llevar una vida de infortunios y decadencia como su tío.
Realista y documentada, sin edulcorar su figura, ni ensalzarla ni denigrarla, Joan Schenkar se vale de recursos como testimonios auténticos y personales de personas que convivieron y conocieron a Dolly.
Mi reseña: sitelink com/lateatralvi Though at times exasperatingly written and structured, the central story of Dolly's outofcontrol life is entertaining and interesting, Like most people, you have probably never heard of Dolly Wilde, born three months after Oscar's demise, Although she never met her uncle, she seems to have been much like him, Seems like she was an interesting figure to know, involved in Natalie Clifford Barney's historical salon, among other things, She was also a moneygrubber and a drug addict, and died rather violently, What really happened to her An intriguing read, nonetheless, If you like biographies about unusual people, you won't be disappointed, I made the enlightening choice to watch one of the author's YouTube videos, and came away with a better understanding of why I didn't really enjoy this book very much.
Ms. Schenkar is extremely selfcongratulatory, and thinks being a biographer gives her the cachet of the person she wrote about, She explains this to an audience both on film, and in her writing as if no one could possibly understand how deeeeeeply invooooollllllved with her suuuuuuuuubject she had to get in order to write a biography of such brilliance.
Phooey.
First of all, she goes on and on and ON about how "beautiful" Dolly Wilde was in many varying adjectives of increased superlativitiy.
. . and yet, to me, the photos suggest she was a nicely dressed horse, As was Natalie Barney, her most famous lover, Heehaw! To my eye, Oscar Wilde himself was much more beautiful than his niece, no matter what sort of blue her eyes were, So there's that.
I suppose I also like my biographies to be at least minutely attentive to some sort of time line, . . Schenkar went on about Dolly's death in every single chapter, as if dying from a drug overdose was some mystical, magical event that only a truly wonderful being like Dolly Wilde could attain.
Personally, I'd have liked to hear a little more about her life before the denouement, By the time she actually gets around to writing about Dolly's death, I'm bored with it,
Also the name dropping! Oh, the namedropping! I kept having to stop reading every few paragraphs to Google another peer of Dolly Wilde, and to try and figure out if this personage was of actual importance in Dolly's life, or if they were just included to impress the reader with how many lesbian artistes the author could name on one page.
Phooey.
Perhaps the reason the author is so enamoured of Dolly Wilde is that they both regarded themselves so highly than it was impossible for anyone else to compete for their adoration
The greatest stroke against this book is that after selfcongratulating to great heights, the author misspells the name of a famous painting "The Death of Sardanapalus" spelling it "Sardanapolus" several times over.
When something that easy to factcheck is done wrong, it makes me doubt the veracity of the more important facts of the tale,
The author's hubris got in the way of my enjoyment of what could have been a very engaging biography,
The one bright spot was the bit about the palmistry reading of Dolly Wilde's hand print, That was interesting.
As for the rest
Phooey, The fact that I read a hardcover for this speaks volumes and I really did enjoy the biography of Dolly Wilde and with it the many glimpses into the Natalie Barney salon and other social circles.
What bothered me with the book itself was that many chapters seemed to be written as standalones, which often led to a rather circular and occasionally superfluous recounting of certain events or quotes.
The transitions could've been smoother and the whole thing made more of a uniform whole rather than the sum of its parts, but I appreciate that it was a stylistic choice.
While this book showed great promise initially, one soon grew tired of Dolly's attempts to outOscar Oscar, I found her extremely annoying after the first few chapters and was relieved when I entered Natalie Barney's inner circle, To be taken into this mysterious realm by the woman who had been Barney's cook and confidante for forty years is the best part of this book.
This is a big book, so is difficult to transport in one's handbag, However it could have been condensed into apage paperback without losing too much of the gist, I found Schenkar's overuse of foreign phrases contrived, and eventually these italicised insertions begin to grate: do we really need to know that Dolly suffered from "chagrins d'amour" or is "carnet d'addresse" really necessary instead of "address book"
I didn't like Dolly, and I could understand why Natalie didn't like her either.
dollys life is super interesting and i urge anybody to read up about her but this book was overly long amp bizarrely structured so it wasnt great technically, but wonderful for an insight intos queer culture This book about a fascinating life that went "noticed but unrecorded" gets five from me as a writer, on the merits of its bold, experimental structure and style which Dolly Wilde would have taken seriously.
That shows a respect for the subject, combined with a gutsiness, that is to the biographer's credit,
As a reader, I rate it differently, This review explains why.
The biographer was clearly in service to the subject in a way much more profound than one reviewer here dismissed when calling the book a "glorified obituary.
" Her service to the reader is also to be taken seriously, but it will not always be appreciated, as I try to explain below,
I like Jesse Kornbluth's very positive review dealing mostly with who Dolly was and why we should care, . . the one that turned up on my Kindle when I downloaded this book, But I wasn't able to find it on Amazon, If you can find it, you might enjoy that review,
Another element worthy of praise is the novelistic one, Novelistic passages in biography are always bad unless the author lives and breathes with her subject, They get worse when the author clearly doesn't understand her subject or its milieu, Later, they can become downright embarrassing if or when it becomes clear that the biographer gets facts wrong, misses key facts, or has perhaps through no fault of her own been prevented from knowing them.
This is a case where hidden facts do, in fact, affect the life story Schenkar set out to tell, What's remarkable is, this biography does not suffer very much from it, and again, I credit the author's talent, She was able to plumb the depths of her subjectand get it righteven with few facts at her disposal, This biographer clearly lived, breathed and understood her subject, As a result, passages like this are not only fun to read, but they are true: "Before falling in love with Natalie Barney, Dolly had been able to forget herself whenever she wanted.
"
So why do you see three at the top of my review Well I've only given Sybille Bedford's best novel four, which shows either that a I have no idea how to rate good reads or b I am trying my best to weigh my experience properly for this forum, knowing that writers read differently than readers who don't write.
And although well worth it, and in spite of the delightful rive gauche walk through Paris that Schenkar opens the book with I really felt I was walking alongside Dolly, fresh as a daisy, what an unforgettable stroll!, this wasn't an easy biography to read.
Do you know the expression, "A man's man" Well, in her milieu between the wars, Dolly Wilde was a woman's woman, Arresting, irresistible, scintillating, attentiongetting and jealousyproducing,
In the spirit of her subject, Schenkar has delivered a biographer's biography, Yes, it's about someone you'll never forget, Someone you won't be able to read about elsewhere, But it is experimental, like its subject herself, The book is actually "bum'soutthewindow," risktakingly experimental, as my university mentor would say,
It dispenses with chronology in lieu of taking a thematic approach, and it is uniquely inventive, It dares to publish a palmist's reading of Wilde's hand, for instance, which the author has been ridiculed for, But the decision is as internally consistent as it is entertaining, Besides, Schenkar's subjects all indulged in as much palmistry as possible, Pun fully intended. The best biographers reject no workable material, I know of writers going much further afield than the psychic for analysis, The crticism of Schenkar in this regard is hypocriticalif you truly appreciate the art and craft of life writing,
If you don't and you just want a straightforward read, then this book won't be for you, It teaches you as much about writing and readingfor better or for worse, in sickness and in healthas it teaches about the subject, It is designed and built by a seriously clever mind, And that is rare these days,
And then there's Dolly Wilde, Less of an enigma, perhaps, to us than she was to those who loved her excepting Honey Harris, who steals all her scenes under Schenkar's deft treatment of Harris's friendship with Wilde.
Maybe we are the first generation to really "get" Dolly, now that there's been a Bowlby and an attachment theory, . . and the novels of Edward St, Aubyn and now that most of us know or can learn about the realities of drug dependency and heroin addiction,
I recently reread, in Richard Ellman's standard Wilde biography, Robbie Ross's terrible, moving account of the last hours and minutes of the life of Oscar Wilde, and it struck me how similar his death was to his niece's in key respects.
Both were painful and undignified, Both took place in hotel rooms, Both died penniless. But Oscar Wilde died in the care of a man who loved him, Dolly Wilde died aloneor else she was left for dead,
Dolly Wilde's unfulfilled promise seems legitimately artistic today, We understand, now, what Lady Slane felt alone in understanding in All Passion Spent, Artists of appreciation are no less gifted than artists of achievement, Natalie Barney herself aimed to make her life into a poem Dolly Wilde actually did it,
"Well " Barney would say, wary of sharing the limelight, "perhaps, But they were different poems, "
Indeed. Wilde's omitted the laundry lists, the itineraries, the hotel bills, the thank you notes,
In any case I read Wilde's life as less of a failure than it seemed at the time to Natalie or Janet Flanner or Lily de Gramont, to take three women who apparently appreciated and/or loved and were flummoxed by Dolly.
As a reader, I kept wishing I could have spent more time with her during the horrors of war, when she clearly came into her own.
I admit, however, to a failure of imagination where Toughie Carstairs is concerned, How did those two ever get together So much of what happened during wartime,
as much if not more as what had gone before, might have lifted some of the mist.
. . the mystery that Dolly remains because of gaps in the record that even Schenkar, with her forensic gifts, could not fill,
What we get with Truly Wilde, in the end, is a glimpse into the future of biography, just as we get in books by Diana Souhami, who, since her own book about Dolly and her milieu, Wild Girls, has started to incorporate fiction to flesh out meaning where a credible and thorough biographer cannot fill crucial gaps in the historical record.
It makes me wonder what materials future biographers will be working with, Or even presenting.
In the future, will we still reckon intellectual, and to some extent cultural, history knowing that many key players lived noticed but unrecorded lives Won't television, film, internet and radio capture and memorialize all but the most reclusive literary, musical, artistic and conversational geniuseseven the girlfriends, the boyfriends and the young suicides like Elliot Smith Won't future biographers know much more about "minor" thinkers and talkers and performers like Fran Liebowitz, John Waters, Susan Sontag, Candace Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Margaret Cho, Gore Vidal and so many others who make major contributions but do not did not produce enough books, plays or films to satisfy accepted criteria for a "productive artist" of major rank I wonder.
Take this example of how Truly Wilde stays with me, Somebody just sent me a weblink to Rory Kennedy's filmed conversation with her cousin's aunt, Lee Radziwill, and I was riveted, Lee Radziwill: no rebel, she, No intellect of the first order, Hardly. Yet it was the radical, practiced artistry that Radziwill invested in her spoken wordssomething Kennedy knew how to bring outit was her conversation, that caught me and held me.
Kennedy had searched for and captured something I hadn't expected, something I don't see or hear in the general mediasomething that only gifted biographers usually capture.
It wasn't a fact or a topic, It was an atmosphere. And it carried the faintest scent of the atmosphere that Schenkar has also captured, however fleetingly, around the radical Dolly Wilde,
Kennedy's filmed chat with Radziwill: was it biographythe kind of biography of Wilde as a scintillating conversationalist that we wish Schenkar could have offered up alongside the palmist's reading as "proof of life" Or is the perfect interview merely a document, a tool of biography to be interpreted Will we have more, or fewer, of these rare, captured moments on film that reveal entire characters and outlooks in a gesture, a glance, a tossed off remark, a refusal to answer Or was the Kennedy interview a fluke, and will these revelations remain largely the domain of talented authors: biographers and novelists
One thing's for sure.
The camera will still miss many worthy lesbian subjects, particularly from privileged backgrounds who guard their privacy, I am not sure how that gap will ever be bridged, For cultural icons in the era before television, at least we have Joan Schenkar, who has given us Dolly Wilde, .
Peruse Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story Of Dolly Wilde, Oscars Unusual Niece Illustrated By Joan Schenkar Provided As PDF
Joan Schenkar