de Profundis - The Original Classic Edition (Paperback)

I usually avoid reading writers' biographies or letters to their loved ones, especially those published posthumously. I am sure some people dream of the time when their lives are open to scrutiny by legions of readers, when their private confessions are published in neat volumes, and their witty letters to friends have little footnotes explaining the inside-jokes to the uninitiated. But the thought makes me cringe, and in the spirit of the old saying 'do onto others', I have never before ventured into someone's exposed private life.

Last summer though, I came across this letter by accident and found myself unable to stop reading it until I was done. The glimpse into someone's vulnerable privacy was intoxicating. Having read (and loved) 'The Importance of Being Earnest', 'The Ideal Husband', and other light pieces, or even 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray'--a more somber but still very controlled story, I was shocked by this letter--tortured by emotion and so uneven--by the same author.

The letter is somewhat contrived. But the insincerity makes it all the more fascinating Not even the insincerity in itself, but the bits where the true emotion bursts through. I could imagine so vividly the great author, the person of wit and fashion, stripped of the glamor, in jail, trying to clear up his name in the public letter to his lover. He starts out with calm and controlled prose, trying to put his Christian-repentance-and-forgiveness scheme on paper... And, I am sure, he believes the things he plans to write. However, as he gets deeper into the narrative, as his pen takes a hold of him, he starts writing what he did not mean--the truth, full of bile and unrequited passion. In a while he notices it and collects himself, and the prose becomes controlled and witty and intellectual. But he is in jail, the time for writing is precious and does not permit the luxury of extensive editing. It lets soul nudity that would normally be edited out remain to seduce shamless readers like me.

It is not only the breakaway emotion that I found so compelling in the letter. It is also the very alternating nature of the narrative--from the polished and righteous to the true and base, and back. Is it not how our mind always works: how it thinks what we wish it to think and then breaks away to find something deeper in us, until we catch it and put it back to its proper controlled place...

There is a long and intricate novel hidden in this letter. It is a story of the rise and fall of a great man, of the universally human desire and its treacherous waters, of stoicism and weakness, of the fine society and jailed outcasts, and we see it through the eyes of the main hero who actually lived. It is presented fully here in this book.

Wilde was a genius indeed.