By Thomas Filbin

If you want to tell people the truth,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” Louis Bayard’s novel offers a compelling vision of what happened to Oscar and his family when the laughter stopped.

The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard. Algonquin Books, 297 pp. $29.

One of the most visited sites at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris is the tomb of Oscar Wilde, a fabulously symbolic monument by Jacob Epstein. In 1981, when I first saw it, the fine white stone was covered with lipstick kisses and epigraphs in numerous languages (“Je t’aime”, “Oscar Lives”, and the like.) These were the acts of adoring fans, but the homages did not enhance the structure — only defaced it. The tomb was cleaned after that, but just as promptly it was marred again. On my last visit, the authorities seemed to have solved the problem by installing a plexiglass enclosure, though it too became the surface for more graffiti. But at least the monument itself was saved. The sphinxlike figure itself tells a provocative story: it was thought obscene when first installed in 1913 because its genitalia were visible (in Paris, you ask incredulously?) The figure was covered for a time, then concrete placed over the offending parts. Finally, in 1961 the site was vandalized and the figure’s genitalia hacked off. Poor Oscar — even in death he continued to endure the slings and arrows of puritanical contempt. But, as time passed, his martyrdom evolved into sainthood, marking his elevation to an artistic genius and gay icon.

Novelist Louis Bayard has written an interestingly creative take on Oscar, particularly his wife Constance and their sons Vyvyan and Cyril, who were so affected by the writer’s trial and imprisonment that they assumed new names and moved out of the country. The novel is divided into parts: the narrative begins with the Wilde family’s holiday at a rented house in the country where Oscar’s lover and nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas appears. Oscar’s obsession with the young man seems innocent at first, but Constance soon begins to suspect the nature of the relationship: it is too intense, too encompassing. In the nineteenth century, sex between two men was about as acceptable as homicide, treason, and atheism. Little by little, and then in a burst, Constance discovers Oscar’s sexual orientation. Because he was so devoted to their children, she had been blind to the truth. After all, they had been maintaining a conventional marriage, even though physical love between them had subsided.

Bayard’s Constance has always wondered about the sources of her husband’s art and its implications and, as the Douglas relationship absorbs more of Oscar’s time, she sees that there is a side to him that rebels against Victorian codes of conduct. His soul followed a more pagan, spontaneously naturalistic, beckoning. “In an Oscar Wilde play, she thinks, the women, after dinner, retire for coffee in the drawing room: the men take their port and cigars in the library. Each sex expresses relief at being left alone, then feeling obscurely abandoned, surges back toward the other.” Her conventional blindness about the relationship between men and women, her ignorance about what they really mean to each other, becomes increasingly clear — and disturbing — the more she learns about Oscar’s relationships with men. “I was such a blinkered wifey I didn’t grasp his direction, but then – as I imagine he wished me to do – I thought back upon that long parade of malnourished youths who used to traipse through Tite Street,” Constance reflects. Later, Lord Alfred said to her, “I don’t want you to think I was his first.”

Author Louis Bayard — an illuminating and entertaining look at the domestic life of Oscar Wilde.

The second act of the book details what happened after Oscar’s trial and imprisonment. Constance has gone to Italy where she and the children have assumed the surname name “Holland”. Oscar himself invented “Sebastian Melmoth” as his new appellation, something that sounds silly enough (it is also a nod to the protagonist of Charles Maturin’s Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer) to reflect the owner’s sense of his own fall from society. The stories about Oscar’s life during his last days in Paris are sad: health failing, funds diminished, he would cadge drinks and meals from English people that he would join in cafes. In payment, he would regale them with yarns of the London theater and people like the Prince of Wales, Known only as “Sebastian,” he sang for his supper and when he toddled off, rather tipsy, someone would ask, “Who was that man?”

Wilde’s two sons, Vyvyan and Cyril, eventually learn of the trial in the subsequent acts of Bayard’s novel, which takes the form of a play in which they grapple with how the father they loved became a social pariah. “He ought to have run…before there was a trial,” Cyril says. Soon they take the view that the real battle was between Lord Alfred and his father the Marquis of Queensberry. If it wasn’t for that domestic conflict, poor Oscar never would have wound up in court.

Bayard treats Wilde sympathetically. The double life Wilde was forced to live inevitably became debilitating. He risked everything for the love that dare not speak its name. Among Oscar’s memorable witticisms: “Be yourself; all the others are taken.” This is a truth that he lived to its fullest, even though its consequences were disastrous. Oscar’s life (and psyche) was so multifaceted it is no wonder he was so successful as a dramatist. He could express, on stage, every aspect of life: comedy, tragedy, satire, and farce.

At the conclusion of the novel, there’s a (fictitious) scene between Wilde’s sons and Lord Alfred (who lived until 1951). They ask Douglas if he had returned the love their father so ruinously lavished on him. He cannot answer, and they take his silence as assent, and perhaps even regret, that only one party had to pay the price for what was, at the time, a forbidden union.

Oscar Wilde is located in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France. It took nine to ten months to complete by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, with an accompanying plinth by Charles Holden and an inscription carved by Joseph Cribb.

There have been many representations of Oscar in portraits, books, and films. The hundredth anniversary of his death in 2000 included the staging of The Importance of Being Earnest in Oxford, where he had been a precocious young student. He has inspired two excellent films: Wilde (1997) starring Stephen Fry and The Happy Prince (2018) featuring Rupert Everett. Fry caught the flamboyance of Oscar’s wit, but Everett evoked his tragedy, especially in a scene in which Oscar stands in a café and sings, on request, “The Boy I Love is Up In The Balcony,” a British music hall tune from 1885 made famous by Marie Lloyd. The French audience members laugh at first, perhaps mocking a man singing about loving another man. But then they grow to admire the brave performance of an artist who is making such an open declaration.

The Wildes is illuminating and entertaining because it takes a refreshingly new angle on Oscar’s fall. The narrative embraces his tragedy from a domestic perspective, examining his life as it was viewed by his shocked wife and children. Today, of course, we see that Oscar clearly had nothing to declare but his genius. Crucified by the morality of the era, he is now generally hailed as a deliciously subversive sensibility, a  brilliant satirist whose aphorisms, stories, essays, and plays drew on humor to express unpleasant truths about Victorian society. “If you want to tell people the truth,” quipped Oscar, “make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” Bayard’s novel offers a compelling vision of what happened, to Wilde and his family, when the laughter stopped.

Thomas Filbin is a freelance critic whose reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, and The Hudson Review. His novel, The Black Amphora of Halicarnassus, was published in May.