I discovered Frank Harris, the writer and friend of Oscar Wilde’s the other day, and started to read his biography/memoir of Wilde. It’s captivating in its plain honesty. I find it very hard to read ‘modern’ fiction these days, because the hype around books is so excessive and ill-considered. On the few occasions I sample the work of a writer that the industry is yapping about, I can tell, literally within two minutes if I try audio, or a couple of pages otherwise, if it’s pedestrian in writing style or story-line, bumping along the ground and likely to go nowhere, and 99% of the time, it is… so I don’t want to give it my time and get bored by it. Occasionally, someone like Kevin Barry materialises however, so all is not lost to me in the world of fiction entirely. As a consequence probably, I’m always on the lookout for biographies of people, usually writers or artists.
Amongst other things, Harris was a writer of short stories, don’t know yet if they’re any good, but more than that, he was a strange character himself, who once had a set of playing cards made for a game he called Dirty Banshee. ‘The art on the cards showed satyrs and goddesses coupling variously.’ When he first met Wilde, he found him pretty repulsive, but got over his initial reaction and came to really like him. This is what he wrote:- ‘His appearance was not in his favour; there was something oily and fat about him that repelled me. Naturally being British-born and young I tried to give my repugnance a moral foundation; fleshy indulgence and laziness, I said to myself, were written all over him.’….’He shook hands in a limp way I disliked; his hands were flabby, greasy; his skin looked bilious and dirty. He wore a great green scarab ring on one finger. He was over-dressed rather than well-dressed; his clothes fitted him too tightly; he was too stout. He had a trick which I noticed even then, which grew on him later, of pulling his jowl with his right hand as he spoke, and his jowl was already fat and pouchy.’… ‘I lay stress on his physical repulsion, because I think most people felt it, and in itself, it is a tribute to the fascination of the man that he should have overcome the first impressions so completely and so quickly. I don’t remember what we talked about. but I noticed almost immediately that his grey eyes were finely expressive; in turns vivacious, laughing, sympathetic; always beautiful. The carven mouth, too, with its heavy, chiselled, purple-tinged lips, had a certain attraction and significance in spite of the black front tooth which shocked one when he laughed. He was over six feet in height and both broad and thick-set; he looked like a Roman Emperor of the decadence.’
