| Show 2E The Salt Lake Tribune Sunday March 27 1988 Oscar Wilde a man before his time Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman Alfred A Knopf Co Inc 598 pp Index On April 10 1882 Salt Lake City had a most improbable visitor — one $2-19- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde Crisscrossing our nation in the course of a profitable and lengthy lecture tour he made vocal his views on the art morals and society of those Victorian times Oscar Wilde likewise held forth in such American backwaters as Leadville Colo and Leavenworth Kan understandably unimpressed by his brief visit to those centers of Plains and Mountain culture However Salt Lake City made something of a mark upon the consciousness of this most picturesque of poets According to an authoritative new biography by Richard Ellman spent the last part of his lifp writing the book Wilde wrote to iriends commenting that in the Salt Lake Theatre where he spoke "each Mormon husband sat surrounded by a coven of wives” It should be noted that his visit followed the death of Brigham Young by a scant five years It should also be noted that we popularly associate the word “coven” with a posse of witches His subject in the city according to The Salt Lake Tribune was “Art Decoration! Being the Practical Application of the Esthetic Theory To Every Day Home Life and Art Orna- Jewelry was hollow and cheap mouldings were made to look like carvings All this spoke an age of In Japan the people went sham into fields and drew pictures of the birds to decorate their homes but in America when a bird showed its head someone threw a stone at it He lashed the vulgar tendencies of American house decorations in good style and showed how a house might with small expense be transformed from an ugly barn into a place where a Christian gentleman might live in comfort Ills lecture was listened to with close attention and when he left the platform the audience applauded although many looked as if his theme and his aim were alike incomprehensible to them” But enough for local lore customs and witticisms And let’s also have done with musical comedy lore Biographer Ellman makes plain that Wilde never did stroll down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand despite that precious parody of him in Gilbert & Sullivan’s tuneful “Patience” But Ellman in this best of all Wilde biographies makes plain that the precocious Oscar in what more plebian folks regard as his misspent youth came to realize the value of Alas it was that mentation” A review in The Tribune quoted Wilde as saying “All good art was honest and conscientious Liars and cheats made cheating designs They made paper look like marble and tin was given the appearance of stone The not - so - Knopf illustrated 292 pp — her real name was Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp — was born 100 years ago this year By the time of her death in 1923 at age 34 she was being acclaimed as one of the few writtruly outstanding short-stor- y ers in English and with minor fluctuations her reputation has held firm ever since Interest in her life has been more fitful but in recent years it has steadily increased There have been no fewer than three biographies over the last decade: the latest of them by Claire Tomalin while it inevitably owes a debt to the researches of its predecessors provides the finest and most subtly shaded portrait so far In broad outline the story Tomalin has to tell seems fairly straightforward Katherine Mansfield w'as a New Zealander the daughter of one of the country’s leading businessmen Three years of schooling in London between the ages of 14 and 17 left her dissatisfied with New Zealand's possibilities and she returned to England when she w'as 19 — hoping initially to study music Before long she had become pregnant by one man and contracted an almost meaningless marriage w'ith another Her mother promptly showed up in London whisked her off to a small spa town in Bavaria and left her there by herself: a few weeks later she suffered a miscarriage But she also managed to turn her observa SILK SILK man Pension Through The New Age she was drawn into literary London and in 1912 she set up house with John Middleton Murry an aspiring young writer who was still technically an Oxford undergraduate There were to be quarrels long periods of separation and affairs on both sides but he was to remain the most important figure in her life from this point on In the early part of World War I the Murry’S — they were not in fact married until 1918 — shared neighboring cottages in a i emote part of Cornwall with DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda Subsequently they became involved with various Bloomsbury or figures: Katherine’s second collection of stories was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf By the time it appeared however not long after her marriage she was showing unmistakable signs of tuberculosis and she was to spend her last few remaining years in Switzerland and France — wasting away but writing until near the end She died three months or so after being admitted to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man an establishment outside Paris presided over by the cult figure and charlatan (some would say) George Gurdjieff Not by the sound of it an undu SILK SILK SILK SILK SILK ms mm 8PM© at® 7 X fvW- "7 ' L x 7 - X-hff- if x 7 Tulip Bush Blossoms 14 Blossoms X 7 Tulip Bush X Violet Bush X 14 x 7 Daffodils 7 ilacs NEW x O'er 7 Incredible Blossoms Blossoms X 14 career or one that automatically justifies Tomalin’s subtitle A Secret Life And yet Katherine Mansfield remains a difficult subject for a biographer to get right For a start so much of her life seems to lack focus She juggled with assumed names and disguises played with the idea of being Russian or Japanese switched moods and formed attachments (or antipathies) with disconcerting abruptness All this helped to make her a natural short-storwriter — she was a master of the evanescent moment the emotional flavor but even in her stories as Tomalin says she “persistently dispersed herself in different styles and ly complicated y n tones” Weighing up her good and bad qualities can present equally She certainly tricky problems wasn't the radiant almost saintly figure that Middleton Murry portrayed her as having been after her death and no one who reads Tomalin’s account could be left supposing that she was Instead we are given the picture of a woman who was frequently treacherous deceitful and ill natured: “Hatred” says Tomalin “was her favorite emotion" But there is a danger that in recoiling from the old stained-glasimage a biographer can go too far the other way Her faults need to be understood set in context related to her virtues — all of which s Tomalin does with unsentimental sympathy and mature judgment She is especially good on the complicated reactions Katherine Mansfield provoked in the two foremost writers in her circle Virginia WToolf and Lawrence and on the feelings they inspired in her in return Perhaps the account of Lawrence is a little too mellow and underplays the hysterical harshness of which he was capable on the other hand we are asked to consider the possibility (a plausible one I would have thought) that it was while living in close contact with him in Cornwall that she may have caught tuberculosis Medical matters must necessarily loom large in any biography of Katherine Mansfield Tomalin not only takes sensitive account of the emotional consequences of consumption but also speculates that the writer suffered from a misdiagnosed case of gonorrhea contracted from a Polish writer Flor-ya- n Sobieniowski whom she met during her stay in the German pension There are many other aspects of the book that deserve to be singled out — the handling of Katherine Mansfield's sexual ambiguities the analysis of her strange relationship with her slavishly devoted friend Ida Constance Baker in terms of child and mother the evocation of the world of “new women” in which she found herself in Edwardian London But perhaps Tomalin’s a Biblical inscription “To my words they durst add nothing and my speech dropped upon them” Nine years after his death in 1900 his ashes were removed to the better known Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris There a famous monument by Jacob Epstein above his grave is inscribed with these lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: And alien tears will fill for him Pity’s long broken urn For his mourners will be outcast men And outcasts always mourn Significantly or not I know of no campaign on anyone's part to remove the pariah poet's remains to Westminster Abbey where they could rest with others among Britain’s men of letters — Jack Goodman novel of love hate Sci-f- i An Alien Light by Nancy Kress Arbor House 371 pp $1795 Science fiction is one way of giving humans a glimpse of their race as others might see it Nancy Kress views humanity in Aw Alien Light through the eyes of a people who call themselves Ged The Ged are separate organisims who meld minds and perhaps even flesh as they gain comfort and information They consider their form of social organization the only rational road for evolution Everyone else in the universe who has passed beyond the animal stage did it their way except for humans With their short lifespans and violent ways the human race should when it discovhave ered the atom Yet here is humanity spreading from galaxy to galaxy actually defeating Ged fleets To determine what makes these anomalies tick Ged behavoria! scientists create an elaborate maze and attract some human guinea pigs The experiment is set up on a planet with two distinct and societies members of both are lured to participate The Ged are kept busy trying to of relationships analyze a soap-oper- a when they have no understanding of human emotions Kress has produced an engrossing novel of love and hatred scheming and noble sacrifice with plenty of tension along the way — Sharon Miller United Press International d Best Sellers New York Time Service The listings below ore base© on figures from 2 000 bookstores in every region of sales the United greatest achievement is that the parts cohere that we we are left with a portrait as consistent as Katherine Mansfield's own inconsistencies allow — John Gross The New York Times PALOMA'S 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