Oscar Fingal Wilde, the last of the great and hopelessly flamboyant, whose full name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, is perhaps because of his flamboyance and his fame frequently misrepresented and misconceived.

He died 119 years ago this month.

I offer here three of the most famous fabulations about Oscar:

3. Oscar only liked men

In actuality, women gave him a big hard-on — judging, at least, from the letters he himself wrote.

He was at one time completely infatuated with a woman named Florence Balcombe, who later married Dracula author Bram Stoker. There are also records of other flirtations he carried on, notably with an Irish lady he loved.

Of course also, in 1884, he married the lovely Constance Lloyd, with whom he rapidly had two children, and with whom he was, in his own words, “blissfully happy” the first several years of marriage.

2. Oscar died of syphilis

The so-called disease of decadence. Quoting Oscar’s grandson — one Merlin Holland — who is still alive and is the sole executor of Oscar’s estate:

“This is an old canard which has been doing the rounds for nearly a century, and was lately championed on the flimsiest of evidence by his best modern biographer, Richard Ellmann. Killing Oscar off with the classic ‘disease of the decadents’ has always seemed a suitably sensational way of rounding off a sensational life, but modern medical opinion agrees almost universally that it was an ear infection and meningitis which did him in the end.”

1. Oscar was a rather lazy, boozy, cigarette-smoking dandy who, as he himself said, “pored the entirety of his genius into his life, but merely his talent into his literature”

In fact, Oscar was extraordinarily intellectual, and he worked doggedly to develop his intellect and his erudition. He worked to develop it both philosophically and also artistically — even if he downplayed it all in the end.

The indisputability of Oscar’s discipline comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has any idea the sheer amount of work and study and self-discipline it takes to write the amount he wrote — and to write, as Oscar did, so cogently about such cerebral subject-matter, in the clear and confident way that characterizes him. Yet it does, I’ve discovered, come as something of a surprise to those who don’t.

He was the son of a famous Dublin doctor named Sir William Wilde, whose medical work garnered him knighthood. Oscar’s mother Jane was a well-known political poet who, more than once, was nearly imprisoned for the caustic anti-English literature she wrote.

It’s true that while he was at Oxford, Oscar deliberately adopted the effete pose of a dandy. This, however, was partly put-on. One must never forget either that Oscar was admitted into Oxford as “a scholar to Magdalen” — a rarified prize and honor — and he also won double-first in classics and the Newdigate prize for poetry. This sort of scholarship required a great deal of discipline and work — a sedate seriousness and a dedication to reading and remembering, which his friends and contemporaries, even his rivals and enemies, testified to in full, as do his extant Oxford notebooks. As a matter of fact, I believe this the primary thing that makes Oscar Wilde so powerful and so wonderful: the depth of his philosophical grasp combined with the originality of that grasp, combined with the scope of his learning, combined with his wit and humor, the idiomatic excellence and clarity of his writing — which writing extended into virtually all mediums of literature: poetry, prose, plays, novels, short-stories, essays, criticisms, letters, children’s literature, and more.

At his trial, echoing a line from The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde specifically said that his aim in life had been self-development “through pleasure rather than suffering.” And yet not too long afterward, in De Profundis, his long and incredible prison letter to his lover Alfred Douglas, Oscar says that “only through pain and sorrow can true nobility of soul be achieved.”

Like Epicurus, like Aristotle, like Marcus Aurelius, like Shakespeare, like Spinoza, all of whom Oscar Wilde admired, he knew very well that self-discipline is a virtue because “self-development is the aim of life,” as Oscar himself said, “and requires thought and effort.”

“The basis of character is self-control,” Oscar Wilde wrote.

From his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

The wild regrets and the bloody sweats,
none knew so well as I.
For he who lives more lives than one
more deaths than one must die.

His dedication to learning is a thing to be inspired by, a thing toward which to aspire.

Oscar’s erudition is of the highest order, a fact which a great many people do not know — largely, I think, because his dynamic personality and the laid-back pose he struck, his dandyism, often overshadow everything else.

There is in Oscar Wilde an absolute and intransigent independence of thought — a categorical rejection of dogma and the status-quo.

“Those who do not think for themselves do not think at all,” Oscar wrote.

A nonconformist if ever there was one, Oscar broke away from the pack early in his life. Yet he did this not for nonconformity sake alone but for the sake of the truth: because Oscar Wilde understood — understood with a deep and philosophical grasp — that there is no such thing as “convention wisdom” because true wisdom is not conventional. Oscar developed early on in his life the confidence to think for himself.

Oscar Wilde occupies a unique and almost indescribable place in my literary-philosophical mind and heart — a place which he alone inhabits. No one else is there.

His love of Shakespeare and his understanding of Shakespeare are as inspiring for me as they are edifying. He is not the most brilliant, neither is he the most profound, nor the most systematic nor the most sweeping in scope. Yet Oscar is rarified: his cleverness and his personality, his independence mixed with his love of philosophy and his understanding of philosophy — Greek philosophy, in particular: lover of reason, wisdom, the logos, admirer of Aristotle and Epicurus — it uplifts and inspires me in a way no other writer does.

I love most especially how Oscar unlike anyone else grasped the profound connection between philosophy and art — how he communicated his original insights so eloquently and in language modern and devoid of anything antiquated.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 1854 – November 1900), whom I never tire of reading, whom I never will never tire reading, RIP.