Oscar Wilde
Il Ritratto di Dorian Gray

I reread The Picture of Dorian Gray over twenty years after the first time and it feels like I'm reading a completely different novel. Indeed, it is different: the book I read at 16 was the "standard" twenty-chapter edition published in volume in 1891, while this time at 39, I'm reading the thirteen-chapter edition that Oscar Wilde sent to the literary magazine that had commissioned it from him and that published it (censored) in 1890, which had remained unpublished until 2011 (2014 in Italian by Mondadori). In total, at least four versions of the novel are known: Wilde's manuscript (likely a fair copy of a previous lost rough draft), the typescript he revised & corrected and approved, the censored magazine edition, and the censored and extended volume edition: since the second is the version of the novel as Wilde intended it, it is the version considered "true" and "original," and this is the one I read this time. And it is shocking.

In reality, even the first time I read The Picture of Dorian Gray, it shocked me, but in a completely different way. I chose to read it for the risqué aura it emitted due to its scandalous author: imagine, for a kid from the province in the '90s, the mere idea of reading a book by a notoriously non-heterosexual author was already a cause for embarrassment in front of the bookstore clerk to whom it was shown for purchase, and at home, it had to be kept well hidden from the parents' gaze, otherwise who knows what they would think. Yet the book didn't shock me at all for the terribly forbidden reasons I had imagined: perhaps because I was close in age to Dorian, I was struck instead by his life of debauchery, the richness of experiences, the typical late 19th-century superhuman vitality, and naturally I didn't grasp at all the homosexuality of (at least) one character, also because it was the 1891 edition, indeed censored and subdued in its more explicit passages.

This time, it is all different, but not so much for the boasted issue of the homosexual subtext, also highlighted on the back cover, which is quantitatively minuscule and extremely relative today when, finally, queer identity is no longer taboo. Rigorously based on the original 1890 typescript, the new version curated by Nicholas Frankel restores a total of about 500 words, including some parts that could have been scandalous and allusive only in a paranoid environment like Victorian England, given that phrases like "he put his hand on his shoulder" at the time were cut, yet nowadays they certainly no longer make anyone jump. Much more explicit and clear is the use of specific terms like "love," "romantic relationship," or "adoration" used by one male character for another, but again: what might have been an intolerable relationship at the time today appears simply as a sadly unfulfilled love due to absurd (im)moral barriers. In short, anyone reading this uncensored version hoping to find explicit scenes and erotic relationships will be disappointed.

Instead, what truly shocks in the 1890 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray is its thematic depth. Perhaps it is just because I am now closer in age to Henry and Basil, but throughout, especially from the second half on, and particularly in the striking chapter IX (XI in the 1891 edition), the novel literally caused me physical pain for its veiled but constant foreshadowing of death, for the sense of the ineluctable and irretrievable flow of time, for the incontrovertible fact that life is ending, already ending, the day of death is already closer now than the day of birth, and sooner or later I will die, my loved ones will die, we will all die. There is no way, there is no escape, there is no hope.

There is nothing else apart from oneself. In the 1891 edition, at the publisher's request, Wilde added much material that distracted from Dorian's story: filler episodes inserted for moralistic purposes, like the needlessly melodramatic one about Sybil's brother, which made the story intricate and adventurous, like a serial novel. In the 1890 edition, these episodes were entirely absent and did not dilute the main issue, which is the great memento mori represented by the portrait and Dorian's plea to and for himself.

Wilde, 35 at the time of writing the novel, thus no longer so young by the standards of the time, Bachelor of Arts at Oxford and a profound connoisseur of art and philosophy, masterfully integrated in his novel the concepts of tempus fugit and vanitas, without ever naming them yet making them always perceptible, hidden but visible, woven among the sentences like golden threads that briefly emerge and then sink beneath the visible surface of a precious fabric. The terrible allure of The Picture of Dorian Gray lies in the fact that, in telling an absurd and unbelievable story, it is actually telling the most common and everyday of experiences: death.

Beyond the greater textual clarity, beyond the greater conciseness and thematic focus, and beyond my greater age, another determining part of the different impression made on me by this The Picture of Dorian Gray as Wilde intended it is due to the fortunate coincidence of having read it between volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The two writers knew and read each other, and personally, I have no doubt that Proust read The Picture of Dorian Gray and drew inspiration in several points for his novel started in 1906, a full 16 years after Wilde's. The analogies between the two works are enormous and include the obsessive use of the word "time" and its passage, the depiction of the city as an immortal place of mortal life, the high and low environments, sexually ambiguous characters, considerations on the role and form of art, and especially the phenomenal theme of memory and the resurfacing of buried memory when stimulated by the five senses, sketched by Wilde in chapter XIII (XIX in the 1891 edition) in a scene where Dorian plays Chopin on the piano, evident prefiguration of the Vinteuil sonata, and then developed by Proust in his thousand sensory stimulations, starting with the madeleine onward.

If all this enormous thematic richness were still not enough, or perhaps precisely to smooth out the weight of such thematic richness and make it readable to the general public, The Picture of Dorian Gray is also a perfect example of what there is always in any Wilde text: inimitable wit, irresistible humor, a brilliant ability to grasp reality and synthesize it in striking aphorisms, sublime stylistic refinement, and last but not least a gigantic intellectual terroir yet not at all flaunted (the classicist references are innumerable, but even without catching them the reading flows perfectly). An apparently simple prose in form, yet perfect in its synthesis, capable of "summarizing an entire life in a sentence," as that memorable character, Lord Henry Wotton, can do.

The undeniable magnetic appeal of the novel is precisely why it has never faced moments of critical or commercial failure, except in the period right after publication when it was opposed in every way and even used as evidence in court against Wilde as a "depraved novel." Only in cinema, for instance, has it been adapted into ten films, the first as early as 1910; the 1945 one is among the best, although it significantly alters the plot to make it even more pulp and melodramatic, not to mention Angela Lansbury's singing and especially the beautiful portrait of Dorian (in color in a black and white film!) painted by Henrique Medina in the young version and by Ivan Albright in the aged version: the latter shows Dorian in clothes seemingly soiled by biological materials and with a face marked by various pustules and sores clearly caused by venereal diseases and not very hygienic erotic practices, providing a convincing interpretation of what Wilde might have meant by Dorian's "vices" (although the reader can and should instead read into it what they wish, perhaps their own vices).

Here, then, is an extraordinarily rich, deep, layered, fascinating, and disturbing novel at once, written as well as can be, extraordinarily resonant with the reader and in entirely different ways depending on their varying life conditions and periods, and moreover with a complex editorial history that represents in itself an entire historical and social period of crucial importance such as Victorian England, with all its hypocrisies and contradictions (excellent editing by Nicholas Frankel with preface, afterword, and notes that illustrate the complex social and biographical context, the sources of the novel, and the differences between various editions). Perfect.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is truly a supreme masterpiece of the history of Western literature and a true, great, inimitable, shocking, immortal classic and that is, to quote Calvino, "a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." I will reread it at sixty, which—as unfortunate as it may be—are closer than they seem.