It is also the former home of William Faulkner, who rented it from a jewelry maker during the twenties. This is also tremendously cool. The entire store is about the size of my dining room, and, similarly, most of it is occupied by a large table filled with books. The room has charming tile floors, high ceilings with beautiful moldings, and enormous floor to ceiling windows. The entire effect makes seem like it must have been terribly wonderful to live in poverty as a writer 80 years ago. Particularly in New Orleans, with an absinthe bar right next door. Please do not disabuse me of my romantic notions of writerly poverty.
it looks just like this, right?
Because the store is tiny, you can browse their stock in no time flat, but of course, as with any carefully curated store, closer inspection is rewarded. They have a large section on New Orleans history and New Orleans cooking, and a nice collection of first editions by southern writers. Of course, a very special case is reserved for all the Faulkner.
Although I was tempted by an enormous, illuminated version of The Canterbury Tales, I settled for a beautiful large-format edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The text of the story is accompanied by extensive marginal annotations and beautiful full-color illustrations of everything from examples of art referenced in the story to places frequented by Wilde in London.
Parenthetically, I’d like to note that this sort of thing would be impossible with an e-Reader. That is all.
I think many, if not most people, are familiar with the story of Dorian Gray. A society portrait painter in Victorian London paints his finest work – a luminous portrait of his young friend Dorian Gray. Dorian wishes aloud that he could always remain as youthful and innocent as the image in the portrait, and thus, without realizing it, makes a pact with SATAN. From that point on, all of his evil thoughts and unspeakable misdeeds are reflected in the painting, thus causing it to grow hideous and evil-looking while the actual Dorian remains as dewy and fresh as honeysuckle.
What prompted the book to be censored and Oscar Wilde to be
prosecuted for gross indecency was the book’s implication that its protagonist
and several of the other main characters were covertly engaging in GAY SEX. I’ll
give you a minute to wipe all of the apple juice off of your computer screen
after the enormous spit-take you just did. There you go. In fact, the painter Basil
Hallward admits that he is initially hesitant to show the painting to Dorian
precisely because “I have put into it all the extraordinary romance of which, of course, I have
never dared to speak to him.” It was this sort of admission that would, in Victorian
times, send monocles clattering into tea cups and old women lunging greedily
for their smelling salts. To the Victorians, any painting that was born out of
a forbidden homoerotic love would inevitably display the “unhealthy insanity”
(to use the words of Wilde’s detractors) of both its author and subject. It’s
all very Gothic and sinister, what with the painting secreted away in a dusty
attic room for only Dorian to view.
One of the things that most struck me about the story of
Oscar Wilde and the publication/persecution of Dorian Gray was the sadness of viewing Wilde’s history in
hindsight. The adjective “Victorian” has become synonymous with oppressive
morality for a reason. After Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency, he
spent two years in a hard labor prison, and then retreated to Paris where he
died alone, depressed and poor, all conditions he loathed. Although there are a
few aspects of modernity I believe he would find repellent (e.g., the Pizza Hut
P’Zone, the American penchant for wearing tear-away pants and Adidas slides in
airports), I think that Wilde would have greatly enjoyed the present. To
paraphrase Nicholas Frankel, the author of the general introduction, he would
not have been forced to live the secret double life that spawned Dorian Gray, and he certainly would not
have found himself and his ideals in conflict with a Puritanical society. He
would possibly have been celebrated, according to Harold Bloom, as “an
aesthetic superstar” not unlike Truman Capote or Andy Warhol. On a personal
note, Oscar Wilde is probably Number One on the list of invitees to my zombie
cocktail party, which will be entirely comprised of dead people who seem like
they would be highly entertaining. Other
invitees include Truman Capote and Andy Warhol. And Waylon Jennings. 
obviously.
If you’ve not read Dorian
Gray, consider picking it up. In some ways the book is a story about the
danger of confusing life and art. Not to make a speech or nothin’, but it
should also make you think about the ways that art can have very real
implications for people’s lives, the way this book did on Wilde’s. And. AND! It
should make you deeply grateful that you don’t live in the 19th
century. Because not only were most people painfully repressed and judgmental
and rabidly homophobic, but they had to drink hideous drinks like vermouth with
orange bitters, or absinthe, which tastes like aftershave. Anyone who tells you
differently is kidding themselves. Plus, they all probably smelled terrible
since they weren’t wearing any deodorant under all those clothes. That is, if
the Mennonites I saw last week at Rock City are to be believed. But more on
that later.
