To Be Said to Have Done It Is Everything

Near the beginning of the second act of Mois�s Kaufman's play�Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, the titular Wilde has just been indicted on charges of gross indecency and denied bail. When Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), apologizes for encouraging Wilde to stand trial, Wilde quotes a passage from�The Picture of Dorian Gray, sadly admitting to Bosie that "the real tragedies in life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning" (81). If one were to assemble a list of requirements for good biography, "crudeness," "incoherence," and "want of meaning" would almost certainly not make the list. Biographical forms, be they written, filmed, televised, digitized or performed, are almost always striving for an artistic rendering of these real tragedies, a way of smoothing out the tangled mess of a subject's life, stretching it tautly to fit a neat narrative structure. But a neat narrative structure is not always the best way to accurately represent the multivalency of the subject of a biography, or, indeed, the nature of historical and life writing in general.