Wilde about Oscar and his links to the West

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy meets Gerard Hanberry who will tell a conference on literature next week of a family mired in tragedy

If Oscar Wilde’s family were around today, they’d be addicted to Facebook and Twitter, observes Gerard Hanberry, the author of a highly-regarded book on Wilde’s connection with Galway and the west of Ireland.

Gerard – one of the speakers at a conference entitled A Millennium and a Half of Irish Literary Heritage, to be held in Galway next week – describes the Wildes’ ability to network and climb the social ladder as second to none.

“Nothing with the Wildes was as it seems when you turned it over,” he says. There was deception, grandiosity and self-delusion, family traits that played a role in Oscar Wilde’s downfall and public humiliation in London 1895. That was, according to Gerard, a ‘tragedy of Greek proportions spun out in the Victorian era’, with court cases involving libel and sodomy, which saw a playwright at the peak of his fame sentenced to prison and hard labour. When he emerged, he was a broken man.

Gerard’s book, More Lives Than One: The Remarkable Wilde Family Through the Generations, shows how Oscar’s family – on both sides – rose from relatively humble backgrounds to achieve major social standing in Ireland and further afield before it all came tumbling down with his disgrace.

Gerard’s talk at the Galway conference will be The Literary Wilde Family: Their Western Roots and Influences and it will take place at the Town Hall theatre next Thursday. He is part of a distinguished line-up which includes Brenda Maddox, author of the renowned biography of Nora Barnacle, as well as Joycean expert Frit Senn from Zurich.

The conference, at the Town Hall Theatre, will explore over 1,500 years of Irish literature and its legacy. Gerard, who was born in the city suburb of Knocknacarra when it was still a country spot, is very happy, if a little bemused to be part of such an illustrious gathering.

But it’s not that he hasn’t earned his stripes. A highly regarded poet as well as a biographer, Gerry is a winner of the Originals Short Story Prize at Listowel Writers’ Festival and has been shortlisted for numerous other prizes, including a Hennessy Award. However, he is quick to point out that he is not an academic, and most of those taking part in the conference are from university backgrounds.

“I am a storyteller rather than a researcher and this story is almost a Greek tragedy. I wanted to take it across the generations because it is such a fantastic saga and there was a foreshadowing of Oscar’s tragedy.”

Gerard – also an English teacher and talented musician– developed his fascination with the Wilde family when he was doing an MA in Creative Writing at NUIG some years ago.

“I got interested in Sir William and got my hands on his book Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands (1867).  It was a great book and I thought it would be a nice project for the course, to revisit the places he wrote about in Lough Corrib and see what sites were there today.”

Sir William, Oscar’s father was a character, and Gerard was spurred to do further research into him and his family, “thinking I’d get a few articles out of it”.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.