Picture(s) of Dorian Gray

By M.G. Wood

I re-read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray over the Autumnal Equinox.

I first read Dorian Gray as a delinquent teenager in high school, still struggling to discover what form, shape, and size my intellectual curiosity would take. And while I thoroughly enjoyed the book back then, I was unprepared for how rich and evocative Dorian Gray would be to me now, as a 42 year old man. But, of course (hand slaps forehead) a book about a man facing his mortality, and the accompanying physical and cosmetic decline, would impact someone who is in actuality staring unblinkingly at the coming attractions of Act II, more than the young scamp about to launch. Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray (or at least the short story version) in 1890 at the age of 26. Lord Henry's theory that beauty and youth, and the indulging of the senses; a hedonistic life; is the only path for a person of means, leads Dorian to wish upon his portrait that he may stay forever young.

Indeed Dorian was able to exploit his beauty and youth for sensual gain, only to watch his portrait suffer the consequences...

He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.

“...which were more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray may cause many middle-aged crazies to regret their past or dread the future. But, Pop Psych Phenom writer Malcolm Gladwell says not so fast...

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Author Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell’s Late Bloomers

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we're inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, Citizen Kane, at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with Moby-Dick. Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ( I grow old . . . I grow old )? Twenty-three. Poets peak young, the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of Flow, agrees: The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young. According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, Robert Lowell's Skunk Hour, Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, William Carlos Williams's Red Wheelbarrow, Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish, Ezra Pound's The River Merchant's Wife, Sylvia Plath's Daddy, Pound's In a Station of the Metro, Frost's Mending Wall, Wallace Stevens's The Snow Man, and Williams's The Dance. Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person's game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost's anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it's forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it's forty-nine per cent.

The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho —one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at fifty-eight.

***

The day after I finished Dorian Gray was Election Day. And given the disconnect between what President Bush sees in the mirror and what everyone else in the world sees, I couldn’t help thinking about the Presidential Portraits that each President has painted. They line the halls of the White House like ghosts from the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. And I thought what disfigured, diseased bloody mess W.’s portrait would show if he existed within the gothic world of Dorian Gray.

One of the strange effects of being so emotionally swept up in the euphoria and joy of a once in a lifetime Election Day, for me, has been my utter disinterest in wallowing in the bile and acid of an ulcerous art. Which, seeing how my work as a writer over the last two years has been mired in death and darkness, I am either finished as a writer (highly improbable), or I am about to enter another phase in my continuing evolution as a little-read and less-paid writer.

Case in point: I had begun writing this review of WHAT WE DO IS SECRET, a film about the suicidal punk legend Darby Crash, when Election Day came, and I found I couldn’t finish it.

Darby Crash

WHAT WE DO IS SECRET

"We did this show so you new people could see what it was like when we were around. You're not going to see it again."

Darby Crash’s parting words to a select few audience members who witnessed his final performance at The Starwood Club in West Hollywood, California, Dec. 3, 1980. What shone through most in Penelope Spheeris’ interview with Crash in The Decline of Western Civilization was an innocence and sweetness; behind the broken tooth, crooked smile was a childlike playfulness. Darby would have no way of knowing that the corrupted fame he sought was being filmed in his kitchen that morning. The scene of Crash attempting unsuccessfully to fry an egg, while his girlfriend told the endearing story of how a house painter died in their backyard, would go on to be one of the most famous scenes from the great lost doc, and really the only way most non-Punk afficionados came to know this twisted young one.

A few weeks before The Decline of Western Civilization was released in theaters, Darby Crash’s “official” plan to become a legend came to fruition in the form of a “planned” suicidal heroin overdose on December 7, 1980. Crash’s plan to be to the Punks what Jim Morrison was to the Hippies, was quickly eclipsed the next day, when another Hippie hero went down, John Lennon.

WHAT WE DO IS SECRET is a film nine years in the making, about the raucous downward spiral that was The Germs. Although we are forced to sit through the paint-by-numbers plot-lines involving band jealousies and squabbling; petty bickering and of course: sex and drugs; we can take solace in the fact that the music will propel us through whatever bullshit modern American film-making requires. The great Pat Smear (lead guitarist for The Germs and Nirvana) produced the music for the film, lending much-needed credibility to the festivities. And while most will be initially turned off by the prospect of a bunch of pretty movie stars playing their own instruments and performing Punk songs written before they were born; the fact is, they actually sound pretty good; Smear has gone so far as to say that the “Baby Germs”, as they are called, play better than the real thing; which is kind of beside the point when it comes to Punk Music. But, you know, what the fuck, Darby would have gotten a thrill at the sight of a pretty boy like Shane West surgically chipping his tooth and performing carefully orchestrated self-mutilation to pull off such a spot-on performance.

Read the entirety of Mr. Gladwell's "Late Bloomers"