0.1 Afterword  (Page 5/25)

In the light of such ideas, it is perhaps not surprising that all of Wilde’s previous books had incorporated significantdesign elements; and Ricketts had played a central role personally in no less than five of them, See Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books ; also Frankel, Masking The Text , 191-221. beginning with the book edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891, while also contributing designs and page ornaments to The Woman’s World during Wilde’s tenure as the magazine’s editor (1887-1889). By late 1891, Wilde proudlydeclared Ricketts to be “the subtle and fantastic decorator” of his books ( Complete Letters , 501) and there can be little doubt that the seriousness given to arrangements for the design andillustration of The Sphinx mattered as much to Wilde personally and intellectually as it did to Ricketts.

In his publishing agreement with Mathews and Lane, Wilde also specified carefully how the book should be disseminated uponpublication. As important as his already-quoted remark that he could sanction “no such thing as a popular or cheap edition” are Wilde’s initial refusal tocountenance advertising of the book In mid-June 1892, Wilde wrote to Mathews objecting to advertising of The Sphinx as “too indefinite” and “not…practical” ( Complete Letters , 527). That advertising costs were expressly limited—“not to exceed £5.5.0”—in the eventual contract(Nelson, 96) was almost certainly due to Wilde personally. and his comment to his publishers that “a book of this kind—very rare and curious—mustnot be thrown into the gutter of English journalism…. I hope that the book will be subscribed for before publication, and that as few as possible will be sentfor review” ( Complete Letters , 533). Such remarks are crucial not because of Wilde’s elitism but because of a certainresistance to appropriation, a façade or cool indifference, that is built into the work at the level of meaning, and which it famously shares with itsenigmatic subject, the sphinx. As one reviewer quickly perceived at the time, the poem was “born rare” and “destined—at least in its original form—to becomerarer still” (“Mr. Oscar Wilde and Edgar Poe,” n.p.) Certainly Wilde was fearful of the intellectual damage that “ordinary English newspapers” ( Complete Letters , 533) could do to his work. The scorn with which The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bernhardt’s banned production of Salome had been met in the British press bore out this fear, just as the journalistic reception of the first English edition of Salome , The Yellow Book , and indeed The Sphinx itself (see “Critical Reception” below) were to do. And it is certainly true that, from a strictly commercial viewpoint, “the author dideverything he could to undermine” publication of The Sphinx (Stetz and Lasner, England in the 1890s , 13). But a certain detachment from the circulation process was essential if the book was wholly to incarnate the central conceit of Wilde’spoem, which is on one level at least about the unattainability of positive knowledge, the history of art’s neglect, and the almost hieroglyphicindecipherability of art’s apparent meanings. If The Sphinx aspired to the archaeological condition of a monolithic “sphinx,” in all its enigmatic beauty and unknowability, it was crucial, asWilde remarked to a correspondent about another of his books, that it reach only “a small and quite unimportant sect of perfect people” ( Complete Letters , 526-27). His initial idea, in fact, was to publish an edition of just three copies, Wilde quipped: “one formyself, one for the British Museum, and one for Heaven. I had some doubts about the British Museum” (quoted Ellmann, 421).