A questionnaire filled in by a young Oscar Wilde comes up at Sotheby’s online Summer Miscellany sale of Books and Manuscripts which closes on August 4. Recording preferences across 39 questions he responds as follows:
Your idea of happiness? ‘Absolute power over men’s minds, even if accompanied by chronic toothache’
Your idea of misery? ‘Living a poor and respectable life in an obscure village’.
What is your dream? ‘Getting my hair cut’
‘What is your aim in life?’ ‘Success: fame or even notoriety’.
Wilde was in his early twenties when he contributed to the album of “Mental Photographs” in 1877. He was still at Oxford and yet to publish a book, but had already established a keen following. It is signed grandiosely with his full name, ‘Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde’.
It is from the collection of actor and director Steven Berkoff (b.1937), famed for his villainous on-screen roles including General Orlov in the James Bond classic, Octopussy (1983). Berkoff began collecting Oscar Wilde material around the time he directed Wilde’s great tragedy, Salome, in the late 1980s. The show opened to acclaim at The Gate Theatre, Dublin, on the sixtieth anniversary of Salome’s first controversial public viewing there in 1928, and went on to sell out at London’s National Theatre, before travelling to Japan, Germany and beyond. The estimate is £40,000-60,000.
