Comma in the Afternoon

Abstract

Wilde may have projected the impression of supreme confidence, but he also knew that some of his epigrams did not work. Underneath his carefully studied nonchalance, he was an exceptionally hardworking writer who often spent hours polishing a line of his prose or a verse of his poetry. “‘I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning,’” he reportedly complained to his friend and biographer Robert Sherard, “‘and took out a comma.’ ‘And in the afternoon?’ ‘In the afternoon? Well, I put it back again.’”¹ He approached his epigrams in the same way: a number of them have been revised multiple times, sometimes so radically that their implied meaning changed entirely. While Wilde’s recycling of epigrams has occasionally been interpreted as a sign of laziness,² it at the same time provides us with a very clear picture of the evolution of his technique. Wilde’s famous notebooks, for instance, not only enable us to trace the genesis of individual epigrams but are also a good indication of the efforts that went into producing the seemingly effortless Wildean wit.³ A closer look at a few of the “Phrases and Philosophies” that have undergone such a transformation is, in this sense, an indispensable component of a thorough study of the subject.