I was a literary gourmand and read a vast amount. And I read Joseph Heller, I read Swift, I had Kafka quite young. WS: Well, I read a lot of Russians, a lot of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. WS: Pretty much always, but I kept it close to my chest. Obs: When did you first want to be a writer? WS: Anaphylaxis - that's double exposure to a certain kind of shock.
Obs: Your work is always notable for its exotic language, for example 'anfractuous'. I don't think that I've done any more in my version than to push the door wide open so that we can clearly see what's going on on the bed. It became the standard around which a certain conception of contemporary homosexuality was mobilised, and it became a succès de scandale for that very reason. WS: Wilde's book was greeted by young gay men in England at the time as a cult novel. Obs: So your picture in Dorian is perhaps not as druggy or sexy as it might have been? In some ways, it's quite restrained.
And at the end of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian submerges himself in the opium dens of East London. I think it is fair to assume that Wilde probably was an opiate addict. He smokes opium-tinted cigarettes, as Wilde did. Lord Henry Wootton, who, in my version, loses his title, takes opium throughout the book.
WS: They do an inordinate amount of drugs. Obs: I was very struck by the amount of drugs in The Picture of Dorian Gray. I read Wilde once through, gutted it, analysed it and then did my best to forget it. There's also the extraordinary popular delusion and madness of crowds that surrounded the phenomenon of Diana Spencer which is a theme that the book runs with. Obs: You call Dorian 'a shameless reworking of our myth of shamelessness', but occasionally it seemed in some way a postmodern 'condition-of-England' novel. My Wootton is one part me and two other parts people I knew who fitted the bill. Dorian is a nasty little piece of work in Wilde's book just as much as in mine. WS: Wilde famously said that Wootton was as the world saw him, that Hallward was as he really was and that Dorian was as he would like to be. Obs: How much of Will Self is there in Dorian, Henry Wootton and Basil Hallward? WS: This dyadic proposition: the decadence of the 1880s and the decadence of the 1980s. Obs: From many possible themes in Wilde's novel, the one you go for is the contrast between appearance and reality. I'd never have approached the idea of doing it as a novel, I approached it as the idea of doing a screen adaptation, and when the screen adaptation ran into the sand, through my own inability to complete it, I decided the only way to get the thing out was to turn it back into prose. The minute I started looking at Wilde's original, this idea came unbidden. WS: The idea came through the suggestion that I adapt Wilde's Dorian Gray as a film.
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