Never Simple

I enjoyed Rebecca Mead’s Profile of Stephen Fry, with its descriptions of his current romp as Lady Bracknell in a new production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” (“Wilde at Heart,” November 24th). But, in regard to the subversiveness of Wilde’s play, there is an additional piece of information that’s worth mentioning. Some historians suggest that, in late-Victorian queer circles, “earnest” could have been used as slang for “homosexual.” This idea gained traction because of John Gambril Nicholson’s 1892 poetry collection, “Love in Earnest,” which celebrated male love. As such, Wilde’s title may have been a double-entendre, as “The Importance of Being Earnest” could also mean “The Importance of Being Gay.”

Wilde himself was deeply aware of coded language, as homosexuality was criminalized in Britain at the time. How fitting that in lieu of a traditional curtain call, Fry’s show, as Mead explains, honors Wilde’s often sly employment of a green carnation in his lapel by having the actors dance as extravagantly costumed flowers.

David Kwiat
Retired Professor of Theatre
New World School of the Arts
Miami, Fla.

I’m glad that Fry is keeping Wilde’s flame burning, but who will speak for his American counterpart, and occasional lover, Clyde Fitch? Almost completely forgotten today, Fitch was arguably a more successful playwright than Wilde during their lifetimes; he produced nearly sixty plays in twenty years, sometimes running five plays at once on Broadway, including an adaptation of “The House of Mirth” which he wrote with Edith Wharton. His mother sent his library—along with many of its furnishings—to his alma mater, Amherst College, which installed it all as the Clyde Fitch Memorial Room. When I attended Amherst, in the nineties, none of my gay theatre friends knew that, a hundred years earlier, another had thrived there. It would have helped.

Daniel Levinson Wilk
Professor of American History
Fashion Institute of Technology
New York City

Heated

Rivka Galchen, in her article about Iceland’s encouraging progress in tapping its vast geothermal-energy reserves, indicates that geothermal energy lags behind nuclear, solar, and wind in part because the latter sources are boosted by far more research and subsidies (“The Heat of the Moment,” November 24th). Geothermal power is surely not the only deserving laggard. “Clean”-energy subsidies too often miss their mark, and they are notoriously persistent once whole industries and regions become dependent on them. Take corn-based ethanol: Congress continues to prop it up despite the fact that decades of scientific analysis has found that it has no significant climate benefits. As for electric-vehicle subsidies, only time will tell whether they’ll be a net good for the environment, or just make billionaires richer.

A broad, briskly rising tax on climate pollution—carbon dioxide, fugitive methane, fluorocarbons—would, on the other hand, claw back the implicit subsidy that fossil fuels now enjoy, seeing as their pollutants are dumped freely. It would simultaneously provide across-the-board incentives for climate-friendly energy, spurring the lowest-carbon alternatives: energy conservation and efficiency. Targeted subsidies don’t always reach underdog alternatives, known and unknown. A carbon tax would.

James Handley
Washington, D.C.

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