Today, Oscar Wilde is one of the most celebrated writers in English, both instantly recognisable and actually read. His plays are performed. His words are quoted. He reclines in effigy on both the Strand and the King’s Road. He even has a commemorative window in Westminster Abbey. But it was not always so.
When he died in Paris, in 1900, aged just 46, the obituaries were not generous. There was a feeling of relief that an embarrassing figure had been removed the scene, and a general hope that he and his works would soon be forgotten. The Pall Mall Gazette suggested that nothing he wrote had “the strength to endure”.
Just five years before, he had been the toast of London, with two successful plays running in the West End, but his arrest and conviction on charges of “gross indecency with male persons” had precipitated a very spectacular fall. Two years in prison were followed by three years of disgrace, continental exile, poverty and declining health, before the sad end at the modest Hotel d’Alsace.
Only the hotel staff and handful of old friends attended the funeral, even fewer made the trip to the cemetery at Bagneux, in the outer suburbs, to see him interred. His long-suffering wife, Constance, had predeceased him, and although his two sons – 15-year-old Cyril and 14-year-old Vyvyan, survived, they were at schools in England, camouflaged with the adopted surname “Holland”, and ignorant of their father’s whereabouts. Indeed, they had been led to believe – by their strait-laced maternal relatives – that their father was already dead.
The story of Oscar’s glorious posthumous rehabilitation, together with the long shadow that he cast over his two sons and continues to cast over his single grandchild, is the subject of this fascinating book – written, with an engaging combination of wit, personal candour and scholarly rigour, by the grandchild himself, Merlin Holland.
The strands are both cultural and personal, and Holland plaits them together with a deft hand. Strict chronology is eschewed, in favour of a more episodic approach. This occasions some minor moments of repetition but produces a clearer sense of the unfolding drama. And the story is dramatic, touched with comedy, tragedy, farce and considerable pathos.
The struggle to secure Wilde’s legacy in the decade-and-a-half after his death is dominated by the figure of Robbie Ross, the “devoted friend” who brought Wilde’s estate back from the bankruptcy into which it had been plunged at the time of his fall. He facilitated experimental German productions of Salome, oversaw a multi-volume edition of The Works of Oscar Wilde, encouraged the young Arthur Ransome to write a first critical study of Wilde’s work, and coordinated the ambitious project to move Oscar’s grave to the fashionable Parisian cemetery, Père-Lachaise, and have it marked with a magnificent monument by the sculptor Jacob Epstein (paid for by a wealthy female admirer of Wilde’s work).
Plans for John Gielgud to unveil the blue plaque on the front of Wilde’s Tite Street house were derailed when he was arrested for cottaging
This tomb, with its “demon angel” figure , plays a recurrent and entertaining role in the book, from the moment the French authorities cover it with tarpaulin due to anxieties about the sculpture’s nudity, to the later mysterious disappearance of the sculpture’s prominent “member” (which had by then become smoothed by frequent caresses); and – more recently – the author’s own battles with French bureaucracy to get the tomb listed as a monument to help protect it from the myriad lipstick kisses planted by enthusiastic votaries.
In all his efforts Ross was busily hindered by the antagonism of his one-time friend (and Oscar’s former lover), Lord Alfred Douglas, who in the years following Wilde’s death had renounced his past, converted to Roman Catholicism, and married. His jealousy of Ross, and his ire at being continually presented as the “evil genius” of Wilde’s life, fuelled a ceaseless round of spite and litigation.
And this Punch and Judy show, as Holland terms it, continued after Ross’s early death. Indeed, up until Douglas’s own demise in 1945 anyone who chose to write about Wilde might find themselves in the litigious lord’s crosshairs; even Vyvyan Holland was not immune.
This, though, was only one of the strains faced by Oscar’s children as they confronted their paternal inheritance. The book offers poignant descriptions of their lonely childhoods – they were kept apart, sent to different schools, quartered with different friends and relations. Cyril, older and aware of the reasons for his father’s disgrace, retreated into convention. Determined to “wipe the stain away”, he joined the Royal Artillery straight after school and died from a sniper’s bullet on the Western Front in 1915, aged 30.
Vyvyan, sensitive and literary, had a more complex relationship with his father’s legacy. His own literary career, as a respected translator from French, was supported by the substantial royalties that in time came from the estate – especially after the actor-manager George Alexander bequeathed back the rights to The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan. But even this created its own problems.
The late 1940s were bumper years, with major film productions and West End revivals of the plays, but they coincided with the postwar Labour government’s imposition of a one-off 50% levy on investment income. Vyvyan was landed with a tax bill for £3,600 at the very moment his own income was dwindling and the copyright on Wilde’s published works was approaching its end. He struggled to keep up, (writing an autobiography, Son of Oscar Wilde, in an effort to earn money) but in 1955 was declared bankrupt.
It was an embarrassment that took place against the accelerating growth of his father’s reputation as both writer and cultural icon. Such increasing status stimulated, among other things, a long (and continuing) cavalcade of Wildean forgeries, fabrications and fantasies. They are all entertainingly detailed here, including the spiritualist volume The Ghost Epigrams of Oscar Wilde with arresting apercus, such as, “Love, like the measles, attacks only the young.”
But the upward path was not always smooth. For most of the 20th century, Wilde’s growing reputation remained subject to periodic eclipse by the lingering scandal of his sexuality – a scandal that had a way of coming into focus at inopportune moments. Plans for John Gielgud to unveil the blue plaque on the front of Wilde’s Tite Street house were derailed when he was arrested for cottaging. (The task was delegated to Compton Mackenzie.) If Vyvyan became wearily accustomed to such setbacks, they greatly distressed his Australian wife, Thelma, who, as a skincare specialist with the firm Cyclax, gave beauty advice to the young Queen Elizabeth, and was anxious to whitewash the family history.
It was Merlin’s growing anxieties about this project – which Thelma continued after Vyvyan’s death in 1967 – that gradually drew him into the Wildean world. After a childhood trying to avoid what seemed an embarrassing association, and a post-university career in academic publishing in the Middle East, he came to realise that honesty was what was needed. If he was going to acknowledge his grandfather it must be not as a mere “living link” with the past, but as an informed expert. And that is what he has become: the author of several important books of Wildean history and historiography – including this one.
Not that the DNA is unimportant. He gives a hair-raising account of attending Moscow Pride in 2006, caught between neo-fascist thugs and the Russian riot police. He had gone, at the entreaty of the organisers, as “the grandson of Oscar Wilde”. It was a courageous gesture, but also a vivid example of his grandfather’s continuing and ever-evolving power. Wilde’s afterlife remains almost as rich and entertaining as his life.
Matthew Sturgis is the author of Oscar: A Life (Head of Zeus). After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal by Merlin Holland is published by Europa (£30). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
