Book review: Revealing dive into the ripple effects of Wilde’s scandal

Over time,  the accumulation of myths, half-truths, gossip, and in much more serious instances, egregious misrepresentations and downright lies, have continued to distort the facts about Oscar Wilde

Merlin Holland, author and grandson of Oscar Wilde, aims to counteract the many inaccuracies surrounding the famed-writer’s legacy in a book that was 25 years in the making. File picture: Stephane Cardinale/ Corbis via Getty 

• After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal 
• Merlin Holland
• Europa Editions, £25.00

In the opening chapter of After Oscar: The Legacy of Scandal, Merlin Holland, grandson of Oscar Wilde, recounts the first day of Wilde’s release from prison on May 19, 1897.

That morning, Wilde was brought to the home of the Reverend Stewart Headlam, who in 1895 had stood bail for the disgraced writer. 

There he met Ada and Ernest Leverson. According to Ernest, Wilde had made an enquiry of a Roman Catholic retreat if he could stay there for six months. 

But Headlam told a different version of events: Wilde had asked to see a priest, with the possible intention of converting to Catholicism, not for permission to enter their community.

Nonetheless, the sensational prospect of a newly-spiritualised Wilde entering a retreat proliferated and continues to do so to this day. 

Such myth-making may be the harmless result of poor memories or imaginative colour, even among those who knew him well. 

But over time, as Holland’s utterly engrossing book makes clear, the accumulation of myths, half-truths, gossip, and in much more serious instances, egregious misrepresentations and downright lies, have continued to distort the facts about Wilde.

Divided into five parts and running to well over 600 pages, After Oscar traces the legacy of the Wilde scandal to the present day. 

Holland weaves together elements of social and cultural history, biography, and deeply personal reflection. 

An important history of homophobia within the British establishment

An immense project 25 years in the making, the book is also an important history of homophobia within the British establishment, as well as portrait of a society making the long transition from Victorian vituperation to the gradual embracing of Wilde as a gay icon.

Throughout, Holland’s tone moves between frothy amusement and occasional anger.

He is sometimes hesitant but always frank in discussing his family, even correcting his father’s mistakes and critiquing his mother’s censoriousness of Wilde’s homosexuality. 

He can be compassionate and understanding when writing of his relations and Wilde’s loyal friends, including their failings, but he is judiciously firm when dealing with sloppy biographers or those who acted out of self-interest, ignorance, or bigotry.

After Oscar is also the history of a family who suffered in the wake of Wilde’s conviction and later death in 1900. 

The severest impact of Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency was on his wife Constance and their young children, Cyril and Vyvyan (Merlin Holland’s father). 

Constance was initially supportive of Wilde, but after some meddling by Wilde’s friends in his financial affairs, she lost whatever trust she had left in her husband. 

But if there had been any chance of a reconciliation with Constance, it was destroyed by Wilde going to Italy with his lover, Alfred Douglas (Bosie).

'After Oscar' is also the history of a family who suffered in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s conviction and later death in 1900. File picture: Apic/Getty

This was a decision that Holland determines was motivated by his grandfather’s social isolation: Vyvyan, in his adult diary, which Holland reproduces here, recorded that he believed attitudes made reunion impossible. 

Tragically, Constance then died in 1898, just 40, after a botched operation in Italy by an incompetent gynecologist. 

As with almost everything to do with Wilde, Constance’s illness has been the subject of vague conjecture; it was even suggested that she caught syphilis from her husband. 

Such unhelpful speculation is the kind of untruth that Holland wishes to dispel, and it now seems likely that Constance had undiagnosed multiple sclerosis, and that her operation was to cure a separate issue.

Lamentably, neither Cyril nor Vyvyan ever saw their father again, prevented largely by the strictures of Victorian mores.

The boys were separated from each other and became distant. The lasting effects were profound not only on their personal lives and senses of identity, but also on their careers. 

Holland’s archival work presents strong evidence that Cyril was turned down for the navy in 1903 because he named Wilde as his father on his application form. 

Henceforth, Cyril joined the army, and was determined to erase the stain, as he saw it, of his father’s scandal. 

While Cyril opted for a disciplined life of military service and to prove his manliness, Vyvyan tended to be less controlled and frequently got into trouble. 

Vyvyan, in particular, cuts a sad and lonely figure, emotionally rejected by his aloof guardian Adrian Hope, remote from his brother, and experiencing long periods of rudderlessness. 

Deeply personal letters from the boys to each other, printed in full here, expressing their mutual suffering provide some of the most moving reading in After Oscar.

In the first two decades or so following Wilde’s death, bitter fighting erupted over De Profundis, Wilde’s long prison letter addressed to Douglas which Wilde entrusted to his friend Robert Ross to publish. 

One of Wilde’s most beautiful texts, it was the source of terrible acrimony and legal dispute between Ross and Douglas. 

Ross, who at great personal cost did more to enable Wilde’s posthumous reputation, emerges from Holland’s account as unshakably loyal to Oscar and a selfless father figure to Cyril and Vyvyan.

The astoundingly litigious Douglas, on the other hand, who objected to his depiction in De Profundis, comes across as vengeful, petty, hypocritical, and cruel. 

Increasingly bitter towards Wilde, and with his own homosexual past behind him, Douglas continued to threaten Ross with public exposure, outrageously charging in one letter that Ross had “corrupted and debauched hundreds of boys”. 

Libel battles between Robert Ross and Alfred Douglas

Even Holland admits that the endless libel battles between Ross and Douglas, while fascinating, grow tiring. However, their prominence in the book is justified because they were central to making of Wilde’s reputation.

As each new court battle wearily rehearsed the whole scandal again through the 1910s, Wilde was damagingly reaffirmed in the public mind as a moral degenerate — in the pernicious words of one of Douglas’s prosecutors, the founder of a “cult of sodomy”. 

De Profundis itself was only published in English in full in 1960 by Vyvyan Holland, when all the main players were dead.

Wilde has been the subject of many biographies, including Frank Harris’s Oscar Wilde: Life and Confessions (1916). 

Douglas, sensing an opportunity, worked with Harris on the book and used it to recast himself in a better light and to open up a new flank in the feud with Ross. 

Although Holland is generally sympathetic to Harris, the book contained inaccuracies and questionable reportage of conversations with Wilde. 

Holland is also less forgiving — as was Vyvyan — of Harris’s unflattering depiction of Constance as without “qualities or beauty”.

Holland also recounts his unhappiness with Richard Ellman for including the theory that Wilde died of syphilis in his otherwise masterful biography Oscar Wilde (1987). 

In the end, Ellman — then dying — agreed to place the syphilis conjecture in a footnote — Wilde is officially recorded as dying from cerebral meningitis — but the episode caused a rift with the wider Ellman family.

There are other disillusionments, including Holland’s annoyance at the makers of the 1997 film Wilde for valuing commercial expediency over fidelity to fact, and for the emphasis in the film on Wilde’s homosexuality over his literary genius.

Is it possible to correct the record completely? Most probably not. Films cannot be un-made and books cannot be un-written. 

But Holland’s monumental undertaking amounts to more than correcting errors. There is a much greater principle at stake, and that is to try to rescue the truth from lies and misrepresentations.