The Banality of Banality

This meme turned up in my feed at Facebook yesterday, and when I checked I found, to my surprise, that it was authentic: Wilde did write these words, in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.  No doubt he had in mind the gospel saying "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal" (Matthew 6:19-20).

But then I began to wonder, and not for the first time, why people choose a platitude like this from the writings of someone who produced a huge store of genuinely witty, intelligent, thought-provoking and meaningful sayings.  (One example out of many: "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.")  Almost anyone could have said the words in that meme, and many have.  Jesus himself was hardly original: the transience of material possessions was a cliche in his own time.  (Helpful hint: if a religious or philosophical teacher preaches against accumulating material possessions, that is a sign that he lives in a culture where most people accumulate material possessions.)  Many of the quotations I see on Facebook consist of putting banalities into the mouths of famous people who didn't say them, which is why this one almost fooled me.

The Way of a Man With a Lad ...

There are three things too wondrous for me, yea, four things which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way people keep talking about homosexuality as an "identity," though they have no idea what an identity is. Or homosexuality, for that matter.

I've just begun reading the new, uncensored, annotated edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, published this year by Harvard University Press. The editor, Nicholas Frankel, has gone back to the magazine publication and Wilde's typescript, which apparently contain more obviously homoerotic content than the book version. That should be interesting, since even some very sensible queer scholars have doubted that Wilde intended sodomitical interpretations of his characters.

But so far I'm still in the introductory material, and damned if Frankel didn't put his foot in it almost immediately. From page 7:

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that in the Victorian era, sexual preference was less clearly seen as an identity; indeed, the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892, when it was used adjectivally in a translation of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis (it was first used as a noun in 1912). Wilde and the other men who participated in London’s homosexual subculture, many of them leading secret double lives, would have been viewed by the majority not as homosexuals per se but as men indulging in “unclean” vices. Even so, homosexual acts were generally considered repugnant and deviant – and for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

Here we have the usual confused and contradictory thrashing around. If it is so significant that "the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892," if it marks some kind of sociocultural watershed, how could London have had a "homosexual subculture" before 1892? How could "homosexual acts" be considered repugnant if they didn't exist before they bore that name, and how could "homosexuality" be criminalized by a law passed seven years before the word entered the language?

Yes, I'm being deliberately pedantic here, but I think it's justified. If "homosexual" uniquely denotes "identity" (a word that neither Frankel nor most other scholars who use it bother to define), it can't be applied to anything that occurred or existed before it passed into the language. It would also be nice if someone explained how the advent of the word "homosexual" magically produced "homosexual identity." As I've said before, talk like this is generally based on a misreading of Michel Foucault, and is more of a genuflection to his influence than a well-founded historical statement.

And no, I'm not being too hard on Frankel. Look again at the latter part of the quotation above:

... for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

This is clumsily written, but on its face it's false. What changed with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (often called the Labouchere Amendment after the Member of Parliament who introduced it) was that a wider range of genital contact between males became unlawful. Henry VIII's statute made "Buggery either with Mankind or with any Animal" a capital crime; there wasn't absolute agreement as to what constituted buggery, whether it extended to oral-genital contact or was limited to anal penetration -- the law required proof of penetration, and was generally interpreted to refer to the latter. The death penalty was abolished for most crimes in 1828. (I'm drawing here on H. Montgomery Hyde's The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid Look at Homosexuality in Britain [Little, Brown, 1970], pages 91-93 and 134-136.) If by "homosexuality" Frankel means "sexual relations between males," then homosexuality had been criminalized centuries before Labouchere; if he means "acts labeled 'homosexual,'" then Labouchere didn't even touch on them.

It can be, and has been, argued that buggery doesn't equal "homosexuality," so under that rather strained interpretation "homosexuality" wasn't criminalized before the Labouchere Amendment. But it it wasn't criminalized after it, either: what the Amendment criminalized were acts, however vaguely specified, not identities. And so matters remained as far as the law was concerned: the "sodomy" laws overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2003 also were about acts, not identities. Most of these laws penalized sodomy between males and females, as well as between males, so they didn't criminalize homosexuality either.

Besides, "bugger" is also an identity. I think it was in a biography of Virginia Woolf that I read that when she began meeting her brother's male friends who did the nasty with other males, she had to learn to refer to them as "buggers," not "sods." Despite their bugger identity, several of them married and sired children; despite their heterosexual marriages, most of these men continued having it off with other men. Probably "sodomite" had functioned as an identity long before that, as Mark Jordan suggested in his The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997).

Nor is it clear what homosexual or gay "identity" means today, or why it matters. That's what bothers me about discussions like Frankel's: there doesn't seem to be any point in invoking identity here. It doesn't explain anything, and it doesn't make much sense.

Gals Go Wilde

"... Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself."

If I had encountered that line out of its context, I'd have guessed it was one of Oscar Wilde's aphorisms. But Jane Austen wrote it, for her character Elizabeth Bennet in chapter 59 of Pride and Prejudice.*

Nor does it stand alone. There's also this one from chapter 60:

Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere.

And then in chapter 61, the narrator informs us that after her marriage, Elizabeth's father "delighted in going to Pemberley, especially when he was least expected."

This line from chapter 20 isn't Wildean, but it jumped out at me as oddly "modern" the first time I read P&P:

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

I've always thought of Wilde's humor as unique to him, maybe even invented by him, but I'm coming to suspect that I thought so only because I hadn't read enough 19th-century English literature. That suspicion was reinforced when I read Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1880 novel A Fair Barbarian, about a wild young gal of the American West who descends upon her father's sleepy English hometown of Slowbridge. Nineteen-year-old Octavia Bassett appears without warning (but with six trunks full of her wardrobe) at the door of her timid maiden Aunt Belinda. Her father, Martin, is a speculator in silver-mines of great but inconsistent fortune, and just as he was about to visit his sister Belinda for the first time in thirty years, his fortune went South, as we Yanks say, and he had to hurry back to America to build it back up again. (Do fortunes go North when they recover themselves?)

Slowbridge is ruled over, socially speaking, by the gorgon-like arbiter (arbitress?) Lady Theobald, a forerunner of Wilde's Lady Bracknell but lacking Lady Bracknell's greater wealth, station, and London address.

In Slowbridge, America was not approved of -- in fact, was almost entirely ignored, as a country where, to quote Lady Theobald, "the laws were loose, and the prevailing sentiments revolutionary." It was not considered good taste to know Americans, -- which was not unfortunate, as there were none to know; and Miss Belinda Bassett had always felt a delicacy in mentioning her only brother, who had emigrated to the United States in his youth, having first disgraced himself by the utterance of the blasphemous remark that "he wanted to get to a place where a fellow could stretch himself, and not be bullied by a lot of old tabbies" [8-9]

Martin Bassett must not have been the only Slowbridge gentleman who lit out for the territories, because there are hardly any left in town by the time Miss Octavia comes to visit. There is, of course, a working-class fellow who brings her trunks from the railroad station; Mr. John Burmistone, the mill-owner, a recent immigrant in small-town terms, of whom Lady Theobald doesn't approve any more than she does of Americans; and the mild-mannered (not to say milquetoaste) curate, the Rev. Arthur Poppleton. Since none of these are gentlemen, a love interest has to be imported, in the person of Lady Theobald's nephew, Capt. Francis Barold, who drops in to visit Slowbridge and becomes fascinated by the fair barbarian.

The first confrontation between Miss Octavia of Bloody Gulch, Nevada, and Lady Theobald of Slowbridge:

"You don't look like an English girl," remarked her ladyship.

Octavia smiled again. ... "I suppose I ought to be sorry for that," she observed. "I dare say I shall be in time -- when I have been longer away from Nevada."

"I must confess," admitted her ladyship, and evidently without the least regret or embarrassment, "I must confess that I don't know where Nevada is."

"It isn't in Europe," replied Octavia, with a soft, light laugh. "You know that, don't you?" [35]

Later, Lady Theobald takes note of the abundance of jewelry Miss Octavia wears:

"You are a very fortunate girl to own such jewels," she said, glancing critically at the diamonds in her ears; "but if you take my advice, my dear, you will put them away, and leave them until you are a married woman. It is not customary, on this side of the water, for young girls to wear such things -- particularly on ordinary occasions. People will think you are odd."

"It is not exactly customary in America," replied Octavia, with her undisturbed smile. "There are not many girls who have such things. Perhaps they would wear them if they had them. I don't care a very great deal about them, but I mean to wear them."

Lady Theobald departed in a dudgeon [39].

Miss Belinda remonstrates mildly with her niece.

But Octavia did not appear overwhelmed by the existence of the standards in question. She turned to the window again.

"Well, anyway," she said, "I think it was pretty cool in her to order me to take off my diamonds, and save them until I was married. How does she know whether I mean to be married, or not? I don't know that I care about it" [40-41].

Octavia is more of a Huck Finn than a Gwendolyn or a Cecily, but Lady Theobald is very much a Lady Bracknell-wannabe. Burnett, though born in England, moved with her family to the US at the age of 16, and spent most of the rest of her life there, with only occasional residence in England. She has a nice touch with the clashing provincialisms of America and Britain, and though A Fair Barbarian drags a bit towards the end -- Burnett seems bored with the story -- she wraps it up neatly enough, with some small surprises.

This was the first book I've read by Burnett with an adult protagonist, and it's a hoot. She's best-known now for her "children's" books Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, which in their day were read and loved by adults as much as children. I think A Fair Barbarian would make a great film. There's a 1917 silent version, but someone today with the right feeling for a comedy of manners could make something very entertaining out of it. It's quite different in its tone and attitudes than I expected from 19th-century fiction, just as Jane Austen's novels shook me out of my preconceptions about what an English spinster would write about 70 years earlier.

Which brings me to something that kept occurring to me as I read Pride and Prejudice last night. The writing drips irony, and some fairly intense sarcasm. Do most Austen fans notice it? After re-watching Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's very fine and successful Sense and Sensibility a month ago, which missed or left out the irony too, I'm inclined to doubt it. As Jane Eyre is often mistaken for a proto-Gothic romance novel ("Always to be a governess and always in love," Virginia Woolf sneered in the 1920s), so Austen's novels seem to be thought of as simple proto-Harlequin romances.

For example, though Austen accepted her society's ideas about class and breeding, she knew very well that a title and thousands of pounds did not automatically make a good person. The Bennet parents in Pride and Prejudice are human failures in their different ways, but there is also the affectionate but insincere Miss Bingley, and even more there is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who despite her august station is not really different from the empty-headed Mrs. Bennet. I've been wondering what Miss Austen would have thought of the great working-class critic Raymond Williams's impression of his class 'superiors' at Cambridge:

The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunately enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people.

*I'm referring to chapters in P&P rather than page numbers because there are so many editions of Austen's novels, and besides, the chapters are short enough to make it fairly easy to find a passage. I quote A Fair Barbarian from a 1995 facsimile reprint, by the University of Idaho Press, of the 1880 original, but it can also be found online.

Wilde In The Streets

Here's another review for Gay Community News, published in the January 15-21, 1989 issue. The caricature above is by Max Beerbohm, a younger contemporary and friend of Wilde's who outlived him by more than half a century.

Oscar Wilde
by Richard Ellmann
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
680 pp.

Oscar Wilde's London: a Scrapbook of Vices and Virtues 1880-1900
by Wolf Von Eckardt, Sander L. Gilman, and J. Edward Chamberlin
Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987
285 pp.

The Oscar industry grinds on, and its two latest offerings demonstrate the range of its products’ quality.

The idea behind Oscar Wilde’s London is a good one. “This book is not about Oscar Wilde,” the authors assert in the Introduction. “It is about the city that made Oscar Wilde.” If, like me, you’re a bit vague on the actual conditions of late Victorian Britain, a social history sounds like just the thing to help understand how Wilde perceived himself and was perceived in his day. Biographers fill in quite a bit of this background, but there are many details -- such as the fact that when Wilde arrived in London in 1879, electric street lights were just beginning to be installed there -- which don’t belong to biography proper but help to understand its subject.

The best thing about Oscar Wilde’s London is its illustrations, particularly the many photographs, most of which are so clear and sharp they might have been taken yesterday. Not just of the famous, they include some fascinating pictures of daily life by one Paul Martin (see pp. 19-20, 94), whose work I’d like to know better. The text is less impressive. The chapters on London’s growth, on the poor, and on sports and popular entertainment are pretty good. But the book seems rather poorly organized. It offers no information on how the three authors divided up the writing among themselves, and at times I had the feeling that it had been pasted together too quickly. Topics are sometimes dropped almost in the middle, with the outcome of one or another controversy omitted as though everyone knew it. There are also some odd errors which suggest a lack of care in fact-checking. The message on the infamous visiting card left for Wilde by the Marquess of Queensberry, which led to Wilde’s downfall, is quoted here as “To Oscar Wilde posing as a sodemite (sic)” (73). Queensberry did indeed misspell the key word, but I’ve always seen it rendered “Somdomite”, and had thought the error was almost as well-known as some of Wilde's epigrams. (According to Richard Ellmann’s new biography, the actual message was “To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite”.) I felt that the connection with Oscar Wilde was too tenuous, more of a marketing hook than a unifying principle for the book. Still, Oscar Wilde’s London is worth a look, and it includes a long reading list which should be useful to anyone who wants to explore the subject more thoroughly. See if your library has it.

The late Richard Ellmann completed Oscar Wilde just before his death in 1987, and while it is neither as exhaustive nor as definitive as his famous biography of James Joyce, this new biography is notable for its warmth, good judgment, and good writing. It is the least homophobic of any book on Wilde by a straight author that I’ve seen: not just free of amateur psychoanalysis but a bit disdainful of that popular biographical perversion, and downright scornful of the hypocrisy which destroyed Wilde's life and career. Nowadays we ought to be able to take such an attitude for granted, but unfortunately it’s still rare enough that Ellmann deserves notice for it.

Ellmann, in fact, writes as an unabashed fan of Wilde, and this makes his book even more refreshing. He has many touching stories to tell about Wilde’s generosity and kindness (see especially pp. 412-13), even in areas where other biographers turn up their noses: “What seems to characterize all Wilde’s affairs is that he got to know the boys as individuals, treated them handsomely, allowed them to refuse his attentions without becoming rancorous, and did not corrupt them” (390). He praises Wilde’s defense of ‘Greek love’ at his trial: “For once Wilde spoke not wittily but well.” Ellmann also credits those courageous souls who helped Wilde when he needed it most. Frank Harris, who is often portrayed (not entirely without reason) as a major buffoon in books about Wilde, has a shining moment of humanity that makes up for a lot of silliness. Believing that Wilde had not committed the acts of which he was convicted, Harris arranged to borrow a yacht to smuggle him to the Continent. When he told him of the plan, “...Wilde broke out and said, ‘You talk with passion and conviction, as if I were innocent.’ ‘But you are innocent,’ said Harris, ‘aren’t you?’ ‘No,’ said Wilde. ‘I thought you knew that all along.’ Harris said, ‘I did not believe it for a moment.’ ‘This will make a great difference to you?’ asked Wilde, but Harris assured him it would not” (468). There are people today who couldn't rise to so much humanity. By way of contrast, the painter Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones “hoped that Wilde would shoot himself and was disappointed when he did not” (479).

There is one area where Wilde’s generosity failed, however, and since no one ever seems to comment on it, I'd like to. Ellmann seems not much bothered by the clear indications that Wilde married because he needed money and public proof of heterosexual normality, and though he was charmed and attracted by Constance Lloyd, he doesn’t seem ever to have taken her seriously. He evidently began to neglect her almost at once, first for his rounds of socializing and travel, then for the young men who occupied his real sexual and romantic interest. After Wilde’s downfall, “Paul Adam, in La Revue blanche of 15 May 1895, argued that Greek love was less harmful than adultery” (482). But Wilde’s love for Alfred Douglas was adulterous, to say nothing of all those hardened little hustlers to whom he was apparently rather kinder than he was to his wife and children. While he was in prison, a reconciliation was arranged which Ellmann seems to think could have succeeded, but it was forestalled by the return of Douglas and by Constance’s death in 1898. I don't doubt that Wilde was so grateful for his wife’s willingness to forgive him that he really believed he loved her, and would change his ways forever. But I also don’t doubt that once he’d regained his freedom, he would have allowed boredom to set in. Despite this, Wilde doesn't come off badly compared to his heterosexual contemporaries -- how many of them went to prison for marrying money or neglecting their wives? -- or to many gay men and lesbians before and since who’ve made the mistake of marrying heterosexually to get a hostile society off their backs. The more so if Ellmann is correct that Wilde had no overt sexual experience with men before his marriage, and some experience with women; that’s a classic formula for disastrous self-deception.

It’s unfortunate that Wilde was unable to pick up the pieces of his life and career after his imprisonment. He had a social conscience, encouraged by his Irish nationalist mother, and had done some interesting political writing; he wasn’t quite the mindless butterfly he sometimes pretended to be. As we watch around us the ominous rise of the same forces that destroyed him, he no longer seems as quaint as he did in the 1970s, and his life has much to teach us. Ellmann’s biography is probably the one to read, and now that it‘s out in paperback it’s the one to own: humane, learned, affectionate and smoothly written, Oscar Wilde is a model of the biographer’s art.

Bosie And The Danger Queen

Jesus, what a foofy outfit!

I slowed down drastically in my book reviewing after 1984, but I'm not sure why the next Gay Community News review I can find wasn't published until 1987. (The May 10-16 issue.) I'll have to dig some more. Meanwhile, here's the next one I have.

Lord Alfred Douglas
by H. Montgomery Hyde
Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1985
$19.95 cloth, 366 pp.

Oscar Wilde: an illustrated biography
by Martin Fido
Peter Bedrick Books/Harper and Row, New York, 1985
$9.95 paper, 144 pp.

More Letters of Oscar Wilde
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis
The Vanguard Press, New York, 1985

On the day that we stand before the Goddess to give account of our lives, Oscar Wilde will have a lot to answer for. He was the centerpiece of probably the biggest homosexual scandal in modern Western history. While the severity of his punishment - 2 years at hard labor - won some sympathy for homosexuals generally and for him in particular, it also scared uncounted English gay men deeply into their closets for years afterward. He reinforced the association of male homosexuality with a sickly, gilded aestheticism which collected and mounted sins like dried butterflies - and Wilde never seriously challenged the idea that diddling boys was sin. (He could have. Walt Whitman's poetry is free of the taint, and it was earlier than Wilde's work; Wilde had even met Whitman.) Numerous writers have suggested that it was this sense of sin that led Wilde into the disastrous libel suit against the Marquess of Queensbury which backfired and sent him to Reading Gaol. This may well be true. Wilde was clearly a danger queen, as can be seen from his fondness for "feasting with panthers" (i.e., consorting with blackmailers). But his personal pathology is of interest mainly as it relates to his pernicious and long-lived influence on other gay men's lives and art.

Of course, blackmail, scandal, and ruin are perennial money-makers, so Wilde has also been the subject of a minor publishing industry devoted to his life and art. Since his story had a gloriously unhappy ending, publishers could safely titillate the public with books about Wilde, his sin, and its wages. This had its flip side: for while writers about Wilde could and must deplore unnatural and unspeakable vice, all those books and articles led to homosexuality's becoming less unspeakable. While the only books about homosexuality a young gay kid might be able to find in the public library (aside from Bieber-Bergler clinical bigotry) would be about the Wilde scandal, at least there would be some nonmedical books about homosexuality there, and a bright kid might realize that if Wilde had had brain one, he could have stayed out of trouble. Nowadays, in our allegedly more enlightened and permissive times, the accounts are a little more lurid and detailed, but the stench of formaldehyde still hovers over the analyses.

An example of what I'm talking about is Oscar Wilde: An Illustrated Biography, by Martin Fido. This large glossy paperback, originally published in England in 1973, tosses out a few details of Wilde's sexual tastes and practices, but thanks one "Dr. Sumi Verma [who] gave me expert advice on the psychopathology or homosexuality." In researching his books on Dickens and Kipling, I wonder, did Fido consult experts on the pathology of heterosexuality? Despite its mildly patronizing tone, however, the book does give an adequate brief account of Wilde's life and times, and the illustrations (many in color) are well-chosen. Not bad for $9.95.

More Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, illustrates another aspect of the Oscar industry. Anyone who possesses a copy of Hart-Davis's huge 1962 edition of Wilde's letters will probably want this addendum for completeness' sake: 164 of the two hundred-odd letters which have turned up since 1962. Wilde always wrote gracefully, and More Letters can be read with pleasure, but the fact remains that most of them are on the level of this 1889 telegram to Clyde Fitch ("Prolific and successful American dramatist [1864-1909]," Sir Rupert helpfully informs us): "What a charming day it has been Oscar." I don't think this is a good place to start if you are interested in Wilde's letters; look for the 1979 Selected Letters, which is available in paperback, instead.

In the case of a martyrdom like Wilde's there is always the temptation to look for a villain, and for a long time Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas was cast as Judas by Wilde's admirers. While in prison, Wilde had written Douglas a long letter, later published as De Profundis, in which he accused the boy of having ruined him by spending all his money, distracting him from his art, goading him into suing Queensbury (Douglas' detested father), and abandoning him to his fate. But Douglas had his own admirers, who have done their best to rehabilitate him, with some success. The chief work was done by Rupert Croft-Cooke, who showed in Bosie (1962) that many of Wilde's charges simply were not true. Croft-Cooke, who had known Douglas personally, also insisted that he was a kindly man, capable of generous encouragement to young writers, and a talented if old-fashioned poet. Now H. Montgomery Hyde, an English barrister who has become one of the pillars of the Oscar Wilde industry with important books on Wilde's trials and on male homosexuality in Victorian England, has published a biography of Douglas which follows in Croft-Cooke's footsteps.

The trouble is that while Douglas was not quite as bad as his enemies claimed, he was still an amoral, paranoid little scumbag who in later life became a self-righteous prig without sacrificing one iota of his amorality or paranoia. Both Croft-Cooke and Hyde try to build Douglas up by running down Robert Ross, who earned a reputation as the man who stood by Wilde through thick and thin and restored his good name years after his death -- and, not incidentally, published De Profundis.

It is true that Douglas remained in England at risk to himself after Wilde's arrest, visiting him in jail, raising money for him, trying to defend him in print after his conviction, and helping to support him after his release from prison. It is also true that Ross had not been linked sexually (and therefore criminally) to Wilde. We know now that Ross boasted privately of having been "Oscar's first boy" and that his homosexuality was more or less an open secret, but his later rehabilitation of Wilde did not put him at risk as it would have Bosie, who also had to rehabilitate himself. It is also true that Ross behaved very badly, not only keeping incriminating letters that legally and morally belonged to Douglas, but supplying those letters to Douglas's adversaries in his many court battles. (Douglas, on the other hand, would probably have destroyed the letters, so posterity's debt is to Ross.) But both Croft-Cooke and Hyde tend to minimize the fact that, unlike Douglas, who in a few years was denouncing Wilde as "the greatest force for Evil that has appeared in Europe during the past 350 years" (Hyde, p. 225), Ross worked devotedly to return Wilde's work to public attention and raised his estate from bankruptcy. Ross also helped many living writers, and he was rightly honored for his services to literature when Douglas was trying to expose him as a bugger.

Now, Ross was no prize: his private life was as seamy as Wilde's. Douglas, by contrast, lived a mostly "respectable" private life after Wilde's death: heterosexual marriage interrupted by one brief adulterous (but heterosexual) fling when his wife left him, followed by years of - so he claimed - chastity. (I don't know whether to credit Samuel Steward's story of tricking with the elderly Bosie.) His public life, by contrast, was spectacularly nasty. Aside from his protracted campaign to destroy Robert Ross, he drifted into yellow journalism as the patron and disciple of T.W. Crosland. This involved him in numerous libel suits both as plaintiff and defendant, culminating in a prison term for proclaiming that Winston Churchill had been in the pay of Jewish bankers during the First World War. (Both Hyde and Croft-Cooke try to distinguish Douglas's anti-Semitism ["the Belloc-Chesterton variety"] from the "racialist" variety implemented by Hitler. This is horseshit. The lies Douglas - and Belloc and Chesterton - helped to circulate were the same paranoid fantasies used by the "racialists," who simply availed themselves of eugenic pseudo-science as an additional prop for their bigotry.) The point is that, his defenders to the contrary, Douglas never reformed, since homosexuality is not reprehensible. His most unappetizing qualities - vanity and bigotry - he hugged close to himself throughout his life.

If you are curious about Alfred Douglas, Hyde's book is a good successor to Croft-Cooke's now out-of-print biography. It's useful to see Douglas in the round, rather than as the boy who betrayed St. Oscar; and it's a real challenge to practice recognizing the humanity even of villains by contemplating the example of Bosie, a man who made a virtual career of denying the humanity of everyone who ever got in his way.