Conversations with Wilde by Merlin Holland

Author:Merlin Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

A FATAL FRIENDSHIP

Contrary to appearances, the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas was not that of an older man leading a younger man astray. Douglas, the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry, had already had homosexual relationships while a student at Oxford, and it was as a result of a blackmailing attempt over one of his liaisons that he appealed to Oscar for help. Oscar, who had already met Bosie several times and was attracted by his exceptional good looks, and initially also by his title and the poetry he wrote, found the appeal irresistible … and that, as he later described in De Profundis, was where it all began.

For nearly three years after you had your first great stage success with Lady Windermere’s Fan, you and Alfred Douglas had been more or less inseparable, hadn’t you?

No, not quite. It was a stormy relationship at best. It pains me to say so, but it was essentially an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, and I allowed it to dominate my life entirely. Bosie’s interests were in his meals and his moods, in amusements and pleasures. He had no motives in life – merely appetites. He admired my work when it was finished. He enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them, but while he was by my side I hardly wrote a single line. My life was sterile and uncreative. Nevertheless, there were qualities which I loved in him, and although he may not have been my literary muse, he was certainly a delightful distraction – delightful, that is, until he lost control of his tongue and his emotions, and made terrible scenes and wrote me revolting and loathsome letters. It was a dreadful mania he inherited from his father. Of course, these outbursts were always followed by remorse and reconciliation. One had either to give in to him or to give him up, and I gave in – always. There were times when I remember thinking what an impossible, terrible, utterly wrong state my life had got into.

Things were hardly improved by Queensberry, were they?

No. Bosie’s father was an irascible aristocrat – he’d mistreated his wife and quarrelled with all his children. Francis, his eldest son and heir, had been appointed Private Secretary to Lord Rosebery in the Foreign Office at about the time Bosie and I first met, and Queensberry suspected that their relationship was “private” in more senses than just the official one. He wasn’t best pleased by the idea, so the open secret in London that his third son had formed a romantic attachment to Oscar Wilde, “the high priest of decadence”, he found intolerable. He and I met by chance on a couple of occasions when I was lunching with Bosie in the Café Royal, and both times we parted on friendly terms. But he was soon writing to Bosie about our filthy, disgusting relationship and threatening to horsewhip him if he caught us together in public.

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