Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis

Author:Matthew Sturgis [Sturgis, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 19th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Europe, Great Britain, Historical, History, Literary Figures
ISBN: 9781788545969
Google: 2FNNDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B079YWDXZY
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2018-10-04T03:00:00+00:00

* Douglas, in later life, after he converted to Roman Catholicism and renounced his homosexual past, became almost frantic in his insistence that he had never been sodomized by Wilde. And perhaps this was true, even if Douglas’s letters to Maurice Schwabe (see below) seem to indicate that he was happy to take the passive role during penetrative sex.

† Pigott seems to have regarded the work – and the idea of producing it – as little more than a joke in very poor taste. He wrote confidentially to his colleague Spencer Ponsonby on 27 June 1892, sending him the MS for his ‘private edification and amusement’: ‘It is a miracle of impudence; and I am bound to say that when Mr Abbey, [OW’s] Acting Manager, called on me, in answer to my summons, he lifted up his eyes with a holy shudder of surprise, when I described the piece to him, & recommended him (as Uncle Toby advised the father of the juvenile Poet [in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy]) to “wipe it up & say no more about it”… The piece is written in French – half Biblical, half pornographic – by Oscar Wilde himself. Imagine the average British public’s reception of it.’

‡ Cyril Flower was unlikely to have regarded the relationship between Wilde and Douglas in such an innocent light. He too was a lover of men – and (as Douglas later reported) in 1902 ‘got into serious trouble for activities on the O.W. lines & had to leave the country hurriedly’.

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