“I have nothing to declare but my genius,” Irish playwright Oscar Wilde is said to have stated on arriving in America; Merlin Holland’s response in a similar scenario was quite different from his grandfather’s: “Nothing but my albatross,” he quipped. While having a witty and intellectually brilliant Wilde in the family is an undoubted asset to the gene pool, the downside has been heartbreak, loss, litigation, perfidy, piracies, forgeries and the exhaustive demands of Wilde’s legacy.
In After Oscar: the Legacy of a Scandal, Holland relates how the public shame that surrounded Wilde’s downfall shadowed his family into the mid-20th century, and how long after that his fame continued to affect their lives. Wilde was imprisoned because of his homosexuality that was illegal in England at the time.
The scandal shocked society. Devastated, his wife Constance and their children, Cyril and Vyvyan, fled to the Continent, never to see Oscar again. In later years, Vyvyan confided trustingly in his diary: “After his appalling prison experience, he should have come back to Mama and Cyril and me which I think he was perfectly prepared to do at the time.”
Holland is a Wilde scholar and a gifted storyteller who writes in an elegant, lucid style as though in conversation with his reader. He weaves the personal story, its cultural context and the building of Wilde’s eventual social and literary acceptance into a dramatic and engaging narrative. The literary status of Wilde was affected through the years by society’s attitude to his sexuality and, initially, much was done to secure it by Wilde’s great friend and literary executor, Robbie Ross.
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The book traces the intricacies of court battles between Oscar’s friends and enemies, including the relentless tormenting of Ross by Wilde’s mercurial, jealous lover, Alfred Douglas. Other relationships, altered and sometimes marred by Wilde’s legacy, are deftly assembled by Holland: the loving connection between Oscar and Constance; the strong but strained bond between their grown sons; Wilde’s adverse intrusion into Holland’s own relationship with his mother who was susceptible to whitewashing Wilde.
One of Holland’s aims in this book is to set the record straight and debunk the many fabrications that distort the story of his grandfather, and this he does with a forensic thoroughness and meticulous honesty.
Noreen Doody is the author of The Influence of Oscar Wilde on WB Yeats: “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music”
