BiographyAlready famous, Oscar Wilde's very public disgrace and imprisonment copper-fastened his iconic status, greatly helped by his writings The Ballad of Reading Gaoland De Profundis.
At the same time, De Profundiscondemned his lover Lord Alfred Douglas to posthumous notoriety as his nemesis, the source of all his ruination. In this remarkable document, Wilde, ill, ruined and alone in his cell, reinvented himself: "I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me."
This letter sets the tone for many subsequent accounts of his downfall, constructing Wilde himself as tragic victim and Douglas as cruel, betraying beloved. De Profundisrecounts so many incidents of Douglas's selfishness and duplicity that it comes as no surprise that Wilde reunited with his nemesis within a few short months of leaving prison. De Profundis was eventually published in full in 1949, after Douglas's death, setting his infamy in stone. Bernard Shaw, a friend of Douglas in later life, once wrote that "It is clearly monstrous that Douglas should have a torpedo launched at him and timed to explode after his death . . . it is rather a humorous stroke of Fate's irony that the son of the Marquis of Queensbury should be forced to expiate his sins by suffering a succession of blows beneath the belt". On the other hand, Gore Vidal also quipped: "Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaolwithout laughing? (In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates, much less loves)."
THIS NEW STUDY, Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and his Finest Work, by Caspar Wintermans, joins other excellent biographies such as Rupert Croft-Cooke's 1963 study, H Montgomery Hyde's 1984 work and Douglas Murray's outstanding Bosie, published in 2000. Wintermans gives a spirited and lively account of the poet's life and writings, seeing Douglas as "a much-maligned man, a first-rate poet whose literary accomplishments have unfortunately been obscured by his involvement with the most sensational society scandal of the Fin de Siècle: the trials of Oscar Wilde".
Wintermans, already well-published in this period, divides his book into three sections. He gives a highly readable account of Douglas's life and vicissitudes, a useful annotated selection of his poems and an excellent bibliography of his writings. De Profundis is described as "a harangue teeming with hysterical outbursts against Bosie, depicting him as an ungrateful, jaded, selfish, irritating little brat who writes doggerel verse". Wintermans sets out to argue that Douglas was a misunderstood figure and an underestimated poet - a challenging task, because Douglas, even in this sympathetic account, emerges as a difficult man, touchy, argumentative and litigious. His marriage in 1902, two years after Wilde's death, to the poet Olive Custance was a love match and they remained lifelong friends even after they separated. However, this marriage brought him into conflict with her father, who took exception to Douglas's conversion to Catholicism and to his overspending. Eventually Douglas went to court to battle unsuccessfully with his father-in-law for custody of his only son, Raymond, a tragic figure, later hospitalised after a mental breakdown.
Douglas developed a taste for legal drama and was involved in a string of high-profile court cases from 1909 onwards, including the infamous Pemberton Billing case in 1918. Here, Douglas came forward to attest to Wilde's degeneracy, and Wintermans tells us that "The trial was a farce . . . Bosie assured the 'intensely bourgeois' members of the jury that Oscar had never written a single line that was not designedly evil, that he had always aimed at undermining virtue, yes, that he had been one of the most powerful pals of the Devil . . .".
Douglas was eventually arrested for attacking Winston Churchill in a pamphlet published in 1923, ending up in Wormwood Scrubs. Apart from his account of this troubled life, Wintermans also addresses Douglas's merits as a poet, but the evidence around the quality of the poetry is not, in my view, compelling. Would Douglas have merited so much critical interest without his connection to Wilde? His most famous poem, Two Loves, gave us the phrase, "The Love that dare not speak its name", a line that Wilde was forced to explain away in his trial as an idealised platonic love between men, devoid of any sexual consummation. Interestingly, Douglas's most striking poem was his 1900 lament for Wilde, The Dead Poet:
I dreamed of him last night, I saw
his face
All radiant and unshadowed of
distress,
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked
him trace
Under the common thing the hidden
grace,
And conjure wonder out of
emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like
a dress
And all the world was an enchanted
place.
Overall, Wintermans extends the scholarly debate around Douglas's poetry in an engaging and accessible way and does much to question Wilde's self-mythologising in De Profundis.
Eibhear Walshe is a lecturer in the Department of English, University College Cork. His biography, Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life, was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006
Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and his Finest Work By Caspar Wintermans Peter Owen, 384pp. £19.95