Son of Oscar Wilde

Quite an eye-opener; while I knew that Oscar Wilde was imprisoned etc; because of his homosexuality, I did not realize the devastation on his family. Wilde's son, Vyvyan tells how his identity was stripped and he had to leave the country, growing up in a variety of schools with harsh environments.

It's so astonishing how we manage to worship Sherlock Holmes stories where a box of matches tells the detective hundreds of important details about a man and simultaneously put people (especially major figures of the past) completely out of context. This book is THE context, the one that makes you rethink what you already know. It thoroughly demonstrates how the world surrounding Oscar Wilde worked -- how this world felt, thought, perceived things. A story of two lost yet creative and go-ahead boys who by the age of 12 experienced more than most do by the age of 50. A story of unbelievably stubborn loyal friends who kept looking for these children years after Oscar Wilde death and of no less stubborn family who made everything humanly possible to erase the memory of Oscar Wilde from these children minds and erase these children identities and the mere fact of their existence from the world. It's not about heroes and villains but about how ridiculously far things can go after they take a wrong turn.

Okay. Everyone surely knows by now that I LOVE Oscar Wilde. No one writes like he did. He was one of a kind. But that does not change the fact that his life brought a lot of misery to his family. Not that he meant it to, but still it did. This book was written by his son and brings a great new perspective to the story of O.W.. His children were never allowed to have a proper childhood, having to hide their identity and living in constant fear that someone, anyone, would find out who they really were. It is a rather tragic story, but fascinating nonetheless. I had read the biography about Constance (Oscar's wife) before and found her to be an incredible person and I would say the same about Vyvyan. I do love reading about this family, understanding the man behind the literature. It makes me love it even more!

Un libro bellissimo, che gli appassionati dell'opera dello scrittore dovrebbero leggere. Permette di dare una dimensione in più al ritratto di Wilde, grazie a un racconto intimo e delicato, mai tinto di rancre o astio. Meraviglioso!

Ultimately a tragic story. Vyvyan and his elder brother Cyril had a very difficult adolescence, and their paternity and the way they were treated for it had a permanent effect upon their lives. It was really, really interesting to read. It gave yet another perspective on the events of Wilde’s life, and it painted a portrait of a more human side to Wilde. I was shocked especially by the way the author talks about Frank Harris and his biography of Oscar Wilde, in a completely disparaging and derogatory tone. It seems it’s not as accurate as I thought it was? I have included below the quotations which mention Frank Harris, as I consider them quite fascinating.

Quotations:

“That my mother was a very beautiful woman, and that she and my father were a devoted couple, are facts beyond dispute. Frank Harris’s description of her as ‘a lady without particular qualities or beauty’ leads me to believe that, as was his custom, he tried to exercise his charm upon her without success. He always disparaged women who did not succumb to his very distasteful advances, persuading himself that they must be very stupid and therefore, by a logical conclusion, ugly. I knew him when I was a young man, and I thought that he was the most sinister and repulsive person that I had ever met. His book about my father has already been exposed as a concatenation of lies, and it should join his other books of reminiscences in the dustbin.” (33) So heated! I’d like to know which parts are lies, anyhow—considering I just read it and took him at his word! I mean, Bernard Shaw seemed to believe in its verity, and Robert Ross to a certain extent.

“In my birth certificate, my father’s profession is given as ‘author.’ The declaration was made by my mother; my birth was not registered for some weeks after I was born, as my father and mother each thought that the other had seen to the matter. When the time came, no one could remember the exact date on which I had been born, though everyone was sure that it was during the first five days of November; so eventually the 3rd was selected, as being the mean date. My mother’s brother once told me that the real reason for the apparent confusion was that I was actually born on November 5th, but that this fact was suppressed, in order to avoid any possible connection between the Aesthetic Movement and Guy Fawkes day. Be that as it may, one great advantage that I derive from this uncertainty is that I am completely immune from the importunities of astrologers as, far from being able to tell them the exact hour of my birth, I cannot be certain of even the exact day.” (36-7)

“Before I proceed with my narrative, I want to emphasise two things. One is that, although by the age of eleven I knew my father had been in trouble, I was quite unaware of the nature of the offences with which he was charged until I was eighteen. The other is that after reading R.H. Sherard’s The Story of an Unhappy Friendship I was so depressed that I decided to read no more books about my father, no matter who wrote them; and to that resolution I adhered for many years. Even now I have read very few. People have often blamed me for this attitude, but it was simply a form of self-protection. I have so often been approached by well-meaning people intending to write about my father and been asked to give them information, and I have always given the perfectly genuine answer that I was far too young at the time of my father’s trial to know anything about what happened, and that in any case I probably knew less about it than anyone else in the world. So much so that when, at the age of twenty, I was asked by Sir Coleridge Kennard to meet Robert Ross, the name meant nothing to me. I was very much embarrassed at his emotion when I met him, because at that time I had no idea of where he came into the story, or of how much he had done and was still doing for my father’s memory.” (60)

“It was a nightmare journey for both of us, but particularly for Cyril, in view of what he had discovered [the truth about their father] in Ireland. He wanted to shield me and keep me in ignorance of the truth, so that I should not suffer as he did. The only person with whom he ever discussed my father was my mother. This self-enforced reticence turned him, while yet a child, into a taciturn pessimist.” (63)

“I think I must have been very different from other boys, since never in the whole of my childhood did I feel a desire to inflict pain or suffering on anyone who had done me no harm, or to kill birds or little furry creatures. I have a very deep respect for life, and I am sure that people who go about slaughtering anything that moves do so out of motives of jealousy, because they know they cannot create life themselves.” (92) This is interesting, because that last sentence there is actually a feminist theory that attempts to explain men’s violence.

“My grandfather, Sir William Wilde . . . is credited with having invented the operation for cataract, and has been called ‘the father of modern otology.’” (17-18)

“This incident seemed to bring back my sense of disaster in a great wave. I realised that we had had a narrow escape from imminent danger. I wonder how many people understand what it is like to be in such a position. To be an illegitimate child is a simple condition compared to the one in which we found ourselves—there are, after all, so many thousands of illegitimate children in all walks of life. But we had known what it was to have our father feted and admired, and now to have to deny him and to lock up all knowledge of him in our hearts was a terrible burden for children to bear. The thought that at any moment an indiscreet remark or a chance encounter with someone from our former lives might betray us was a sword of Damocles constantly hanging above our heads. From that summer day in Bevaix a year before, when we were called into the dining-room to sign our new names, we had been supposed to leave behind us everything even remotely connected with our former lives. All the friends, places, and objects with which we had been familiar had to be obliterated from and torn out of our minds, as Cyril tore our names from our cricket flannels. My mother’s advisers were, of course, foolish, since it was clearly impossible that the secret could be kept for ever. All my mother’s numerous family knew that we had taken the name of Holland, and some of them were bound to talk. I think that their immediate concern was to protect themselves; the problems of the future were for our own solution when the time came. If there was ever a secret that was bound to develop into a secret de polichinelle, it was that one.” (95)

“My mother was always afraid that, with our two rather unusual names of Cyril and Vyvyan, our identity might be discovered, particularly as my father’s works were still widely read in literary circles, and our names appeared as the speakers in one of the dialogues of Intentions.” (107) I was wondering about that! So the children came first, then their names were used in Intentions?

“On his [Oscar Wilde] arrival in France he assumed the name Sebastian Melmoth, after the central figure in Melmoth the Wanderer, a book written by his great-uncle, Charles Maturin; and under this name he took rooms at the Hotel Sandwich in Dieppe.” (125) I was wondering the story behind his assumed name.

“But one day, at the beginning of April, I received a long letter from her [his mother] in her own handwriting, which must have cost her a prodigious effort [because she had developed paralysis in her right arm]. In it she mentioned my father. She wrote: ‘Try not to feel harshly about your father; remember that he is your father and that he loves you. All his troubles arose from the hatred of a son for his father, and whatever he has done he has suffered bitterly for.’ This was her last letter to me [before she died].” (130)

“While my own efforts were being devoted to gaining entry into a Catholic school, those of my mother’s family were being directed towards obliterating all memory of my father from the minds of both Cyril and myself; and at the same time towards destroying all evidence that might conceivably connect us with the family of Wilde.
tThe first step in that direction was to give us to understand that our father was dead. We were not told this in so many words, as that would have been a lie and I do not suppose that anyone in the family ever told a deliberate lie. But the impression was conveyed and we accepted it as fact. And it was once more impressed upon us that we must never mention our father’s name to anyone, particularly in connection with ourselves.
tThe next move was to separate us from each other. It is much easier to keep a secret by oneself than to share it with someone else. One becomes careless and is apt to blurt out indiscreet remarks.” (137)

“By the beginning of 1899 I was convinced that my father was dead, though in fact in February 1899 he made a special journey to Genoa to visit my mother’s grave. Robert Ross told me in later years that he was continually wondering where we were and asking after us. We were completely hidden. No inquiries as to our whereabouts were ever answered. None of my father’s friends knew where we were.” (149)

“Once more I felt that everyone’s hand was against me, and I began to think that there must be something monstrous about my family that caused me always to be in disgrace. And as I drew near the house in which I was staying, my footsteps dragged until finally I came to a full stop.
tThere had been a light snowfall in the morning, but now it had begun to snow in real earnest. So I wheeled my bicycle past the house and started walking, with no particular idea of what I was going to do. Presently the road ran through a wood, and I decided that I would get away from all my troubles and not try to carry on the struggle. I had read, probably in one of Jack London’s books, that people who lay down in the snow and went to sleep never woke up again, but died quite painlessly. And with this in the back of my mind, I left my bicycle against a tree and wandered into the wood. When I thought I had gone far enough to be lost, I found a place in a clearing where the snow had drifted against a low bank and I lay down on it and closed my eyes and reviewed my life to date. I thought of the Tite Street days, and of my wanderings. But most of all I thought of my parents and of the enigma of my father and pondered over the misery of being an unwanted orphan. I did not seem to feel the cold and eventually I fell asleep.
tActually, before I arrived at the General’s house and was refused admittance, they had already telephoned to my cousin to stop me coming. Unfortunately, as I had already started, I knew nothing of this, although I think they might have told me on my arrival and so saved me from considerable mental anguish, but it did not seem to occur to them. When time passed and I did not return, my hosts began to be worried, particularly as the snow was now falling more heavily than ever. And when a couple of hours went by without my appearing, they thought that something should perhaps be done about it, and search parties set out to find me.
tIt did not take very long to get on my tracks, as my bicycle leaning against a tree by the roadside led them practically straight to me. I was found and taken home and put into a warm bath. I had gloves on my hands, which did not, therefore, suffer. But my ears, exposed to the air, were slightly frost-bitten and I got a chill in the inner part of my left ear which turned to a mastoid, for which I had an operation on the day of Queen Victoria’s death. . . . My illness had left me deaf in one ear.” (155-6) A suicide attempt?! At about 14 years old! How tragic.

“I saw a great deal of Robert Ross and of Mrs. Carew during these months, and I met most of the literary and artistic figures of the time. Among those with whom I formed friendships were Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Sir William Richmond, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. I found myself at last in the literary milieu to which I had always wanted to belong. Particularly did I make friends with H.G. Wells, whom I saw constantly throughout the rest of his life.” (191) Wow!

“In about 1929 I received a letter from an American author who was contemplating writing a book about Frank Harris; he wanted my own opinion about Harris’s Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde. I replied that I knew nothing whatever about the matter, but that I had heard Robert Ross say that, although it was a thoroughly bad book, written with the sole object of glorifying Harris himself, it did, on the whole, contain some elements of truth. I think Robert Ross meant that Harris had put Alfred Douglas into his proper perspective. Unfortunately I now no longer possess a copy of my letter. Six months later I received an infuriated letter from Alfred Douglas. [T]his and one other letter on the same subject constituted the only correspondence I ever had with Douglas . . . The first and only time that I met Alfred Douglas after 1895 was shortly before the last war, at the coming-out ball of his great-niece, Lady Jane Douglas. We chatted on general subjects for about five minutes and then pared. I never saw him again.” (193) More trashing of Frank Harris! How fascinating. Now I don’t know whether to trust what I read!

“More books have been written, in more languages, about Oscar Wilde than about any literary figure who has lived during the past hundred years. [Is this true? If so, that’s impressive.] But as people recede further and further into the past, they are apt to assume the aspect of effigies from which all humanity has departed; and when other people write about them they hack them about to make them fit into a pattern of their own making until no flesh and blood remains. This is especially true of Oscar Wilde. Most of the people who have written about him have treated him like a beetle under a microscope, to be examined and dissected and analysed as a psychological problem—not as a human being at all. If they have mentioned any human qualities it has always been in parentheses, as it were, and almost on a note of surprise and deprecation. And yet the most outstanding aspect of my father’s character was his great humanity, his love of life and of his fellow-men and his sympathy with suffering. He was the kindest and gentlest of men, and he hated to see anyone suffer. None of his biographers, not even Frank Harris [LMAO], has suggested that he ever did a mean or an unkind act. Many stories are told of how he helped people in distress, even when he was himself in want.” (198-9)

“As one result of the secrecy with which I was surrounded in my childhood, I have suffered all my life from embarrassing shyness. Because of my anomalous and often awkward position it is difficult for me to make friends. Difficult more for the prospective friends than for myself. I always have to be explained—almost apologised for. Men, particularly men of the Anglo-Saxon races, are innately conventional. Women usually take a wider view; consequently I have always felt more at ease with women than with men. As much as women are capable of being understood, I understand them; and I know that they understand me.” (201-2) I dislike the first part of that last sentence, but otherwise, this is an illuminating paragraph.

“I do not try to defend my father’s behaviour; but I do think that the penalties inflicted upon him were unnecessarily severe. And by that I do not only mean the prison sentence; I mean the virtual suppression of all his works and the ostracism and insults which he had to endure during the few remaining years of his life. The worst aspects of Victorian hypocrisy have now disappeared, and today my father would not have been hounded to his death as he was fifty years ago. The self-righteousness of that age was really camouflage to disguise its own hypocrisy, and the people who were loudest in their condemnation of my father were often those whose own lives could least bear investigation. Nothing makes the transgressor so indignant as the transgressions, of a different kind, of his fellow-men; except, perhaps, transgressions of the same kind.” (203)

“In these pages I have tried to show what it is like to be the son of Oscar Wilde. On the whole my life has been one of concealment and repression. My descendants will not suffer as I have done, as they become more and more remote from the actual tragedy. As ancestry recedes into the past it becomes more and more impersonal; more than one great English family views with equanimity the fact that an ancestor many generations back was executed at Newgate or at Tyburn for sexual aberrations.
tIt was a cruel irony that Oscar Wilde should have been singled out by fate to suffer for all the countless artists who, both before and since his day, have shared his weakness.” (205-6)

“I send you this letter and a Book together—I wonder which you will open first.
tIt is Aurora Leigh—which I think you said you had not rad.
tIt is one of those books that, written straight from the heart—and from such a large heart too—never weary one: because they are sincere. We tire of art but not of nature after all our aesthetic training. I look upon it as much the greatest work in our literature.
tI rank it with Hamlet and In Memoriam: so much do I love it, that I hated the idea of sending it to you without marking a few passages, I felt you would well appreciate—And I found myself marking the whole book. I am really very sorry—it is like being given a bouquet of plucked flowers instead of being allowed to look for them oneself.
tBut I could not resist the Temptation as it did instead of writing to you about each passage.
The only fault is that she overstrains her metaphors till they snap—and although one does not like polished emotion, still she is inartistically rugged at times—as she says herself she shows the mallet hand in carving cherry stones.” (221, a letter from Oscar Wilde to William Ward dated 25 July 1876, when he was an Oxford student)

Nowadays it feels like Oscar Wilde and I are engaged in a never-ending game of tag; a game in which I always seem to be "It", tirelessly chasing after him while he constantly escapes my grasp, urging me to run a little faster, a little further, mocking me when I triumphantly exclaim "This is it! I've got him!" only to be met with thin air and another layer of humanity staring me right in the face. Because that's the thing about Oscar - we're on a first-name basis by now -, he's filled to the brim with raw, vulnerable, flawed humanity. "Well, he was human, after all", you say, and yes, I know, I know he was but the thing about Oscar Wilde is that he's so shrouded in mystery and myth, like a Victorian Alexander the Great, who is not just The Alexander but An Alexander, malleable and unreachable and always at the mercy of those who never knew him but like to think they do. I never knew Oscar, though I wish I had, but I like to think I do, because that's human nature and that's what happens when you feel like life (or death?) cheated you out of something(one) that feels so very necessary & so in tune with who you are. I reckon that's probably how Oscar himself felt about Alexander. How Alexander felt about Achilles. I've read everything Oscar Wilde ever wrote. I've read a lot of book about Oscar Wilde, about his family and his sexuality and his library and his relationships and his engagement with Ancient Greek culture. Every time I finish one of these books I am ashamed at ever having thought I knew who Oscar Wilde was before reading said book, before discovering whatever facet of him those pages unearthed for me. And that's when the "This is it!" moment hits me, but it departs as swiftly as it arrived, and leaves in its wake yet another layer to Oscar's humanity, another side to him that I wasn't aware existed (or that I never thought I'd be privy to, as is the case with this particular book), and once again, for what feels like the umpteenth time, I am left speechless by the intensity of the love I bear for a man I've never known, but wish I had, and sometimes like to think I do.

A book I somehow didn't know existed until I found it in Bridport Oxfam. On one level, it is necessarily not far from the misery memoir field - the edition above (not mine) even has the obligatory sepia child. But for all the occasional note of whininess, this is someone from an earlier generation less prone to complaining, which makes his complaints far more interesting. The thuggishness of old public schools, the hypocrisy of the late Victorians and Edwardians - we take these things for granted now, but a first-hand account of their small yet no less painful injustices as made manifest in one boy's life is still a somewhat harrowing read. And, while he's not on his father's level*, it helps that Vyvyan can write.

Beyond that - there is an interesting injury-to-the-arse motif in Vyvyan's life, none of which can be deliberate given the perpetrators are all unknowing for one reason or another of his father's crime, and that wasn't even Oscar's preferred MO, but it does still make one wonder about fate's sense of humour. There are memories of Firbank (to whom apparently only my own alma mater, Pembroke, would have been less suited than Vyvyan and his' college, Tit Hall - sadly, this comment is left without further explanation) and a passing mention that, like all the best people, Vyvyan had an Arthur Machen phase. There are the obligatory scenes of Wilde engaged in non-Wildean pursuits - mending a toy fort, golfing, swimming in rough seas. There is, ultimately, another in the endless series of facets to one of the great tragedies of literary history, and one which could so easily, and in so many ways, have been avoided - but as Stoppard suggests in The Invention of Love, perhaps all of us are better for it not having been avoided. All of us, at any rate, except Wilde's wife and children.

*Though in the appendix are several of Oscar's undergraduate letters, and his less polished style is a revelation - not in a good way. Especially when he describes a much-loved book as "simply 'intense' in every way", the FMF.

On an April morning in 1895, two boys, nine and eight, are hurried out of London in the care of a French governess they didn’t know to flee across the Channel to Paris and then on to relatives, also unknown to them, in Switzerland. Their mother, they were told, would join them when she could.
So begin the peregrinations of the two, recounted here in the recollections of the younger boy. The boys are shunted off to private schools, first together in Germany, then separately. It is a case study in how not to treat the children who are the inconvenient collateral damage of a scandal. The boys are told they must never tell who their father is and, before long, are presented with documents informing them they had taken on new names.
It was a couple of years before Vyvyan learned that his father, Oscar Wilde, had been imprisoned, and had come of age before learning the charges on which he had been sent up—a discovery that relieved him after years of wondering if his father was a murderer or embezzler.
He was also only dimly aware that his father had been a writer. The first Wilde book he saw was at a relative’s house, a collection of fairy tales. As he read, Vyvyan recalled the stories. He remembered his father had told them in happier days in their Chelsea home but didn’t know that their father had written them.
His mother died before he came of age; at about that time, his father was released from prison, but Vyvyan wasn’t told that by the relatives who insisted they were only doing what was best for him. When Oscar Wilde died, the fourteen-year-old Vyvyan was informed by the rector of his school. He had assumed his father was already dead, not knowing that Oscar’s persistent attempts to contact his sons were rebuffed.
The two boys dealt with the unmentioned shame of their origin in different ways. The elder, Cyrill, became hyper-masculine to prove there was no inherited taint; he excelled at sports, joined the army, and met the hero’s death he sought in France in 1915. Vyvyan was in the same battle line at the time, three miles away, but didn’t know of his brother’s proximity.
Vyvyan’s own response was to own up to his father’s legacy and to cultivate friendships with literary figures who had known him. The story is told with a lack of bitterness. There is even a trace of diffidence, which corresponds to Holland’s self-description as being very shy. While the ordeal clearly affected him deeply, this memoir is also a testimony of the resiliency of the human spirit.