Oscar’s not so Wilde Side
He was a shameless show-off, but his only grandson reveals Oscar Wilde was a hands-on father who doted on his two boys
There’s no doubt that if he were alive today, Oscar Wilde would be a glittering star of social media. Provocative, intellectual, witty, he’d have followers clamouring to ‘like’ his posts, while his detractors would be aiming online barbs – or worse – at him. After all, as Oscar himself once remarked: ‘There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.’
And here he is, nearly 120 years after his death, being talked about again, this time in a brilliant 90minute documentary, The Importance Of Being Oscar. The facts of his life – the triumphs, the comedy, the tragedy – are presented alongside absorbing analysis of his work and dramatised extracts from his great society comedies – Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman Of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance Of Being Earnest (1895). ‘I think it would have pleased Oscar that this film is happening,’ says author Gyles Brandreth, who is president of The Oscar Wilde Society and one of the contributors to the documentary.
Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde had gained two degrees by the age of 24, first at Trinity College, Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a double first in Classics, ‘the only subject where you can be simultaneously brilliant and unreasonable’, as Oscar quipped. He’d already won a major poetry prize too, and he announced at the time: ‘I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other, I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.’
‘He is the father of the modern cult of celebrity,’ says Gyles. ‘In London, he deliberately turned himself into a celebrity before he was known for anything else. He’d go to the theatre and make himself ostentatious in his appearance. He’d be seen in the stalls and then he’d move to the circle, the grand circle, a box and back to the stalls to make sure he was noticed.’
He was parodied in Punch and, later when he put on weight, was fat-shamed in celebrity magazines of the time. In 1881, Gilbert & Sullivan staged Patience, their comic opera which caricatured those who followed the Aesthetic movement, a creed which held that art didn’t need to teach you anything but should be appreciated for beauty alone. Following the mores of Aestheticism at Oxford, Oscar had held soirees in his rooms, decorated with peacock feathers and sunflowers. ‘One of the characters in Patience walked down the street with a lily in his hand and Oscar
said: “Ah, that’s me,”’ says Gyles.
In 1882, Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario and hotelier who had nurtured the talents of Gilbert & Sullivan, invited Oscar on a lecture tour of the US. While there, he visited eminent figures like the American poet Walt Whitman and the circus star PT Barnum and his performing elephant Jumbo. ‘What amuses me is that he was very conscious of his own celebrity,’ says Gyles. ‘He used to say that to be well known you had to be known by one name with five letters like Oscar or Jesus or Plato – or Jumbo.’
Unlike many reality stars today, beneath the carapace of fame Oscar was hugely talented, writing plays, essays, children’s stories and letters that are still read, enjoyed and staged. ‘I should think the sun doesn’t set these days without a version of The Importance Of
Being Earnest being played somewhere,’ Merlin Holland, Oscar’s only grandchild, tells me. Merlin was a late and only child born in 1945 to Oscar’s son Vyvyan (1886-1967). Oscar’s eldest boy Cyril was killed in the First World War. The family name was changed to Holland by Oscar’s wife Constance after Oscar was convicted of gross indecency in 1895. It’s extraordinary to be able to speak to Merlin more than a century after the death of his grandfather in 1900. His plays weren’t staged for many years after and it was only when his ‘warts and all’ collected letters were published in 1962 that ‘people realised he wasn’t a cardboard cutout figure but a brilliant man and a fallible human being’, says Merlin.
Having married the formidable Constance Lloyd in 1884, Oscar’s bisexuality came to the fore in 1887 when he became involved with Robert Ross, then Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, targeted Oscar, calling him a sodomite. Oscar sued him for libel but when gigolos gave evidence of having consorted with him, he lost and found himself standing trial and sentenced to two years’ hard labour for gross indecency.
Merlin’s theory is that Oscar went to court to defend The Picture Of
Dorian Gray, his novel in which a young man makes a Faustian pact whereby his portrait ages while his face remains unravaged by his corrupt lifestyle. ‘Queensberry’s lawyers claimed that Dorian Gray was intended to depict unnatural practices. In court Oscar said that because he wrote about these things, it didn’t mean that he was these things.’
Bankrupted by court fees, Oscar
UNLIKE MANY REALITY STARS TODAY, OSCAR WAS HUGELY TALENTED
had his Chelsea home pillaged by bailiffs and souvenir hunters after Constance took the boys to Switzerland. Vyvyan found it particularly painful that first editions of his father’s books with inscriptions to Constance and the boys were taken. ‘All the family has is Constance’s wedding ring, designed by Oscar with two interlocking bands, and an envelope decorated by him with a lock of the hair of his sister Isola, who died of meningitis aged nine,’ says Merlin.
Oscar had come from an extraordinary family. ‘His father Sir William Wilde, a renowned eye and ear surgeon, treated the poor of Dublin for little or nothing,’ says Merlin. ‘When at his villa on the west coast of Ireland, he’d treat people in return for their folklore stories. His wife Speranza was a feminist who argued that women should have access to positions of authority.’
When he was 16, Merlin’s father Vyvyan gave him a copy of his book, Son Of Oscar Wilde, published in 1954.
‘Oscar had always been there in the background of my life but my father was eight when he last saw him,’ says Merlin. The memoir paints a picture of a loving father, on his hands and knees in the nursery playing games, not caring for his otherwise immaculate appearance. ‘He was a hero to us both,’ writes Vyvyan. Oscar sang and read to them, mended their toys and, on beach holidays, barefoot and wearing knickerbockers, he built sandcastles for the boys.
In his book Vyvyan recalls the house being full of guests like Lillie Langtry – a mistress of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII – John Singer Sargent, Mark Twain, Robert Browning, and all the pre-Raphaelite painters. Oscar’s writer friends included Arthur Conan Doyle, JM Barrie and fellow Dubliner Bram Stoker.
But how different his life became. The last three years, after he was released from prison in 1897, were spent in exile and he died of meningitis in a Paris hotel in 1900. ‘My wife and I were in that hotel room on the centenary, raising a glass to his memory,’ says Gyles Brandreth. As a teenager at Bedales school, Gyles, aged 13, had played Scrabble with the school founder, John Hayden Badley. Vyvyan had been a pupil there and Badley knew Oscar well. ‘He said he was the wittiest man ever, also a delightful and giving person,’ recalls Gyles.
Alice Orr-Ewing, who plays five Wildean characters in the new documentary – which aired on BBC2 last night but is to be released internationally – says: ‘There’s a huge range from the sexual energy of Salome to Lady Chiltern in An
Ideal Husband, whose love for her politician husband crumbled when his criminal past was revealed. Wilde’s female characters are strong and relevant but the pressures to get married and to be a perfect wife are still there.’
These themes are played out in The Importance Of Being Earnest, of which Stephen Fry, who played Oscar in the 1997 film Wilde, says: ‘Almost nothing in art, and even less in theatre, is perfect – not a single play of Shakespeare’s – but
Importance is perfect. Oscar showed me that language could do what music and painting could do – it could sing, bounce inside your head and make remarkable shapes.’ A Wilde life indeed.
THE LAST THREE YEARS, AFTER HE WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON, WERE SPENT IN EXILE