FULL FEATURE: Oscar Wilde’s WW1 Legacy, 1914-18

A huge, HUGE thank you to lovely Josh Provan for doing the archival legwork on this one. It would have sat on the shelf a long time given my current schedule, had he not sacrificed some of his time to photograph what I needed at Kew for me.

Oscar Wilde pictured in 1889 (Wikipedia)

---

With his wife Constance, playwright and author Oscar Wilde had two sons: Cyril was born in June 1885, and Vyvyan in November 1886. Within a decade, he had been convicted of ‘Gross Indecency” on account of his homosexuality. His downfall was very public, and highly salacious. It began when the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a calling card calling him a “somdomite.” (He was illiterate as well as a prick, it seems). What Wilde should have done, in hindsight, is ignore it. He didn’t. When he brought a libel case against his nemesis, it opened the door for his accuser. In order to clear his own name, he had only to prove that Wilde had participated in liaisons with men. He duly hired private investigators and did just that, leaving Wilde’s life in ruins. He would spend two years in prison, beginning with short, brutal sentences at Pentonville and Wandsworth. Eventually, he was transferred to Reading Gaol, before spending the last three years of his life impoverished on the continent. He died as a result of meningitis in November 1900.

Vyvyan later published a memoir. ‘This is not a very amusing or entertaining story,’ he wrote. ‘I think, however, that it should be written as part of the whole tragic story of Oscar Wilde.’ In his book, he described the earliest part of his life as ‘the happy years.’ The family lived at what is now 34 Tite Street, in Chelsea. Sargent and Whistler had studios on the same street, and perversely, the judge who would pronounce sentence on Oscar Wilde lived a few doors away. ‘Most small boys adore their fathers, and we adored ours,’ wrote Vyvyan decades later:

‘As all good fathers are, he was a hero to us both. He was so tall and distinguished and, to our uncritical eyes, so handsome. There was nothing about him of the monster that some people who never knew him and never even saw him have tried to make him out to be. He was a real companion to us, and we always looked forward eagerly to his frequent visits to our nursery.

Most parents in those days were far too solemn and pompous with their children, insisting on a vast amount of usually undeserved respect. My own father was quite different; he had so much of the child in his own nature that he delighted in playing our games. He would go down on all fours on the nursery floor, being in turn a lion, a wolf, a horse, caring nothing for his usually immaculate appearance… He also played with us a great deal in the dining-room, which was in some ways more suited to romping than the nursery, as there were more chairs and tables and sideboards to dodge through, and more room to clamber over Papa as well.

When he grew tired of playing he would keep us quiet by telling us fairy stories, or tales of adventure, of which he had a never-ending supply. He was a great admirer of Jules Verne and Stevenson, and of Kipling in his more imaginative vein. The last present he gave me was The Jungle Book; he had already given me Treasure Island and Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, which were the first books I read through entirely by myself. He told us all his own written fairy stories suitably adapted for our young minds, and a great many others as well… Cyril once asked him why he had tears in his eyes when he told us the story of The Selfish Giant, and he replied that really beautiful things always made him cry…

Perhaps my father was at his best with us at the seaside. He was a powerful swimmer; he also thoroughly enjoyed sailing and fishing and would take us out with him when it was not too breezy. I do not think we took to it very much; personally I was much too concerned for the plight of the fish flapping about on the floor-boards. I preferred helping my father to build sand-castles, an art in which he excelled; long, rambling castles they were, with moats and tunnels and towers and battlements, and when they were finished he would usually pull a few lead soldiers out of his pocket to man the castle walls. I remember him so well, in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, no shoes or stockings and a large grey hat which he had probably brought back with him from the United States.’

‘I suppose my brother and I got on together as well as any brothers can be expected to do,’ wrote Vyvyan: ‘I think my brother was jealous of me, though he had no cause to be, and I was really far more jealous of him. Cyril had curly hair and was the favourite of both my father and my mother. He was stronger and healthier than I; he excelled at games, even as a small boy, whereas I took little interest in them.’

Then came the fall. After 1895, neither Cyril nor Vyvyan would ever see their father again. Vyvyan remained in the dark about what had transpired for years; partly on his own account and partly because of their mother’s attempts to shield the boys from the truth.

‘My main recollection is of my mother, in tears, poring over masses of press-cuttings, mostly from Continental newspapers. I was of course not allowed to see them, though I could not help seeing the name OSCAR WILDE in large headlines; but I had no inkling of the true state of affairs.’

Constance Wilde resolved to leave London. Ireland had been a suggestion, but ‘the hue and cry after the Wilde family was just as bad, if not worse, in Ireland, the land of my father’s birth; so our plans were changed.’ Constance opted to remove the boys to the continent instead. Initially, she remained in Chelsea to deal with the fallout of her husband’s trial and imprisonment, until bailiffs threw her out of their home and seized the contents to raise money.

‘That sale was a scandalous piece of barefaced robbery. Even before it took place, the house was full of riff-raff, souvenir-hunting and stealing anything they could lay hands upon. I have seen a priced catalogue of the sale. Books, of inestimable value for their association interest, were sold in bundles of twenty or thirty for two or three pounds a bundle. Among them were first editions of all my father’s books with inscriptions to my mother, to my brother and to myself, which were kept in my mother’s bedroom, in a special bookcase to the right of the door. They have never reappeared.’

Some have, now, popped up for sale in America, but it was not only the loss of valuable items that was hurtful for the family:

‘For months afterwards, my brother and I kept asking for our soldiers, our trains and other toys, and we could not understand why it upset our mother, since of course we knew nothing about the sale. It was only when I saw the catalogue, many years later, that I realised why my mother had been upset. The sale consisted of 246 lots; number 237 was “A large quantity of toys”; they realised thirty shillings.’

In the meantime, Cyril and Vyvyan had crossed the Channel and left England for the first time in their lives with a hastily employed French governess; a complete stranger to them. If Vyvyan was oblivious, Cyril was not, as he had learned the truth of the accusations against their father:

‘It was a nightmare journey for both of us, but particularly for Cyril, in view of what he had discovered… He wanted to shield me and to 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.’

The boys were nine and ten years old. From now on, their lives would be lived in exile, always hiding their true identities. Constance abandoned her married name and instead took to using her mother’s maiden name, Holland, for both herself and her boys. Eventually, Cyril and Vyvyan ended up living separately and attending different schools, in Germany and Monaco respectively. In 1898, they lost their mother. We now think that Multiple Sclerosis was at play, but whatever the cause, Constance Holland’s demise was long and painful.

‘For some months she had been having difficulty in writing and she had taken to using a typewriter for her correspondence. But one day, at the beginning of April, I received a long letter from her in her own handwriting, which must have cost her a prodigious effort. 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. She went into a nursing home in Genoa shortly afterwards, for an operation to relieve the pressure on her spine that was causing her ceaseless pain… I can only think, from the contents of her last letter to me, that she knew in her heart that her sorrows would soon be over.’

Constance pictured with Cyril (Wikipedia)

---

When he learned of his mother’s death, Vyvyan’s first instinct was to ask a priest at his school for news of the only parent he had left:

‘I cried a little, then I asked him about my father, for I wanted to know where he was. He shook his head and said that he did not know. And again I instinctively asked him: “He has been in prison, hasn’t he?” Again a pause, then: “Yes, but he is free now.” Although I had suspected this for a long time, I had never asked anyone about it, and this was the first time that I was certain. I had a great sense of relief at the words: “He is free now.” He had, in fact, been free for nearly a year and was living in Naples.’

Constance Holland’s relatives resolved to continue to keep the boys away from their father, as she had chosen to do. ‘I think these relatives were genuinely affected by the tragic circumstances in which my brother and I now found ourselves,’ wrote Vyvyan, ‘but they also felt that we were a bit of a nuisance, and were rather apprehensive of the effect that our paternity might have upon us.’ In 1900, Oscar Wilde died in Paris, and they became orphans. Writing in the 1950s, Vyvyan discussed the impact of the separation, and what he thought it did to him:

‘When I was parted from my father for ever I passed through the stages of fear, perplexity and frustration. Fear and frustration are more destructive to peace of mind than almost any other mental processes; and as I connected these with my father I gradually began to think of him with dislike, when I thought of him at all. And this feeling, fostered by the attitude of my mother’s family, increased as I approached adolescence.

My fear was for what I might one day discover. My frustration came from having it constantly dinned into me that I was different from other boys; that I was a pariah who could not take his place within the framework of the world, except, perhaps, in some remote corner of it.

Fear and frustration are two obsessions of which it is terribly hard to rid oneself. And if I have learnt nothing else in the course of my life, I have learnt that it is impossible to hide one’s head and to be happy at the same time, that it is better to sail under one’s true colours and to face all corners bravely and resolutely. And I think that this is what our family should have made us do, even though it meant that our entire education must take place away from England; it was not as though we were English anyway.

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.’

At the age of 19, however, Vyvyan began to read his father’s works at University.

‘Until a few months earlier he had been nothing to me but a name shrouded in mystery. It was really as well for me that I had been enlightened about my father’s life by my aunt in Switzerland, as at Cambridge his name was frequently mentioned. Many references to him were, to say the least of it, unflattering, but already the rising generation was beginning to appreciate the beauty of his language, and his works formed one of the main subjects for discussion in literary undergraduate circles.

I succeeded in getting hold of a secondhand copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. At the time I was passing through a stage of being intensely interested in the supernatural… So naturally Dorian Gray had a great fascination for me, and it was then that I first began to feel proud of being the son of a man who could write such a book. And there, for the time being, my knowledge of my father’s writings ceased, as it was impossible to find copies of any of his other books. No reference book of the period even gave a list of his works. And it was not until two years later that Mrs. Carew lent me her own precious copies, each containing inscriptions to her from my father.’

It took him a lot longer to delve into a biography and open himself up to a full account of his father’s life:

‘Until I was thirty-five, the only biography of my father that I had read was one by Sherard, and I had only skimmed through that. I took the view that my father had plunged my mother into the depths of misery and had caused her premature death. In this attitude I was, of course, encouraged by my mother’s family, upon whom the responsibility for my subsequent upbringing devolved.

Time, however, which numbs pain and dulls resentment, has caused me to take a more tolerant view, and has convinced me that my father was more the victim of circumstances than of his own frailty… if Alfred Douglas’s father had not hated his son and used Oscar Wilde as a cat’s-paw, a very different story might have been told, and the world might have been richer by many more plays like The Importance of Being Earnest.

For many years I had a recurrent dream that I met my father again, rather quietly in a sombrely-lit room, and that he spoke gently to me and asked me to forgive him for the unhappiness he had brought upon his family.

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.’

Vyvyan Wilde as a boy (Wikipedia)

---

Annoyingly for the First World War historians, the book ends before 1914. Vyvyan Holland thought it a fitting end to they story of his father to discuss his own journey to witness the move of his father’s remains from Bagneux Cemetery to Père Lachaise Cemetery in 1909.

As one of those historians, however, I look at those dates of birth: 1885, and 1886, and my brain immediately jumps to: what did Cyril and Vyvyan, who would have been in their late 20s when it began, do in the Great War…