Oscar Wilde's Secret Life

Contemporary Review, June, 2004

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. Neil McKenna. Century. [pounds sterling]20.00. 535 pages. ISBN 0-7126-6986-8.

The circumloquant litterae Oscariensis are, by any count, wildly in excess: the shelf bows beneath the bulky figure. Is Mr McKenna's hefty, post-Ellmann 535-pager de trop? I think, warts and all, not. The theory it vaunts, Wilde, the political pawn, playing official sacrificial ram to the salvation of Rosebery and Drumlanrig is by no means novel. Neither, though long ago burked, has it ceased to breathe. But it is not here, or anywhere else, neatly, geometrically as it were, a proposition to be tagged quod erat demonstrandum.

Mr. McKenna's account of the Wilde-Miles liaison, and of Frank Miles' overall circumstances, is not quite accurate, and the corruptive role of Lord Ronald Gower in the lives of both is not allocated its full due to discredit. Close scrutiny distinguishes a number of generally minor blemishes upon an otherwise wholesome, if that is the right word, body of work.

The secret life, which is to say the sexual life, of Wilde is quirkily seedy. Love is blind and cruel. Lust likewise. Constance, the constant wife, was constantly humiliated, her trust abused; but it is Mr McKenna's contention that she knew full well about her husband's furtive garnerings of the 'Apples of Sodom' and had forgiven him for his solipsistic sunderings of the vinculum matrimonii.

Those of us who, back in 1972, accompanied Rupert Croft Cooke on a cruise through much the same homoerotic waters in his The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde, experience a certain deja vu. Mr. McKenna does, however, include on the itinerary of his voyage of discovery some fresh ports of call, producing, for instance, resurfacing statements of sundry rag, tag and bobtail prosecution witnesses at the Wilde trial, hidden these last hundred years, dust-gathering on the shelves in a cubby-hole at the office of Sir George Lewis, Queensberry's solicitor.

Less reassuring is his production of the--these days it seems inevitable--conspiracy theory. His 'revelation' that the higher authorities were desperately anxious to bring about Wilde's conviction in order to stay the hand of the scarlet, screaming Queensberry from exposing the seduction of his other son, Bosie's elder brother, Francis, the twenty-seven-year-old Viscount Drumlanrig (who, incidentally, had died by the gun in sufficiently mysterious circumstances, in October 1894)--into a homosexual relationship with Lord Rosebery, who had become Prime Minister the previous March. This bewhiskered theoretical construct was, in fact, closely examined in 1977 by Michael S. Foldy (The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Yale University Press), who, like Douglas' and Rosebery's biographers, failed to find any concrete support underpinning it. McKenna's 'evidence' derives largely from the strongly suspect, scabrous, unpublished memoirs of that arch-fraudster, Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse.

Mr. McKenna, ci-devant editor of the Pink Paper, enjoys a perspective clarified by his possession of a contemporary sensibility to the woof and warp of the gay life. He is authoritative about the homoerotic underworld of rent boys, telegraph lads, and Mary Anns, as well as the upper-middle and aristocratic Uranian cabals--the entire gamut of paiderastia, the Dorian confraternity, the Cleveland Streeters, is dealt with sexually explicitly. He has unquestionably toiled hard in his selected vineyard, and has accomplished telling original work, which makes it all the more of a shame that his book should be so woefully deficient in precise references. There is also a serious shortfall in the source notes and there is no bibliography. The book could have been much improved by more strenuous editing, some curtailment of the more extravagant exercises in pure--and impure--speculation, the excision of unfortunate duplications, a little thinning here and there of the word-picture paint and varnish. All said and done, this is, for Wildean scholars and students of the fin-de-siecle, a treasure-trove of a book.

RICHARD WHITTINGTON-EGAN

Editor's Note: Fourth Estate has recently published Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters selected and edited by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland ([pounds sterling]20.00. xv 384 pages. ISBN 0-00-716103-4). In this selection of some 400 letters from The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (published in 2000 by Fourth Estate) the editor has sought to make available to 'a broader public with only a minimum of editorial intervention' those letters which 'reflect the man, warts and all'. The first letter is dated 1868, when Wilde would turn fourteen; the last, in 1900 within weeks of his premature death. In addition to brief explanatory notes, the editor has also added as an Epilogue the moving letter from Robert Ross to Adela Schuster, written three weeks after his friend's death.