But Bosie was also the incarnation of what the playwright wanted. It seems as if this bloodsucking Bosie was the ruin of him. Oscar Wilde was a decent and humane man full of generous impulses. Wilde couldn’t have written a line without Lord Douglas-or someone like him-in his life. Which contains the phrase “the Love that dare not speak its name.” Of course, though Oscar couldn’t write when the creature was around, he craved the divine and devilish confusion that the lad always brought with him. He also has to his credit the poem “Two Loves” Bosie seems to have been fairly idle and unable to exist on his own resources for five minutes, though he got some verses into Q’s Oxford Book of English Poetry. He’d pointed out to Bosie that, apart from anything else, it was impossible to write while he was around. No matter that Oscar had burned his telegrams and agreed with the boy’s mother that it was best if he and Bosie separate for good. But you can sense in these prison cell outpourings (with the Warden and others vetting the manuscript) a pathetic triumph in the fact that the darling gilt and lavender lad always hung on like grim death. He was good at giving him up-he did it every three months. You can’t help chuckling when you read how Wilde tried to get rid of the clinging Bosie. If the whole world despises her/him, well, are we not the truer and more discerning if we can see how fascinating he/she is? (Often these creatures show an arrogance that seems, to their victim, to set them off like deities against the background of a tedious, carping world.) They have a romance that is inherent in their very disreputability. But at the same time it’s obvious that he possessed an arrogant charm that continued to devastate Wilde to the end.Īffairs that to outsiders appear like a sickness are not uncommon. Lord Alfred Douglas comes out of all this as a flimsy, impish figure. In jail he couldn’t have helped remembering exploits in Tite Street and at Torquay, Goring, Florence, Monte Carlo, etc. As he wrote to Robert Ross-who was understandably flabbergasted by this backsliding-he loved Bosie precisely because he’d ruined his life. Bosie dragged Wilde down to hell while Oscar loved every minute of it, hypnotised by the oncoming wreck of his life.ĭespite all his good intentions, when Wilde got out of jail he soon took up with the little shit again. Of course the author had always found Douglas, the writer of what he now called “revolting” letters and telegrams, that gilt and lavender lad, utterly irresistible. Wilde claims that he hated the fact that he had to pay for everything, “from (Bosie’s) morning shave to (his) midnight hansom.” The folly of that whole glorious extravagant career is exhilarating. Everything was so expensive: the meals, the gifts, the gambling debts incurred by Bosie and covered by Wilde, (there is no problem recalling prices, as Wilde had had to go over the whole period recently with bankruptcy auditors). Image via EmptyMirrorIt is hard to read the letter published as De Profundis, with its account of Wilde’s disastrous life with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, without laughing.įrom his cell in Reading Gaol, Wilde recounts the tally of the couple’s lavish, carefree days of freedom.
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