The Most Beautifully Defensive Lines From Lord Alfred Douglas' Forward For An Oscar Wilde Biography

I recently picked up a copy of Frances Winwar’s 1941 Wilde biography, Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties, not for the biography itself but for the hostile forward written by Lord Alfred Douglas, which I can only imagine Winwar’s publisher forced into the book after the threat of legal action.

At this point in Douglas’ life he had turned Wilde-related litigation into a one-man cottage industry. He had already published both Oscar Wilde and Myself (1914) and Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up (1940), but additionally contributed antagonistic forwards and prefaces to a number of other Wildean biographies (not to mention a number of libel cases):

• Oscar Wilde Twice Defended From Andre Gide’s Wicked Lies and Frank Harris. To which is added a reply to George Bernard Shaw, a refutation of Dr. G. J. Renier’s statements, a letter to the author from Lord Alfred Douglas, an interview with Bernard Shaw by Hugh Kingsmill, Robert Harborough Sherard, 1934.

• Oscar Wilde: A Play, Leslie & Sewell Stokes, 1938.

• A New Preface to “The Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde,” Frank Harris, 1925.

I experience a curious reversal of interest in a post-sentencing Douglas and Wilde. While this picture may not be strictly accurate, my sense of Wilde’s few remaining years after prison feel a little inert and predetermined; in the recollections of others he seems neutralized by martyrdom, unbearably sentimental, dead in all but name. Whereas Douglas, as wretched and hateful a character as the nineteenth century was capable of minting, turns spitefulness, mulishness, self-pity, and petty record-correcting into an art.

One gets the sense, reading Douglas, that it was only because he had the misfortune to be born in the nineteenth century rather than the ninth, that he was not able to recreate the Cadaver Synod of Pope Formosus. Given half the chance, I have no doubt he would have dug up Wilde’s corpse and through it ventriloquized a full exoneration and generous apology for himself.

Here are a few of the best and brightest lines:

“As I have been invited to defend myself against the accusations brought against me in this book I feel it would be impossible for me to decline that invitation and to refuse to shoulder the burden of all the unpleasantness it implies.”

I have to do this. I am seventy years old and it is impossible for me to stop litigating the 1890s. We are in the middle of World War II but nothing matters more than American biographies about my old boyfriend. I’m not doing this because I want to. I’ve never wanted to do anything. All I ever wanted to do was live in quiet retirement in this cave and whittle figures of the saints. You’re making me do this! I hope you’re happy!

“I entirely acquit [Miss Frances Winwar] of malice and deliberate unfairness.”

I forgive you. I forgive you all, so beautifully, for you know not what you do…

“This book…is of such a character, so libelous in fact, that it could never have been published in England. I could have prevented its publication in Great Britain as easily and effectively as I prevented the sale of Frank Harris’ Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions.”

By the way, if we were doing this at my house, I would have won easily. You have the advantage here — also I have a slight cold — I slept funny last night and am not at all well — but of course I say nothing of my own problems — I win a lot of court cases back home but I’m happy to play on your court today, even though it’s riddled of infractions and is not regulation-sized. I will allow your little book to move forward with publication, out of the goodness of my heart, but rest assured that if I wanted to, I could remove it from existence with a snap of my fingers.

“It is no exaggeration to say that in this New Preface, which he wrote in Nice and personally handed to me in manuscript, Harris admitted that practically everything he had written against me in his life of Wilde was untrue, and he explained that he had been deceived and misled by the malice of Robert Ross.”

He also said that my eyes were as blue as robin’s eggs, and that I don’t look a day over thirty-five. He said that to me in Nice, which is in France by the way.

“After the removal of about half of one chapter I was satisfied, and the brilliant preface which Mr. Shaw wrote for the reissue of Harris’ book…contained such kind and flattering references to myself (he exalted me as a poet, compared me favourably to Shelley, defended my moral character, and vindicated the nature of my relationship with and treatment of Oscar Wilde in the strongest and most generous terms) that it would ill become me to cherish any grievance.”

I never hold grudges. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you I make a business of forgiving my many horrible enemies, even though they do not deserve my beautiful blond forgiveness. My greatest antagonists have nevertheless admitted that I am as good as Shelley, and a physically vigorous virgin. I’m twenty-five by the way.

“Many things related about me in Miss Winwar’s book are utterly false, and there is also a continual suppression (I do not for a moment suggest deliberate) of facts which tell in my favour.”

It is not this dim broad’s fault that she has committed so many disgusting errors of fact!! I am sure she was merely misled, like how dogs get confused when you pretend to throw a ball but don’t actually throw it. You wouldn’t blame the dog :( :( :(

“She declares that this two hundred pounds was merely a part of a much larger sum (five hundred pounds she says) which I “owed” him and that this mythical (for it is mythical) five hundred pounds was ‘a debt of honour.’”

And I don’t owe him money. Do not write down that I ever owed Oscar Wilde money, because I didn’t. People made that up, just because I happen to be a perfect size six and the best poet since Rimbaud, and sometimes when I walk down the street titled gentlemen want to give me presents, not through any ulterior motives, merely because they wish to add beauty to beauty’s store.

“Mr. Symons has assured me that when his book is finished it will result in my complete and final vindication…Mr. Symons told me he was amazed at the way letters and documents turned up to endorse my version of the facts.”

It’s crazy, how many documents have been turning up fifty years later with all kinds of admissions. “I hate Alfred Douglas and am going to tell lies about him, because I am jealous of his perfect chin and his well-balanced checkbook. Signed Robert Ross,” for example.

“In his De Profundis letter written in prison, to which Miss Winwar frequently refers, he makes the astonishing statement that I interfered with his art and prevented him from writing, whereas the truth, which is susceptible of complete proof, is that from the time he met me till the day of his death the only thing he wrote when I was not with him (generally sitting in the same room) was precisely this De Profundis screed which is a letter to me!”

How could I have kept him from writing when he literally wrote De Profundis to me?? If anything I made him write more than he would have otherwise!

“He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol in my villa at Naples, and from the day when we were separated till the hour of his death he never wrote another line.”

Draw your own conclusions!!!

“I have never denied that I was in many respects ‘a bad boy’ in my early youth. I have admitted it and expressed the deepest contrition for it over and over again, publicly, in my books, and in the witness box in open court. Those who are sufficiently interested in me to want to know the exact truth about me personally will find it in my books.”

I already told you I apologized, so there’s no point in my trying to apologize now. I did a whole apology tour and if you missed it that’s not on me. If you want to hear more about it you are welcome to purchase one of my books but if you’re not going to pay me I don’t see why I should tell you anything.”

“I owed no money at all to Oscar Wilde at the time I left him in Naples.”

Do not put that I owed him money!!!

“There was never any such thing as any ‘debt of honour’ between him and me, and, on the contrary, if I were now to do what (to do us both justice) we never did — that is, make up a strict account of all money transactions between us — the result would show a large balance in my favour.”

We didn’t keep “records” and I never wrote down how much we borrowed from each other but I promise you that if I ever went back and wrote it all down it would absolutely prove that I gave him the most.

“Again, my father’s whiskers were not red but very dark brown, almost black, as was his hair. Not that it matters. I merely mention it.”

But it does make you wonder what else they got wrong!

“As for the ravings against me of Wilde in his De Profundis letter…Wilde wrote that letter when he was half mad and nearly starving in prison…Directly he got out of prison and realized how utterly mistaken he had been about my attitude to him he started writing me letters ‘in the old adoring strain.’”

None of that stuff was true! He was just hungry! Once he had a few square meals he realized he’d made it all up. Oscar was like that. Not me. I skip meals all the time, I just don’t even think about it, and then my friends say “Oh my God, Alfred!! You are TOO SKINNY! Look at you! You forgot to eat again!!!” and I don’t even realize it, because I am so unconcerned with matters of the flesh (is that how you spell it?) but if Oscar missed lunch he’d immediately start accusing people of embezzling.

“I said to my counsel, ‘People have only got to listen to all this wild nonsense to see how ridiculous it is.’ I was quite wrong of course. To this day this farrago of malignant imbecility is taken quite seriously by many people and is sometimes referred to as a ‘terrible indictment,’ a ‘damning exposure,’ and so forth. All I can say is that I decline to argue with anyone who is stupid enough to be taken in by such twaddle.”

People keep saying that the “preponderance of evidence is against me” which is so stupid I don’t even want to breathe anymore.

“It is no use arguing with people who can swallow such drivel, so I say no more about it.”

I generally stay above the fray. People are always saying how far above the fray I remain, although I would never say it, because I’m very humble, even though I’m also far above the fray.

“The [In Praise of Shame] sonnet, which happens, though I say it, to be a pretty good one, and which obviously is influenced in its style by Swinburne, has nothing on earth to do with the vice which was the subject of Wilde’s trials. It has not the remotest connection with or reference to homosexuality.”

Once again I really have to insist that people stop talking about my relationship to some dead guy and start talking about my poetry. People should stop writing biographies of Oscar Wilde, who was really more of a playwright than a poety anyway, and start writing about my many heterosexual poems, and how much my poems remind them of Shelley and Swinburne and so on.

“As to the other poem, I do not deny that it contains an allusion to homosexuality, but it is really very harmless and decorous, and if it had been printed for the first time within the last ten years as the work of one of our ‘modern poets’ no one would have turned a hair over it.”

Because of political correctness!!!

“As I tried to explain then (unsuccessfully), it is merely the outcome of a classical education and a passion for the sonnets of Shakespeare.”

If you are prepared to call me a homosexual then I hope you are ready to say the same about the entire British educational system.

“Can Miss Winwar lay her hand on her heart and conscientiously declare that she has been fair to me?”

Also can she say that her latest hairstyle really suits her, if she is scrupulously honest with herself about the shape of her head?

“I am quite aware that my claim to rank as a major poet, which has not been seriously disputed in this country (England) for at least twenty years, may not have penetrated to America, where my poetry has been persistently boycotted by publishers, but even if I am not a great poet I am surely entitled to common fair play.”

Possibly in your country you are not aware that for the last twenty years everyone in England has agreed that I am a major poet, a major and a great poet, right up there with Shelley and Swinburne and so on, and if you don’t happen to know that then I am embarrassed for you, and I think you must deserve that haircut after all.

“Is there never to be an end of this mudslinging? Perhaps I may be allowed to plead that as I am now over seventy years of age people, who still feel an irresistible ‘urge’ to throw mud at me might decently bring themselves to wait a few years till I am dead.”

I am so old, even though I am regularly carded in bars (not that I go to bars, I only go to the forest when I run out of wood for whittling my little saints, and then I creep right back to my humble little hermitage), and you are killing me by inches. Why don’t you just wait to deface my grave in a few years, instead of kicking this gentle old man with the face, ass, and calves of an angel, who never hurt a soul and always paid his own way at group dinners? Have you no decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? PS Even Oscar Wilde admitted I was the greatest poet since Chaucer, the nicest guy he ever met, and his only inspiration, even though we never had sex or even went to a hotel together, and that he made it all up, and that he’s very very sorry, and if he had it to do all over again he would hold a parade in my honor. Which of course I could never accept because I am much too humble to attend my own parade. And what would I even wear? I don’t have a thing to wear.