In his early thirties, Merlin Holland went to the launch of an anthology of work by Rebecca West at Searcys restaurant in London. There, a certain actress took it upon herself to introduce him to the famously irascible playwright Harold Pinter. ‘Harold,’ she said, ‘this is Merlin Holland. He is Oscar Wilde’s grandson.’ Pinter didn’t pause. ‘So what?’ he replied, before turning back to the person to whom he had been talking before. This was in 1977. Now, after a Pinteresque pause of almost half a century, Holland has finally got around to answering that question.
After Oscar is a 600-plus-page labour of love recounting the ways in which Oscar Wilde’s unique legacy has affected the lives of his family members, including his grandson Merlin. In Wilde’s day, his witty, brittle plays made him the toast of the town. Yet his fall from grace in 1895, after he was convicted of consorting with rent boys and sentenced to two years of hard labour, was so spectacular that he became a myth: the social and literary butterfly broken on the wheel of 19th-century law.
Wilde’s works – particularly the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the play The Importance of Being Earnest – are constantly revived, along with the conversation that accompanies them. In an effort to escape Wilde’s shadow, his wife, Constance, vainly changed her and her children’s surname to Holland, and denied Wilde access to their sons. She died in 1898 after a botched operation in Italy. The older son, Cyril, reacted to learning about his father by striving to be as manly as possible. He was shot by a sniper in the First World War.
The younger son, Vyvyan, Merlin’s father, led a largely feckless life. He passed his bar exams but never practised because he found the law boring. Nevertheless, when he had to state his occupation on a form, he would always put ‘barrister’. He tried writing fairy stories and screenplays but wasn’t much good at them. He went bankrupt and ultimately died after falling down the stairs at the Beefsteak Club following a boozy lunch with the author Alec Waugh. In his younger years he had been a hit with the ladies; his lovers included Kathleen Hale, the author of the Orlando children’s books, and the aforementioned Rebecca West. In his late fifties he married Thelma, a fetching Australian twenty-four years his junior, who wasn’t very nice to him. According to Holland, Thelma urged Vyvyan to write his memoir, Son of Oscar Wilde, but was then severely critical of it, describing it as dull.
There was evidently an element of denial in Vyvyan, who once noted in his diary that his father may have been ‘slightly inclined towards homosexuality’. The strait-laced Thelma wouldn’t even go as far as that. She ‘brainwashed’ young Merlin into believing that his poor old grandpa was the victim of a stitch-up. In one of the best stories here, we learn she travelled to Oxford to talk to the biographer Richard Ellmann, who was working on what would be the most influential life of Wilde. In a letter to her son describing meeting Ellmann and his wife, Thelma reported, ‘I then gave them a dissertation, which I am sure is true, that OW was basically heterosexual. That shook them.’ In response to which Holland remarks drily, ‘I have no doubt that it did.’
Another highlight of After Oscar is Holland’s description of his involvement in the so-so 1997 film Wilde. The filmmakers tried to hire him as a consultant, but then ignored his advice to the point that he refused their offer of £5,000 for the role, despite the fact he was short of cash at the time. His blow-by-blow account of these negotiations provides a nice insight into the scrappier side of movie-making. And his judgement of the film feels spot on: too much on Wilde’s sex life, too little on his writing, plus a slightly drippy central turn from Stephen Fry; ‘Somehow this wasn’t the remarkable wit and conversationalist who had kept dinner tables enthralled in the early 1890s.’
As we proceed through his conscientious chronology, with each chapter handling a different episode in Wilde’s afterlife, Holland’s attitude towards his grandfather emerges as mixed, to say the least – as it is towards the whole business of writing about his family. The result, unfortunately, is that he includes some material that he would have done better to leave out (I’m not sure we needed an account of the events surrounding the unveiling of a memorial plaque to his great-grandmother), and omits some things we want to know more about.
He mentions in passing, for example, that his father put together ‘an extraordinary library of erotic literature, mostly French from the 18th and 19th centuries’. We learn no more than that. And he confesses that, at a certain point, he realised he knew next to nothing about his grandfather and so embarked on a mission to educate himself. Yet we never hear how he went about it, or what that experience was like – a very strange omission in a long book about the emotional legacy of Wilde for his descendants.
Incidentally, it’s best to ignore the publisher’s claim that this book is ‘the definitive study of Oscar Wilde’s posthumous reputation’. It isn’t anything of the kind. We learn something about changing attitudes towards homosexuality in the 125 years since Wilde’s death, but we get little on his critical standing. His society comedies have always been popular, but for decades Wilde was seen as a lightweight. In an article in 1930, for example, Evelyn Waugh dismissed his talent as ‘unremarkable’ and sneered at his epigrams and paradoxes as ‘monkey-tricks of the intellect’. Since then, he has been accepted as a writer to be taken seriously – one who bears comparison with Waugh himself, say, combining social snobbery with perfect pitch and a fine gift for silliness.
The way Wilde progressed from lightweight to literary great was in fact a brilliant act of posthumous self-promotion. While in prison, he wrote a 50,000-word letter to his toxic ex-boyfriend Alfred Douglas, blaming him for his downfall. He also took the opportunity to sketch his own achievements as a writer. His self-assessment is not modest. Clearly intended for publication, De Profundis, as the letter became known, was too scandalous to be brought out straight away. He entrusted it to his friend Robbie Ross, who placed the manuscript in the vaults of the British Museum. There it lay for half a century like an unexploded bomb. When it was finally published in full in 1962, it settled the score between Wilde and Douglas once and for all – and in the process, staked Wilde’s claim to greatness. It was a fitting last bow from the old showman.
