Pederast & Peer

Pederast & Peer

OSCAR WILDE: His LIFE AND CONFESSIONS--Frank Harris--Covici, Friede-- Published July 23 ($3-75).

Of Oscar Wilde's guilt, and the nature of it, there has never been much doubt since his disastrous libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, when the Poet too loudly claimed the Peer had fouled him. The name usually coupled with Oscar Wilde's is Lord Alfred ("Bosie") Douglas, unfilial son of the unpaternal Marquess. After Wilde's sentence and imprisonment in Reading Gaol he rejoined Douglas on the Continent, but the two erstwhile boon companions soon quarreled for the last time. When Wilde died squalidly in Paris (1900), "Bosie" was far away.

To his definitive life of Oscar Wilde, first published in 1916, Author Harris has added only a long statement, never before published, by Lord Douglas, and a memoir of Wilde by George Bernard Shaw.

The Douglas "confession" was written to Harris in 1927. By then Douglas had become a devout Roman Catholic and had been married a long time. Says he: "A little more than a year after Wilde's death I married. Such perverted instincts as I had disappeared completely as soon as I lost contact with Wilde and his immediate entourage." Douglas openly accuses Wilde of pederasty but denies any complicity on his part. Harris is inclined to believe this.

Playwright Shaw's memoir of Wilde is sparkling. Shaw reports the "maudlin pathos and inconceivable want of tact" of Wilde's brother Willie. Slily he says: "Oscar was not a man of bad character: you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere." Shaw did not like Wilde personally, considered him a "Dublin snob"; but when Shaw was trying to get signatures of London literary men to a petition for the reprieve of the Chicago anarchists (1885), Wilde was the only one who would sign. Says Shaw: "It secured my distinguished consideration for him for the rest of his life."

The Author. Frank Harris, 74, born in Ireland of Welsh parents, is one of few living literary men to whom the term "free lance" can be fittingly applied. Onetime cowboy (in Texas), onetime schoolteacher, onetime editor (of the London Vanity Fair, Saturday Review, Candid Friend), he is an all-time anti-authoritarian and rebel. Says Critic Joseph Wood Krutch of him: "Love, forgiveness and pity are his themes, Jesus and the 'gentle Shakespeare' his idols, but truculence is his manner." Says Harris of himself: "I am a lover of books and men, who takes pleasure in the past by traveling and in the future by dreaming." Say caustic critics: his favorite recreation is drawing the long bow. He lives in a villa at Nice with his wife, has had no children.

Other books: Monies the Matador, The Bomb, The Man Shakespeare, Contemporary Portraits, My Life.

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