Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred DouglasDouglas MurrayHodder & Stoughton £20, pp374
In 1895, as the storm clouds gathered over the already tempestuous affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Bosie’s intemperate and quite possibly insane father, the Marquess of Queensberry, voiced the opinion that his son ought to have ‘the shit kicked out of him’.
I’m afraid it’s an idea which might occur more than once to the reader wading through incident after paranoid incident of hurt, reproach, libel suit and vicious sonnet in Bosie’s life story, all employed by this ‘golden boy’ in the relentless pursuit of his own ends. Douglas Murray’s rehabilitation of his subject is a brave attempt to redeem a character immured in the calumny of legend. Beloved of Wilde, betrayed by Wilde, betrayer of Wilde, Douglas was a man-boy who played on his charm until it ran out, then raged against Fate for that mortal fact.
After a colourful introduction to the ‘black Douglases’, Murray’s well-researched account soon has us in the thick of the affair, and by telling it from Douglas’s point of view, the author gives us an illuminating new angle, especially on Bosie’s sexuality. An early experimenter with his own sex, Douglas came to Magdalen as the leader of ‘the cause’, a campaigner by default. Yet he would turn both straight and Catholic post-Wilde. Indeed, it increasingly seems as though it was both protagonists’ heterosexuality which proved their downfall.
Bosie had the added burden of genetic instability to cope with. Murray reminds us what a monster the Marquess was. He was a vicious man who damned his family to misery. None more so than Alfred, although his other son, Percy, was described by his father as a ‘sicked-up looking creature, as if he had come up the wrong way. When he was a child swathed in irons to hold him together it used to make me sick to look at him and think that he could be called my son.’
Murray’s account of the familiar tragedy of Wilde’s trials is well marshalled. He points out that when Bosie failed to make it into the dock to defend Wilde, the rest of his life would seem to have been a series of attempts – often in the courts – to make up for the fact. Most crucial of all is the time-bomb of Wilde’s prison letter to Douglas, De Profundis, which was kept from Bosie by Wilde’s ‘devoted friend’ Robbie Ross and which Murray correctly sees as Wilde’s most ‘destructive legacy’ to Douglas.
Bosie became twisted up in his own past, his literary talent wastefully channelled into vituperative sonnets and magazines which seem to exist solely for the purposes of pursuing his campaigns against Robbie Ross, the Asquiths, Jews, and any other party by whom he felt wronged. This sometimes tiresome sequence of spats culminated in the infamous Pemberton Billing trial of 1918, when the protofascist MP Billing alleged the war effort was being undermined by sexual perverts in the highest positions of influence. Douglas, seizing the opportunity for revenge on Ross – and Wilde, by one remove – and encouraged by Billing in his mad conspiracy theories, took the stand to declare that Wilde was ‘the greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years’.
But Douglas’s public nadir came when Churchill sued him over wild allegations that he had taken part in a Jewish-financed conspiracy to have Kitchener ‘murdered’ in 1916; Douglas received a prison sentence. Murray depicts this as a turning-point in Douglas’s life. Like Wilde, Douglas wrote an epic work whilst in prison – In Excelsis – which his biographer sees as a purging of his old obsessions, although with lines such as ‘The leprous spawn of scattered Israel/Spends its contagion in your English blood’, it merely repeated the kind of libels which had got Douglas into prison in the first place. Contorted in the fundamentalist pathology of the time, such accusations were little removed from those made by Billing’s intellectual patron, Arnold White, that: ‘Wilde, after death, was found to have a tumour on his brain, a fact that pointed to a hospital rather than Reading gaol’.
Yet Douglas did redeem himself in the Twenties and Thirties, repledging his name to Wilde’s. Abandoned by his wife, his son in a mental hospital, slipping further into poverty, he was supported only by his undoubted Catholic faith and friends as disparate as Marie Stopes and Bernard Shaw. In a centennial year which threatens many more books on Wilde, Murray’s book does a fine job of putting an irksome and faded legendary boy to bed.
