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Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and His Finest Work

Caspar Wintermans

‘His [Wintermans's] knowledge of Lord Alfred Douglas is second to none.’ – Merlin Holland, grandson of Oscar Wilde

Caspar Wintermans's eagerly awaited and highly controversial biography of Lord Alfred Douglas sets out to defend Oscar Wilde’s beloved ‘Bosie’ from over a century of false accusations, lies and misinformation. By directly engaging with the source of these attacks – Wilde’s De Profundis – upon which most previous biographies have been based, Wintermans is able to show that this was a work written in the depths of despair while Wilde was incarcerated in gaol, being passionate, cruel and deeply untruthful.
Wintermans' proves that, far from being a rakish homme fatale, Alfred Douglas was in fact a supportive and kind lover who worshipped the playwright and whose life was destroyed by both those who loved and hated the ostentatiously homosexual Wilde.

Accompanied by a long overdue anthology of Douglas’ poetry, this is a revealing and moving representation of a tragically misunderstood poet.

Bosie in from the Cold

Irish Times, June 2nd

An engaging reassessment  of the life, reputation and poetry of Oscar Wilde’s lover

Already famous, Oscar Wilde’s very public disgrace and imprisonment copper- fastened his iconic status, greatly helped by his writings The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis. At the same time De Profundis condemned his lover Lord Alfred Douglas to posthumous notoriety as his nemesis, the source of all his ruination. In this remarkable document , Wilde, ill, ruined and alone in his cell, reinvented himself: “I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me.”
            This letter sets the tone for many subsequent accounts of his downfall, constructing Wilde himself as tragic victim and Douglas as cruel, betraying beloved.  De Profundis recounts so many incidents of Douglas’s selfishness and duplicity that it comes as no surprise that Wilde reunited with his nemesis within a few short months of leaving prison . De Profundis was eventually published in full in 1949, after Douglas’s death, setting his infamy in stone. Bernard Shaw, a friend of Douglas in later life, once wrote that “It is clearly monstrous that Douglas should have a torpedo launched at him and timed to explode after his death  . . . it is rather a humorous stroke of Fate’s irony that the son of the Marquis of Queensbury should be forced to expatiate his sins by suffering a succession of blows beneath the belt”. On the other hand, Gore Vidal also quipped : “Must one have a heart of stone to read the Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing? (In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates, much less loves).”

THIS NEW STUDY, Alfred Douglas : A Poet’s Life and his Finest Work, by Caspar Wintermans, joins other excellent biographies such as Rupert Croft-Cookes’s 1963 study, H Montgomery Hyde’s 1984 work and Douglas Murray’s outstanding Bosie, published in 2000. Wintermans gives a spirited and lively account of the poet’s life and writings, seeing Douglas as “a much- maligned man, a first rate poet whose literary accomplishments have unfortunately been obscured by his involvement with the most sensational society scandal of the Fin de Siecle: the trials of Oscar Wilde.”
            Wintermans, already well -published in this period , divides his book into three sections. He gives a highly readable account of Douglas’s life and vicissitudes, a useful annotated selection of his poems and an excellent bibliography of his writings. De Profundis is described as “a harangue teeming with hysterical outbursts against Bosie, depicting him as ungrateful, jaded, selfish irritating little brat  who writes doggerel verse”, Wintermans sets out to argue that Douglas was a misunderstood figure and an underestimated poet – a challenging task, because Douglas, even in this sympathetic account, emerges as a difficult man, touchy, argumentative and litigious. His marriage in 1902, two years after Wilde’s death, to the poet Olive Custance was a love match and they remained life long friends even after they separated. However, this marriage brought him into conflict with her father, who took exception to Douglas’s conversion to Catholicism and to his overspending. Eventually Douglas went to court to battle unsuccessfully with his father-in-law for custody of his only son, Raymond, a tragic figure, later hospitalized after a mental breakdown . Douglas developed a taste for legal drama and was involved in a string of high profile court cases from 1909 onwards, including the infamous Pemberton Billing case in 1918. Here, Douglas came forward to attest to Wilde’s degeneracy, and Wintermans tells us that “The trial was a farce . . .” Bosie assured the ‘intensely bourgeois’ members of the jury that Oscar had never written a line that was not designedly evil, that he had always aimed at undermining virtue, yes, that he had been opne of the most powerful pals of the Devil . . .”
            Douglas was eventually arrested for attacking Winston Churchill in a pamphlet published in 1923, ending up in Wormwood Scrubs. Apart from his account of his troubled life, Wintermans also addresses Douglas’s merits as a poet, but the evidence around his quality as a poet is not, in my view, compelling. Would Douglas have merited so much critical interest without his connection to Wilde? His most famous poem, Two Loves, gave us the phrase , “The Love that dare not speak its name”, a line that Wilde was forced to explain away in his trial as an idealized platonic love, devoid of any sexual consummation. Interestingly, Douglas’s most striking poem was his 1900 lament for Wilde, The Dead Poet.
            Overall, Wintermans extends the scholarly debate around Douglas’s poetry in an engaging and accessible way and does much to question Wilde’s self mythologizing in De Profundis. – Eibhar Walshe, Irish Times

Bewildered, Betrayed

TLS, June1st

‘Lord Alfred Douglas belong to that small group of individuals who have had the shock of reading their own obituary. On the afternoon of February 4, 1921, he bought a copy of the Evening News and was halted by the headline: “SUDDEN DEATH OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS – FOUND DEAD IN BED BY A MAID”. What followed was worse: “A brilliant and most unhappy career is ended . . . The charity which is fitting at all times, but most fitting when we are speaking of the newly dead, urges that much should be forgiven to this poor, bewildered man, who, with all his gifts, will perhaps only be remembered by the scandals and the quarrels in which he will be involved himself”. Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, who by this stage of his life (he was fifty-one) had largely abandoned his literature for litigation, immediately instructed his solicitors. It was a gross libel, he claimed, to suggest that he should only be remembered for his squabbles. What of his poems, his good looks, his horsemanship, his journalism?
         Douglas won his case, but he has scarcely been vindicated at the bar of history. Now, whenever he is recalled, it is as a player in Oscar Wilde’s downfall and its many aftershocks. And certainly this entertaining and well researched biography derives much of its colour and interest from the various rows, scandals, feuds, and legal actions in which Douglas was embroiled on account of his friendship with Wilde. Additional spice is provided by subsidiary squabbles with his wife, the intensely affected poet Olive Cunstance (whom he married in 1902), her father Colonel Custance, Winston Churchill (whom Douglas accused of engineering a stock-market coup for Jewish investors by withholding vital information about the outcome of the Battle of Jutland). According to the established reading it was the thirty-six-year-old Wilde’s fatal passion for beautiful young spoiled selfish vicious Bosie – then a floppy-haired undergraduate at Oxford – that led him onto the rocks of disaster. Their intimacy provoked first the wrath of Bosie’s intemperate father, the Marquess of Queensbury, and then Bosie’s own intemperate desire to confront his brutal parent in the courtroom. This was the interpretation of events set down by Wilde while he was in Reading Gaol in the long – but never delivered letter to Douglas, which was eventually published as De Profundis. It is an interpretation that has readily taken up by others. It stands behind the account in Richard Ellman’s still authoritative biography of Wilde. It informed the Stephen Fry film.
         Douglas himself, by the actions of his later life, did much to contribute to this negative impression. He published a bitter book repudiating Wilde’s memory and – following in his own footsteps – he hounded his contemporary and sometime-friend Robbie Ross through the courts for being a sodomite. Caspar Wintermans, however, offers a more complex and convincing picture of events. He carefully unpicks the background to the writing of De Profundis, Wilde’s changing attitude to what he had written and the subsequent use of the text by Robbie Ross, as he sought to claim Bosie’s place as Wilde’s foremost friend. Ross was an amusing and urbane character, and is rightly well regarded for his work in securing Wilde’s literary legacy and in supporting Wilde’s orphaned children, but in his dealings with Douglas it is clear that he did not play altogether fair. He had always been jealous of Wilde’s love for Douglas and was delighted – when Wilde gave him the De Profundis letter for safekeeping – to have ammunition to humiliate his rival. Douglas’s humiliation, when the letter was finally read out in court in 1913, was complete. He felt betrayed by Wilde, by Ross, by everyone, and he began lashing out in all directions. He was indeed often a “poor bewildered man”, more deserving of sympathy than blame. And he has received a good deal of kindness over the years.
         This is not the first sympathetic life of Douglas; it has the virtue, however, of being the shortest. It is brisk, interesting, lucid and also well written – translated as it is from the original Dutch by its author. Wintermans is clearly steeped in his subject, and his English – enlivened with occasional epigrams – has an engagingly period feel. He writes enthusiastically about Bosie’s poems, and prints a generous selection as an appendix. It is useful to have them, though they scarcely confirm the biographer’s warm verdict . Almost all of them are finely chiselled Petrarchean sonnets: a few cloyed with self-pity, some laboriously artificial, and a rather high proportion beginning with the exclamation ‘Alas’. Alas, indeed. His one immortal line – ending a paen to same-sex love – remains , “I am the love that dare not speak its name”. Its fame has carried to Middle America, where Pat Buchanan – faced with the gay-rights lobby – recently modified it to “I am the love that will not shut up”. As a literary legacy it is limited, but not unimpressive.’  

‘An authoritative new biography of Lord Alfred’– Daily Express

‘An excellent book full of brilliant and original insights that makes a real contribution to the subject.’– Thomas Wright, respected Wildean