Alfred Douglas

• Two Loves, page 262.
• The Dead Poet, page 264.

Bibliography

• He betrayed Wilde. But that wasn’t the worst thing Bosie didby Philip Hoare inThe Observer Review, 4th. June, 2000, page 12. “Douglas Murray’s rehabilitation of his subject is a brave attempt to redeem a character immured in the 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.” “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.”
• Wilde at heartby Humphrey Carpenter inThe Sunday Times Culture, 4th. June, 2000, pages 35-36. “ ‘There were only about a dozen homosexuals in the country and all of them known to the police.’ This is what a certain Colonel Custance believed in 1902 when he discovered that his daughter had eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas, notorious as Oscar Wilde’s lover and muse. The bisexual Douglas knew very well that these were faulty statistics. ‘At Oxford,’ he stated in one of his defences of Wilde’s sexual habits, ‘I knew hundreds who had these tastes among the undergraduates, not to mention a slight sprinkling of dons.’ And during the period between Wilde’s release from prison and his premature death in 1900 Douglas was willing to support the gay cause to the hilt. Asserting that at least 25% of ‘the heroes of humanity’ had been homosexual, he declared that ‘sodomites ... are intellectually superior to other men’. Yet at other times of his life, Douglas (who married Custance’s daughter and had a son by her) turned aggressively on Wilde’s memory, rewriting his own past to the extent that he virtually denied having committed homosexual acts. He accused others of them in the most vitriolic terms; for example, Robert Ross, Wilde’s friend and literary executor, became in Douglas’s eyes ‘Ross the Sodomite ... the notorious Sodomite’.” “Douglas Murray, the author of Bosie, a new life of Lord Alfred, must be Britain’s youngest biographer. Aged 21, he is an Old Etonian and currently an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Wilde was once a student. Judging by the book’s author photograph, Murray looks more than a little like his subject, so that one begins the book expecting it to be a case of one golden boy writing about another. Nothing could be further from the truth: Murray is a firm, confident, objective biographer who writes unobtrusively well, and skilfully cuts a path through the vast jungle of Wildeana and the complexities of Douglas’s own life, so that the book is one of the most impressive biographical debuts for some time.”
• The devil’s partyby Jad Adams inThe Guardian: Saturday Review, 10th. June, 2000, page 8. “There is something for everyone to despise in Lord Alfred Douglas: those who have no criticism of his promotional homosexuality or his later homophobia will find his anti-semitism disgusting; anyone who can stomach this must have a hard time with his cruel treatment of friends and family, his litigiousness and absurd posing over his third-rate poetry.”
• It was Bosie’s love that never dared to speak its nameby Jeremy Reed inThe Times 2, 14th. June, 2000, pages 18-19. “In a passionate and well-researched defence of his subject Douglas Murray works hard to convince us that Douglas remains undervalued as a poet and undermined as a person.” “Murray’s thesis points up the confusion and moral dishonesty that were at the core of Douglas’s personality. “That his life was ruined by the consequences of his involvement with Wilde is beyond question, but that was a reflection of his lack of growth and generosity. Murray is to be commended for his attempts to vindicate Douglas’s life, and for giving us an eminently readable biography. It is a book calculated to appeal to devotees of Douglas and Wilde alike, and to the cult of their enduring scandal.”
• Dorian Gray goes to courtby Thomas Wright inThe Times Literary Supplement, 16th. June, 2000, page 12. “InDe Profundis, Oscar Wilde contemplated with horror the idea that Lord Alfred Douglas would appear in history as an Infant Samuel who had been corrupted by a wicked and immoral writer. He needn’t have worried. Largely as a result ofDe Profundisitself, Douglas is remembered as the ‘boring boy beauty’ (Gore Vidal) who lured Wilde into a life unworthy of an artist and then precipitated his downfall by urging him to prosecute Lord Queensberry. He survives in the popular imagination as ‘a Narcissus stupid when not cunning’ (Anthony Burgess) and as an arrogant aristocrat ‘with the despotic manners of a spoilt child’ (Gide). ‘History’, as Richard Ellmann put it, ‘preserves in amber his beauty and his greed, rage, and cruelty’. Poor Bosie? Nearly all his biographers seem to have thought so, and their works are essentially attempts at exculpation.” “The most spirited biographical defence of Wilde’s ‘dearest of all boys’ isRupert Croft-Cooke‘sBosie(1963), which is written in a cantankerous style that is ideal for its subject.” “The most persuasive apology for Douglas is, however, H. Montgomery Hyde’s weightyLord Alfred Douglas(1984). Montgomery Hyde very wisely allows the documents, rather than his client, do most of the talking.”
• A love that cannot clear its nameby Mark Bostridge inThe Independent on Sunday: The Sunday Review, 18th. June, 2000, page 55. “Bosie’s bad name has ensured that his serious work has tended to be excluded from anthologies, and that even his nonsense poems, which have a sub-Belloc flavour about them but which are fun for all that, are ignored in collection of light verse. Douglas will always be remembered as the perpetrator of one line which caused him such notoriety and which was later a source of bitter regret: ‘I am the Love that dare not speak its name’.”
• The unimportance of being Lord Alfredby Richard Canning inThe Independent: The Friday Review, 7th. July, 2000, page 5. “A friend ofJohn Gielgudrecently recollected the actor’s encounter with Lord Alfred Douglas. Gielgud asked Bosie whether the first production ofThe Importance of Being Earnest, which he had attended, was played as comedy or farce. ‘I can’t remember’, Douglas replied. Gielgud took that as evidence of extraordinary conceit. It is an opinion that this new biography - Douglas’s fifth - does little, for all its efforts, to shift. Douglas Murray began writing this life of Oscar Wilde’s fatal lover as a 16-year-old Etonian, completing it before progressing to Magdalen College, Oxford, where both Douglas and Wilde studied. Credit must be given for young industry and achievement. But there’s an indulgent air toBosie, suggesting it sprang from a schoolboy crush and never escaped.”
• A poet with his own paradise lostby Adrian Poole inThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 17th. November, 2000, page 42. “Douglas has never had much of a press and there is much in his life to deplore, especially the vindictive assault on fellow survivors from the Wilde years and on the memory of Oscar himself. Murray does not flinch from judging the Judas in him, but he shows us a boy who kicked and screamed through most of his life and was lucky and plucky enough to survive a bit longer a grow up.”
  
  
  
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• ‘Bosie’ cast as Wilde victim to avoid prosecution by Peter Day in The Independent, 21 January, 2000, page 5. “A letter lost for more than 100 years sheds new light on the trial of Oscar Wilde, revealing why his gay lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, escaped prosecution. The letter from senior Treasury counsel, Charles Gill, to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Hamilton Cuffe, advises that Lord Alfred should be regarded as a victim, corrupted by Wilde’s influence. It is the only surviving document from the DPP’s 1895 file on the case. Sir Hamilton is believed to have taken the file to his Irish mansion where it was destroyed by fire.” “Lord Alfred’s involvement had placed the DPP and the Government in a quandary. Queensberry’s older son had died in a shooting accident, reputedly suicide to avoid a scandal involving a homosexual relationship with Lord Rosebery, then Foreign Secretary.”
• The poet that time forgot by Gawain Douglas in The Guardian: Saturday Review, 12 February, 2000, page 5. “When I was a boy, my great uncle, Lord Alfred Douglas - or Bosie, as he was known - was just the photograph of a beautiful young man in a dusty old book of his poetry. I loved, and still love, the soaring Shakespearean line and musical quality to his poems; they beg to be read aloud - which is why I have recorded a CD of them. I felt I had to do something to re-establish his reputation, still completely dominated by his relationship with Oscar Wilde.” “His rigid adherence to an antique style of sonnet writing and his defiance of convention certainly make him an exceptional 20th-century figure, He was once highly regarded, gaining a place in the Oxford Book of English Verse. His poems, with their rigour and diamond-like strength, as clear and sharp as frost, should fascinate us today.”