*Criterion Winter 02-4.16 - Divinity School - University of Chicago

20 WINTER 2002
In sifting the rubble of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas
rationality is a useless tool.
And then methought outside a fast locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds.
And so I woke and knew that he was dead. 20
Douglas seems at last to have understood, if too late,
the fundamental principles of forgiveness—that true reconciliation
can only be affected by genuine contrition and
reconciliation with the one wronged. That becomes clear
in a sonnet transparently addressed to Oscar, entitled
THE WASTES OF TIME
If you came back, perhaps you would not find
The old enchantment, nor again discern
The altered face of love. The wheels yet turn
That clocked the wasted hours, the spirit’s wind
Still fans the embers in the hidden mind.
But if I cried to you, ‘Return! return!’
How could you come? How could you ever learn
The old ways you have left so far behind?
How sweetly, forged in sleep, come dreams that make
Swift wings and ships that sail the estranging sea,
Less roughly than blown rose leaves in a bowl,
To harboured bliss. But oh! the pain to wake
In empty night seeking what may not be
Till the dead flesh set free the living soul. 21
“Bosie had the most beautiful manners. I hope you will
mention them,” wrote John Betjeman to Rupert Croft-
Cooke when the latter was writing his biography of Douglas.
Croft-Cooke concurred in this judgment of Bosie’s personality
in maturity that “He was a splendid example of the
truth of the tag that a gentleman is one who is never rude,
except on purpose. He could be, in his earlier days particularly,
most effectively rude, as his satires prove. But he could
not be rude to the merely importunate, the tactless or the
dull-witted.” 22
It is a damnable assessment of a person to reduce a life to
the judgment that he or she was, in the end, “nice.” That
simplistic reduction is balanced by Aubrey Beardsley’s contemporary
assessment of Oscar and Bosie that “both of them
are really very dreadful people.” 23 All of which is only to say
that Douglas and Wilde, like each of us, are complex.
When I first set out to engage their stories I had in mind
to revisit and reassess their biographies. I had a hunch that
their life stories, like most, invite us to reflect upon our own
lives. That is one reason why biography, self-inflicted or
otherwise, remains the powerful genre that it is.
What struck me about both Wilde and Douglas was a
blindness that was, and still is, hard to plumb. Each man, at
so many points, was blind to the effects of his actions upon
himself, upon the other, upon all the others in their lives and
societies. Each man was the product of complex family and
social systems, yet each also possessed such strong will and
sufficient ability as to dilute any excuse of victimization. Each
man deeply wounded himself, the other, and all the others
whom they touched; their wives and children were especially
badly treated. Each was obviously capable of deep affection
even for those they hurt. But the most difficult mystery was a
profound blindness to consequence. Each seemed genuinely
surprised at his fate. Was it true innocence, naïveté, invincible
ignorance? Was it egotistical selfishness, social privilege,
intellectual arrogance? I don’t yet know.
In sifting the rubble of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred
Douglas rationality is a useless tool. Mystery defies reason. If
their lives serve any use, it is perhaps as a morality tale for
our own time. From the wreckage of their lives rise the first
plaintive questions to ascend from the rubble of the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon: Who could hate us so much,
and why? How could so loving and generous a people as
we are occasion such anger and suffer such loss? Having
scratched around in the ruins of Wilde and Douglas, I know
that even if we sift every ash in lower Manhattan, the mystery
will remain. After all the clues are gathered, the evidence
examined, the mystery will endure, the ancient mystery of sin.
Try as we might, and try as we surely will, to deny it,
excuse it, or justify it, ours is still a fallen world, and we with