Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture - Ohio University Press & Swallow ...

Such an anecdote beggars belief, and even Harris—who made capital from
exaggerating the story of Wilde’s life—would later take pains to correct this
extravagant tale. In the mid-1920s, Harris decided to approach Wilde’s former
lover, Alfred Douglas, with the intention of toning down the unflattering picture
of the aristocrat. In 1925, Harris hoped that Douglas could be persuaded that
the time had come for a fresh edition of Oscar Wilde—one furnished with a
preface that made appropriate apologies for defaming Douglas—to be published
in Britain. Harris duly supplied Douglas with the text of his preface. But Douglas,
after their meeting at Nice in April that year, stated that he would capitulate to
Harris’s demands only if the new edition of Oscar Wilde included “marginal
notes and the modification of the worst passages” that would counter the “mass
of malicious lies and misrepresentations” of him (New Preface, 8).
According to Douglas, Harris responded by stating that such changes “would
involve the destruction of a great many of the stereotyped plates,” and thus the
expense of such revisions would be well in excess of what he could afford (New
Preface, 8). In the circumstances, Douglas refused Harris permission to print a
new edition of the biography in Britain. As a consequence, Harris’s Oscar Wilde
was not issued in the United Kingdom until 1938. Douglas, however, took the
publication of Harris’s recantation into his own hands, and the resulting short
volume comprises Douglas’s foreword, Harris’s new preface, and Douglas’s letter
to Harris dated 30 April 1925, which aims to set the record straight. One event
that particularly irked Douglas puts Ross in a very poor light. Douglas explains in
some detail to Harris what happened before he turned up at the Hôtel d’Alsace on
2 December 1900:
While Wilde lay dead, and before I arrived in Paris, Ross went through the papers
and manuscripts he found in Wilde’s rooms. Among them he found a
quantity of my letters to Wilde. These letters he appropriated without a word
to me. I naturally had not the slightest idea that he had found and stolen letters
written by me to Wilde, and I suppose that even those queerly misguided
persons who profess to admire Ross as a model of “faithful friendship” . . . will
admit that to steal or appropriate letters written by one of one’s friends to
another friend, and to keep them secretly and finally use them against their
writer in a law court, is a wicked, disgraceful, and dishonourable action. The
facts as to this business cannot be denied. Ross took my letters, and his executors
or heirs have got them to this day. How many letters he found and kept
Introduction 29