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

even moderately profound things, and disposed to fribble and antic with old
thoughts for lack of power to evolve new ones” (Oscar Wilde and Myself, 62–63).
Douglas confused matters further in his 1929 Autobiography by stating that in
1914 he did “not tell the whole truth” about his relations with Wilde (25); he thus
began what amounts to a partial recantation in two further autobiographical
works. In 1940, five years before his death, Douglas’s volte-face became complete
when he went into print declaring that the “assurance that Wilde died a Catholic
. . . enabled” Douglas “to undertake the task” of defending Wilde, since Douglas
had been a convert to Rome since 1909. “When I speak of defending Wilde,”
Douglas writes, “I do not mean defending his vices. . . . I mean defending his
character apart from his vices.”₁⁰⁰ Even though in this later work Douglas disavows
that he had any homosexual involvement with Wilde, he goes out of his
way to claim that when reading the critical essays gathered in Intentions, “all the
time one is conscious of an alert and well-informed intelligence which is not
exploiting merely personal prejudices but is unobtrusively testifying to profound
intellectual and artistic principles” (108). Understandably, the fact that Douglas
engaged in tedious squabbles with other biographers has often discredited him
as a reliable source in the study of Wilde.
Yet Douglas, for all his tempestuousness, was more honest than the two (or,
depending on how we count them, three) individuals who in the 1920s were
responsible for committing serious frauds in Wilde’s legendary name. One of
them, Arthur Cravan, happened to be a relative. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd,
he was the second son of Constance Wilde’s brother, Otho Holland Lloyd, and
he was raised in Switzerland. Even though Cravan had no contact with Wilde (he
was thirteen when his uncle by marriage died), he brought Wilde’s spirit alive in
a posthumous interview published in his Surrealist magazine, Maintenant: Revue
littéraire, in 1913.₁⁰₁ A performance artist, he delivered lectures, which involved
bizarre displays of dancing and boxing. By all accounts, he cut an imposing figure;
Blaise Cendrars recalled the amazing spectacle of Cravan doing the tango at a
Paris nightclub “in a black shirt with the front cut away to reveal ‘bleeding tattoos
and obscene inscriptions on his skin.’”₁⁰² After traveling to New York in 1917,
Cravan fell in love with and subsequently married American poet Mina Loy.
They moved to Mexico City, where he became a competition boxer, and in 1918
he set sail to meet his spouse, who awaited him in Buenos Aires. It appears that
he was lost at sea; at least, Loy, who recalled her marriage as the happiest period
of her life, thought so.
Introduction 31