Lord Alfred Douglas: A biography

by H. Montgomery Hyde

A very good+ copy in a very good price-clipped dust jacket. First American edition. Cloth. 8vo. xviii, 396 pp. Illus. with b/w photos. Douglas was ostracized and Oscar Wilde imprisoned for their homosexual liaison.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1984

About the author

Harford Montgomery Hyde was born on 14 August 1907 in Belfast, the son of James Johnstone Hyde and Isobel Greenfield (née Montgomery). He was educated at Sedbergh School; Queen's University, Belfast (where he gained a first class History degree); then at Magdalen College Oxford (where he gained a second class law degree). He was called to the bar in 1934. From 1935-1939, Hyde was librarian and Private Secretary to the 7th Marquess of Londonderry. In 1939 he married Dorothy Mabel Brayshaw Crofts (divorced 1952).

During World War II, Hyde held several positions. He served as an Assistant Censor in Gibraltar (1940) and was commissioned in the intelligence corps and engaged in counter-espionage work in the United States under Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination in the Western Hemisphere (whose life Hyde published as "The Quiet Canadian" in 1962). He was also Military Liaison and Security Officer, Bermuda (1940-41); Assistant Passport Control Officer, New York (1941-2); with British Army Staff, USA (1942-4); attached to the Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (1944) and then to the Allied Commission for Austria (1944-5).

Hyde was the Assistant Editor of the Law Reports (1946-7), then Legal Adviser to the British Lion Film Corporation Ltd (1947-9). From 1950-59 he was a Unionist MP for East Belfast and was the UK Delegate to the Council of Europe Consultative Assembly in Strasbourg (1952-5). From 1958-61 Hyde was an Honorary Colonel of the Intelligence Corps (Territorial Army), Northern Ireland. After losing his parliamentary seat, Hyde was Professor of History and Political Science at the University of the Punjab in Lahore (1959-61).

In 1955, Hyde married his second wife Mary Eleanor Fischer. The marriage was dissolved in 1966 and he married Rosalind Roberts Dimond. He died on August 10 1989.

Hyde wrote a great many books on a wide variety of subjects including "The Rise of Castlereagh" (1933); "The Quiet Canadian" (1962); "Cynthia" (1962) and "Secret Intelligence Agent" (1982).

The held at Churchill Archives Centre chiefly consist of the papers and letters Montgomery Hyde collected and generated in the course of writing three of his books: "The Quiet Canadian" (a biography of Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination in the Western Hemisphere, 1940-46); "Cynthia" (a biography of the British agent Elizabeth (Pack) Brousse); and "Secret Intelligence Agent" (which included descriptions of his own wartime experiences). The collection also includes papers and letters relating to Hyde's work in Censorship and Security in Gibraltar, Bermuda and the USA during the Second World War; and in the legal division of the Allied Control Commission in Austria.

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very detailed and exhaustive. For the most part, it’s written with an extremely distant and objective tone, and Hyde’s legal experience undoubtedly shines through in his in-depth, intelligent, and illuminating descriptions of the trials Douglas was a part of. He was a very litigious man, as Hyde says himself. It became rather funny, honestly—like, BAM, I accuse you of libel—BAM! I accuse you of libel—BAM! Another libel case. Bosie was really such a fascinating personality. Not a wonderful and flawless man whatsoever, but so incredibly compelling. He isn’t quite so charming in this biography as he was in the letters between him and Bernard Shaw, alas, but that makes sense, as with a biography, you’re a shade removed from the individual, while letters are quite direct and give a vivid and raw imprint of a person (although there are letters of his recounted in this book, some of which are to Shaw and familiar to me).

But back to the book: I liked the writing style, though sometimes I felt it was so detailed in its names and titles and meticulous facts that it got boring, and it was pleasurable to read; the quality of the prose never deteriorated but steadily maintained itself, which I appreciated. I feel this is definitely the most even-handed treatment of Douglas in a book I have read so far; it acknowledges his pig-headed, vituperous, prickly, and childish personality (ah, shit! Libel!!!) without stooping to painting him a one-dimensional caricature of a villain. And for all his faults, showing through the narrative is Douglas’ intelligent, aristocratic, and strangely charming personality. He’s just—fascinating. It’s strange, because he has so many marks against him, with him becoming extremely Catholic and right-wing and viewing homosexuality as a sin, and the way he, at the drop of a hat, becomes very offensive and insulting in his descriptions of people he disagrees with. (He went to jail for 6 months for libeling Winston Churchill. And then later he was commissioned to write a sonnet praising him for the way he dealt with WWI, did so, and Churchill sent a note saying he liked it! But jail really mellowed him and made him less bitter.) But maybe it’s inoffensive to me simply because it feels so childish, like when a child earnestly approaches another child for friendship, gets rebuffed, then starts angrily screaming and calling the child names. In any case, I’m definitely going to read up more on Douglas.

One thing: I was shocked at the end of this book, because I realized that the author of this book (for all he writes on the subject of Wilde!) is what we today would consider homophobic. Because he’s so objective and never really makes value judgments, it’s hardly obvious until the last page of the book (before the bibliography, notes, and index), but then several odd comments that appeared scattered throughout the rest of the book start to make sense. Basically, Hyde is sympathetic to homosexuals, but he considers homosexuality “bad” (saying that Bosie wasn’t mad but was certainly bad in his homosexual days) and says Bosie became a good man after he abandoned homosexuality and married Olive. It’s…unfortunate. And shocking, because I felt sure for a lot of the book that he was a homosexual scholar himself (a scholar of homosexuality and a homosexual who is a scholar!). But it barely shows through this book and appears maybe three times, so I can mostly ignore it (hence my high rating). I guess you have to remember he was born in 1907 (I think that’s what it said) and was considered very progressive during his time. I was so shocked, though, because this was published in the 1980s! The hey-day of radical feminism, and right about when gay liberation started to kick off! Sure, Hyde was like 80 then, but doesn’t this make a difference? But I guess this is the reality. Also, what’s cool is that he met Bosie and corresponded with him for a bit, while he (Hyde) was a student at Oxford, so it was interesting to see “me” and “I” intrude into the sea of “he” and “she” and “it”.

One other thing of note: I can’t believe Natalie Barney fell in love with Olive Custance, Bosie’s wife, and, noting that she was in love with Bosie (I think they were married at that point), proposed a menage a trois! Yes, that Natalie Barney, the Natalie Barney who had a tumultuous love affair with Renee Vivien. That famous lesbian who was the source of that beautiful love poetry. I thought this was such an interesting tidbit, and it was kind of like two different worlds colliding. (The offer was declined, by the way.)

I liked this book, anyhow! I think I may read The Cleveland Street Scandal in the future, and if (as I feel may happen) I become interested in the legal aspects of the Wilde trials, I’ll definitely read Hyde’s book on it, as I’m sure it’ll be very methodical and systematic. I think I’d recommend this. I’m so shocked so few people have read it (on Goodreads). For some reason, I thought I’d marked this as to-read and seen reviews of it, but it must have been a different book!

Quotations:

“Frank Harris has given a highly coloured and misleading account of this meeting in his biography of Wilde, stating that Bosie hung upon his host’s lips ‘with his soul in his eyes’ and ‘before he had listened long Bosie declared his admiration passionately.’ This was not so at all, according to Bosie. ‘What really happened, of course, at that interview was just the ordinary exchange of courtesies. Wilde was very agreeable and talked a great deal. I was very much impressed, and before I left Wilde had asked me to lunch or dinner at his club, and I had accepted his invitation.’ After tea Wilde brought his guests to the upstairs drawing-room where he introduced them both to his wife Constance. A few days later, at their second meeting, which was at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, Wilde gave Bosie a copy of the large paper limited edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray which had been published on 1 July and which he inscribed ‘Alfred Douglas from his friend who wrote this book. July 91. Oscar.’ According to Bosie, on this occasion Wilde made homosexual advances to him, which Bosie resisted, as he was to do for the next six or nine months before finally giving in to him.” (25)

“Meanwhile Bosie was in the Thuringian Forest where he wrote to John Addington Symonds, and had promised to write an article on one of Beethoven’s concertos for The Spirit Lamp. In his letter reminding Symonds of his promise, Bosie told his correspondent that he had been staying at the Savoy with Oscar. ‘I daresay it is rather dreadful for you at Klein Schmalkalden,’ Symonds replied on 30 March from Italy which he was visiting. ‘But you’ll shake down. You can’t always be pampered at the Savoy. It was very pleasant for Oscar pampering you, I doubt not. I wish you would come and see how I can make you comfortable, and feed your soul on honey of sweet-bitter thoughts – in Italy – in Switzerland – it is all the same.’
Bosie did not accept this invitation as he had promised Oscar to be back in London for the opening of A Woman of No Importance.” (37)

“‘Alfred Douglas at that time was very good-looking in a blond poetic way,’ Hichens later recalled, ‘he was whimsical, capricious, exceedingly clever and amusing, and entirely unlike anything I had encountered before. The conversation at meals, especially between him and Benson, the one seeming to inspire and polish the wit of the other, was the most entertaining I had ever heard until then.’” (50)

“What Bosie described as ‘our case’ was really his private case against his father, and he failed to see, at this stage or at any time, that the evidence he wished to give would not be admissible in any English court of law. It rested on the mistaken belief that Sir Edward Clarke would begin by launching a violent attack against Queensberry. In later years Bosie liked to assert that he had obtained a promise from Clarke that he would put him into the witness box to prove his father’s true character – a claim emphatically denied by Sir Edward Clarke. (‘I made no such agreement or promise.’) Bosie certainly appears to have expected that he would be allowed to depict Queensberry as outwardly pretending to be a solicitous father trying to save his son, whereas in fact he had behaved like an inhuman brute towards every member of his family. Bosie did not appreciate – indeed he never grasped the point as long as he lived – that such evidence as this had nothing to do with the issue to be decided at the trial, and that, even if he did go into the witness box, he would never be permitted to give it, ‘The question of Lord Queensberry’s character was quite irrelevant to the case, and was never mentioned in my instructions or in consultation,’ wrote Sir Edward Clarke in answer to Oscar’s friend and first biographer, Robert Sherard, who raised the point when Bosie’s autobiography was published in 1929; ‘and if an attempt had been made to give such evidence, the judge would of course have peremptorily stopped it.’
The sole issue which the jury would have to decide was a simple one of fact. Did Oscar Wilde pose as a sodomite? If the jury found that he did not, then Queensberry was guilty of libel. On the other hand, if they found that he did, Queensberry was not guilty.” (78-9)

“However he may have continued to feel about Lord Roseberry and the late Liberal administration, it must always be remembered in justice to his reputation that Lord Alfred Douglas lived to modify very considerably his views on the controversial subject of homosexuality.” (99) This is the surprising touch of homophobia I was talking about. It takes as a matter of course that positive views on homosexuality are wrong or misguided.

“In his action Robert Ross showed duplicity. He had been Wilde’s lover long before Douglas – indeed there is good reason for believing that it was Ross who initiated Wilde into homosexual practices. While outwardly remaining on friendly terms with Bosie and staying with him as his guest, he was really jealous of him and in his correspondence and meetings with Wilde in prison probably he ran down Douglas and emphasised his comfortable lifestyle in Naples and Capri compared with Wilde’s in reading.” (100-1) Really?? This was one of the points in Hesketh Pearson’s biography of Wilde that I thought was ridiculous, but I’m more inclined to trust Hyde’s judgement, since he tends to be very objective and fact-oriented. (And also I’m more sympathetic towards Douglas now.) I guess it could be true. Although the fact that Hyde is homophobic makes me wonder if there is a touch of bias in the way he speaks of this subject matter.

“There is much that is incorrect or misleading in this letter. There were no ‘endless letters’ extending over four months. Their decision to go to Naples was agreed at their reunion in Rouen in August 1897 and there is nothing in Oscar’s letters to Ross and others when he and Bosie were living in the villa at Posilip to suggest that Bosie was not paying his ‘share’ of the expenses, while through his mother he paid the cost of their stay at the Hotel Royal before they moved into the villa." (118)

“Ross told Bosie that Oscar had been received into the Catholic Church and the last rites had been administered while he was still conscious, although Bosie did not believe that Oscar was conscious at the time, nor that he wished to become a Catholic, since ‘he was as a matter of fact the most complete sceptic imaginable, and would never have bowed his intellect to any dogma or any form of religious belief however fine.’” (128)

“It was at this period, in the spring of 1901, that Olive went to Paris . . . In Paris they met the notorious lesbian writer Natalie Barney, who had also written to Olive Custance admiring her poems. Olive replied to Natlie with a daring verse:
For I would dance to make you smile, and sing
Of those who with some sweet mad sin have played,
And how Love walks with delicate feet afraid
‘Twixt maid and maid.
Although here and there Olive’s poems have a hint of lesbianism in them, she was not attracted to Natlie as Natlie was to her. When Olive told her that Freddie Manners-Sutton had taken a fancy to her, Natalie replied: ‘Tell him I’m in love with you!’ When he heard this Freddie did not seem to mind, as long as he could see Olive, even if she were with Natalie. But Natlie wished to have Olive to herself, and contrived to persuade Mrs Custance to agree to her and Olive going off to Venice together, provided Olive was chaperoned by her maid, while Freddie Manners-Sutton and Mrs Custance returned to England. In Venice Olive hung a picture of a statue of ANtinous, the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s favourite, over her bed, confessing to Natalie that it reminded her of Lord Alfred Douglas with whom, she said, she was really in love. Natlie now tried to ‘rescue’ Olive by proposing that she (Natlie) should marry Bosie, and the three of them would live happily ever after in a menage a trois. But this idea did not appeal to Olive, who now went back to Norfolk, while Natlie Returned to Paris, where she rejoined her lesbian lover Renee Vivienne, a francophile English girl whose real name was Pauline Tarn.” (135)

“‘This is a beastly country really. I feel quite two years older since I left England. It will be a nice place to live in in about 500 years time when the people have got civilized and when they have built up a few traditions of comfort and manners. I am sorry I didn’t go only to Canada. The people there are really delightful and it really is a much finer country.’” (138; Bosie on the United States of America)

“In this context is should be noted that nowhere in the numerous letters, postcards and telegrams, amounting to eighty-eight in all, addressed by Wilde to Ross after his release from prison, is there any change in the instruction in the letter written by Wilde from prison to Ross on 1 April 1897 that the original of the whole of the De Profundis letter should be sent to Bosie, nor is there any request as stated by Ross above that he should publish it ‘at some future date.’ On the other hand, Ross has stated definitely that Bosie received a typed copy of it in Wilde’s lifetime, to be precise on 8 August 1897. It is known that Ross was staying with Wilde at Berneval at this time and it is not inconceivable that Wilde changed his instructions orally, possibly at Ross’s suggestion, and in the result one of the two typed copies which Ross had made was sent to Bosie who was then staying at Nogent-sur-Marne, and after he had read a page or two with their reproachful language, he destroyed the whole typescript.” (179) So he did receive it and destroy it—he just didn’t read the whole thing.

“Actually Bosie had quite a strong case. Far from deserting Wilde he had stuck to him when he came out of prison, inviting him to join him in his villa at Naples, and paying his fare there from Dieppe. He only left him at his mother’s urgent entreaty; and, when he did so, as we have seen, he persuaded Lady Queensberry to send Wilde £200. During the remainder of his life he gave him further sums amounting to £1,200, and on Wilde’s death in the same year he paid for the funeral in Paris. As for the suggestion that his influence had brought about Wilde’s ruin, it could be argued that this was absurd, since he was only twenty-four at the time of the scandal, while Wilde was over forty, and an experienced man of the world who, as Mr Hayes pointed out in his opening speech, had lived in the Latin Quarter of Paris and had lectured and travelled all over America.” (185)

“[Bosie] also gave me nicely inscribed copies of his Collected Poems and the French edition of his autobiography with the additional chapter in which he said he had dealt with Andre Gide, who had also libelled him in his book Si le Grain ne meurt. When I asked him what he thought of this author, Bosie replied: ‘Gide is a shit! Like a person who has an abcess on his bottom and continuously displays it to the world.’” (289)

“At one of their meetings in Silverdale Avenue, Hove, Donald asked Bosie about the famous love poem about ‘those rose red-leaf lips of yours’ which figured conspicuously in the Wilde and other trials; and the young actor found it extraordinary that Bosie should have been so careless as to have left the letter in a suit of clothes he gave away. ‘My dear darling,’ Bosie replied, ‘you must realise that this letter was by comparison with others insignificant. I had received scores of letter from Oscar far more beautiful, far more personal than this one. I kept them locked away, but I burned them after the Ransome case.’” (331) ARGH! That is so upsetting. Someone needs to invent a time machine and go back and stop Bosie from burning those letters. To think, we could have had access to them, to have them for posterity! They must have been wonderful.

“As for Bosie, if he was not mad, he was certainly bad in his early homosexual years [italics mine] before his marriage. His reformation was undoubtedly due in great measure first to his marriage, and secondly to his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, which gave his life a stability and a spiritual substance which it had previously lacked. Nor can there be any question that he was a poet of much more than ordinary merit, as The Times described him in his obituary. The Wilde tragedy was to a great extent his own and he added to it by his action in never letting the world forget it. However, it is now beyond dispute that he neither ruined his friend nor deserted him, as his enemies so often alleged. To those of a younger generation, like the present writer, he was an essentially kind man. . . . The attainment of this objective [‘To fight with form, to wrestle and to rage, / Till at the last upon the conquered page / The shadows of created Beauty fall.’] must be accounted his outstanding personal achievement in the literary field. One likes to think that it will still be held in high regard long after the follies of his association with Wilde [italics mine] and the quarrels with Robert Ross and Frank Harris and others which marred his tempestuous career have been forgotten.” (339) Respectful as this homage is, I cannot agree with it and find it exceedingly irritating. This is the one other noticeable section where Hyde’s anti-homosexual bias shows through, as can be seen in the two sections I emphasized. The second is extremely annoying—I think his association with Wilde was beautiful, though the trial it led to was not.