GREAT BRITAIN: A Life of Concealment

Shortly before Easter in 1895, two English boys, aged 8 and 9, were wrenched from the security of a happy family life in Victorian London and sent abroad like fugitive criminals to forget their past, their parenthood and even their names. The crime from which they fled was that of being born the sons of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, the most famous and quite suddenly the most notorious literary figure of his day.

The shame which the innocent boys were taught to feel by presumably well-meaning friends and relatives never quite wore off. The elder son Cyril got himself killed in World War I in a deliberate effort to prove his manhood and expiate his father’s crime. For close to half a century, the shy and sensitive younger son Vyvyan kept the secret of his past hidden in a life of semi-retirement and seclusion. Last week, in a biography published in England,* 68-year-old Vyvyan, whose last name was changed to Holland, told what it was like to spend a lifetime as the hidden son of Oscar Wilde.

The Milk Run. Whatever the world at large may have thought of Oscar Wilde after his prolonged and sordid trials for sodomy, to young Cyril and Vyvyan Wilde he was a fine father. The greatest figures of pre-Raphaelite London were constant visitors at the house in Tite Street, Chelsea, where Wilde, wittiest and most elegant of them all, held court with his beautiful wife Constance. But it was not the distinguished company that made the house a delight to the young Wildes; it was “the smiling giant, always exquisitely dressed, who crawled about the nursery floor with us and lived in an aura of cigar smoke and Eau de Cologne.” Unlike many another stiffly Victorian parent living on Tite Street, Wilde was always ready to romp with his boys, mend their toys and enter into their games.

He spent hours in the summer sailing and swimming with his boys. In quieter moments he would tell them stories. Once when he had finished a story called The Selfish Giant, tears came to his eyes and his elder son asked him why. “He replied,” writes Vyvyan, “that beautiful things always made him cry.”

The Sword of Damocles. What had this kindly father done to deserve the obloquy of his own sons? Until he was 18 years old, Vyvyan never knew. By his own devices and the careless words of elders, the little boy learned to suspect in time that his father had been sent to Reading Gaol, but for what crime he could only guess unassisted—and the guesses were dark beyond belief. Cyril, the elder, got a glimmer of the truth from a glance at newspaper headlines, but even he felt it necessary to keep the facts from his brother. All the boys knew, as they were spirited away first to Switzerland and then to Germany, was that their father “had had a great deal of trouble” and was not, to be mentioned further.

A family conference picked a new surname, Holland, for them out of their mother’s ancestry. While the boys set to work practicing their new signatures, elders sorted their possessions, relabeling their clothes and making sure that the name of Wilde appeared on nothing. Later on, when the boys were at an English-run boarding school in Germany, they found some cricket flannels still marked with their right names and tore out the labels with the desperation of criminals on the brink of discovery. “The thought that at any moment an indiscreet remark or a chance encounter . . . might betray us,” writes Vyvyan, “was a sword of Damocles constantly hanging over our heads.” In time, to make security even more certain, the boys were separated, Cyril to stay on in Germany, Vyvyan to be sent to a Jesuit school in Monaco.

The Sins of the Father. Three years after the boys’ exile began, their mother died and they were left to the mercies of maternal relatives and legal guardians whose only thought for them lay in an occasional reminder of their black parentage. The only word they were ever told of their father was at his death in 1899. When a kindly English schoolmaster broke the news to Vyvyan, the boy was astonished. “But,” he said, “I thought he died long ago.” Dutifully, the boy went into mourning, and when his schoolmates asked him why, he invented a story about the discovery of his father’s body on a South Sea island after he had long been thought dead at sea. For the moment, the orphan boy “became something of a hero,” at least in the eyes of his school mates.

His mother’s family were prepared to grant him no such laurels. If Vyvyan took a drop too much at a party, he was promptly described in family circles as being “dead drunk.” When Vyvyan Holland went to Cambridge—Oxford was out of the question since his father had gone there—his guardian was quick to warn those in charge that he was “idle, drank to excess and frequented bad company.” In the years since, Vyvyan Holland has found, befriended and been befriended by many old friends of his father. He has married and has a son of his own. He has lived well enough from his own earnings as a part-time author and translator, and from his father’s royalties. His memoirs, written with candor and simplicity, are free of bitterness. But even the balm of time cannot erase from Author Holland’s story the cruel fact that “my life has been one of concealment and repression.”

*Son of Oscar Wilde; Rupert Hart-Davis; 185.