RESOUNDING ECHO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 12

RESOUNDING ECHO

SON OF OSCAR WILDE, by Vyvyan Holland; Faber and Faber, English price 18/-.

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

HE hangers-on of fallen greatness often have a far worse time of it than bedraggled genius itself. This was certainly true of the two sons of Oscar Wilde. Their mother had money-and a respectable family, who after his trial and sentence exerted themselves to try to cut off all connection with Wilde for fear his disgrace should indirectly besmirch them, The two small boys had their names changed. They were sent abroad. Finally in England they were sent to different schools lest they inadvertently betray who they were. An extraordinary purdah, unexplained but potent, enveloped everything connected with their father whose identity they learned almost by accident. The memoirs of the surviving son are thus a case-history in the inhumanity of outraged respectability. The size and stability of the English colony in Germany in the last years of the 19th Century are of considerable interest. There were enough families resident in several German towns to run a number of thoroughly and exclusively English schools, staffed, alas! by Englishmen. (A. curious sidelight on the sporting spirit, export quality, is the incident where an English — school trounced a German at football-as the Germans indignantly pointed out, the English school played masters in its team.) The life of the English traveller and resident on the Continent last century was materially comfortable at low eost,_ and spiritually, too, it had its rewards: for what could be more delightfully convincing of English superiority than constant contact with foreigners? These voluntary exiles had their cake and ate it too. The crumbs of fifty-year-old anecdote and gossip about this halfworld with which Vyvyan Holland regales us are still fresh and interesting today. He tells fascinating stories, too, of a Jesuit school in Monaco he attended (he was a youthful convert), and of Stonyhurst. Although it is not written in a heightened emotional vein-indeed, it is often deliberately toned down-this book has its own intensity, It is sincere without being querulous. It is frank without committing any error of taste. One cannot imagine that such a story, both painful and gripping, could be better told. The subject matter is of absorbing interest, and this is enhanced when Vyvyan grew up and himself entered at least the fringe of literary circles. His brother, a professional soldier, was killed in the 1914-18 war, almost deliberately seeking death. Vyvyan had a different way of "living down" his father: he learned to understand his quality and realised that he must have been a very different person from the position he occupies in popular legend. A subsidiary merit of this book is the light it throws on Oscar himself. Letters from his Oxford days and a memoir of a fellow undergraduate reveal a very much more robust and conforming person than the "greenery-yallery" aesthete derided by Gilbert. Instead he was an

intellectually athletic young man with a taste for such sports, amongst others, as shooting and fishing. While society has every right to protect itself against the criminal, Vyvyan Holland reminds us that in some ways the criminal (and his family) needs protection against society. But, of course, the children of the damned could not suffer such tribulation today. Could they not? :