2023-12-12 18:01:07
Time.news – Merlin Holland he is a 78 year old English gentleman made elegantly youthful by an innate clumsiness, as well as theonly direct descendant of Oscar Wilde. The different surname is due to the fact that his father Vyvyan, second son of the author of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, was forced, like his brother, to adopt a new identity after the scandal following the famous trial for sodomy. Today the greatest expert and editor of the complete works of his famous grandfather, Merlin Holland is also the leading expert and editor of his father Vyvyan Holland’s autobiographical book “Being the son of Oscar Wilde” recently published in Italy by La Lepre Edizioni. We met him in Rome.
What is the story of Oscar Wilde’s Son and what does it tell?
“This is a work that required more than 50 years of preparation, such was my father’s resistance to recalling the past. Publishing it was a catharsis for him, a release from pain, and served to complete my grandfather’s story by making public what happened to his family after the trial he underwent. When the book first came out in England in 1954, my father received many letters from people who said they were unaware that Wilde had even had offspring. The first part of the text recounts Vyvyan’s happy childhood, which he lived with her parents until he was 9 years old. In the Victorian era, when upper-class and nobility fathers did not spend much time with their young children, my grandfather Oscar was so affectionate that he played with his children for hours on the floor.”
“The second part of the book describes the three years of forced exile following Wilde’s trial for homosexuality in 1895. Having changed his name, his two children fled England entrusted to a governess, while his wife Constance remained there despite the enormous burden of the scandal. My father does not dwell on this topic, but my grandmother was an extremely courageous woman and did not abandon her husband until after the last sentence, although she often joined her children or in any case kept in close contact with them, before the definitive reunion , while their diaspora as exiles continued from college to college between Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the Principality of Monaco”.
“After an insert composed of around thirty of Wilde’s youthful letters and three of his unpublished stories (first passed down orally and then written), the third part of the book tells of the return home of Wilde’s children, following the death of their mother, and of how the family tries to erase every memory of their father, who shouldn’t even have been named. It’s the most emotional, because despite all the attempts at removal, Oscar’s memory continually leaks into Vyvyan Holland’s life. The last pages report a letter from Wilde’s lover, Alfred Douglas, to Vyvyan and an obituary from Oscar’s college friend, named William Ward, who remembers him as a young man.”
Wilde’s figure is incredibly modern: can we say that the portrait of Dorian Gray is the first social profile?
In fact, what dominated the Victorian era resembles the hypocrisy of our time. You present an ideal image of yourself in public, but behind it there is a completely different reality. The difference is that today we are willing to sell our souls in exchange for wealth and success, rather than beauty.
The title of his father’s book is Being the Son of Oscar Wilde: Who is Wilde’s Son Today?
David Bowie was his son. On the other hand, my grandfather has always been loved by rock: his image is also on the cover of Sgt Pepper by the Beatles. More generally, he was an individualist in a time when conformity dominated. Today no one likes to call themselves a conformist: there has never been a time when so many people would like to be Oscar Wilde.
With his behaviors, was Wilde the forerunner of genderfluid?
I suppose so. Every time I go to the Parisian cemetery of Pere – Lachaise, the majority of people I find around his grave are young people, who tear pages from their diaries, write sweet dedications and leave them like love notes. Over the years I have collected and preserved many of them. A large number are in Italian, and of women.
Does the Victorian respectability that condemned Wilde resemble the new dictatorships of cancel culture and political correctness?
I don’t know, but when talking about Wilde we must always keep in mind that nothing for him was just black or white. On the contrary: according to his inspiring principle, reality was never univocal. He abhorred dogmatism. So today’s culture of absolutism would have deeply shocked him.
Do you have an aphorism for your father’s book?
I prefer to quote a phrase contained within its pages that I only truly understood 30 years after reading it for the first time: there is nothing worse than realizing that no one in the world is thinking of you as the most important person. It represents total solitude. The one that Oscar Wilde’s children unfortunately experienced.
#Ill #grandfather #Oscar #Wilde