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.