The Sins of the Father

A. A. Milne’s son musing with mixed feelings on his childhood as ‘Christopher Robin’; Daphne du Maurier’s daughter recalling life at Menabilly, the model for Rebecca’s Manderley . . . I’ve always been drawn to memoirs by the children of famous writers. They may not be as stirring as the life stories of the writers themselves, the Trollopes and Dickenses who emerge triumphant from youthful adversity, but those whose lives are lived in the shadow of celebrated parents have struggles and sufferings of their own. It can be as much a burden as an honour to bear a well-known name, and I’m intrigued to find out how they carry it.

That burden may be all the heavier when the parent is unconven­tional, a transgressor. So when, years ago, I came across a memoir called Son of Oscar Wilde, of course I had to read it. Written by Wilde’s younger son Vyvyan, it describes the aftermath of Wilde’s fall from grace for Vyvyan, his brother Cyril and their mother Constance. The sadness of their story made a deep impression on me then. Recently I revisited it after reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of Wilde and Franny Moyle’s of Constance, who spent the last three years of her life in exile with the two boys following Wilde’s impris­onment (she died at the age of 39 after a botched operation). Neither biography gives much more than glimpses of the two children, and Cyril, the elder son and favourite child of both parents, is more visible than his brother. Vyvyan was something of a disappointment from the start, since they had wanted a girl. He was thought to be delicate, an excuse to bundle him off for months at a time to friends’ country houses away from the London smog. Thus, he led a peripatetic existence even before his exile. He tells us that he wrote down his story to convey ‘the loneliness of being Oscar Wilde’s son’ and ‘the cruelty of the self-righteous who believe that “the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children”’. The book was published in 1954; homosexual acts were not decriminalized in Britain until 1967, the year of Vyvyan’s death, and he does not refer to his father’s crime by name or comment much on the rights and wrongs of the case. His purpose was to describe its consequences for ‘those who, although innocent, suffered in a hurt, uncomprehending way, wondering why they were not treated like other people’. Unlike most ‘son of . . .’ memoirs, his tells of the anguish of not being able to identify himself as his father’s son. When Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895 Vyvyan and Cyril were dispatched with a hastily hired French governess to a Swiss hotel, where Constance joined them. They never saw their father again. It was the start not just of a period of foreign exile but of a childhood and youth of ‘concealment and repression’; they returned to England three years later, following Constance’s death, under a different identity. Wilde was still living at the time, but his wife’s family gave them to understand that he was dead. In the early days in Chelsea, although Wilde had often been an absent father, he was an affectionate one. The boys took into exile happy, innocent memories of playtime with him in the Tite Street nursery. Heedless of his immaculate attire, he would crawl on the floor with them. He bought them a toy horse and milk-cart and wasn’t satisfied until he had filled the tiny churns with real milk, and Nanny found the three of them hurtling their cart round the room as milk slopped over the floor. These recollections in the book’s first chapter establish Vyvyan as a good storyteller and someone who, like his father, can step easily into a child’s world. Son of Oscar Wilde, related as simply as if he were telling it to his own son, is packed with vivid details. On rereading the book I found I had forgotten just how gripping it is. I’m hooked from the moment the two boys board the train to Dover in the company of the supremely unsympathetic French governess. Every detail of the Channel crossing (spent by Vyvyan in the boat’s engine-room), the railway journeys, the stuffy Parisian hotel room where, hungry and bored, they are left to their own devices on their first day of exile, is seen through the eyes of the two unhappy little boys. There is entertainment along the way, as when Constance arrives at the Swiss hotel to find that the (soon-to-be-dismissed) governess has run up a ruinous bill for candles, needed for her devotions – she has spent her time praying for her charges instead of looking after them. Driven from the hotel when their identity is revealed, the trio move on to Italy and Germany where the brothers, often left to roam wild, prove resourceful at supplementing their pocket money, undercutting local flower-sellers in an Italian fishing village and offering themselves as guides to English tourists in Heidelberg. The educational regime changes as often as the landscape. One moment Vyvyan is enduring bullying and canings at an English school in Heidelberg, the next he is admitted to the dimly lit corridors of the Collegio della Visitazione in Monaco, run by Italian Jesuits. ‘A haunted creature chased from pillar to post’, as he describes himself, fear of discovery an ever-present sword of Damocles, Vyvyan spent his childhood in a state of perplexity. He didn’t discover the nature of his father’s offence until he was 18, imagining him variously as a burglar or a bigamist. After the scandal broke, a wall of secrecy was built to shut out all knowledge of the man he remembered as a ‘smiling giant’. ‘My wife sends me photographs of the boys – such lovely little fellows in Eton collars,’ Wilde wrote to his friend Robert Ross from France following his release. The photos were taken in Heidelberg when Vyvyan was 7 and Cyril 9. The pair gaze at us out of the pages of the book, two solemn little boys. Wilde longed to see them but Constance was loath to allow this when he resumed his friendship with Bosie, and whatever hope he had of contact with them ended with her death. Constance’s family determinedly severed all links with Wilde. At an uncle’s house in Switzerland, the boys were informed that their surname was to be officially changed to ‘Holland’ and instructed to practise their new signatures. New name tapes were sewn into their clothes, but at school in Heidelberg they found the old ones still in place on their cricket flannels; minutes before the first game of the term Cyril was frantically hacking them off. Back in England after Constance’s death, under the strait-laced tutelage of their great-aunt Mary, Vyvyan came across a copy of The Happy Prince, a book he recalled from the old days, and wondered why Wilde’s name had been scratched off the cover. When he returned home for the school holidays wearing a black armband, having been told of Wilde’s death by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College (for his classmates he invented a yarn about an explorer father, dead after a long absence), ‘I had not been at my aunt’s house for more than four minutes when my armband was ripped away, and it was once more impressed upon me that my life was not like that of other boys and I could not go into mourning for my father.’ We feel the pain all the more keenly because the emotion is so restrained. Vyvyan’s most desolate moments speak for themselves. At 15, home for the Christmas holidays, he was turned away from the house of cousins with whom he was to spend the day, their parents having taken offence at something he had heard and repeated in all innocence, unaware of a slightly indecent double meaning. The lesson learned, as so often before, was that as the son of Oscar Wilde he was different, a pariah. Reluctant to return to his great-aunt’s house after this contretemps, he was found hours later lying in the snow in a nearby wood in an attempt to freeze to death, which resulted in mastoiditis and the loss of his hearing in one ear. All this is told without self-pity or bitterness. Rather, it was Cyril, considered the braver and stronger of the two, who became embittered. But then his burden was harder to bear; he had found out the truth about his father at the age of 10 and had had to keep it from his brother. Vyvyan tells us that the elder brother became grave and taciturn, desperate to prove himself ‘a man’ and wipe the stain from the family name. ‘For that I have laboured; for that I have toiled . . . It was this Purpose which whispered in my ear,’ he wrote in a letter to Vyvyan. I feel great sadness for Cyril even if his letter-writing style makes me thankful he’s not the narrator of the boys’ story. His chance to redeem the family honour came with the First World War; he was killed in France in 1915 by a German sniper. As for Vyvyan, the family’s solution to the problem of what to do with him was to pack him off into a second exile – in the Far Eastern Consular Service. But a few months from his twenty-first birthday, as he was listlessly cramming in dingy lodgings for a civil service exam, the wall of shame and secrecy finally began to crumble. It had started to wobble some years earlier, when a broad-minded aunt by marriage had told him the reason for Wilde’s disgrace and said she found all the secrecy ‘absurd’. And at Cambridge, where he was riveted by The Ballad of Reading Gaol after spotting it on a friend’s bookshelf, he had disclosed his real identity to a few choice companions and found that they weren’t shocked either. Now, through a fellow student at his London crammer, he finally met his father’s friend and literary executor Robert Ross. Within months, many