Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. – Review – book review
Robrt L. Pela
Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas * Douglas Murray * Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion * $27.50
It’s impossible to understand the tragedy that befell Oscar Wilde without understanding Lord Alfred Douglas, the bold young poet and emotional turncoat who was both Wilde’s lover and his eventual undoing. This lengthy and detailed biography of Douglas covers his notorious affair with Wilde (for which the writer was imprisoned on counts of “gross indecency” in 1895) and his previously unchronicled later years as well.
Murray reveals that Douglas renounced his homosexuality, married, and converted to Catholicism. “Bosie,” as he was known to friends, spent the rest of his litigious life reliving his betrayal of Wilde in a series of costly courtroom feuds with others. After suing anyone who dared to cross him, Douglas was finally imprisoned himself for libeling Winston Churchill. He died, forgotten, in 1945–nearly 45 years after Wilde’s death.
Murray began researching Douglas’s life at age 15; today, he’s an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, England, where Bosie himself studied. By continually pestering the British government for over a year, the author wrangled access to previously unavailable letters and personal papers, including a manuscript that had been embargoed until well into the 21st century. These documents shed new light on Douglas’s troubled mind and expose him as anti-Semitic and a religion-obsessed elitist. Though Murray’s criticism is well-balanced and fair-minded, he presents compelling evidence (in prose and poetry) that Douglas was one of the great unsung English poets of his day, his life undone by bad judgment and sad scandal.
Murray’s persuasive words may not alter Douglas’s rogue status, but they do reveal the man behind “the love that dare not speak its name” and provide insight into why he destroyed his famous lover.
Pela is the Arizona arts correspondent for National Public Radio.
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