THE LIVERPOOL DAILY POST

Liverpool, Lancashire, England

2 January 1950

(page 3)

AMONG THE NEW BOOKS

Lord Queensberry Courageous

Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas, by the Marchess of Queensberry in collaboration with Percy Colson.

Lord Alfred Douglas has been dead four years and frankness has become possible. The other week Oscar Wilde’s son, Mr. Vyvyan Holland, gave us the complete text of “De Profundis,” with its grave indictment of Lord Alfred’s nature. Now Lord Queensberry’s book looks before and after the “De Profundis.”

It traces the ancestry of Wilde from brilliant Irish parents, and of Bosie from the Black Douglas who was invoked to frighten children.

This is courageous on Lord Queensberry’s part, for Lord Alfred was his uncle, and the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, whose half-crazed campaign forced Wilde’s exposure, trial and ruin, was his grandfather.

[ . . . . . . ]

At first, after leaving gaol, Wilde was in financial straits. He, who, within a year or two, had squandered £5,000 on Bosie, became pathetically grateful for £5 or £9—“a miracle.” But Lord Queensberry shows it to be quite untrue that during his last period at Paris in 1900, he was in dire poverty. The generosity of his old theatrical friends had given him comparative riches, though he ran through everything he got.

Contrast the integrity—even the sweetness—of his intellect with the malicious arrogance of Bosie, who spoiled even his own writings by irritating personal animosities. Bosie went too far when he libeled Mr. Winston Churchill concerning the death of Kitchener; he was arrested and sentenced for it.

But in 1941, we now find, he made tardy amends in a sonnet, which Churchill accepted with the comment “Time ends all things.” Anyhow, Bosie never accomplished any poem so withering as one which Aleister Crowley printed privately about Bosie himself, “A Slim Gilt Soul.” Lord Queensberry gives this in full.

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