262
PARTISAN REVIEW
everything he could to milk the relationship professionally, in ways Wilde
was quite aware of. And though Wilde obligingly trumpeted Douglas's liter–
ary genius,
De Profundis
makes the true nature of his regard for Douglas's
talents quite clear.
Ellmann's treatment of this ill-starred romance has an almost novelistic
interest, though he relies a little uncritically on the accounts Wilde provided in
De Profundis
-
a work that is, after all, a lover's complaint and self-justifica–
tion, and therefore scarcely to be considered a documentary record. Ellmann
indulges
in
less detail about Wilde's sexual habits than
H.
Montgomery Hyde
does in his
Oscar Wilde
(1975), but he gives a good idea of the extent to
which the pursuit of fresh young men became an obsession for Wilde,
persisting, to the dismay ofmany friends, even in his last years.
Still, a strange defensiveness creeps into Ellmann's description of this
side ofWilde's biography. "What seems to characterize all Wilde's affairs," he
concludes at one point, "is that he got to know the boys as individuals, treated
them handsomely, allowed them to refuse his attentions without becoming
rancorous, and did not corrupt them. They were already prostitutes." These
sentences sound like special pleading, but that is not what's wrong with them.
What's wrong is that they are not true. In 1893, to take one instance,
Wilde's close friend Robert Ross invited a sixteen-year old schoolboy called
Philip Danney to London for the weekend. Ross informed Douglas about
Danney, and Douglas rushed to London and brought the boy back to Goring,
where he and Wilde were staying. "On Saturday," according to Oscar
Browning, whose brother-in-law was Danney's headmaster, "the boy slept
with Douglas, on Sunday he slept with Oscar. On Monday he returned to
London and slept with a woman at Douglas's expense. On Tuesday he re–
turned to Bruges [where the school was located] three days late." The boy's
father, an army colonel, found out through the school about the escapade and
threatened legal action, but the affitir was kept quiet in the end. And poten–
tially the most serious charge brought against Wilde during his trial for "acts
of gross indecency" involved a seventeen-year-old named Edward Shelley,
who was not a prostitute. Shelley's testimony (which Ellmann does not
quote), though it was ultimately disallowed, makes it apparent that Wilde had
several times tried to seduce him, not violently but concertedly, and against
Shelley's wishes. Wilde did not limit his field of sexual play to young men
who were already, as Ellmann puts it, "corrupt."
The predatory character of Wilde's sexuality belongs to a minor but
significant side of his personality - the hedonistic cult of Oscar that caused its
chief devotee to conduct himself at times with insufferable egotism and snob–
bishness. Still, this was part of the continuous performance that made Wilde a
magnetic figure , even in his occasionally repellent aspects, to his contempo–
raries, and that makes us regret again and again, as we read of the famous
mots and the extraordinary charm, that Wilde died just before (and so
