Resumo de Bosie - A Biography Of Lord Alfred Douglas

2000 Hodder & Stoughton Press. ISBN 0340 76770 7 One of the finest literary biographies available. A magnificent reappraisal of the life of Lord (Bosie) Douglas, a poet doomed to be remembered as Oscar Wilde's unwitting nemesis in the 885 sodomy libel case that destroyed the better known poet. Bosie fell out with his father, The Marquis of Queensbury, who became hell-bent on causing his son's financial, social ruin. Bosie and Wilde had an affair with one another, which caused their undoing. They flaunted their affections publicly, and alluded to it in their verse. Queensbury set out to make the fact of their relationship known, which as Homosexual acts had been ruled illegal in 1875, proved potentially lethal. Queensbury accused Wilde of Sodomy and Wilde recklessly issued a libel challenge. Queensbury was really interested in getting at his own son, but Bosie, under pressure from Wilde and other friends, was talked into leaving for France. Wilde too could have fled but chose to stand trial, which of course, he lost. One of the most damming pieces of evidence against him being Bosie's beautiful sonnet Two Loves and its line, 'I am the love that dare not speak its name.' Interpreted as a reference to the homosexual passion shared by Bosie and Wilde. Bosie stood by Wilde as best he could by post and in person when Wilde took exile in France for the last five years of his short life. It was actually in the years after Wilde died (1900) that Bosie's own world really began to fall apart. Bosie was alienated by Wilde's literary friends who, eager to reinstate Wilde to literary glory, downplayed Bosie's part in the story or vilify him, This resulted in a series of fierce legal battles between the various members of the Wilde circle, who sued and counter-sued each other for the first quarter of a century. Bosie, after some successes in this battle, took it on him to engage in more and more such battles, most of which he was to lose, to great financial cost. Though he doesn't comment on it as such, Murray pictures a literary scene of men eager to score points of one another with extraordinary bile and bitchiness and backstabbing. Bosie was becoming just as bad at this as any. Bosie became a Roman Catholic, coming to regard his gay history as a sin, albeit not as a crime, (he would later write a major article in defence of homosexuality) and he married a lesbian poet, Olive Custance, who would later separate from him some time before reconciling with him and standing by him until her own death, though with them torn asunder by a bitter custody battle over their son, Raymond taking place in their years of conflict. Bosie became bitter at just about everyone, especially when the full text of Wilde's De Profundis came to his attention, as Wilde had made some very cutting remarks about him there, which he could do nothing about with Wilde now dead. Bosie became inclined to believe every crackpot conspiracy theory going. He was impressed by the forged and hateful Protocols Of Zion documents that had criticised a Jewish conspiracy in political and business circles, (a document that the Nazis were to make some use of for propaganda purposes in later years) and Douglas wrote his own anti-Jewish propaganda, losing himself even more friends and admirers. He then went to his greatest extreme of irrational hatred, and issued a sensational pamphlet accusing Winston Churchill of personally masterminding the assassination of Lord Kitchener (in actuality killed when a German WW1 U Boat sank the ship he was on, The Hampshire, Churchill sued and Bosie went to serve his own term in Reading Gaol (Where Wilde had been) for Criminal Libel. In his later years, Bosie seemed to recover his senses, writing sincere letters of apology to the many he had sued or tried to sue, including Churchill. Though bankrupt, he found many new admirers, including Donald Sinden, John Betjemen, and more unlikely, George Bernard Shaw (an atheist) and Marie Stopes, theer for contraception who loved Bosie despite the Catholic beliefs he held being so contrary to their own convictions. The story of a man broken and embittered by rivalry and bigotry to becoming dangerously bigoted in his own views only to reform again and rediscover himself is beautifully put and there is no doubt as to the power and beauty of Bosie's own verse, often in sonnets described by some as the best since Shakespeare's day. (Bosie was a fierce critic of the modernist free verse trend set by T.S. Eliot for its lack of formal poetic construction and use to depict ugliness instead of beauty and love.) It is not stated whether Bosie recanted his anti-Semitic convictions in light of news coming through of the nazi-holocaust of the Jews by the close of WW2 (Bosie died about four months before VE Day, but there is little doubt that he was man of great spirit and conviction, destroyed in part by his stubbornness in his principles and also by the intolerance of the legal system and his appalling father, but Bosie left a legacy of poetry that reminds the world that love, whether its peaks its name or not, matters a great deal.

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