Abstract
To retrace our steps momentarily to Chapter 4, Oscar Wilde had two literal sons. The youngest, Vyvyan, was only nine years old at the time of his father’s criminal conviction. Vyvyan’s autobiography describes the estrangement and repression that dominated his later childhood: his mother changed the family name to Holland and abandoned England to live on the continent. After her death in 1898, two years prior to that of her husband, Vyvyan represents his mother’s relatives as actively hiding his true identity, telling him to forget his former name, and even intimating that his father was dead well before his actual demise in 1900. Only after his eventual friendship with Robert Ross was Vyvyan able to come to terms with the legacy of his family. Both he and his own son, Merlin Holland, became instrumental in the gradual rehabilitation of Wilde’s literary reputation over the course of the twentieth century.
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Notes
Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen, revised edn (London: Pimlico-Random House, 2013), pp. 301–2.
Guy Cuthbertson, Wilfred Owen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 147, 58. Cuthbertson also seems to me rather dismissive of the Ross circle, writing of ‘Robert Ross and other homosexual hangovers from the 1890s’ (p. 258) and going on to characterize Ross and Wilde’s relationship through an uncontextualized and parodically camp quotation from Augustus John’s autobiography (p. 259).
See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 203–20
Adrian Caesar, Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets: Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) for Graves’ pre-war sexual identity. For Graves’ claim that Owen confessed to picking up young men in France
Dominic Hibberd, Owen the Poet (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 199 and Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography, pp. 145, 277.
Monro used appreciation for male beauty as an integral part of his war poetry in his ‘Youth in Arms’ sequence; see Harold Monro, Collected Poems, ed. Alida Monro (London: Duckworth, 1970), pp. 166–70.
Philip Bainbrigge, ‘If I Should Die, Be Not Concerned to Know’, Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches, ed. Martin Taylor (London: Constable, 1989), p. 69.
Timothy d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 148–50 cites a representative passage from Bainbrigge’s bawdy verse play Achilles in Scyros.
Jean Findlay, Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator (London: Chatto and Windus, 2014), especially pp. 140–63, provides the most complete account of the relationship between Owen and Scott Moncrieff.
Hibberd, Owen the Poet, p. 199 cites Martin Seymour-Smith as getting the story from Graves, who in turn claimed to have gotten it from Ross; see also Findlay, Chasing Lost Time, p. 319. Graves also claimed to Seymour-Smith in 1943 that ‘Owen was a weakling really; I liked him but there was that passive homosexual streak in him which is even more disgusting than the active streak in Auden’; see Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 63. Graves also referred to Owen as ‘an idealistic homosexual with a religious background’ in the 1957 revision of Good-Bye to All That. As Seymour-Smith points out, both of these dismissive summations come from decades after Owen’s death and do not seem to be reflected either in the extant letters between Graves and Owen or in Graves’ recorded comments about Owen during the war.
Cited in Peter France, ‘Scott Moncrieff’s First Translation’, Translation and Literature, 21 (2012), pp. 364–82, p. 367.
Scott Moncrieff used this poem in the dedication to his translation of The Chanson de Roland in a slightly bowdlerized form, changing among other things ‘thy shame’ to ‘this name’ and altering the final couplet to ‘Beyond the stars’ light, in the eternal day/Our two contented ghosts together stay’; see Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, ‘To W. E. S. O.’, The Song of Roland: Done into English, in the Original Measure (London: Chapman and Hall, 1919), p. vii.
See James Campbell, ‘“For You May Touch Them Not”: Misogyny, Homosexuality, and the Ethics of Passivity in First World War Poetry’, ELH, 64 (1997), pp. 823–42 for more on the misogyny of much of the First World War trench lyric.
J. D. Reed, ‘Wilfred Owen’s Adonis’, Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 39–56 demonstrates Owen’s use of Bion’s ‘Epitaph on Adonis’ in these lines, as well as the implications of Owen’s appropriation of them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream’, Poetical Works I, vol. 16 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 16 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 509–14, p. 514.
John Stuart Mill, Essays on Poetry, ed. F. Parvin Sharpless (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), p. 12.
Any reading of ‘Strange Meeting’ rests on assumptions, one of the most important being whether the reader assumes that the dead enemy soldier is a doppelgänger figure, and thus a double of the persona, or whether the persona’s encounter represents a meeting of the persona and an other and thus a true moment of alterity. The first possibility is exemplified by Daniel Hipp, The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), pp. 94–8
Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 192–4. My own reading is more sympathetic to the second assumption, male procreation being a product of alterity.
Mark Rawlinson, ‘Wilfred Owen’, The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 114–33, pp. 128–9.
In this sense ‘Strange Meeting’ places its persona in a similar role to that described by Ramazani in his reading of ‘Mental Cases’, one that places the speaker ‘between mourner and mourned, voyeur and victim’; see Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 79.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), pp. 127–8.
Rupert Brooke, The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (New York: Dodd Mead, 1980), p. 83.
Vincent Sherry, ‘First World War Poetry: A Cultural Landscape’, The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 35–50, p. 37.
Kathy J. Phillips, Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) outlines the use of ‘war as a cure for decadence’ (p. 26) in twentieth-century warfare generally (pp. 26–33).
Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 144–5.
Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 117.
Attempts to locate the paradigm shift of sexuality have varied widely. To cite just one example, Randolph Trumbach, ‘Modern Sodomy: The Origins of Homosexuality, 1700–1800’, A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, ed. Matt Cook (Oxford: Greenwood, 2007), pp. 77–105 sees the early eighteenth century, when an effeminate minoritized subculture of sodomites in northern Europe began to emerge, as the moment when ‘the first European men who might reasonably be called “homosexuals”’ (p. 77) became evident in the historical record. Yet in the same volume, Matt Cook claims that it was not until the late 1950s that ‘more polarized ideas about sexual identity had taken hold, and... who you desired and had sex with defined who you were. Identity politics in relation to homosexuality had been in play since at least the 1890s, but by the late 1950s, it seemed like it was virtually the only way to think about love and sex between men’
Matt Cook, ‘Queer Conflicts: Love, Sex and War, 1914–1967’, A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, ed. Matt Cook (Oxford: Greenwood, 2007), pp. 145–77, pp. 173–4.
Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005) offers a slightly more recent version of a historian’s objection to the overemphasis of the war poets, Owen especially. Like Bond, Todman is reluctant to engage with Owen’s poetry in any detail, but his account of Owen’s rise to cultural dominance, especially in British secondary schools in the 1960s and after, is impressive and meticulous; see pp. 153–72.
Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 1.
Historians less explicitly committed to undoing the poets’ interpretation of the war have nonetheless engaged with their legacy. Hew Strachen, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2003), p. xviii, for instance, challenges John Keegan’s contention in his similarly named volume that the war ‘was a tragic and unnecessary conflict’
John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 1. Strachen emphasizes the desirability of understanding the war as its contemporaries did at the time, uninflected by the war books of the twenties and thirties.
Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. xxvi predates Bond in identifying the war poets as the source of ‘the persistence of the idea that the war was “a bad thing”’; Ferguson’s book nonetheless draws both its title and one of its epigrams from Owen.
Jon Stallworthy, ‘The Legacy of the Somme’, Survivors’ Songs: From Maldon to the Somme, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 98–108, p. 98.
Although the discussion is largely a debate between military historians and literary scholars, Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) represents a more literary and mythic reading of the war that nonetheless opposes Owen’s dominance of its meaning. Frantzen is interested in reclaiming the chivalry of the war, as well as the positive value of sacrificial violence more generally. He reads Owen’s ‘Strange Meaning’, for instance, along lines compatible with what I offer above, but he rejects Owen’s ‘dismal hermeneutic circle’ (p. 262) as an interpretation of either Owen’s war or war more generally.
For the extent of the statistical insignificance of the trench lyric in the poetic output of 1914–1918, see Catherine Reilly, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography. (London: George Prior, 1978).
Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) is helpful.
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Campbell, J. (2015). OW/WH/WO: Wilfred Owen as Symbolic Son of Oscar Wilde. In: Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen, and Male Desire. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137550644_7
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