Merlin Holland, 80, is the third generation of Francophiles in his family, having travelled to France as early as nine years old, studied in Dijon and lived in southern Burgundy since 2003.
He walks in the footsteps of father Vyvyan Holland, who was the English translator of writers Henri Barbusse and Julien Green, and grandfather Oscar, who lived the last three-and-a-half years of his life in Paris and died there.
Only Oscar’s last name was Wilde.
Merlin as a child with his father Vyvyan Holland, who was the English translator
of writers Henri Barbusse and Julien GreenPublic domain
“Oscar Wilde had a great love for the French language. His play Salomé was written in French, so were his letters to French friends,” said Mr Holland, who released After Oscar: The Legacy Of A Scandal last October. The US edition will be published on April 7.
It tells over 700 pages the posthumous years of Oscar Wilde’s legacy, sorting out the myths, rumours and misconceptions surrounding him, a task that took him 25 years.
Within the myths are some from his years in Paris, from May 1897 to September 30, 1900 when he was found dead at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Saint-Germain-des-Près, including the cause of his death or how miserable those years were. He answers them below.
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The Connexion spoke with him two weeks after the Irish Embassy and the Centre Culturel Irlandais (Irish Cultural Centre) inaugurated two busts to mark the 125th birthday of Oscar’s death.
“Both institutions are the obvious places,” he said, alluding to the Irish ambassador’s comment that they were placed in “the land of his birth and the country of his death.”
We talked about the myths, his influence, the cumbersome task of translating his most memorable quotes, his ambivalence toward Americans and life in France.
Before he immersed himself in the 25-year project, Mr Holland compared himself to a monkey in a cage.
“Learning and studying more about my grandfather, it allowed me to get out of it,” he said.
When did the myths, rumours and legends around him start to wane?
I would say in 1962 when English publisher Rupert Hart-Davis persuaded my father Vyvyan to let him publish his letters. Before then, he was regarded as “a cardboard cut-out funny man who wrote four amusing plays, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Portrait Of Dorian Gray”. The letters showed him as a three-dimensional, flesh and blood, faults and all human being. They also showed that he had an extraordinary mind. It made people realise that their perception was wrong. He was not just an amusing author who was sent to prison for being gay. There was more to him than that. He was, for instance, the editor of The Women’s World, a women’s magazine during The New Woman movement in England. Many of his serious sides emerged from these letters. It took a while to filter down through the academics and the public. I think he is now regarded as both an amusing and serious writer.
His post-mortem trajectory is certainly quite outstanding. He is sometimes revered as an avant-garde gay and fashion icon. French people gave him a label which relies almost exclusively on these famous pictures of him that were taken in the United States in 1882. They also refer to him as a dandy. It is in part true but dandy, in English, refers to someone who is concerned about fashion, good-looking and well-behaved but not somebody who has been recognised as a great writer.
Long-standing rumours said he died from syphilis while you confirm in the book he died from cerebral meningitis. Was it part of a homophobic smear campaign?
No. It was the romantic end of writers in those days. He was sensual, a man of the world, consulted prostitutes and died of syphilis. It was about adding to the extraordinariness of an author’s life. It now has been more or less completely dismissed. The death certificate says ‘cerebral meningitis’.
In 2018, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years by Nicholas Frankel was released, in which he wrote that Wilde’s Paris years were not as miserable as is often portrayed. You argue the opposite. Who is right?
Let’s put it this way. His wife gave him £150 a year from her income over the last three-and-a-half years in Paris. He certainly was not living in abject poverty. I think it is a known fact that he was terrible with money [laughs]. When he had it, he spent it on himself and other people. It shows terribly in his letters.
He did not have the sort of money by comparison with what he had before the trial took place which was, in today’s money, somewhere around £7,500 and £10,000 a week, thanks to two plays running simultaneously in the West End of London. His income for the last three years of his life was what he had been earning – an annual income – from theatre receipts at the beginning of 1895 in two weeks. Frankel is right to say that people exaggerate his poverty. But he was not well-off. He had money and he spent it.
Do you consider yourself an historian of Oscar Wilde? An expert? His grandson?All of these characteristics?
I am very reluctant to call myself an expert. There are academics, biographers who have studied his life, written about him and who fall into the category of thoroughly admirable, responsible people.
I did learn about him to escape the cage, as I like to say. I often compared myself to a monkey, trapped in a cage in a zoo, with the label saying ‘Merlin Holland, grandson of Oscar Wilde’ for outsiders to look at.
By learning and studying him, I was able to match academics’ knowledge and deal with whatever their demands were around Oscar’s works. It allowed me to get out of the cage and join the spectators. There is a dual purpose to it.
Oscar Wilde is part of a long-standing tradition of English-language writers to have lived in Paris such as Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. But they were all around in the 1920s. Was he ahead of a trend?
All the authors you mentioned wanted to come to Paris. I think if Oscar could have remained in England, he would have remained in England. It became impossible after the trial. He wrote in a letter to a friend that France ‘the mother of all artists, granted me asylum’. That is what he felt about the country. Of all the English-language writers of his period, he was the most Francophile.
Merlin Holland does not consider himself an expert on his grandfatherPublic domain
“These days you don’t even need to have read any Wilde to see how far his influence has spread,” one journalist wrote. I would agree in name only. Not much is known about Wilde in France, with the exception of Dorian Gray. Do you agree?
I agree. I too did not know what the critic wanted to say. I am not sure what he meant by ‘his influence’. What I can say is that Oscar Wilde has four attractive characteristics to the youth: rebellion, integrity, individuality and sensuality. Perhaps this is what it means.
I will not say people want to emulate him but there is an element of admiration, even though they do not know what he had written.
I once gave an interview to Ouest-France at Père Lachaise, where he is buried. Two young girls came in and asked us: ‘Where is the tomb with all the kisses?’ The journalist said: ‘Whose tomb?’ They replied: ‘We do not know’. Therein could lie an element to what ‘his influence’ refers to.
There are six different French translations of The Importance of Being Earnest. What is your favourite one?
I would say L’Importance d’être Constant because Constant is also a name, much like Earnest. There is not a lot of Wilde’s work which is cunning.
In The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry says: ‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’ When translating Oscar Wilde, it is pretty easy to appeal to the same sense of humour he does to English people, don’t you think?
Some of his quotes are lost in translation. I have read several butchered ones. Does the wittiness evaporate in French?
To be fair, Oscar Wilde has been attributed more quotes than he said. The most famous one being: ‘Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.’ It is a shorter, inaccurate, quote from Lord Henry. Once one of these things appears on the internet, everybody assumes it is true. If you repeat them three or four times, it becomes fact.
‘When good Americans die they go to Paris…Does it mean they go to Heaven?
I think that is the sous-entendu of it.
…Where do bad Americans go? They stay in America.’ He is suggesting they go to Hell, isn’t he?
I would not say that. Oscar Wilde took many jibes and made several disparaging remarks about American architecture or the American way of life.
“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language,” as he famously wrote in The Canterville Ghost, which, similarly, is not to say the American language is ugly.
He admires Americans too, mainly their no-nonsense attitude to life. He is a bit ambivalent.
There is one side that admires and respects them and the other side that finds their frankness a little bit disarming and where he prefers the more sophisticated attitude toward life from Europeans.
It is never either/or but both/and. Oscar Wilde is the Protestant attracted by Catholicism, the Irishman who is at heart a Francophile, the married man who becomes an homosexual. It isthese contrasting characteristics that typify him.
You have been living in France since 2003 now. Is there determinism in you being a Francophile?
There probably is but if I inherited it, it is more because of my father Vyvian than Oscar. He was a translator, took me to France when I was nine. I was immersed in French culture for a month in Lunel (Hérault). When I came back to England, my French teacher used to tell me: ‘Where did you get this terrible Provençal accent?’ [laughs].
‘My grandfather left England because it was too moral. I left because it no longer was moral enough,” you told L’Humanité.
I did feel that what I used to love about England – the honesty, the straightforwardness, the frankness – was being, in London, absorbed by gross American materialism.
Buying this house in France, I realised that the French spend money on it in order to be happy, to be comfortable and to enjoy the pleasure of the house that they bought. In England, it was far more about making a financial gain by putting an extension on the back or a swimming pool.
After Oscar: The Legacy
of a Scandal is available on Amazon.
