Bosie, the Story of Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies by Rupert Croft-Cooke, and: Oscar Wilde, the Aftermath by H. Montgomery Hyde, and: The Importance of Being Oscar by Michéal Mac Liammóir (review)

1964 BOOK REVIEWS 103 stage, the players enacting, through formalized ritual and relationships, a kind of "mascarade" that gives full scope to the ambiguous expression of feeling; lovehate , revolt-submission, fear-power, etc. In this respect Sartre's interpretation of the role of "the other" in the creation of Genet's personality is pertinent to an understanding of the world set in motion by his plays. In an appendix to the book, Sartre gives an interpretation of The Maids which, although it is not addressed to the stage value of the play, seems more illuminating, less arbitrary than his "reconstruction" of the author. Thereby an interesting point is raised: to what extent, one wonders, was Sartre's Saint Genet influential in sharpening Genet's sense of what he, as playwright, could do with the stage? Sartre, with some measure of justification sees Our Lady of the Flowers as marking the transition from Genet the "aesthete" to Genet "the writer." It was perhaps Saint Genet that precipitated the final metamorphosis of Genet into the successful playwright he has become. GERMAINE BRiE University of Wisconsin BOSIE, THE STORY OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS, HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES , by Rupert Croft·Cooke, W. H. Allen, London, 1963, 414 pp. Price 35/· $4·90, OSCAR WILDE, THE AFTERMATH, by H. Montgomery Hyde, Farrar, Strauss Be Company, 1963, 221 pp. Price $4.50. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING OSCAR, by Micheal Mac Liamm6ir, with an introduction by Hilton Edwards, the Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1963, 68 pp. Price $2.40 • Oddly enough, though perhaps not so oddly when one begins to think about it, the mass of published comment on Oscar Wilde bears down far more on Wilde the man than on Wilde the writer. Even more oddly, those who undertake to explain (and usually to vindicate) Wilde the man appear driven to harp on his "genius" as a writer, without, as a rule, subjecting his work to the kind of critical judgment that alone would justify their claim that Wilde made significant contributions to literature and to the criticism of literature. Purely critical studies of Wilde are rare, that of Edouard Roditi (Oscar Wilde, New Directions, 1947) being one of the few that attempts to evaluate Wilde's role as poet, critic, fiction· ist, and playwright in fin de siecle England. It seems fairly clear that one of Roditi 's aims was to right the balance, to insist that if Wilde has any importance for our century, he is important precisely because, poseur though he was, the varying poses he assumed were designed to express his dissatisfaction with a world that deserved pungent criticism and a general housecleaning. One may decide that Roditi's claims for Wilde border on the extravagant, but one is thankful that he is willing to forget about the notorious Wilde of the 1895 trials, Wilde the victim of self-righteous "justice," and Wilde the unforeseeing instigator of all the sound and fury still associated with De Profundis. All this may seem an oblique approach to a review of the three books whose 104 MODERN DRAMA May titles head this essay. Actually it is not, for though one might like to forget it, De Profundis is in many ways the crucial document for understanding Wilde both as man and writer. All three of the authors I am concerned with here are obliged to cope with it and do so as best they can. Biographically, the question they have to wrestle with is whether or not Lord Alfred Douglas was the villain Wilde made him out to be; critically, the question is what kind of man Wilde really was and how, being the man he was, everything he wrote, including De Profundis, was conditioned and shaped by his highly personal sensibility. Rupert Croft-Cooke's Bosie is an admitted apologia for Douglas, a detailed, thoroughly researched and finely detached study of the one friend of Wilde who has been for the most part vilified for his conduct before, during, and after Wilde's imprisonment. (Even Roditi in Appendix I of his book has not been able to forego unpleasant innuendo upon Douglas's behavior.) That Douglas has been shabbily misjudged is Croft·Cooke's...