Bosie: The Man, the Poet, the Lover of Oscar Wilde

Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie, had the face and body of a classic Greek statue, and his life, in which fate and his own hubris interacted disastrously, could constitute a Greek tragedy. One comes away from this assiduously researched and percipient biography of Oscar Wilde's notorious lover, once considered ""among the foremost younger English poets,"" with an indelible impression of a man endowed by fortune who was destroyed--first by the court trial brought on by his father, Lord Queensberry, and then by his own rash behavior. First-time author Murray, who is only 23 and still an undergraduate at Oxford, is impressive in his mature assessment of Bosie's emotional instability and ruinous need for revenge, tracing much of it to the strain of insanity in the Douglas family. While his account of the infamous 1895 libel trial is mainly sourced from earlier books and records, Murray's access to the further details of Douglas's life through letters and journals in Britain and in the Berg collection here breaks new ground. Treated shamefully by Wilde after the playwright's release from prison, and then vilified by English society, Douglas developed a persecution mania that inspired many of his unhinged accusations. As Murray shows, at every point in his life Douglas made poor judgments--sabotaging his career as a poet and editor, resorting to libel and rushing to litigation in a clearly hostile court system, destroying a strange but loving marriage, losing his son and his social standing--and then even criminally libeling Winston Churchill. Eventually, Douglas was left penniless and alone. On the evidence Murray presents here, however, Douglas's small but eloquent poetical oeuvre should survive the sad scandal of his life. B&w photos not seen by PW. Agents, Belinda Harley and Mary Pachnos. First serial to Talk magazine. (June) FYI: Douglas's papers were embargoed by the British Home Office until 2043, but when Murray was 16 and at Eton, he persuaded the Home Office to grant him access to those papers.