Elizabeth Winkler in The New York Times:
On the evening of Nov. 30, 1994, Merlin Holland sat in a dim side aisle of the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Paris church where, in 1900, Oscar Wilde had been given a quiet, almost clandestine funeral. Holland had spent the day tracing his grandfather’s final, penniless years in exile for a BBC documentary, and it had disturbed him. That evening, several dozen candles were already burning at the entrance to the chapel, far more than on his previous visits. Working out the day, he realized it was the anniversary of his grandfather’s death.
The fans had remembered; he hadn’t. He sat there with his unlit candle, resenting what felt like the intrusion of strangers on a private moment.
Then something shifted. “Blood and history flowed together,” he writes in a new book, “and I found myself the unwilling conduit for a century of unwept family grief”: for Wilde’s two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, who were raised to forget him; for his wife, Constance, who stood by him through scandal and imprisonment for “gross indecency,” dying within a year of his release; and for Wilde himself, who never saw his family again after prison.
“For the first time,” Holland wrote, “I felt it was part of me, not just cold, bare facts from the past.”
More here.
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