LETTERS Peregrinations
Sir: At last a worthy, homophobic deprecia- tion of my grandfather, Oscar Wilde (As I was saying, 24 May). He has had almost too good a press in recent years, which has dis- turbed me a little — like reading proofs and finding no typos, you worry about your own carelessness rather than commending the skill of the printer. In the latest flurry of Wildeomania I was beginning to think that either I had missed Sir Peregrine's obituary or he was losing his touch; but no, there he was, bringing up the rear (if you will forgive the pun), ranting on about Wilde and the rent-boys and laying a whole nation's immorality at his doorstep, just as he had in the correspondence columns of the Times when a statue to honour him was announced two years ago.
First of all, this is not a memorial to Wilde the homosexual, as Sir Peregrine makes out, but to his life and his works, and his life did encompass more than sex. Sec- ond, my grandfather may have been a paed- erast but he was not a paedophile, with all the modern emotive connotations that the word evokes. Charles Dodgson's photo- graphic activities were more akin to mod- em paedophilia and Lord Melbourne's beating of his wards was not far off it, but Wilde's consorting with young men from Piccadilly was no worse than the average Victorian man buying the favours of young female prostitutes and, from what we know, he treated them rather better.
The tolerance which Jeremy Isaacs asks for is that which will allow a memorial to Oscar Wilde despite his different sexual polarity rather than because of it, and it has been our prurient preoccupation with his private life and ill-informed attitudes like Peregrine Worsthorne's which have pre- vented it for so long. But as Oscar once said to his friend Vincent O'Sullivan, 'Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.'
Merlin Holland
115 Broomwood Road, London SW11
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