Sir: That Peregrine Worsthome, once the Ganymede of Stowe School,
Bucks, should write an uncompromising attack on Sir Jere- my Isaacs for instigating a statue to Oscar Wilde is quite predictable. Nor is it a surprise t0 find it in The Spectator, that often divert- ing bible of reactionary provocation. In the ordinary way, despite having been accused in print by Peregrine of having expertly seduced him . . . on the art-school Couch' in our distant boyhood, I'd have smiled tolerantly at this tirade which, apart from being better written, could well have been signed, 'Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells', but so dishonest are his arguments, so false are his comparisons, that somebody surely must at least rap him across the knuckles and, as a great friend of the sculptor Maggi Hambling, commissioned to create the offending statue, it might as well be me.
The first bit of bad faith is the deliberate use, right at the beginning of the first para- graph, of the word 'paedophilia'. In Ancient Greece a paedophile was a lover of young men, and that Wilde certainly was, but in recent years it has come to describe almost exclusively a molester of small chil- dren, and that he could never have been. Nor, may I add, do an overwhelming major- ity of homosexuals have any sympathy for paedophiles in the contemporary sense. Still Worsthome, an expert striker of cracked Pavlovian gongs, knows how to get his public's mouth watering. He describes Wilde as 'encouraging that vice'. Then, suddenly, the implied small children have grown up into 'working-class lads' whom Wilde sodomised. Less to quarrel with here, although I don't know whether Wilde was active or passive, but here again the language is carefully loaded. These honest 'working- class lads' were in fact male prostitutes. Admittedly, as in all prostitution, exploitation is involved, but it is mutual exploitation. Wilde, like many gays, had a taste for 'rough trade' or, as he put it, 'feasting with panthers', but he was hardly unique in that. The statue is not going up because he handed out engraved gold cigarette cases to `stable boys' or stained the linen at the Savoy, but because he was not only a great writer but also a humane and lovable human being to whom a hypocritical and savage injustice was done.
1 don't suppose that even Sir Peregrine, with his proposal to erect a statue of a homophobe, would advocate that it should represent Wilde's destroyer, the repellent Marquess of Queensberry.
It would be a tedious exercise to pursue and unmask all the half-truths and distortions in this over-excitable piece, but most of it is rubbish. Sir Jeremy, for instance, is shown as deciding to suppress 'the plainly intolerable story of Wilde's sex life'. If this is true, he's surely left it a bit late in the day. There have been two films already (and another is on the stocks) which have made it all pretty clear, while several full-scale biographies have left the reader in no doubt at all.
Elsewhere Worsthome admittedly con- demns 'louts who beat up poofters', but not those who offer verbal violence. On the contrary, he makes out homophobes to be suppressed but courageous martyrs, claims most of them to be 'devout Christians' (at least he doesn't claim all) and prepared to be shouted at in fashionable restaurants.
Well, elegantly as he writes, I am not won over. Nor am I convinced that he is com- pletely certain himself. He has always been a self-intoxicating journalist, something he recently admitted in a rather touching piece on earlier failings and misjudgments. Per- sonally, too, he's both very courteous and rather lovable. Come back on the art- school couch, Perry — all is forgiven.
George Melly
33 St Lawrence Terrace, London W10
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