Alfred Bruce Douglas

Artist Info

Alfred Bruce DouglasWorcester, 1870 - 1945, Lancing

LC name authority rec. n50027698

LC Heading: Douglas, Alfred Bruce, 1870-1945

Biography:

Douglas, Lord Alfred Bruce (1870–1945), poet and biographer, was born on 22 October 1870 at Ham Hill near Worcester, the third son of John Sholto Douglas, ninth marquess of Queensberry (1844–1900), and his wife, Sybil (1845–1935), daughter of Alfred Montgomery, a commissioner of Inland Revenue. The favourite of his mother, who dubbed him Bosie (a version of Boysie that stuck to him for the rest of his life), he was educated at private schools, then sent to Winchester College (1884–8); there he was an average student but a good runner, winning the school steeplechase in 1887. He also started a magazine, the Winchester College Pentagram; though it was hardly the success hoped for—it ran for only ten issues—his contributions gave promise of his developing into a capable poet and incisive writer of prose. In 1889 he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued running and winning races. Athletic and handsome, popular with his classmates, he applied himself more to writing verse than his studies (he did not take a degree), but while at Oxford he contributed to the Oxford Magazine and edited the Spirit Lamp.

Lionel Johnson, a friend from Winchester, introduced Douglas to Oscar Wilde in June 1891. Flattered by Wilde's fawning attention and impressed by his literary prominence, Douglas entered into a relationship that proved mutually disastrous. In March 1895 Wilde, strongly encouraged by Douglas, sued Queensberry for libel (Queensberry having provoked him by leaving a card for Wilde at his club: ‘To Oscar Wilde—posing as Somdomite [sic]’). By his own account, Wilde abandoned the case rather than call Douglas as a witness (Ellmann, 428). Wilde was then prosecuted and, at the second of two trials in 1895, sentenced to two years' hard labour, served at Pentonville and Reading gaols. Douglas was not called to give evidence at either trial, but his letters to Wilde were entered into evidence, as was his poem, ‘Two Loves’. Called on to explain its memorable concluding line—‘I am the love that dares not speak its name’—Wilde answered in a great paean for the ‘affection of an elder for a younger man’ (Ellman, 435). Greatly distressed, Douglas wrote letters to the newspapers and unsuccessfully petitioned the queen for clemency for Wilde. Upon Wilde's release from prison in 1897, he took up with Douglas once again. They travelled through Italy together and met frequently in Paris.

After Wilde's death in 1900 Douglas established a close friendship with Olive Eleanor Custance (1874–1944). She was born in London on 7 February 1874, the elder daughter of Colonel Frederick Hambleton Custance (1844–1925), a retired guards officer, of Weston Old Hall, Norwich, and his wife, Eleanor (d. 1908), daughter of Captain Hylton Jolliffe. They eloped, and married on 4 March 1902, and although their life together had a radiant beginning, after ten years of marriage they separated. Douglas lost custody of their only child, a son, Raymond (1902–1964). The Douglases did their utmost to remain respectful of each other over the remaining years of their lives. When Olive died at Viceroy Lodge, Hove, in her seventy-first year on 13 February 1944, she was eulogized as a gifted poet. She had published her early poems under the pseudonym Opals, later works under her family name. Among her most significant publications are Opals (1897), Rainbows (1902), The Blue Bird (1905), and The Inn of Dreams (1911).

Douglas himself completed more than twenty volumes of poetry and prose. Poems (1896), The City of Soul (1899), Sonnets (1899), and Lyrics (1935) rank among his best collections of verse; his Autobiography (1929), Oscar Wilde and myself (1914), and Oscar Wilde: a Summing Up (1940) present vivid accounts of his creative but troubled life and his association with one of the most colourful personalities of the nineties.

Douglas was egocentric, quarrelled often, and made many enemies. In 1907, after being appointed editor of The Academy, he became involved in a series of violent disagreements with the publisher and an assistant editor. His disputatious behaviour cost him the editorship. In 1913 he was charged with libelling his father-in-law. In 1915 his attacks on Robert Ross led to a prosecution for criminal libel, in which the jury disagreed. During the trial, Douglas fiercely criticized H. H. Asquith, the prime minister, for his association with Ross, and Asquith, with others, responded with a testimonial to Ross. Douglas published the most vitriolic of the many public attacks on Asquith at this time (Jenkins, 380). His vindictive nature occasioned several additional legal battles, including one with Winston Churchill in 1923, an action that resulted in Douglas's being sentenced to a six-month term in Wormwood Scrubs prison. One of the few consolations that sustained him at the time was his Roman Catholicism, to which he had converted in 1911. On 20 March 1945, while staying with friends in Lancing, he suffered a fatal heart attack. Three days later a requiem mass was said for the repose of his soul; and, as he had requested, he was interred beside his mother in the Franciscan friary cemetery in Crawley, Sussex.

Estimates of Douglas's personality and poetry vary from commentator to commentator. He has been labelled everything from ‘the most complete cad in history’ (Read, 1009) to ‘thoroughly goodhearted and by no means the moody, irascible revengeful person that many fancy’ (Sherrard, 141). Considered opinion allows the inference that he neither ruined Wilde nor deserted him, as Douglas's enemies often alleged. The history of Wilde and his Bosie remains one of the most notorious scandals of the period. To accept Wilde's account as found in his De Profundis at Douglas's expense is to be less than objective. Douglas's loyalty to the imprisoned Wilde, his financial generosity, and continued concern, must be viewed in the context of a turbulent relationship involving two highly self-centred and opinionated individuals. As a poet, Douglas excelled as a sonneteer, and that his carefully crafted verse failed to win critical acclaim distressed him deeply. The attention accorded T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Sitwells, and other so-called moderns, he was certain, was misdirected. He believed that the spotlight should have fallen on The Complete Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas (1928), but Douglas was essentially a nineties' poet whose gifts did not survive into the twentieth century.

G. A. Cevasco

Sources H. M. Hyde, Lord Alfred Douglas: a biography (1984) · R. Croft-Cooke, Bosie: Lord Alfred Douglas, his friends and enemies (1963) · B. Roberts, The mad bad line: the family of Lord Alfred Douglas (1981) · W. Freeman, The life of Lord Alfred Douglas (1948) · R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1988) · G. H. Paterson, ‘Lord Alfred Douglas: an annotated bibliography’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 23 (1980), 168–200 · G. A. Cevasco, ‘Lord Alfred Douglas and the Winchester College Pentagram’, Columbia Library Columns, 39 (1989), 3–8 · B. Sewell, ‘Olive Custance’, Like black swans (1982), 76–96 · B. Sewell, Olive Custance: her life and work (1975) · H. Read, ‘Your affectionate friend’, The Listener (8 Dec 1949) [review of Vyvyan Holland's edition of De profundis] · R. Sherrard, Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde (1937) · R. Jenkins, Asquith (1964) · The Times (17 Feb 1944)

Archives Grolier Club, New York · NYPL, diaries and letters · Ransom HRC, letters and papers · Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, papers · U. Cal., Los Angeles, department of special collections, papers · U. Cal., Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, letters and memorabilia :: BL, corresp. with Marie Stopes, Add. MSS 58494–58495 · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Symons, Hugh Walpole, and others; papers relating to prosecution of Herbert Asquith · NL Scot., letters to W. Sorley Brown · NYPL, Berg collection, diaries of Olive Custance · Ransom HRC, corresp. with John Lane

Likenesses double portrait, photograph, c.1893 (with Oscar Wilde), L. Cong., Kaufmann Collection · O. Wilde, photograph, 1897, U. Cal., Los Angeles, W. A. Clark Library · G. C. Beresford, photographs, 1902, NPG [see illus.] · H. Gaudier-Brzeska, pen-and-ink drawing, 1913, NPG · H. Coster, photographs, 1930–39, NPG · H. Leslie, silhouette, NPG · photographs, repro. in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde · photographs, U. Cal., Los Angeles, W. A. Clark Library · portrait (as undergraduate), repro. in A. Douglas, Autobiography (1929) · portrait (in his sixties), repro. in A. Douglas, Autobiography (1929) · portrait (aged forty-eight), repro. in A. Douglas, Collected poems (1919) · portrait (Olive Custance), repro. in Sewell, ‘Olive Custance’, 76–96

Wealth at death £2885 15s. 6d.—Olive Eleanor Douglas: probate, 30 Sept 1944, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

G. A. Cevasco, ‘Douglas, Lord Alfred Bruce (1870–1945)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2014 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/32869, accessed 4 Nov 2015]