70 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
lodgings, describes how, over successive
morning cups of tea, Wilde gradually
induced Grainger to lie on the bed with
him, then “placed his penis between my
legs and satisfied himself.”
Ellmann’s biography, for so long the
authoritative one, has very little to say
about Conway and Grainger, neither of
whom was a rent boy, and both of whom
were very young. When he met Wilde,
Conway had just turned sixteen; Grainger
was seventeen. Wilde was in his late
thirties. Ellmann never saw the witness
statements, but he would have known
enough from Montgomery Hyde’s ac-
count of the trial to have paused before
asserting that “none of the young men
was under the statutory age of seven-
teen,” and that they were all “prostitutes,”
“corrupt” long before Wilde met them.
In Ellmann’s account, the most memo-
rable detail from the trial is Wilde’s
courtroom joke that he considered
Grainger far too “plain” to kiss—the kind
of caustic quip that might once have en-
livened his drawing-room theatrics.
Ellmann emphasizes Wilde’s mag-
nanimity—that “he got to know the
boys as individuals, treated them hand-
somely,” and “suffered because of his
generosity.” Sturgis, though he doesn’t
neglect to mention the many unsolic-
ited silver cigarette cases, dwells instead
on what Wilde’s attention granted in
some quarters and depleted in others—
what it took away, above all, from his
own family, to whom Wilde, at the
height of his fame, appeared like the
unreformed “selfish giant” of his own
famous fairy tale.W
ilde was first incarcerated at Hol-
loway, the North London prison
to which a solicitor in an early version
of “Earnest” threatens to send Alger-
non for the crime of “running up food
bills at the Savoy.” After his sentencing,
he was moved to Pentonville, where en-
forced silence was one of the worst pri-
vations. The sameness of prison life,
Wilde later wrote, degraded his body
and his mind, just as the trial, sensa-
tionalized in the newspapers and re-
duced to a morality tale, had robbed
him of his multidimensionality.
Wilde’s ability to create, as his Ox-
ford friend Rennell Rodd had observed
decades earlier, relied on interaction and
confrontation: “You see you’ve no oneto contradict you!—Which is bad for
you!” Wilde’s critical dialogues had
achieved their effect by shuttling be-
tween outrageous paradox and conven-
tional protestation (“My dear fellow!”),
like miniature society plays. In prison,
it was only by finding interlocutors and
entering the unstable, dynamic arena of
dialogue that he began to recover some
of his vitality. A year into his sentence,
he was at Reading Prison, where a sym-
pathetic warden permitted him access
to pen and paper. Wilde used it to con-
verse, tutoring an enthusiastic guard in
literature through “extensive written an-
swers on sheets of foolscap” passed under
his cell door every morning.
In the early months of 1897, he em-
barked on a long letter to Douglas, pub-
lished posthumously as “De Profundis.”
Correspondence, for Wilde, was some-
thing of a misnomer: it was a form in
which his complexities could vie, not
align. The letter became a displaced di-
alogue, an attempt to fix, by imagining
and answering, the sentiments of his
former lover. The intensity of his suf-
fering, he explained to the silent Doug-
las, had laid the ground for what he had
always sought—new shades and possi-
bilities of self. “My nature,” he wrote,
“is seeking a fresh mode of self-reali-
zation.” The task now was to “ab-
sorb...all that has been done to me,
to make it part of me.”
In his earlier dialogues, Wilde had
argued that adopting multiple poses was
the key to developing complex selfhood.
Now he considered these façades thin
and inauthentic, the stock guises of in-
stitutional life. “A man whose desire is
to be something separate from himself,
to be a Member of Parliament, or a suc-
cessful grocer...invariably succeeds in
being what he wants to be,” he wrote.
“Those who want a mask have to wear
it.” True self-realization came not through
performance but through experience, by
“absorbing” the lessons of sorrow and
pleasure into the self rather than by re-
peatedly dividing it. “Exactly as in Art
one is only concerned with what a par-
ticular thing is at a particular moment
to oneself, so it is also in the ethical evo-
lution of one’s character,” he wrote. Every
experience counted; everything was grist
for development. Unifying it all into a
coherent form, in life as in art, was the
great challenge.more often used to distill his character
than to dramatize its contradictions: to
perform a humanist rescue of Wilde,
as in Ellmann’s portrait, or to point the
finger of judgment at his puritanical
adversaries. A major achievement of
Sturgis’s book is the nuance it restores
to this episode. Drawing on material
discovered and published in the past
twenty years, Sturgis gives center stage
to all the young men, professional rent
boys and others, whose histories have
previously been obscured by the emo-
tional extremity of the affair with Doug-
las. For Ellmann, the nature of these
relationships could be summed up in a
few words: sex exchanged “for a few
pounds and a good dinner.” But the
libel trial wasn’t the elevated referen-
dum on Platonic male love that Wilde
had imagined it could be. His own so-
licitude for Douglas meant that his
lover was kept out of the witness box;
instead, the arguments against him
leaned heavily on statements gleaned
from boys he’d picked up.
Sturgis quotes extensively from the
unexpurgated trial transcript, first pub-
lished in 2003, by Wilde’s grandson, the
scholar Merlin Holland. Its register
hovers between Victorian euphemism
and startling intimacy. From questions
establishing the disparities between
Wilde and his young male compan-
ions—“Who was Alfred Wood? What
was his occupation? What was his
age?”—the defense counsel dug deeper:
“Did you ever have immoral practices
with Wood?” “Did you ever open his
trousers?” “Put your hand upon his
person?” “Did you ever put your own
person between his legs?” In these
exchanges, Wilde lied, denied, and de-
flected, but was unable to do what his
work could: to rewrite duplicity so that
it became truth.
The young men’s witness statements,
drawn on at trial but first published in
McKenna’s “Secret Life,” give us their
side of the story. From the account of
Alphonse Conway, whom Wilde and
Douglas picked up in the seaside town
of Worthing, Sturgis shows that Wilde
showered him with gifts (a blue serge
suit, a copy of “Treasure Island”), then
led him out along the coastal road one
evening to “put his hand inside his trou-
sers.” In another statement, Walter
Grainger, a servant in Douglas’s Oxford