Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas by Douglas Murray

Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas Reviews

• 
  Lord Beardsley

  I have this huge, weird love for horrible bastards. I don't know why. I always have. It all stems back to really liking Gargamel from The Smurfs. I think that's why I like Lord Alfred Douglas so much.
  
  The author of this book probably likes evil villians also. And he's one himself. I'll explain.
  
  Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas was the Golden Boy who brought down Oscar Wilde. This biography of him is very well written and researched. For starters, the author is 27 now and started writing it when he was 14 years old. He did an amazing job researching a rather obscure life and the first half of the book is incredibly engaging and gives a very fair look into Bosie as a person. He brings up some very valid points and really does express that Bosie wasn't as horrible and evil as many people think him (he's just your typical spoiled, jaded, bitch). In fact, he did heavily support Wilde for some time when he was released from prison. He also stood by him and defended him for a long period of time. I disagree with the author, however, on the point that Douglas was one of the best poets of his generation. His stuff is cringe-worthy terrible.
  
  Bosie was less the Shakespeare of his generation and more like the Conor Oberst of his generation. Bosie was seriously more emo than Bright Eyes and his emo-poems are nearly as god-awful.
  
  Also, as he grew older he converted to Catholicism (which reminds me of what a friend of mine once said: "when I'm old I'm either going to end up crazy or Catholic". Bosie ended up both). He also was responisible for translating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (one of the most, if not the most Anti-Semitic pieces of garbage ever written and one of the most influential books for Hitler). He was a raging bigot not to mention a pederast. When he was still a practicing homosexual (as opposed to a closeted one) his favorite thing was to seduce schoolboys. He was basically an all around horrible person.
  
  Speaking of all-around horrible people...Douglas Murray (the author) is an enthusiastic Neo-Conservative. He is anti-multi-culturalism and if you look him up on Youtube you'll be appaled at some of the things he espouses.
  
  It sounds like he and Douglas had a lot in common.
• 
  Christine

  
  
  Boise, Alfred Douglas, was a factor in the fall and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Douglas Murray’s book attempts to rescue Douglas from being known just for one thing – as Wilde’s boy toy – as well to restore Boise’s reputation as a poet.
  
  Sadly, there is something off about the book.
  
  Murray does have a point in the whole Wilde/Boise affair. At that point, Boise was young and spoiled. He didn’t hold a gun to Wilde’s head, and Wilde was the married man and father.
  
  Yet this point aside Murray does not really succeed in what he sets out to do.
  
  Part of the problem is the sense of vacuum. The book is about Boise, and mostly Boise there really isn’t much sense of the time he lived in or the people who formed part of his story. While background is given about his parents, this is one of the few times that such detail is given. For instance, when Boise’s elder brother’s wife dies it only gets a mention when his brother remarried in the next sentence. When talking about the animosity between Ross and Douglas, Murray chalks it up to simple jealous on the part of Ross, an argument that is hard to fully buy because Murray doesn’t really give any sense of the relationship between Ross and Wilde, but to say they slept together at least once. He also implies that Wilde engaged in homosexual behavior because Wilde and his wife stopped having intercourse as a form of birth control. While such conclusions might be true to present them with little to no support makes them dangerously simplistic.
  
  Another problem is the double standard and Boise as the only honest person. When writing a biography about someone who has been the target of potshots, there is always the danger of making the subject a sinned against saint. While Murray doesn’t go this far, he does come too close. This is due to two things. The first is that he makes it appear that Boise was the only friend to stand by Wilde upon release from prison. He does this, in part, by condemning Constance Wilde for refusing to give her husband an allowance unless he broke it off with Boise. Basically, we are led to be, she is being judgmental and unfair. But this is put forward in a vacuum (Wilde’s fall in this book seems to have had limited impact on his family), and that is part of the problem. The second is the account of Douglas’ translating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into English. While it is true that Anti-Semitism was viewed differently, why does this only get a very brief paragraph? Why should we avoid judging him when we are encouraged to judge Constance and others who condemn homosexuality by today’s standards?
  
  In fact, this almost cynical and dismissive view of women is consistent. Douglas’ wife is no more than a pawn of her father. Again, there is a vacuum in the detail.
  
  And we are to view Wilde’s affair with Boise differently than we are to view Boise’s affair with a young man. This episode in the biography occurs when Boise is older and has converted Catholicism – so why a homosexual affair, Murray doesn’t really say.
  
  The other main thrust of the book is that Boise is an overlooked poet, who might have been greater than Wilde in some cases. He really doesn’t prove this, and the poetry that he does quote, is rather mediocre. The focus on poetry accounts for the vacuum that weakens the book.
  
• 
  Rohase Piercy

  This is a fascinating read, an in-depth study of the life and character of Lord Alfred Douglas, always remembered as Oscar Wilde's lover and often judged harshly for escaping to the continent when Wilde was tried and convicted of gross indecency back in the 1890s.
  It's amazing to think that this biography was first written back in 2000 when the Douglas Murray was still an undergraduate - whilst I'm sure that much revision went into this 2020 edition, I'm still in awe of the meticulous research conducted by so young an author, and of his insight into the complexity of life in general, and Lord Alfred Douglas' life in particular.
  Oscar Wilde died in 1900 - Bosie lived on until 1945, his life and experience covering a remarkable period of changes, historical, political and social. Yes, he was neurotic, fractious and argumentative (his long list of lawsuits against people he claimed to have libelled him in some way or other, including his rival for Wilde's affections Robert Ross, exhibit a most unpleasant paranoia); but he was also sensitive, introspective, generous and kind, a willing mentor to the young, a devout Catholic convert, and a major poet whose mastery of the sonnet form is regarded by many as second only to Shakespeare.
  Bosie renounced his homosexual lifestyle very soon after Wilde's death, and his subsequent marriage to Olive Custance produced one son, Raymond, who unfortunately ended his days in an asylum. There is no doubt that he genuinely loved his wife - although separated after a number of years, they remained close - and towards the end of his life, Bosie candidly stated his opinion that most people are basically bisexual.
  By the end he had made peace with those of his enemies still living, forgiven those who had predeceased him, written some of the most beautiful sonnets in the English language, and published (in addition to his autobiography) a candid re-evaluation of his life and character entitled 'Without Apology' in which he says:
  "All one is constrained to do ... is to say: 'This is what I did, and this is why I did it.' Life lands one in a certain position (whether by one's own faults, or merely by fatality or the fault of others, really matters very little); and finding oneself in that position, one acts according to one's temperament, one's convictions and one's courage or lack of it. On the whole, I think that it is a mistake to allow the opinion of the world to influence one ... One can act only according to one's lights, and if one is in good faith, one may hope that in the long run justification will result, even if not in this world or in one's own lifetime.'
  That is the epitaph of a man who has made peace with himself at the end of a long and eventful life - and really, what more can any of us wish for?
• 
  Philip Clark

  We usually have come to know Lord Alfred Douglas in the context of being the spoiled, often vicious, self-centered young beauty who was the great love of Oscar Wilde. But here, thankfully, Douglas Murray shows us the man who learned hard lessons from that time, who was often pilloried wrongly and misunderstood. His biography is invaluable in bringing Douglas's poetry to the critical level that shows their resonance and worth in the long line of poetic history, and here places them once again for reconsideration and deep reading. Murray is completely even on presenting the good and the bad sides of Douglas, but his incisive research provides a overall life of a man who was unsettled by his time, and too often unaware of his gifts. Murray too lets us know the very hard life and lessons learned that Douglas had to suffer -- much of his life was involved in litigious court battles, constantly fighting to tell his side of a story much maligned and assumed by those who had no real idea or compassion for neutrality and fairness. We come away from it, knowing Douglas as at last a man who paid his dues, suffered deeply -- he too was imprisoned, and experienced hard labor, and the result of which, like Wilde's almost destroyed his desire to write. But he found deeper creative tethers to hold fast to, and with a return to the Catholic faith, found ways in which to accommodate and and be fully honest with his life and its repercussions. Beautifully written, and consummate in its research, it gives us a portrait of Douglas that is complex, and human. One comes away from it with a deeper understanding not only of Douglas, but of Wilde and the entire period in which both of them loved each other, no matter how harsh the resultant lessons learned.
• 
  Ashley P.

  This is one of the three books on Wilde-related subjects that my poetry professor lent me to read over the summer, and I figured I'd read this one first because I thought its subject matter will frustrate me most. Turns out I was right, but I also learnt many new things and gained a new insight on the lives of all the people involved in that famous late eighteen nineties scandal.
  
  I think I gained a better understanding of how Lord Alfred's mind worked, how his thought process was during the 1895 trials, and what led him to act in the way he did in the early decades of the twentieth century. I think Murray was incredibly succinct and efficient in describing what exactly went wrong with the Wilde lawsuit and how those trials affected everyone involved for decades to come. Wilde was of course had his entire life ruined, but Douglas also didn't escape unscathed. His paranoia that he held in later life was definitely a consequence of people's attitudes towards him in the years after the trial and it definitely motivated all the times he went to court after Wilde's death. I was surprised to learn that Bosie had beef with Winston Churchill himself, among many, MANY others. By the end of the biography, I couldn't help but to feel just a little sorry for Bosie, since he did, in many ways, become just like his father that he despised so strongly and openly in his youth. His attacks on the people he knew were vicious, he sometimes straight up used the same techniques as his father, which is almost scary. It brings me some peace of mind that he seemed to have gained just a little clarity over his own behavior by the end of his life though.
  
  Murray tried to make a case for Bosie's poetry, which in my opinion didn't succeed. I won't hold that against him though, since poetry is very subjective and if he wants to make a case for a bunch of poems I find rather mediocre, let him do so. My problems with this biography are mostly tied to the treatment of Robbie Ross. Even as a self-proclaimed member of the so-called Ross camp, I can recognize that nobody in this situation was the clear-cut "good guy", but I can't help but to think that Bosie is sometimes a bit unfairly presented as a victim, or the only "good guy" in a situation. I still can't get over Murray arguing that Bosie was the only person who made an effort to help Wilde in prison. I'm sorry but Robbie didn't tirelessly campaign for Wilde to be moved into a prison where he'd have the privilege of writing and Robert Sherard, as misguided as his attempts to redeem Wilde in his later years were, didn't challenge the Marquis of Queensberry to a DUEL to defend his honor while Bosie was chilling on Capri and actively making the situation worse with his articles that were supposed to help. Murray is fair enough to recognize that most of Bosie's tragedy was of his own making, but he definitely leans against Ross. I think this is a bit unfounded, since in my opinion, Ross gave Bosie more than enough chances to try to redeem himself, but what could he do if Bosie simply refused to cooperate?
  
  All in all, I think this biography needed to be written. It's easy to just think of Bosie as the asshole that ruined Wilde's life and went full villain after his lover's death, but I think it's also valuable to understand some circumstances that brought him there, whether they ran in the family (like his temperament) or were of his own making. It's a valuable source and I'm glad I read it.
• 
  Mary Pagones

  Four stars primarily for chronicling Douglas' far lesser-known life post-Wilde, an an important corrective to the romanticized image of the relationship of the two men after Wilde's release from prison.
  
  I can't improve upon a review I saw of this book from Twitter, which is basically that even as a Douglas apologist, Murray can't conceal what an absolute shite his subject was in life--like his father, Douglas used the court system to hound those whom he hated, including dear Robbie Ross, who did everything he could to rehabilitate and preserve Oscar Wilde's reputation. Douglas converted to Catholicism, repudiated Wilde, was an absent father like his own (although that was partially because he was forcibly separated from his son as unfit), and libeled William Churchill as a war profiteer. Oh, and he was also antisemitic. He threw away just about every opportunity to do something useful, including the editorship of several literary magazines, and pretty much the only good things Douglas did was that he eventually softened in his position to Wilde and wrote a halfway decent poem, "Two Loves," as a young man.
  
  Unfortunately, Douglas also wrote a great deal of forgettable verse, and Murray spends far too much time trying to convince the reader it's significant, even though it would never have been given any regard, were it not for the sexual history of the author. The poem written about his brother's untimely death is moving because of the context. But as a poet of significance Douglas falls short--he disdained modernism and never became a vibrant part of the changes in poetic culture, which would have made him interesting beyond his personal biography.
• 
  James

  An exhaustive biography of the infamous younger lover of Oscar Wilde. The book strives to act as a corrective to the well-known narrative that Bosie was a petulant and faithless lover whose attentions brought Wilde to ruin - in this it is successful, with the relationship being painted in far more shades of grey than usual; the account of their final days together in Naples, ended because their respective funders would not agree to them living together, is very sad and moving. Secondly, the book attempts to rescue Douglas' reputation as a poet - his sonnets were once considered on a par with Shakespeare; the Wilde affair has rather overshadowed his poetry, and it does feel unfair, given how highly the poetry was considered in his life (it is mostly out of print now). The book does best as an account of a deeply flawed man, often responding to circumstances unwisely, who eventually found a home in the Catholic faith and a way of coming to terms with his past.
  
  It's not that great as a portrait of Douglas' times, and there's a sense that the author doesn't really give credit to Douglas' class position - his inherited wealth and title entirely shaped his ability to go through life without ever having to earn a living, although that bit him in the end, given he ended up flat broke. But one does come away thinking rather fondly of the older Douglas, and intrigued to read his poetry.
  
  It's fascinating to read Bosie as Murray's first book, written in his late teens. His writing career has taken him away from being a biographer, and the detail and affection for his subject here makes one consider that a loss to the craft.
• 
  Denis

  For anyone interested in Oscar Wilde, this book is a must-read. Murray, the author, has had the great idea of investigating the one who enthralled Wilde with his beauty, but about whom very little is known: lord Alfred Douglas, the blonde young man who, besides being Wilde's lover, was also a reknown poet. He's the one who wrote the famous sentence "the love that dare not speak its name". It is a fascinating biography because Douglas is a complex, strange, hard to grasp character, and Murray has done an amazing job at reconstructing his life and analyzing his life, his personality, his work, his psyche. Especially surprising is Douglas' life after his affair with Wilde, and what became of him. He does not especially comes out as an endearing man, especially in his late years, yet there's something slightly sad and pathetic about him.
• 
  Catherine Siemann

  Knowing that the author was an undergraduate when he wrote the book makes this a remarkable achievement. The problem is that he has not succeeded, for me at least, in making his case that Lord Alfred Douglas is interesting enough, on his own, to justify an entire book. There are two sides to every story, and I'd wondered if there was more to Douglas than there seemed. It was interesting to have the various bits and pieces of his later life that turn up in biographies of Oscar Wilde fleshed out (his marriage, his Catholic conversion) and rather charming to read about his late-life friendships with George Bernard Shaw and Marie Stopes. I cannot share the author's high opinion of Douglas's poetry, and my opinion hasn't been changed significantly.
• 
  Anna Kļaviņa

  Really attention-grabbing read and Mr Murray, in my opinion, has done excellent work researching and writing biography of Lord Alfred Douglas.
  
• 
  David Gee

  In this detailed and thoroughly researched biography, Bosie Douglas comes across as a bitter, vindictive man torn between love and hate for Oscar Wilde, whose downfall was brought about as much by Bosie and his father as by his own love of life in the gutter (from where, as we know, there is a view of the stars).
  
  The young Bosie has been accurately portrayed in all the movies: lazy, spoiled and petulant. He graduated from college flirtations to commercial sex with London rent-boys (then called ‘renters’). Wilde was going to seed by the time they met; Bosie’s infatuation was more for the playwright and wit than for the bedroom partner. But he loyally visited Oscar every day while he was awaiting trial for sexual offences after the collapse of his libel case against Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry.
  
  Douglas Murray believes Bosie ‘went straight’ after he converted to Catholicism and married Olive, a fellow poet. But he never could not let go of the past. He wrote several books about his relationship with Wilde and got involved in a long series of libel cases, many centred on Robert Ross, Oscar’s ‘ex’ from way back who deserves much of the credit for safeguarding Wilde’s legacy, the plays. Bosie edited a series of short-lived literary magazines and ‘discovered’ some notable poets, including Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke.
  
  Murray’s major achievement is perhaps in arguing the case for Bosie to be recognized as a poet of some significance. Several critics of the time (and again when he was republished in the 1950s) rank Alfred Douglas’s sonnets alongside Shakespeare’s. How highly is he rated today? His early poems (many invocations to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’) are a bit twee. The middle ones are vituperative, reflecting his long period of litigiousness. Then sanctimony gets the better of him as he becomes an increasingly hardcore Catholic and denounces homosexuality.
  
  This is not an easy book to read, especially for non-poetry lovers. Full of a queeny bitchiness and endlessly self-pitying, Alfred Douglas was neither lovable nor likeable. In death as in life, Bosie gets co-star status in the drama of the rise and fall of a great literary figure.
• 
  Sharon Terry

  Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie, is best known for his fateful relationship with Oscar Wilde. Douglas Murray does his level best to add a bit more flesh to the bones, principally by celebrating Douglas's poetry. In his day, Douglas was a respected, if minor, poet, who was especially good at the sonnet form. Unfortunately, try as I might, I could find no special merit in Douglas's verse, with the exception of The Dead Poet:
  
  I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
  All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
  And as of old, in music measureless,
  I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
  Under the common thing the hidden grace,
  And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
  Till mean things put on beauty like a dress
  And all the world was an enchanted place.
  
  And then methought outside a fast locked gate
  I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
  Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
  Wonders that might have been articulate,
  And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds.
  And so I woke and knew that he was dead.
  
  This poem is, of course, about Oscar Wilde. Douglas could never escape this relationship, which overshadowed his entire life. The biography chronicles his attempts to edit and promote various literary journals and his many lawsuits, one of which involved Winston Churchill. The crown, on behalf of Churchill, sued Douglas for libellous accusations published in his journal, "Plain English". Douglas lost the case and was sentenced to six months in prison. He had previously been bankrupted in a failed case against the writer Arthur Ransome. None of this, however, discouraged him from using the courts.
  
  In later life Douglas converted to Catholicism and totally rejected his gay past. He even married - an interesting woman called Olive Custance, who first approached him by presenting herself dressed as a boy! They managed to make a go of it long enough to produce a son, Raymond, who unhappily spent most of his life in psychiatric institutions. Eventually they parted, but did not divorce and remained on good terms.
  
  Douglas's politics were deeply conservative and he was a virulent anti-Semite, though he stopped short of endorsing Hitler's treatment of the Jews.
  
  There has always been speculation that mental illness ran in the Douglas family. His hated father, the Marquis of Queensberry, was known as a brutal man, an outspoken atheist and something of a thug, who transgressed the social etiquette of his class by his flamboyant behaviour. Several of his relatives committed suicide or became alcoholics.
  
  It is easy to see mental health issues in the character of his son, as presented in this biography and in various accounts of the life of Oscar Wilde. His turnabout, from idle, hedonistic youth to moralistic religious conservative, seems a violent swinging of the pendulum. Alfred Douglas seems to have lacked a solid centre to his character. A very sad tale of a beautiful youth with the world before him and the love of a great man, to a thoroughly unpleasant, embittered, vituperative and vexatious litigant, with few friends and not much to show for his life.
• 
  Anne

  Maybe two stars is harsh but I just can’t find too much to like about this book. I’ve no problem with an attempt to rescue someone’s reputation - and I was looking forward to seeing what he had - but that has to be built on fresh perspectives on their own character and circumstances. The author here couldn’t offer that much in that line and resorted to rubbishing the characters of the absolute congregation of people who Douglas had fallen out with or had turned on him as a result of his own behaviour. I found few examples in Douglas’s own actions to persuade me he’s been misunderstood, which itself would have been fine, but the spite against others as a means to accommodate this was a bridge too far for me. And, frankly, his life doesn’t make that much of a read once you get past the Wilde years. There’s a large concentration on his poetry which might interest some. I’m not a big reader of poetry so the theme that his poetry was his greatest achievement may well have merit but I’m not qualified to judge.
• 
  Carlos Olmo

  Surprisingly interesting and tragic life. I didn't know anything about Alfred Douglas, but the detailed writing of Murray and the dramatic story itself engaged me from the beginning. The background of the taboo of homosexuality around the turn of the century is ever present - and his relationship with Oscar Wilde in particular which marked his life since he became an adult up until he died, is especially fascinating. The evolution of Douglas' difficulties understanding, rejecting, and finally accepting his own youth feelings, dealing with changes in faith, moral beliefs, societal norms and attacks from enemies, captivated me and was very informative as a historical description of the time.
• 
  Jeni

  Between 3 and 4 stars -- it's a well-written and well researched book (almost too much so, as it was at times difficult to read because so much information was being given). I didn't know much about Lord Alfred Douglas except for his role in Oscar Wilde's downfall, so it was good to see how the rest of his life panned out and see him for the complex human he was, rather than just his association with Wilde.
• 
  Ross Dorianycc

  Tre stelle solo perché si vede che l'autore era terribilmente di parte e giovane quando ha scritto questa biografia. Per il resto, che pesantezza mi lascia...un po' perché Alfred sembrava del tutto fuori controllo per gran parte del tempo, un po' perché forse i disturbi mentali non trattati lo hanno solo affossato - non aiutato affatto dalla croce di Oscar che non gli hanno mai tolto dalle spalle.
• 
  Lenny Burnham

  This is such a captivating, detailed book about an intense man. All the stuff about his relationship with Oscar Wilde is absolutely gripping. It paints a great portrait of the time.
• 
  Erica

  The golden boy lead no golden life. Certainly many of Douglas's failings were of his own making, but many were not. It seems that Bosie suffered a similar illness as his father, and many of his ancestors. It shaped Bosie's life and those that surrounded him in many ways, it was he that endured the most from his sometimes injudicious choices and irrational behaviour.
  
  His life reads as if it were a Shakespearean tragedy, from his many litigations, his imprisonment, his marriage, the fate of his son, and the poverty. "A Lord without any money" indeed.
  
  Murray's research is extensive and goes a way to repair Douglas's reputation in regards to his treatment of Wilde. I found Bosie hard to like at times throughout the book, but then he would do something that made you like him again. Having finished the book I felt that was not the life that I expected him to have lead, there is just such a sadness that I feel after having closed the cover.
• 
  Ellen

  Murray presents the Oscar Wilde/Lord Alfred Douglas relationship from Bosie's perspective, and does a fine job in illustrating how this relationship impacted Douglas' life in a terrible way. From a young and delightful man, Douglas became over his lifetime an embittered person who spent much of his time in court filing and trying to win libel lawsuits. He was a good poet, and the book closes with a poem he wrote about Wilde; very sad. I'd recommend this to people interested in Wilde's life and in the life of Lord Alfred Douglas as well.
• 
  Abi_88

  This is one of only three non fiction novels that I've read in less than three days, or even finished. Oscar Wildes life and that of his lover lord alfred douglas always fascinated me. This book contains a most balanced account of L.A's point of view during the wilde trials, and also an interesting insight to the rest of his life.
• 
  Jemppu

  How much this was mostly but a collection of previously recorded writings is neatly encapsulated by the last 40 pages of notes, listing the sources of various quotes.
  
  Though not very captivating or memorable a read, it seems nicely thorough summation of the history of an individual.
  
  ____________
  
  Reading updates.
• 
  Anamarija

  soooooo boring