James Davidson’s books include Courtesans and Fishcakes, One Mykonos and The Greeks and Greek Love, which was published last year. He is a reader in ancient history at the University of Warwick.
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Vol. 22 No. 18 · 21 September 2000
pages 19-21 | 3635 words
Too Young
James Davidson
- Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas by Douglas Murray
Hodder, 374 pp, £20.00, June 2000, ISBN 0 340 76770 7
What is interesting about Bosie is that he was such a thoroughly bad character. It only adds to the fascination that this bundle of malice, treachery, deceit, hypocrisy and vanity was wrapped up in such attractive features. Wilde compared him to a pet lion-cub wreaking havoc on reaching actual size, but he was less impressive and more sinister than that, a King Charles spaniel of vicious temperament, a cute Walt Disney rattlesnake, or a beautiful child vampire. He was hardly an angel in the 1890s, but he truly blossomed after Oscar’s death, when he converted to heterosexuality and the Catholic Church. Wilde called him a ‘monster’ and ‘evil’, and he seems to have devoted the long remainder of his life to proving Wilde wise as well as witty.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 21 · 2 November 2000
From Earl Dachslager
In his review of Douglas Murray's biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, James Davidson (LRB, 21 September) states, as I assume Murray does, that it was Douglas who wrote the persistent bit of anti-semitic doggerel, 'How odd/of God/to choose/ the Jews,' usually attributed to Hilaire Belloc. In fact the verse was written by William Norman Ewer (1885-1976). The almost equally well-known reply was by Cecil Browne: 'But not so odd/As those who choose/A Jewish God/But spurn the Jews.' A less familiar riposte came from the American author and Yiddishist Leo Rosten: 'Not odd/Of God./Goyim/Annoy/'im.'
Earl Dachslager
The Woodlands, Texas
