Word: vyvyan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...presumably well-meaning friends and relatives never quite wore off. The elder son Cyril got himself killed in World War I in a deliberate effort to prove his manhood and expiate his father's crime. For close to half a century, the shy and sensitive younger son Vyvyan kept the secret of his past hidden in a life of semi-retirement and seclusion. Last week, in a biography published in England,* 68-year-old Vyvyan, whose last name was changed to Holland, told what it was like to spend a lifetime as the hidden son of Oscar Wilde...
...Milk Run. Whatever the world at large may have thought of Oscar Wilde after his prolonged and sordid trials for sodomy, to young Cyril and Vyvyan Wilde he was a fine father. The greatest figures of pre-Raphaelite London were constant visitors at the house in Tite Street, Chelsea, where Wilde, wittiest and most elegant of them all, held court with his beautiful wife Constance. But it was not the distinguished company that made the house a delight to the young Wildes; it was "the smiling giant, always exquisitely dressed, who crawled about the nursery floor with us and lived...
...spent hours in the summer sailing and swimming with his boys. In quieter moments he would tell them stories. Once when he had finished a story called The Selfish Giant, tears came to his eyes and his elder son asked him why. "He replied," writes Vyvyan, "that beautiful things always made...
...Sword of Damocles. What had this kindly father done to deserve the obloquy of his own sons? Until he was 18 years old, Vyvyan never knew. By his own devices and the careless words of elders, the little boy learned to suspect in time that his father had been sent to Reading Gaol, but for what crime he could only guess unassisted-and the guesses were dark beyond belief. Cyril, the elder, got a glimmer of the truth from a glance at newspaper headlines, but even he felt it necessary to keep the facts from his brother. All the boys...
...English-run boarding school in Germany, they found some cricket flannels still marked with their right names and tore out the labels with the desperation of criminals on the brink of discovery. "The thought that at any moment an indiscreet remark or a chance encounter . . . might betray us," writes Vyvyan, "was a sword of Damocles constantly hanging over our heads." In time, to make security even more certain, the boys were separated, Cyril to stay on in Germany, Vyvyan to be sent to a Jesuit school in Monaco...