Word: vyvyan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...books on the pre-Revolutionary South (The First Americans, The Founding of American Civilisation, etc.) gave U.S. history students one of their liveliest and most authoritative pictures of the Cavalier tradition, the manners & morals, art & architecture of Colonial America. Wertenbaker was twice appointed to Oxford's honored Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Chair of American History. His advice to students: "Teacher says Shakespeare was a great dramatist; question it. Teacher says Jamestown was the birthplace of the nation; question...
...sensational London Daily Mail, endowed a chair at Oxford. Its purpose: to acquaint Britons with their recent American allies. Since 1922 such sober, unsensational U.S. historians as Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison, Princeton's Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker and Columbia's Allan Nevins have occupied the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professorship of American History. Last week a 29-year-old, crewcut veteran of World War II sailed for England to become the new Harmsworth professor, as well as the first U.S. Rhodes Scholar ever named to an Oxford chair...
...explain very little. He thinks that Wilde's emotional nature never developed "beyond adolescence"; hence Wilde always remained "an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate, half boy, half genius." Nevertheless, he adds, Wilde was "very much in love" with Constance Lloyd when they married in 1884, and "delighted" in Cyril and Vyvyan, their two sons, born a few years later.* Wilde, moreover, according to Pearson, did not become a "practicing" homosexual until after the children were born. Constance, for her part, remained "completely unaware" of his tendency until he was arrested...
...Cyril, who became a professional soldier, was killed in France in 1915. Vyvyan, now 60, studied law, lives in London, works for the BBC. In 1943 he married Australian-born Thelma Besant, a great-great niece of Theosophist Annie Besant. They have one son, Christopher Merlin Vyvyan, born in 1945. Says Vyvyan Holland (the Holland surname was adopted by Constance Wilde, under strong pressure from her family, after Oscar's conviction): "I was only nine in 1895, and was not even told of my father's difficulties until I was 20. Everything happened so long ago that...