Your success is quite assured now, dear boy.
I have the pleasure to announce that my short story, In Wilde Pursuit, has been accepted for publication by Midnight Circus in their Spring 2015 Alternate History issue. I got the idea for the story from Frank Harris’s autobiography in which he claimed that he and Bernard Shaw had a steam yacht on call to spirit Oscar Wilde out of England before his arrest for homosexuality. Whether the story is true or not, I have no idea, especially when one considers what a notorious embroiderer Harris was. It is a fact that Wilde’s friends begged him to flee and if he had had a grain of sense, he would have. A good part of the story’s setting at the start is taken from John Betjeman’s poem, The Arrest Of Oscar Wilde At The Cadogan Hotel. I’m no real connoisseur of poetry, but this always struck me as a very fine work.
I admired Wilde even as a teenager. Rather than expand on his significance in a towering tide of blather, I’ll conclude with one of my favorite Wildean anecdotes. While on holiday in the English countryside with his lover (and betrayer) Lord Alfred Douglas, the two decided it would be fun to strip down and run around the yard while spraying one another with garden hoses (didn’t know they had those back in the 1890’s, did you? [Not homosexuals, garden hoses!]). An aged Anglican prelate came upon them during his post-prandial walk and remonstrated at their public nudity to which Wilde replied: “You see before you Greek gods at play.”
Criticize the man if you like, he was a great one with a comeback.