A voyage around my grandfather

It doesn't take a genius to work out the connection between The Wilde Years exhibition at the Barbican, this week's opening of Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts at the British Library, In Extremis/De Profundis at the National Theatre, and the publication of The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde.

Just as he would have wanted, in the month that marks the centenary of his death, Oscar Wilde is the talk "de tout Londres". But there's more to link these London Oscars than meets the eye. Just as Wilde is a shoo-in for the Lifetime Achievement award, there's just one candidate for Best Supporting Actor. Merlin Holland, Wilde's only grandson and closest living relative, has not only been an adviser or co-curator to the two exhibitions, he is also editor of De Profundis at the National and The Complete Letters. He is the man with his finger in every Oscar pie.

Holland cuts a slightly distracted and harassed figure in his south London home. He appears other-worldly at the best of times, but even more so as he's just got back from an epic journey to southern Sweden, involving cancelled trains and planes, to receive an award from the John Andreen Foundation in recognition of his work. "It was very kind of them," he says, "but I felt a bit diffident about accepting as I'm only really doing my job, my duty."

The words job and duty are his, but he objects to being pigeonholed as a professional descendant. There is a sharp breathing-in that collapses into a sigh when I suggest he has become the de facto keeper of Oscar's flame. "I suppose I have brought it on myself," he says measuredly, "but it's a label, with its connotations of being jealously protective, obstructive and defensive, that I try to get away from. I've never set out to be a public Wilde figure."

Holland's father Vyvyan was dogged by the stigma still attached to Wilde's bisexuality, and when the copyrights ran out in 1950 he followed his father into poverty. So avoiding close associations with his grandfather was almost second nature to Holland by the time he left school in the mid-Sixties. He went to work as a paper salesman for Wiggins Teape in the Middle East for five years before returning to Britain in 1974 to work for Kraus Thompson, a publisher specialising in reprinting journals such as the Burlington Magazine.

It was at this point that his grandfather began to re-enter his life. "My mother used to get the occasional request for permission to reprint material from his letters," he explains. "She used to refer these enquiries to a solicitor who would ask £5 for the permission and charge her £10 for the legal work. So it made sense for me to take over. I soon found myself talking to people who knew far more about my family than I did and I felt obliged to learn as much as them."

Which he did. His research stretches out across his living room in a disordered chaos of books, files and folders and he can happily quote chapter and verse on any period of Wilde's life. And as Wilde's reputation has been restored in the last 25 years from an infamous but essentially lightweight Victorian epigrammatist to serious literary figure, so Holland's own standing has grown with it. His new volume of more than 1,500 letters, which updates the long-since out-of-print Rupert Hart-Davis edition with 300 previously unseen letters, is the culmination of his work to date. "I think it is only through the letters that you get to see the real Wilde," he offers, "the man of contradictory impulses; the married homosexual, the writer who hated writing, the humility and the arrogance, the barbed and the kind." Contradictory impulses may be a family trait. For someone who does not want to be labelled Oscar's keeper, Holland has had some very public spats with those whose vision of Wilde does not coincide with his.

Even Richard Ellmann's acclaimed biography does not escape criticism. "It's still the best biography there is," he says semi-graciously, "but for a book that is supposed to be encyclopedic there are surprising errors. He gets the names of Oscar's brother and father wrong within the first 20 pages, though that may be the copy editor's fault as Dick died before publication. More importantly, he repeats the claim that Oscar caught syphilis from a prostitute in Oxford and that this affected his whole life and writing, even when he knew it was a rumour mistrusted by the medical profession. An article will be appearing in the Lancet shortly that finally blows this theory out of the water."

Holland also takes issue with Stephen Fry's film version, both for its factual inaccuracies and for being played entirely as a Greek tragedy. "Fry played him throughout as if he knew he would end up in prison." His attacks on Melissa Knox for her psycho-biography, which claimed that Wilde's poetry indicated incestuous leanings towards his sister, ended in an ugly public argument with Knox protesting that Holland was unfit to run the Wilde estate.

You sense that Holland takes some perverse pleasure from these feuds, not least because he normally turns out to be correct. "I think that one of the problems is that, unlike writers such as Carroll, Stevenson and Kipling, whose sexual foibles have been teased gently out of the closet over the years, all Wilde's skeletons came tumbling out in 1895. And as there are no scandals left to discover, people have taken to inventing their own."