Detailed item info | Synopsis | In 1918, a production of Oscar Wilde's SALOME in London led to a libel trial when the star of the play was reported to be a member of a lesbian cult inspired by the "decadent excesses" of Wilde. This is an account of the trial, and of the postwar anti-homosexual social climate in England.
| | Size | | Length: | 250 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in. | | Width: | 6.3 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 21.6 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | The Billing trial's beginnings can be traced to the moment British authorities finally permitted a staging of Wilde's play Salome. American beauty Maud Allan was to dance the lead. So outraged was Noel Pemberton Billing, a member of Parliament and self-appointed guardian of family values, that he denounced Allan in the right-wing newspaper Vigilante as a member of the "Cult of the Clitoris". Billing was convinced that the "Cult of Wilde" - a catchall for anyone guilty of degeneracy and perversion, in his eyes - had infected the land. Of that, Billing maintained, he had proof: a black book containing the names of 47,000 members of the British establishment who without doubt were members of the Cult of Wilde was in the hands of the Germans. Threat of exposure was costing England the war. Maud Allan sued Billing for libel, and the trial that followed held the world in thrall. Was there or was there not a black book? What names did it contain? The Billing trial was both hugely entertaining - never had scandal and social prominence been so deliciously juxtaposed - and deadly serious. As in Oscar Wilde's own trial in 1895 (which also took place at the Old Bailey), libel was hardly the issue; the fight was for control over the country's moral compass. In Oscar Wilde's Last Stand, biographer and historian Philip Hoare gives us the full drama of the Billing trial, gavel to gavel, and brings to life this unique, bizarre, and spell-binding event.
| | Industry reviews | Wilde's green carnations did not have quite the same Geclat after the red poppies of Flanders. In The Eye in the Door, Pat Barker's Charles Manning is bored by a performance of Salome: 'It was not that he thought the theme trivial or unworthy or out of date--certainly not that--but the language was impossible for him. France had made it impossible.' . . . For all its detail, Hoare's account lacks the nuance and amplitude of Barker's fictional evocation of the trial and its context. His is a London story, confined to a ritzy, rarefied caste: the rest of the country is a grey hinterland in which nothing interesting seems to be happening.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Spero
Most of the original research of the case, as well as the historiography concerning links between the case and World War I, is contained in Michael Kettle's marvelously reasoned and elegant 'Salome's Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century'. What Hoare has done, in addition to offering many more anecdotes of right-wing obloquy and malice, is to shift the focus from general sexual censorship to the particular censorship of homosexuality that he contends was part of a continuing cultural war.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Aloff
Hoare's amusing account of the court and press battle between the now-forgotten diva and this British Joseph McCarthy--as a defense he claimed to have the names of 47,000 English homosexuals in a black book that was also in German hands--makes for stimulating reading on the moral controversies of the postwar years. This same territory has been covered well by Michael Kettle's Salome's Last Veil (1977), but Hoare's work includes new facts and commentary. American students and researchers will find Hoare useful as a comparative guide to similar antigay/antiartistic movements still roiling in this country. Recommended for comprehensive theater, gay studies, and censorship collections.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Adam
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