I forget what it's called, but whatever

Interviewer: Your publisher is American, so do you ever find yourself having to defend real historical fact over the “perception of history” to your publisher or your audiences? Are there things you’ve uncovered in your research that are stranger than fiction and that a modern audience would find too difficult to believe?

Jo Walton: […] I call that the Tiffany Problem. Tiffany is a real attested medieval name, it’s a variant of Theophania, it appears in twelfth century documents from Britain and France, and you cannot give it as a name to a character in a historical or fantasy setting because it looks too horribly modern.

My father [John Lambden Ross], a contemporary of Oscar Wilde, was actually better acquainted with his brother, the journalist Willie Wilde; on the other hand, Robert Ross (though not a relative of ours) was a frequent visitor at my grandmother’s house and had given her a copy, flatteringly inscribed, of a book entitled Masques and Phases, which later passed into my possession, while his elder brother Alec was a close friend of Father’s and may even have been at school with him, though I am not certain of this.

‘But Oscar?’ I would persist: for, ever since I had read The Picture of Dorian Grey a year before, at the age of seventeen, I’d taken a passionate interest in everything pertaining to its author, about whom I planned, one day, to write a novel called Paradox; ‘You must have known Oscar too?’

‘Oscar Wilde,’ my father said, ‘was his own worst enemy, poor fellow’ - it was a description which, in his view, could equally apply to me - ‘Great charm when he chose to use it, of course, but arrogant, incurably arrogant… .’ Here my father, never conspicuous, himself, for abject humility, still less when young, shook his head reproachfully and sighed. ‘Everybody shouting ‘Author’ and he’d come out in front of the curtain smoking a cigarette. Gold-tipped, too, like one of those things you smoke. Couldn’t expect the public to like that, but damned if Wilde didn’t seem to take a deliberate pride in antagonizing everybody. I remember for example the first time I met him… .’

This initial encounter had taken place in a London club with literary and theatrical associations, where my father was entertaining a visiting French comedian, known as Marius, to dinner. The meal was half-way through when Oscar Wilde entered the dining room. (‘Great big hulking man, six feet two and seventeen stone at least’ - my father was some inches taller and more than a stone heavier - ‘Effeminate? Far from it. He’d hands like a butcher. Affected, yes. Very overbearing manner. Damson velvet dinner coat, wouldn’t swear he wasn’t wearing a frilled shirt as well.’) Wilde recognised Marius and came over to greet him with great cordiality. Pulling up a chair without invitation, he sat down at the table as if unaware of my father’s presence, and at once initiated a conversation in fluent French; Marius made several embarrassed attempts to interrupt the flow and introduce his host, but in face of Father’s evident annoyance and Wilde’s determination to ignore these tentative overtures, he soon desisted and pecked at the food on his place, answering Oscar only in monosyllables. In defiance of the club regulations, Wilde lit a gold-tipped cigarette and continued his monologue; Father, swallowing his anger, tried to concentrate on the next course; Marius, by now completely silent, had given up eating altogether.

At last, as the savoury was served, Wilde turned to my father with a start of apology, and addressing him in English: ‘I do hope you’ll forgive me, sir, and you too, my dear Marius - the pleasure of seeing you again must be my excuse - it is really unpardonable to intrude at your table and to speak a language perhaps unfamiliar to your friend… .’

Father interrupted, speaking for the first time, and with his suave smile: ‘Ne vous gênez pas, monsieur Wilde, je vous en prie. J’ai fait mes études en France, et j’ai pu, par conséquent, suivre votre discourse sans trop de difficulté,’ and in English: ‘If I may be allowed to say so, sir, you speak French very well - for an Irishman.’

But whatever personal distaste for Wilde he may have felt, and whatever verbal skirmishes they may have had, my father had nonetheless registered a violent protest when, after the sentence, Oscar’s plays were presented in London without acknowledgement to the author, and had incurred much unpopularity by arguing that figures more prominent in the social register should also have stood trial if homosexuality were indeed to be treated as a criminal offence (a measure to which he declared himself rigorously opposed): this led to the suggestion, from a man named Cope-Frazer that my father was himself, in the current phrase, ‘addicted to unnatural practices’. Father, having recently got married, was not unreasonably annoyed; he replied first by throwing Cope-Frazer through the glass of a french window and then bringing a suit against him for slander: despite a counter threat of proceedings for assault, the case was settled out of court in my father’s favour, after which no further allegations of this sort were made, though Father continued for long afterwards to defend Wilde in public whenever the occasion arose.