Early life, schooling, and Oscar Wilde Wilkinson was born on 17 December 1881, in the
Suffolk town of
Aldeburgh, At the time of his son's birth, Wilkinson senior was running the
Aldeburgh Lodge preparatory school, where Louis received his early education. Wilde and Wilkinson never met. Lindsay Smith, in
Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood , suggests that Wilkinson was a proxy for Wilde's son
Cyril, with whom by law Wilde was not permitted contact. After Wilde's death on 30 November 1900, Wilkinson sent a wreath. Wilde's friend
Robert Ross added Wilkinson's name to a list he prepared "of those who had shown kindness to [Oscar] during or after his imprisonment". This association with Wilde deeply affected Wilkinson, and led him to become a passionate advocate against England's repressive laws against homosexuality.
Oxford and Cambridge On leaving school in 1899, Wilkinson was accepted at
Pembroke College, Oxford to study classics. Unhappy with the college's overt religiosity, he and a group of friends rejected Christianity and declared an allegiance to atheism. Wilkinson's anti-imperialist views and his opposition to the
Boer War added to his unpopularity with the authorities, as did his continued championing of Wilde, a large photograph of whom decorated his rooms. He and his friends were suspected of conducting mock
Masses and
Confessions; Among his contemporaries he acquired the nickname "the Archangel", perhaps on account of his physical and mental attributes, In 1916 he wrote the pamphlet "Blasphemy and Religion", in which a fictitious lord and his son discuss two contrasting recent works by John Cowper Powys and his brother T.F:
Wood and Stone and
The Soliloquy of a Hermit. The dialogue suggested T.F's artistic superiority over his brother. In the same year Wilkinson published his second novel,
The Buffoon, in which the principal character is "Jack Welsh", a satirised version of John Cowper Powis. Two more novels quickly followed:
A Chaste Man (1917) and
Brute Gods (1919). Wilkinson had by this time become acquainted with
Frank Harris, the Irish-born journalist, editor and biographer of Wilde, who after a turbulent career in Britain had moved to America at the outset of
World War I and later taken American citizenship. Harris considered
Brute Gods to be Wilkinson's best work to date: "[It] deserves to be read very carefully even by those who think themselves masters of the story-telling art". Harris was sufficiently taken with Wilkinson to include him in the third volume of his
Contemporary Portraits series, published in 1920. His encomiums tend to treat Wilkinson, then nearing forty, as a newcomer to the literary scene: "I expect considerable things from Wilkinson ... [he] has the heart of the matter in him ... and so I bid him gird up his loins and give us his very best." Much later, Wilkinson described Harris as "a man of violent projections, brutal, gross, sentimental, and yet poetic ... his hand against every man's and every man's hand against him; but as a person, a talker, he was surely a man of genius". Since 1915 Wilkinson had been associated with New York's
Greenwich Village literary set, and acted as an unofficial mentor to the future poet, essayist and scholar
Kenneth Burke. Wilkinson was a constructive critic of the younger man's early literary efforts, advised him what to read, and introduced him to
Theodore Dreiser and other established writers. In time Burke developed an enthusiasm for the "moderns" was not encouraged by Wilkinson: "I'm sick to death of the whole blasted lot of them", the latter wrote, adding that
James Joyce was absurdly overrated. Despite this division of view Wilkinson and Burke remained on good terms and continued to exchange occasional letters until 1926.
Popular British novelist, early 1920s–1946 In 1923 Wilkinson's marriage to Gregg ended in divorce, and he settled in England to resume his career as a novelist. In the same year he published
Sackville of Drayton, a biography of
George Sackville, 1st Viscount Sackville. The book was reviewed critically by the subject's great-great-grandniece,
Vita Sackville-West, who, far from defending her distant kinsman, upbraided Wilkinson for his whitewashing of the viscount, long a pariah in her family. She characterised Sackville as "obstinate, arrogant, coarse-grained, lacking all statesmanlike vision, almost every word and act reported of him contradicts the case that Mr Marlow so gallantly endeavours to put up". As Wilkinson aged, his literary output diminished. In 1953 he produced his final full-length work,
Seven Friends, a compendium of brief lives of some of his more remarkable acquaintances: Wilde, Crowley, Harris, Maugham and the three Powys brothers. In 1954 he served on a committee formed to organise Wilde's centenary celebrations, including the erection of a commemorative
plaque at Wilde's
Tite Street address. In 1958 he edited and published
Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson, which the reviewer Douglas Hewitt described as "largely a libretto for a performance [by] a pair of outrageously shocking old men". Thereafter Wilkinson lived in quiet retirement; his last published work was a contribution to a series of essays on the works of T.F. Powys which appeared in 1964;
Bumbore: a Romance, a short parody of John Cowper Powys's 1916 novel
Rodmoor, was not published until 1969, after Wilkinson's death. the available fragment was published privately later. Wilkinson enjoyed a brief return to the public arena with several
BBC Radio broadcasts of reminiscences, between February 1964 and May 1965. He died on 12 September 1966 at the home of his son Oliver, at
Westcott Barton, near Oxford. ==Appraisal==