Oscar smiled. ‘It’s my story, Arthur, but it’s Robert’s handiwork. Robert is my recording angel — my Dr Watson. He witnessed much of what occurred in France himself, as you’ll discover, but I saw it all as it unfolded, from its beginnings in the New World. This is a tale that starts on one continent and travels to another. I want you to pay close attention to the beginning, Arthur. The beginning does not merely set the scene; it lays the groundwork for what is to come.’ Slowly, Oscar ran his forefinger along the string that held the brown paper parcel together. ‘This is a true story, Arthur. I suppose you’d call it a murder mystery. It can’t be published — at least, not in my lifetime. Much of it is libellous. Some of it is salacious. And, as yet, the story is incomplete. The manuscript’s unfinished. It lacks the final chapter. I want you to read it, Arthur. I want you to read every word, even though some of it will make you blush. If you like, you can show it to your friend, Sherlock Holmes — he’s made of sterner stuff. And then, when you’ve read it, and pondered long and hard, I want you to tell me what you think the final chapter should reveal.’
Oscar turned back to our host and widened his eyes. ‘Now, Mr Tussaud, kindly lead us to your lobster salad.
The sight of all these wax cadavers has given me the most tremendous appetite.’
What follows is the manuscript that I gave that day to Arthur Conan Doyle.
1
America
On 24 December 1881 Oscar Wilde set sail for the United States of America. He went in search of adventure and gold. Within weeks, he had found a portion of both.
Oscar had recently turned twenty—seven and, in England, his claim to fame was that he was famous for being famous. He was a celebrity, in the tradition of Lord Byron and Beau Brummell, but more Brummell than Byron, more style than substance. ‘Evidently I am “somebody”,’ he noted at the time, ‘but what have I done? I’ve been “noticed”. That is something, I suppose. And I have published one book of poems. That doesn’t amount to much.’
As a young man, first at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, Oscar had achieved every academic honour within his reach. He rounded off his undergraduate years by securing an Oxford double first and winning the coveted Newdigate Prize, the university’s chief prize for poetry. But what was his real ambition in life?
‘God knows,’ he said, when asked. ‘I won’t be an Oxford don anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious. Or perhaps I’ll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then — who knows? — rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? “To sit down and contemplate the good”. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.’
When Oscar left Oxford, cushioned by a modest legacy from his late father, he floated down to London, the capital of the British Empire, and made his mark on the metropolis with outlandish views and an outrageous appearance. ‘Only shallow people do not judge by appearance,’ he declared. He had always been partial to dressing up. In his last term at Oxford he appeared at a ball disguised as Prince Rupert of the Rhine. In his first season in London he took to going out in a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket edged with braid, wearing a cream-coloured shirt with a scalloped collar and an overabundant orange tie, taffeta knee-breeches, black silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes. He became a champion of beauty and a self-styled professor of aestheticism. ‘Beauty is the symbol of symbols,’ he declared. ‘Beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.’
The young Oscar Wilde was determined to be noticed.
And he was. Soon after his arrival in London, the satirical magazines of the day started to publish spoofs and squibs at his expense. He was lampooned in music hall sketches, in stage farces and then, most famously, in April 1881, in Richard D’Oyly Carte’s hugely successful production of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s comic operetta, Patience. Oscar was at the first night and gently amused. He recognised the piece for what it was: not a personal attack on him, but a pleasingly tuneful skit on the absurdities of the Aesthetic Movement.
The success of Patience changed Oscar’s life. On 30 September 1881 he received a telegram from Colonel F. W. Morse, Richard D’Oyly Carte’s business manager in New York, inviting him to undertake an American lecture tour to coincide with the operetta’s American production. Oscar did not hesitate. On 1 October 1881 he wired his acceptance to Colonel Morse. The young poet was in want of money and exhilarated by the prospect of crossing an ocean and discovering a continent. ‘I already speak English, German, French and Italian,’ he explained to his mother. ‘Now I shall have the opportunity of learning American. It will be a challenge, I know, but I must try to rise to it.’
He wrote to James Russell Lowell, the United States Minister in London, presuming on their nodding acquaintance to ask for some letters of introduction. The venerable Lowell, then in his early sixties, replied that ‘a clever and accomplished man should no more need an introduction than a fine day’, but as he liked Oscar, was amused by him, and, a poet himself, admired the young man’s verses, he was happy to oblige.
As well as letters of introduction, Oscar equipped himself with a new wardrobe, including a warm Polish cap and a befrogged and wonderfully befurred green overcoat; Lowell had warned him about the New York winters. And because Colonel Morse had advised him that he would be lecturing to ‘huge audiences in vast auditoria’, in the weeks before his departure Oscar engaged the services of an expensive expert on oratory to give him elocution lessons. ‘I want a natural style,’ he told his instructor, ‘with a touch of affectation.’ Oscar Wilde prepared carefully for his American adventure. He hoped that it might prove the ‘making’ of him.
Oscar set sail from Liverpool on the afternoon of Christmas Eve 1881 on board the SS Arizona. He was apprehensive. The Arizona was the fastest steamship then crossing the Atlantic, the holder of the Blue Riband, and the young aesthete did not much care for speed. The Arizona had also recently survived — but only narrowly — a mid-Atlantic collision with an iceberg.
In the event the crossing was calm and hazard-free. It was the arrival that proved more of an adventure. The Arizona docked in New York harbour on the evening of 2 January 1882. It was too late to clear quarantine, so Oscar and his fellow passengers were obliged to spend a further night on board ship. The gentlemen of the New York press, however, were impatient for a first sighting of the much vaunted Mr Wilde. They would not wait till morning. They chartered a launch, came out to sea and, in Oscar’s phrase, ‘their pens still wet with brine, demanded that I strut before them, like a prize bantam at a country fair’.
The journalists were a little taken aback by what they found. Oscar was not the delicate exotic that they had been expecting. According to the man from the New York Tribune:
The most striking thing about the poet’s appearance is his height, which is several inches over six feet, and the next thing to attract attention is his hair, which is of a dark brown colour, and falls down upon his shoulders. When he laughs his lips part widely and show a shining row of upper teeth, which are superlatively white. The complexion, instead of being of the rosy hue so common in Englishmen, is so utterly devoid of colour that it can only be said to resemble putty. His eyes are blue, or a light grey, and instead of being ‘dreamy’, as some of his admirers have imagined them to be, they are bright and quick — not at all like those of one given to perpetual musing on the ineffably beautiful and true. Instead of having a small delicate hand, only fit to caress a lily, his fingers are long and when doubled up would form a fist that would hit a hard knock, should an occasion arise for the owner to descend to that kind of argument.
Oscar did not engage his interlocutors in fisticuffs, but nor, in the main, did he endear himself to them. ‘I tried to be amusing,’ he later confessed, ‘and engendered snarls where I had hoped for smiles. My efforts at drollery were taken for disdain.’ He w
as asked how he had enjoyed his ocean crossing. He replied, ‘The sea seems tame to me. The roaring ocean does not roar. It is not so majestic as I expected.’ His remarks appeared beneath the headline:
‘Mr Wilde Disappointed with the Atlantic’. He gave the impression of arrogance.
And he compounded that impression on the morning after his ship-board press conference. Disembarking from the SS Arizona and passing through customs, he responded to the customs officer’s predictable enquiry, ‘Have you anything to declare, Mr Wilde?’ with a well-prepared reply: ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius.’
Some thought this vastly amusing. Others thought that young Mr Wilde was riding for a fall. And, to an extent, he was. His first few lectures were not a success. He said too much, too quickly, and in too soft a voice. He failed to hold the attention of the crowd. His audiences were disappointed; the critics were unkind.
In public, Oscar was undaunted. In private, he acknowledged that he had work to do. He simplified his lecture; he improved his presentation; he moderated his language; he added some jokes that everybody could understand. He turned a potential disaster into an unquestioned triumph. Ultimately, during the course of 1882, Oscar delivered a total of more than two hundred lectures in one hundred and sixty towns and cities across North America, from New Orleans to Nova Scotia, from northern Massachusetts to southern California. ‘Oh yes,’ he would say in later years, ‘I was adored once, too. In America I was obliged to engage two secretaries to cope with the correspondence — one being responsible for the demand for autographs, the other for the locks of my hair. Within six months, the first had died of writer’s cramp; the other was entirely bald.’
In fact, Oscar did have two companions on his travels, but neither was a secretary. Colonel Morse supplied him with a ‘man of business’, a clerk from D’Oyly Carte’s New York office, named Aaron Budd, and a personal valet, a young Negro called W. M. Traquair. ‘I did not care for Mr Budd,’ said Oscar. ‘He looked after our railroad tickets and counted the takings. He was efficient, but not interesting. He rarely spoke, he never smiled and the pallor of his skin was disconcerting. I believe he was an abstainer and a vegetarian. By contrast, I cared a great deal for Washington Traquair. His father had been a slave. He was my servant, but he was also my friend. He was not a great talker and he could neither read nor write, but he had a wonderful smile and he laughed at my jokes. You have to love a man who laughs at your jokes.’
In the course of his tour, Oscar made a great deal of money and, as he put it, ‘a rich assortment of new acquaintances’. In New York, he met the celebrated novelist, Louisa May Alcott, then in her forties and at the height of her fame. ‘She was a small but profoundly passionate woman,’ he recalled. ‘She told me the plot of a story that she was revising at the time. It was entitled A Long Fatal Love Chase. As she recounted the tale, she held my hand in hers and tears filled her eyes. I asked her why she had never married. “Oh, Mr Wilde,” she said, “if I tell you, will you keep my secret? It is because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”‘
It was in New York, too, that Oscar met the great showman, Phineas Taylor Barnum. Oscar was lecturing at the Wallack’s Theater on Broadway and Barnum came with a party of friends ‘to see what all the fuss was about’. What Barnum made of Oscar’s disquisition on ‘Art and the English Renaissance’ history does not record, but Oscar reckoned the encounter a success. ‘When I spoke to Mr Barnum of Georgione, Mazzini and Fra Angelico, he assumed they were a trio of Italian acrobats. Mr Barnum lacked education, but he had style. He came to my lecture and I visited his circus. After the spectacle, at my insistence, he introduced me to his prize attraction, Jumbo, the African elephant. “I must meet him,” I told Mr Barnum. “His name will be remembered long after ours have been forgotten.” “I should hope so, Mr Wilde,” answered Barnum. “He cost me ten thousand dollars.”‘
Oscar brought back many good stories from his year on the American lecture circuit. Probably his favourite anecdotal set-piece concerned his time in Leadville, Colorado, high up in the Rocky Mountains. There he addressed audiences consisting of ordinary working men — labourers and mine-workers in the main. Because the miners were mining for silver, Oscar chose to read to them extracts from the autobiography of the great Renaissance sculptor in silver, Benvenuto Cellini. ‘I was reproved by my auditors for not having brought Cellini with me. I explained that he had been dead for some little time, which information elicited the enquiry: “Who shot him?”‘
When, later, Oscar was asked if he had not found the miners ‘somewhat rough and ready’, he replied: ‘Ready, but not rough. There is no chance for roughness in the Rockies. The revolver is their book of etiquette. This teaches lessons that are not forgotten.’
The mayor of Leadville, one H. A. W. Tabor, known as the Silver King, invited Oscar to visit the Matchless Mine and open a new shaft named the Oscar in his honour. Oscar was delighted to oblige and, dressed in his aesthete’s finery, was ceremoniously lowered into the mine inside a huge bucket. Once he had inaugurated the new shaft, employing a special silver drill for the purpose, the miners invited him to dine with them at the bottom of the mine. ‘They laid on quite a spread,’ he recalled. ‘The first course was whisky; the second course was whisky; the third course was whisky; I have little recollection of the dessert.’
That evening, Mayor Tabor offered Oscar further entertainment at the Leadville casino. According to Oscar, ‘Drinking rather than gambling appeared to be the business of the place. It was crowded with miners and the female friends of miners. The men were all dressed in red shirts, corduroy trousers and high boots. The women wore brightly coloured evening dresses cut so low that their breasts were almost entirely exposed. The floor was covered with sawdust and the walls hung with huge, gilt-framed mirrors. In a corner of the main saloon was a pianist, sitting at an upright piano over which was a notice that read: “Don’t shoot the pianist; he is doing his best.”‘
On his second (and final) night in Leadville, Oscar returned to the casino. This time, he went alone. Mayor Tabor had business to attend to in Denver; Aaron Budd, Oscar’s business manager, was not a drinking man; and Traquair, the valet, was barred from entry because of his colour. Oscar began the evening by the piano, surrounded by young men in red shirts and young women with full bosoms. He made them laugh and they made him smile. Four and a half hours later, having eaten nothing and drunk too much, he found himself in a different, darker, corner of the saloon, seated alone with two men in check shirts and a young woman who leant towards him across the table, dusting her breasts playfully with a little lace handkerchief. As one of the men plied Oscar with drink and the other removed his wallet from his coat pocket, two pistol shots rang out across the room. One shot blew the whisky glass from Oscar’s hand; the other sent his wallet spinning into the air.
Instantly, as the shots were fired, Oscar’s trio of drinking companions fled the scene, and Oscar, bewildered but unharmed, slumped slowly to the floor. The man who had fired the shots crossed the room, helped Oscar to his feet and accompanied him out of the casino, down the deserted street and back to his hotel. The man’s name was Eddie Garstrang.
2
Eddie Garstrang and Edmond La Grange
Eddie Garstrang was thirty-seven, ten years older than Oscar. He was several inches shorter than Oscar, and slimmer, more wiry, with a small head, pale yellow hair, milky blue eyes and a disarming, open smile. A professional gambler, he was also a professional marksman, a sharp-shooter of exceptional skill and daring. At least, that’s what he claimed, and Oscar saw no reason to doubt him. Garstrang boasted that the great P. T. Barnum had once seen him in action and offered him a starring role in his circus. Eddie Garstrang had decided against working for Mr Barnum. He was determined, he said, to be his ‘own man’. He had declined Mr Barnum’s offer politely, to be sure. He was softly spoken and a firm believer in what he termed ‘old-world courtesy’. Garstrang was not
as others were in Colorado. He did not chew tobacco or drink whisky. He did not wear a red shirt and corduroy trousers. He dressed in a tailor-made woollen suit of sober check and sported a white and lavender columbine in his buttonhole. Oscar found him fascinating.
On the morning after the incident in the casino, the pair met up for breakfast. It was not a prearranged encounter. At around ten o’clock, Oscar, unshaven and still groggy from the night before, made his way into the hotel dining room in search of coffee and found Garstrang already seated at his table.
‘Good morning, Mr Wilde,’ said Garstrang, getting lightly to his feet and extending a hand to Oscar.
‘Good day, sir,’ replied Oscar croakily. ‘I must thank you. I recognise you. You are my rescuer from last night, are you not?’
‘I have that honour,’ said Garstrang. He bowed towards Oscar with a smile.
Oscar seated himself at the table. ‘Is there coffee?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes fiercely with clenched fists.
‘There is,’ said Garstrang, pouring Oscar a cup. ‘And it’s hot.’
‘And strong, I hope.’ Oscar lifted the cup and sipped at the coffee. He looked up at Garstrang who was still standing and smiled at the stranger. ‘I’m in your debt, sir. I know it. What do I owe you?’
‘Nothing, Mr Wilde.’
‘You must want something. How much?’ Oscar slipped his hand into his coat pocket and produced a green snakeskin wallet. It was one of his favourite possessions, a twenty-first birthday present from his mother. He examined the scorch mark at the wallet’s edge. Garstrang’s bullet had done no more than lightly nick the snakeskin.
‘The pleasure of your company for breakfast is all I ask,’ said Garstrang.
‘Whisky was all my supper,’ said Oscar, returning the wallet to his pocket, ‘coffee will be all my breakfast, but you’re welcome to share it.’ He smiled and nodded to the older man. ‘Be seated. Please. And remind me of your name? I’m afraid that my recollection of last night’s adventure is somewhat hazy.’
Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile Page 2