Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Almost since the moment of his arrival in America people had been telling Wilde how much he would like Boston, and how much Boston would love him.39 And they were not altogether wrong. Even as he arrived at the snow-girt Vendome Hotel in fashionable Back Bay, Wilde discovered an invitation from Oliver Wendell Holmes to lunch that very day with the ‘Saturday Club’ – the city’s most illustrious, and jolliest, literary institution.40 Hawthorne had been a member; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Longfellow still were – though both were now too infirm to attend the monthly lunches at the Parker House. The ‘seventy-three years young’41 Holmes – a favourite author of Wilde’s student days – remained the club’s presiding genius. And, swept into this ‘bright party of men’, Wilde passed a delightful and stimulating afternoon.42

  From there (with only a short break, to be interviewed for the second time that day) Wilde was whisked up by John Boyle O’Reilly, the dashing editor of the Pilot – and, hence, publisher of several of Wilde’s early verses – and taken to dine at another of Boston’s intellectual sodalities, the Papyrus Club. Afterwards they took in a production – partly in Greek – of Oedipus Tyrannus at the Globe, before dropping in at the St Botolph Club on the way home to bed.43 Wilde’s social stamina was something phenomenal.

  Throughout his time in the city Wilde was ‘treated gloriously’. The grand receptions of New York were replaced with more intimate gatherings. Burne-Jones’s great friend, the Harvard professor of the history of art, Charles Eliot Norton, was out of town (and, as he privately admitted, rather relieved to escape Wilde’s ‘affectations and maudlin sensualisms’), but his son, Eliot, ‘did honour in [his] stead’.44 Wilde lunched with Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist and orator. And, following up the pleasures of the ‘Saturday Club’, he called on Oliver Wendell Holmes, admiring his daughter’s needlework, and impressing his son (then on the verge of becoming a high court judge) with the ‘extraordinary vividness’ of his storytelling.45 There was a welcome, too, at the home of Sam Ward’s widowed sister, the impressive Julia Ward Howe – famed as the author of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. She invited Wilde to an impromptu Sunday lunch party – just the family, along with Isabella Stewart Gardner and the mezzo-soprano Madam Braggiotti: ‘Perhaps ten or twelve friends came after lunch,’ she recorded in her diary. ‘We had what I might call a “lovely toss-up,” i.e., a social dish quickly compounded and tossed up like an omelet.’46

  Sam Ward’s influence also gained Wilde an interview with the aged, and fast-declining, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had been part of Wilde’s imaginary life since childhood.47 Wilde greatly admired the poet’s verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, even if Longfellow’s other works had less enduring appeal (it became Wilde’s line that ‘Longfellow is a great poet only for those who never read poetry’).48 Nevertheless, he was the grand old man of American literature, and Wilde – always eager to associate with the great – was determined to meet him.

  Overcoming some initial resistance, he secured an invitation to breakfast at Longfellow’s home, near Harvard Square, and spent a happy afternoon there.49 ‘I went’, Wilde said, ‘in a snowstorm and returned in a hurricane, quite the right conditions for a visit to a poet.’50 The encounter itself was an altogether milder affair – ‘very pleasant’, rather than cataclysmic.51 Wilde was touched by the invalid writer (who would die barely a month later), and remembered him as ‘himself a beautiful poem’ – indeed, ‘more beautiful than anything he ever wrote’.52 He much enjoyed Longfellow’s comment on Browning (‘I like him well – what I can understand of him’) and cherished his description of a visit to Windsor, when the queen had said some generous words about Longfellow’s poetry; at Longfellow’s expression of surprise that his verse was so well known at Windsor, she had replied, ‘Oh, I assure you, Mr Longfellow, you are very well known. All my servants read you.’ Longfellow confessed to still waking at night and wondering whether this was a ‘deliberate slight’. Wilde – always prone to vainglory himself – suspected that it was her majesty’s sly rebuke ‘to the vanity of the poet’.53

  Although hostile reports in the press later claimed that Longfellow had been ‘forced to endure the infliction’ of Wilde’s visit, he seems to have enjoyed the encounter – even if he was rather confused as to his visitor’s attainments, beyond having written ‘some good verses’.54 ‘A few days ago I had a visit from Oscar Wilde,’ he informed a friend:

  Whatever he may be in public, in private he is a very agreeable young man; and, when we remember that he gained a first prize in mathematics at Cambridge, the mathematical university of England, we can perhaps pardon some eccentricities, otherwise unpardonable. Let us remember that Alcibiades cut off his dog’s tail to make the Athenians talk, and that Petrarch was troubled because the maids of Avignon disordered his curls!55‡

  Wilde gave his lecture at the Boston Music Hall on the evening of 31 January, to another full house of over a thousand people. For some days it had been known – and reported – that a body of Harvard students had bought up the front two rows of the stalls. Their intentions became clear when, shortly before the advertised starting time, with the rest of the house seated, they paraded into the auditorium – sixty youths, ‘arrayed in all the “aesthetics” that ingenuity could devise’:

  There were blond wigs and black wigs, wide-floating neckties of every hue and fashion… Knee breeches and black stockings of ‘ye olden time,’ and in every hand the ‘precious loveliness’ of the lily or the ‘gaudy leonine’ glare of the sunflower. As the youths entered they assumed all sorts of poses, and held aloft or looked languishingly down on the circling petals of flowers. Then they took their seats, utterly pleased with themselves.56

  Wilde, however, had been apprised of the jape. With the audience in a state of expectation to witness his discomfiture, he made his way onto the stage with calm deliberation, arrayed not in his characteristic Aesthetic garb but in conventional evening wear: dress coat, white tie, black trousers. On reaching the lectern, and setting down his script, he allowed his eyes to travel over the ranks of ‘fantastic masqueraders’. And then he smiled at them. The rest of the audience smiled too. Then laughed. Then broke into applause.

  ‘As a college man I greet you,’ Wilde suavely began, to the further delight of the audience. He subsequently brought home his advantage with the aside, ‘As I look about me, I am impelled for the first time to breathe a fervent prayer, “Save me from my disciples.”’ The lightness of the rebuke made it the more effective. The lecture itself passed off well enough, but it was Wilde’s chastening of the Harvard pranksters that drew most of the comment.57 ‘Mr Wilde achieved a real triumph,’ reported the previously disparaging Transcript, ‘and it was by right of conquest, by force of being a gentleman, in the truest sense of the word… Nothing could have been more gracious, more gentle and sweet, and yet more crushing, than the lecturer’s whole demeanor to [the Harvard freshmen].’58 Such was his success that some papers began to claim that the whole charade must have been stage-managed by Colonel Morse as a showcase for Wilde’s ingenuity and wit.59

  The incident marked another stage in Wilde’s education as a public persona. He was, by and large, coping well with the demands of his rapidly increasing fame. He endured the intrusive attention of the public. At the hotels where he was staying, ‘all sorts of strategic movements were indulged in’ by fellow guests, ‘in the hope of seeing Oscar at his evening meal’. He continued to deal with the demands of the autograph hunters. Having run through his stock of ‘aesthetic green’ paper slips he was now writing his name on large yellow-hued cards. It was tiring work, though. There had been twenty-seven letters asking for his autograph waiting for him when he arrived at his Washington hotel. In an effort to stem the flow he told one reporter that, in future, he would give his signature to ‘beautiful ladies only’.60

  Wilde strove to satisfy the insatiable press. He developed an effective formula for the never-ending succession of interviews, increasingly aware of what w
as wanted – a couple of quotable comments on American subjects, a suggestion of personal engagement, a touch of flattery, some serious name-dropping, and a suitably Aesthetic mise-en-scène. Recurrent props included a volume of verse (often his own), a vase of flowers, a lighted cigarette, the fur-trimmed overcoat and any number of coloured kerchiefs.61 Every detail was considered. James Kelly recalled meeting Wilde off the train when he arrived in one new town, looking pale, tired and ‘partly streaked’. Shortly afterwards, though, when Kelly brought a reporter to Wilde’s hotel room, he found a very different figure. The stage had been set:

  [Wilde] was sitting back in the arm-chair by the table, the sun streaking its brilliant light through on to the rose-coloured scarf [that Wilde had been wearing at the station], which was now taken off and replaced by one of bronze green. All this was apparently careless, but the effect was superb; the glow of the handkerchief cast a delicate reflection on his face, and gave him an usually fine effect.

  The reporter was duly ‘awed’.62

  Wilde accepted with good grace some of the feeble bon mots which were foisted on him by imaginative paragraphists. It was told that, when asked by one Washington hostess, ‘Where is your lily?’, Wilde had replied, ‘At home, madam, where you left your good manners.’ Quizzed about this, he claimed – surely untruthfully – that the exchange was ‘absolutely true’, except that it had ‘happened in London and that the lady was a duchess’. He deflected, though, the report that he had complained of there being ‘no ruins or curiosities in America’ (supposedly eliciting the barbed retort, ‘Time will remedy the one, and as for curiosities, we import them’); the story, he pointed out, had first been told of Dickens, when he was in America fully forty years before.63

  Not surprisingly, Wilde was stung by the personal attacks that appeared in the press. The New York Tribune remained unrelentingly hostile, keeping up their image of him as a mountebank on a mercenary exhibition tour. And it was a line that was taken up by others. Particularly galling had been the malicious and false reports filed in the wake of the Baltimore ‘fiasco’. In the first flush of his anger Wilde did allow himself to complain about such treatment, telling a reporter from the New York Herald, ‘If you expect English gentlemen to come to your country, you must improve the character of your journalism. I do not intend to come… again until this sort of thing is changed.’64 And when he did finally reach Baltimore he sought out the reporter who had invented the story about him demanding money to attend a private reception. Wilde asked him how much he had been paid for his article. On learning that it was a meagre $6, he claimed to have replied, ‘Well, the rate of lying is not very high in America. That’s all I wished to ascertain. Good day.’65 Soon, however, he recognized that anger and indignation were counterproductive. Behind the scenes, he might ask George Lewis to intervene with Whitelaw Reid, editor of the Tribune, in an effort to stem the flow of ‘bad reports’, but in public he strove to project an air of amused detachment about the press and its antics.66

  Asked for his views on ‘newspaper men’ by a Boston reporter, Wilde replied:

  Yes, some of them have been very tedious, while some others have succeeded in being very amusing. I was dressing one night [in Washington] when I received the card of a person: on the card was printed his name and also that he was correspondent for a lot of western papers. ‘This must be an immense newspaper man,’ I said; I cannot dream of keeping him waiting. So I put on my dressing gown and he was shown right up. A very young gentleman, or rather a boy, came into the room, and as I saw him I judged that he was nearly 16. I asked him if he had been to school. He said he had left school some time since. He asked my advice as to his course in journalism. I asked him if he knew French. He said no. I advised him to learn French and counseled him a little as to what books to read, and, in fact, I interviewed him. At last I gave him an orange and then sent him away… the meekness with which he took it all was very charming.67

  He was cross with Morse for complaining to the Washington Post over its crude juxtaposing of a portrait of Wilde holding a sunflower with a picture of a ‘Wild’ man of Borneo, holding a tropical fruit, above the caption ‘How far from THIS to THIS?’ ‘I regard all caricature and satire as absolutely beneath notice,’ Wilde informed his manager grandly. ‘I regret that you took any notice.’ Allying himself with the great Romantics, he told the reporter from the Boston Herald that an artist should never take note of ‘ridicule and abuse… Shelley was abused, but he did not heed it’.68

  Nevertheless he was happy when people not connected to his management team rose in his defence. Julia Ward Howe and Joaquin Miller both earned Wilde’s gratitude for rebuking the puritanical and pompous Thomas Wentworth Higginson over an intemperate piece he had written in The Woman’s Journal which had not only slated the ‘immoral’ and pagan nature of Wilde’s ‘very mediocre verse’, but also suggested his unfitness to be received in society. Ward Howe, who had just entertained Wilde at Sunday lunch, replied with a letter to the Boston Globe, concluding: ‘If, as alleged, the poison found in the ancient classics is seen to linger too deeply in [Wilde’s] veins, I should not prescribe for his case the coarse, jeering and intemperate scolding so easily administered through the public prints, but a cordial and kindly intercourse with that which is soundest, sweetest and purest in our own society.’69

  Wilde’s growing celebrity in America was being echoed back in Britain. All the newspapers carried reports of his doings from US correspondents or wire services. Most of the comment was positive, although – as Lady Wilde reported – many papers (and ‘especially Vanity Fair’) were ‘very angry with the knee breeches’. The Pall Mall Gazette was always apt to be ‘sneering’, while the Daily News – prompted by Forbes – kept up a succession of spiteful stories, such as the fable of a pun-loving member of New York’s Century Club arriving on the evening that Wilde dined there, exclaiming, ‘Where is she? Have you seen her? Well, why not say, “she”? I understand she’s a Charlotte-Ann!’.70 On the other side, Labouchère’s Truth led the way with an enthusiastic round-up of Wilde’s early achievements compiled from the American press.71

  Rennell Rodd sent Wilde a copy, noting, ‘you are indeed lucky to have both Yates and L[abby] on your side’. Mingling admiration and envy (and deploying Whistler’s favoured adjective, ‘amazing’) he went on:

  Well, you seem to be having amazing fun over there. We all feel a little jealous. And then your statements are amazing of course, but you must not assert yourself so pointedly when you come back, you see you’ve no one to contradict you! – Which is bad for you! We were surprised to read, that Mr Wilde declined to eat [in a report on the Davis reception in Philadelphia], on hearing the ladies were upstairs. It was never so known in Israel.72

  Whistler, in whom envy was always prone to trump admiration, sent a bantering note to Wilde (and the New York papers) – with which, as Rodd reported, he was ‘immensely pleased’: ‘Oscar! We of Tite Street and Beaufort Gardens joy in your triumphs, and delight in your success, but – we think that, with the exception of your epigrams, you talk like [new Slade Professor] Sidney Colvin in the Provinces, and that, with the exception of your knee-breeches, you dress like ’Arry Quilter [the despised Times art critic]. Signed J McNeill Whistler, Janey Campbell, Mat Elden, Rennell Rodd.’ Wilde responded in the same vein, writing privately, ‘My dear Jimmy, Your abominable attempt at literature has arrived: I don’t believe that my lovely and spirituelle Lady Archie [Campbell] ever signed it at all. I was so enraged that I insisted in talking about you to a reporter. I send you the result.’ For publication he also sent a telegram: ‘I admit knee-breeches, and acknowledge epigrams, but reject Quilter and repudiate Colvin.’73

  Wilde kept up a constant hymn of praise to Whistler throughout his time in America. The New York World reported him telling guests at one reception that Whistler was ‘the first painter in England’, before adding, ‘[but] it will take England three hundred years to find it out’.74 And although Whistler had not been
mentioned by name in the ‘English Renaissance’ lecture, Wilde – in conversation – gradually drew the artist into the picture. Wilde’s championship was widely noted, even if he did rather overstep the mark when he claimed to Joseph Pennell that it was he who had really ‘made Whistler’s reputation’.75

  Lady Wilde’s jubilations at her younger son’s successes knew few bounds. She delighted in Oscar’s ‘triumphs’, and the stir they were causing in England. ‘No news,’ she told him in one of her almost weekly letters, ‘except that nothing is talked of but you.’76 A fair bit of that talking was done by Lady Wilde herself. Violet Hunt recorded a visit to a ‘conversazione’ at Lady Wilde’s new Park Street home, at which the hostess had gone on at length ‘about Oscar, his success in America, the “costume Oscar” which he has originated [i.e. knee-breeches], and which all young men of fashion are wearing there’; she also showed off one of the Sarony photographs, which Hunt thought ‘looked very taking’.77 Wilde’s photograph was now everywhere in London. Americans staying at the Langham Hotel were buying it. Even Lady Wilde’s milkman bought one.78

  Wilde arrived back in New York (on 3 February) his star still in the ascendant. The interest generated by his first half-dozen lectures – and by his reception in society – was kept up. He remained a focus for constant press attention. He was also being accorded the twin tributes of musical homage and commercial exploitation. Music sellers were starting to offer such choice items as ‘The Oscar Wilde Galop’, ‘Oscar Wilde, Forget Me Not (Waltz)’, ‘Oscar’s Schottische’, ‘Wilde Oscar Wilde’, and ‘Oscar Dear!’ (with its lively refrain, ‘Oscar dear, Oscar dear, / How utterly, flutterly utter you are; / Oscar dear, Oscar dear, / I think you are awfully wild, ta-ta’) – along with other, more general, ‘Aesthetic’ titles such as ‘The Sunflower Waltz’ and ‘An Utterly Utter Young Man’.79

  The ‘windows of uptown fancy and dress goods establishments’ were blooming with Aesthetic displays of sunflowers and lilies.80 Indeed the ‘leonine’ sunflower became so ubiquitous that many florists struggled to maintain supplies.81 Wilde’s overcoat created a new vogue, with newspaper advertisements declaring that ‘the ladies go “Wilde” over “Oscar’s” Ulster’.82 Gentlemen’s outfitters (unsupported by either fact or probability) claimed that their ‘New and Stylish Goods’ represented ‘Oscar Wilde’s Style’.83 And although some companies did take a satirical line (a firm specializing in work-wear for railroad men offered a ‘Hoss-Car Wilde’ suit, and Willoughby, Hill & Co. of Chicago advertised an ‘amusing’ new tailcoat under an image of ‘Wilde “Oscar”… the Ass-thete’) for the most part he was taken seriously.84§