Wilde returned to Chicago on 28 February, but almost immediately set off again. His second mid-western itinerary – ‘eleven consecutive nights in eleven different cities’ – took him to Dubuque (Iowa), then through Illinois and Wisconsin to Rockford, Aurora, Racine, Milwaukee, Joliet, Jacksonville, Decatur, Peoria and Bloomington, before he headed back to Chicago. It was, though, a sad failure: a ‘fiasco’, Wilde called it. The towns were small, and the audiences smaller. In Joliet ‘only 52 people… turned out’; at Peoria it was 78. Even Milwaukee, the largest city on the list, only produced a crowd of around 200, and ‘probably one third of [them] left before the conclusion’.32 He provoked neither outrage nor interest. The small and ‘scattered’ audience at Dubuque listened to him ‘as though they were at the funeral of a friend’.33 Although Wilde had been told by Wendell Phillips that the ‘test of a true orator’ was an ability ‘to interest an audience of twenty’, he was not inclined to test himself in that way.34 He was crushed, too, by the schedule. At Racine (4 March) he briefly broke down ‘in the midst of his lecture, saying he was exhausted and could not read his lines’.35 Morse, moreover, had failed to secure guaranteed returns from the various local promoters. At Aurora the receipts were a pitiful $7.35. There, and at Joliet, they failed to cover expenses. It was, Wilde complained, a ‘depressing and useless’ business wearing his ‘voice and body to death’ for such meagre reward.36
He was relieved to get back, once again, to Chicago. On 11 March Wilde made his second appearance at the city’s Central Music Hall. He had written a new lecture for the occasion, even more practical and prescriptive than his talk on the ‘Decorative Arts’. He now addressed how Aesthetic ideas might be applied to ‘The Decoration of Houses’. Quizzed beforehand about the contents, he had explained, ‘I shall begin with the door-knocker and go to the attic. Beyond that is Heaven, and I shall leave that to the Church.’37 And he was true to his word, offering such useful, if mundane, advice as: ‘the hall should not be papered, since the walls are exposed to the elements by the frequent opening and closing of the door; it should be wainscoted with beautiful wood… Don’t carpet the floor: ordinary red brick tiles make a warm and beautiful floor… Don’t paper [the ceiling of the drawing room]; that gives one the sensation of living in a paper box, which is not pleasant.’ He recommended ‘Queen Anne’ furniture, small circular mirrors (‘to concentrate light in a room’), brass fire-irons, and Albanian hatracks – ‘Not, indeed, that in other matters the Albanians have shown much artistic taste, but in hatracks the Albanians have excelled every other nation. There are beautiful, nay, I may say artistic curves in their hatracks which we do not find elsewhere… Of course I need not mention to an audience of your intelligence that I do not refer to Albany, New York State, in America’ (almost the only ‘joke’ in the lecture, this aside produced shrieks of merriment and applause).38
Wilde’s final mid-western itinerary ran from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, via Sioux City to Omaha. His visit to St Paul coincided with St Patrick’s Day (17 March). The Irish diaspora ensured that in many places across America Wilde received a special welcome, not so much as the ‘Apostle of Aestheticism’ but as ‘Speranza’s Gifted Son’. He was happy to accept the label, and to assert his position as a proud Irishman. At St Louis – which had a large Irish population – he had given a special interview to the Globe-Democrat, laying out some of his ‘well-settled opinions on the Irish Question’. He declared himself ‘entirely at one with the position held by the Land League’, urging a redistribution of ownership in favour of the long-impoverished ‘peasantry’, with ‘the Government purchasing the land of Ireland from the landlords at a fair rate… and distributing [it] among the people’. Political change was needed too, although, as he remarked, ‘Politics is a practical science. An unsuccessful revolution is merely treason; a successful one is a great era in the history of a country.’ Drawing on a pamphlet about The Irish Americans, published by his mother, he noted that the modern spirit of ‘practical republicanism’ alive in Irish politics was ‘due entirely to the reflex influence of American thought’ carried by emigrants returning to Ireland. Nevertheless he remained wary of too precipitous change. Ireland, he thought, was not yet ready to ‘claim total separation’ from the United Kingdom. Declaring himself, like his father before him, ‘emphatically’ a Home Ruler, he suggested that the ‘first step… should be a local Parliament’.39
In St Paul, on the evening after his lecture, he attended a nationalistic St Patrick’s Day event at the Opera House. Although not intending to speak, he was prevailed upon to make an impromptu address, encouraged in part by ‘the generous response’ the audience had given ‘to the mention of the efforts of [Speranza] in Ireland’s cause’. Linking politics to art, he described how the Irish race was ‘once the most artistic in Europe’, but with the coming of the English in the twelfth century that rich tradition was ended – ‘for art could not live and flourish under a tyrant’. And it would take the restoration of Irish independence before the country’s ‘schools of art and other educational branches will be revived and Ireland will regain the proud position she once held among the nations of Europe’. It was a sentiment that drew ‘generous applause’.40
As he travelled west Wilde came into contact with members of another oppressed race. He had long wanted to meet the American ‘Indians’ – ‘to see men who spend all their life in the open air… to see how they carry themselves’.41 He had been intrigued too to hear from one of his travelling companions about a tribe ‘who used to subsist on a diet of sunflowers’, only regretting that he could not go and dine with them.42 The ‘Indians’ he did meet were rather less romantic: demoralized figures hawking goods on station platforms. As he wrote to Mrs Bernard Beere:
Most of them are curiously like Joe Knight [an English theatre critic] in appearance, a few are like Alfred Thompson [the playwright] and when on the war trail they look like a procession of Salas:‡ their conversation is most fascinating however as long as it unintelligible, but when interpreted is rather silly – like dear Dot [Boucicault]’s. There are also among them Burnands and Gilberts – in fact Burnand in a blanket and quite covered with scarlet feathers is now trying through the window to force me to buy a pair of bead slippers and making signs to a ruffianly looking Gilbert who is with him to tomahawk me if I refuse. It’s most odd my meeting them so far. The squaws are poor imitations of Clara Jecks [an actress who had played an American Indian on the London stage] and the papooses – or babies – the images of Dot. Papoose is the word they are using for baby, but tomorrow it will mean river, or a maple tree, or something quite different.
Wilde contended that the Indians had ‘such a strong objection to literature that they always use different words for the same object every day’.43
Even as Wilde made his way across the prairies his plans were changing. Morse had been approached by several rival promoters proposing to take Wilde even further west, past the Rockies and into California. By the time Wilde reached Omaha the details had been finalized. Rather than return east, as originally planned, Wilde and his party would push on to San Francisco. Although the press reported that the Californian promoter Charles E. Locke had contracted for twenty lectures over three weeks at a flat remuneration of $5,000 with all expenses paid, the final arrangement was slightly less daunting – and the remuneration rather less handsome. Wilde would give fifteen lectures over the three weeks, in California, Utah and Colorado, for a fee of $3,000.44
* The name of Wilde’s black valet has proved elusive. Although not infrequently mentioned in press reports, and in Wilde’s letters, his name is never given. In his Oscar Wilde in Canada (1982), Kevin O’Brien gives the valet’s name as Stephen Davenport, but without citing a source. The identification is certainly plausible. The name ‘Stephen’ recurs several times among Wilde’s private expenses in Morse’s account book – for small amounts, ranging from 50 cents to $3.35. And the American 1910 census records do show a literate black man na
med ‘Steven C. Davenport’, born in 1856 in Virginia, but living in New York, and (then) working as a messenger in the Stock Exchange.
† Wilde later amplified his sense of disappointment. As the New York Tribune reported, he advised Lillie Langtry not to bother with Niagara: ‘They told me that so many millions of gallons of water tumbled over the Falls in a minute I could see no beauty in that. There was bulk there, but no beauty… Niagara Falls seems to me to simply be a vast, unnecessary amount of water going the wrong way then falling over unnecessary rocks.’ And in due course he developed the line, ‘Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.’
‡ George Augustus Sala, the flamboyant British journalist, who had also lectured in America, had – coincidentally – produced a ‘Red Indian’ themed comic skit for the 1881 Christmas Number of The World. It opened upon ‘the Big Salt Lick Rolling Prairie’ where the darkness of the night was deepened by ‘the amalgamation of smoke, fog, and the Poetry of Obscurity specially supplied… by Oscar the Wild Boy’.
4
Bully Boy
‘The further West one comes the more there is to like.’
oscar wilde
The 1,867-mile train journey from Omaha to San Francisco took four days (and nights). Wilde described the shifting scene to Norman Forbes-Robertson as ‘at first grey, gaunt desolate plains, as colourless as waste land by the sea, with now and then scampering herds of bright red antelopes, and heavy shambling buffaloes, rather like Joe Knight [again] in manner and appearance, and screaming vultures like gnats high up in the air, then up the Sierra Nevadas, the snow-capped mountains shining like shields of polished silver in that vault of blue flame we call the sky, and deep canyons full of pine trees’. It became Wilde’s considered opinion that the Yosemite Valley, in the western Sierra Nevada, was one of the two most remarkable pieces of scenery in the States – the other being Delmonico’s restaurant in New York.1
Although Wilde was travelling first class in one of the railroad’s luxuriously appointed ‘palace cars’, the long journey was tedious – the pace slow, the stops frequent. With no dining car, meals had to be taken at station hotels and restaurants along the way. At several of these halts groups of locals gathered to cheer or gawp at the celebrated Aesthete. At Corinne (Utah) ‘forty improvised aesthetes with sunflower accompaniment and a dingdong brass band’ even tried to ‘invade’ Wilde’s car in their desire to serenade him. Such constant and intrusive attention soon became wearisome. Fortunately for Wilde, one of his fellow passengers was John Howson, an operatic tenor heading out to San Francisco to appear as Bunthorne in a D’Oyly Carte-approved production of Patience. The two men got on well, and on occasion Howson would relieve Wilde of his duties, by donning the Bunthorne costume and wig, and appearing at the carriage window as the poet.2
After four days of travel the train descended ‘from the chill winter of the mountains down into the eternal summer’ of the San Francisco bay, with its ‘groves of orange trees in fruit and flower, green fields, and purple hills’. It was, Wilde declared, ‘a very Italy, without its art’. Taken to San Francisco, he was installed in the opulent and recently constructed Palace Hotel, ‘the largest hotel in the world’ – and perhaps the ugliest.3
Locke had mapped out a full schedule of talks in the various cities around the bay: Oakland, Sacramento, San José, Stockton, and San Francisco itself – with repeat appearances and special matinees at several of the venues. Despite the animosity of Ambrose Bierce, who kept up a constant attack in his satirical paper the Wasp, Wilde was generally well received in California. His opening lecture, at a flower-bedecked Platt’s Hall in San Francisco, drew, according to one paper, ‘the most fashionable audience that any entertainment could attract’. The Daily Report estimated that: 30% chose to attend because they were determined NOT to be convinced by OW’s ‘tomfoolery’ and wanted to experience his ‘bunk’ at first hand.
13% came because their ‘wives insisted’.
10% were open-minded, and wanted to hear what OW had to say.
10% ‘various other reasons’.
9% ‘wanted to see and hear the Damphool on general principles’.
1% admitted to being ‘honest admirers of Oscar’.
Wilde, however, was able to win over many of the doubters. As the Examiner reported, ‘As soon as the first feeling of anxious wonder at the lecturer’s appearance had passed away, [the audience] caught the infection of his enthusiasm in the subject and exhibited interest by marked attention and quite frequently applause and appreciative laughter.’4*
Although the original plan was for nine talks in California, crammed into just fourteen days, there was still scope for an additional lecture. At the special request of some of San Francisco’s ‘prominent citizens’, on 5 April Wilde gave a fourth address at Platt’s Hall, on ‘Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century’. Refining upon (or contradicting) the remarks he had made at St Paul, he suggested that English oppression of the Irish had actually stimulated his nation’s poetic urge, rather than crushing it. ‘The poetry and music of Ireland are not merely the luxury of the rich, but the very bulwark of patriotism, the very seed and flower of liberty,’ he declared. ‘The Saxon took our lands from us and left them desolate. We took their language and added new beauties to it.’ To illustrate his point, he read from the works of Thomas Davis, Gavin Duffy and other poets of his childhood, as well as from John Boyle O’Reilly and, of course, Speranza. The performance drew an enthusiastic response from the fair-sized and partisan crowd. Indeed the San Francisco Chronicle adjudged it the most applauded of all Wilde’s lectures in the city.5
Despite the almost daily lectures Wilde found ample time for pleasure. Indeed his fortnight on the west coast – between the bright sky and the sparkling ocean, amid peach blossom and greenery – seems to have been a charmed interlude during his American adventure. He always recalled San Francisco as a special place, ‘a really beautiful city’, the people ‘warm and generous and… cultivated’. There was an exotic element too. Wilde had previously disparaged Chinese art, suggesting that it possessed ‘no element of beauty, the horrible and grotesque appearing to be standards of perfection’; San Francisco made him change his mind. He was fascinated by the city’s crowded and colourful Chinatown – ‘the most artistic town I have ever come across’ – where the inhabitants, despite their modest means, had ‘nothing about them that [was] not beautiful’. Even a scribbled bill of charge, done on rice paper in Indian ink, was like a work of art; and a brothel might be touched with poetry (Wilde often repeated a ‘Chinese distich’ that he was told in ‘a house of sin’ at San Francisco: ‘The moonlight touches the flowers / The flowers love the moon’.) He was particularly struck at the contrast between the little blue and white porcelain cups in the humblest Chinese tea house – ‘cups as delicate as the petals of a rose-leaf’ – and the brute ugliness of the teacups in his own ‘gaudy’ hotel, their rims fully ‘an inch thick’.6
There were visits to libraries, art galleries and art schools. There were lunches and dinners, even a breakfast with the property tycoon Adolph Sutro. He was most anxious to have Wilde’s opinion on his scheme for a new suburb, and led the somewhat ‘indolent apostle over the sand dunes’ as he mapped out his vision for ‘Sutro Heights’. Wilde, always ready for the next meal, said he would be happy to give his advice – but ‘after breakfast’. Wilde was entertained – twice – by San Francisco’s rather inaptly named ‘Bohemian Club’ – an institution which, though established as a meeting place for ‘gentlemen connected professionally’ with the arts, had been invaded by the city’s business and legal worthies. Wilde remarked, having lunched there, that he had never seen ‘so many well-dressed, well-fed business-like Bohemians’ in his life.7
At a dinner, given on April Fool’s Day, the members – rather uncharitably – planned to show up their guest. ‘Judge Hoffman and General B
arnes were [detailed], after a good dinner and plenty of drink, to “attack” Wilde on the Classics and English Literature respectively.’ But, despite being unprepared, and having drunk a considerable amount, Wilde outshone and defeated both his adversaries. The membership was impressed, and impressed too at the amount of liquor Wilde was able to put away. Several fellow diners were, apparently, asleep at the table or slumped beneath it, when Wilde finally rose at the end of the evening. For those who had considered the long-haired, breeches-wearing Aesthete something of a ‘Miss Nancy’ this was a stunning refutation. The ‘Bohemians’, as others before them, were obliged to acknowledge that Wilde ‘was not such a fool as he looked’. A committee subsequently called at the Palace Hotel and secured Wilde’s agreement to sit for a portrait, to be hung at the club among images of other notable guests.8
Wilde found a more genuinely bohemian milieu at an afternoon studio party hosted by the painters Joseph Dwight Strong and Jules Tavernier. The room had been artistically got up, its skylight painted with roses, while the Chinese studio hand, dressed in a gown of silk brocade, made tea for the assembled guests. ‘This’, Wilde declared, as he surveyed the scene, ‘is where I belong! This is my atmosphere!’ Strong’s wife, Belle, recorded Wilde’s infectious brilliancy that afternoon. ‘He was charming. His enthusiasm, his frank sincerity, dispelled at once any constraint… We were exhilarated by his talk, gay, quick, delightfully cordial and almost affectionately friendly.’ In one corner of the studio there was a lay figure that had been dressed in women’s clothing and perched on a chair; knocking up against this dummy, as he strolled about the room admiring the pictures and ‘Indian’ artefacts, Wilde momentarily took it for a fellow guest and apologized. Then, realizing at once his error, he went on ‘without changing his voice [and] began a conversation’ with the seated figure. ‘He told her his opinion of San Francisco… replied to imaginary remarks of hers with surprise or approval.’ It was ‘a superb performance,’ Mrs Strong recalled, ‘a masterpiece of sparkling wit and gaiety… When he left we all felt we had met a truly great man.’9
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