Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  San Francisco was also a city of romance. Almost from the moment of his arrival in America there had been speculation about Wilde’s love life – and the possibility of him taking ‘an American girl’ back to England as his wife. Everywhere he went he was – like Bunthorne – surrounded by ‘lovesick maidens’. Many were beautiful; some were interesting; a few were insistent. Helen Lenoir recalled one of them approaching him at a reception, with the ecstatic exclamation, ‘Oh, Mr Wilde, this is what I have longed for.’10 His mother hoped that he would return from America with a bride.11 But his hectic travel plans and the constant scrutiny of the press were scarcely conducive to romance. Asked by one reporter about his ‘private life’, he replied wearily, ‘I wish I had one.’12 To another he lamented that any future Mrs Wilde remained ‘a dream, a dream’.13 He did admit, following his trip to Washington, that he had ‘seen an original of Daisy Miller’ (the alluring young heroine of Henry James’s novel of the same name), but refused to give further details – as he hoped to see her again.14

  To Sam Ward, however, he confessed that he had lost his heart in San Francisco.15 The object of his adoration remains unknown, but the most likely candidate is Hattie Crocker, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of Charles Crocker, director of the Southern Pacific Railroad. She was bright, vivacious, beautiful and rich. She and her family were San Francisco nobility, living in a large mansion up on Nob Hill. They had an interest in the arts: her father was sponsoring an impressive new building on Post Street ‘for a music hall and for art purposes’; her uncle – Edwin B. Crocker – had established an art gallery in Sacramento, which Wilde visited. Hattie’s parents were listed as attending Wilde’s first lecture at Platt’s Hall, and it is likely that she was with them. And perhaps Hattie was one of the ‘young society girls’ who attended the Montgomery Street tea party. Certainly her cousin Amy Crocker was there.16

  What is also certain is that, not long after he left San Francisco, Wilde wrote a fun-filled letter to a ‘Dear Hattie,’ lamenting their separation, and concluding, ‘when I think of America I only remember someone whose lips are like the crimson petals of a summer rose, whose eyes are two brown agates, who has the fascination of a panther, the pluck of a tigress, and the grace of a bird. Darling Hattie, I now realise that I am absolutely in love with you, and for ever and ever, your affectionate and devoted friend, Oscar Wilde.’17 Hattie Crocker would have been an impressive match for Wilde, such as his mother dreamed of. But the imperatives of his schedule gave him no opportunity to foster the connection.

  Wilde was being whisked away across the plains of Utah. Still under Locke’s direction, he lectured to the polygamous, homely and thoroughly ‘unintellectual’ Mormons at the Salt Lake City Opera House – ‘an enormous affair’, Wilde called it, ‘about the size of Covent Garden’, holding ‘with ease fourteen families’.18 He appeared twice at the opulent Tabor Grand Opera House in Denver, and once at the fashionable spa town of Colorado Springs. In between these engagements he also made an unexpected detour. Horace Tabor, Colorado’s lieutenant-governor, had amassed his fortune from a silver mine high up in the Rockies, at Leadville; Wilde accepted his impromptu invitation to go and lecture there. The town was a place of legend: a sprawling miners’ camp assembled around a broad main street, it was reputed to be both the richest and the most violent conurbation in the United States. Wilde had, since his arrival in America, wanted to see the town ‘immensely’: here was an opportunity.19

  The visit was a memorable one. It had a hint of danger: Wilde acquired a revolver for the trip – though his claim to have practised with it by shooting sparrows off the telegraph wires seems doubtful. There was the long, slow-climbing narrow-gauge train journey, up over 10,000 feet, and the giddiness caused by the ‘light air’ on arrival. There was ‘the silent and dignified reception from a well armed mob’ as he made his way into the town. There was the unexpected charm of the eight-hundred-seat Tabor Opera House, filled with red-shirted, blond-bearded and attentive miners. Wilde considered them the best-dressed men he had seen in America. There was the delightful incongruity of the whole occasion; as Wilde fancifully put it, ‘I described to them the pictures of Botticelli, and the name… seemed to them like a new drink… I approached modern art and had almost won them over to a real reverence for what is beautiful when unluckily I described one of Jimmy Whistler’s “nocturnes in blue and gold”. Then they leapt to their feet and in their grand simple way swore that such things should not be.’ The Leadville Daily Herald, though less eloquent, confirms the picture, reporting that Wilde’s disquisition on the architectural splendours of Renaissance Pisa was interrupted by a cry from the audience, ‘We live in adobes in this country!’20

  Then, after the lecture, there was a guided tour of State Street’s rowdy bars and bordellos, where Wilde was greatly impressed by a sign, hung up in Pap Wyman’s saloon, reading ‘Please Don’t Shoot The Pianist. He Is Doing His Best’. It was, he declared, ‘the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across’ – recognizing, as it did, ‘the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death’.21† From State Street Wilde processed a couple of miles out of town, riding in a ‘bullock cart’ flanked by torch-bearing miners, for a late supper at Tabor’s celebrated silver mine, ‘The Matchless’. Having struggled into a protective rubber suit, he was lowered down the shaft in a large metal ‘bucket’. Wilde claimed that, true to his principles, he remained ‘graceful’ throughout the operation, though the press reported him clinging anxiously to the bucket rope.

  Accompanied by the mine manager, Wilde found a party of miners waiting to greet him, each armed with a bottle. A ‘banquet’ had been spread, though Wilde later said of the feast that ‘the first course [was] whisky, the second whisky, and the third whisky’. The miners were certainly impressed by his capacity for drink. As he knocked back his first ‘cocktail’ without flinching they pronounced him ‘a bully boy with no glass eye’; it was, he said, ‘artless and spontaneous praise which touched me more than the pompous panegyrics of literary critics ever did or could’. Wilde’s energy was unflagging. He ‘chatted incessantly’ during the several hours he spent underground.

  Thinking that the miners might imagine that art was so ‘bound up with respectability that there was no room for them’, he strove to make clear that ‘between art and respectability there was really no connection at all’. Considering them as ‘men working in metals’, he told them of the great Renaissance goldsmith and ‘most accomplished rough’, Benvenuto Cellini, who had both killed a man and created a masterpiece. They wondered why Wilde had not brought this remarkable personage along, and – on learning that had been dead ‘for some little time’ – demanded, ‘Who shot him?’22 Wilde’s one disappointment was that, having ‘amidst unanimous applause’ wielded a silver drill to open up a new vein (to be known as ‘The Oscar’), he was not offered shares in the lode – only the drill.23

  While Wilde had been exploring the world west of the Rockies, Colonel Morse was plotting his route back eastwards, securing fifteen further lecture dates across Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania. After the sunshine and glamour of California, it might have been something of a slog. The days, however, were enlivened by change, the advancing spring and Wilde’s openness to his surroundings. ‘Every day’, he claimed, ‘I see something curious and new.’24 From St Joseph, Missouri, he wrote to Norman Forbes-Robertson:

  Outside my window about a quarter of a mile to the west there stands a little yellow house, with a green paling, and a crowd of people pulling it all down. It is the house of the great train-robber and murderer, Jesse James, who was shot by his pal [Robert Ford] last week, and the people are relic hunters. They sold his dust-bin and foot-scraper yesterday at public auction, his door-knocker is to be offered for sale this afternoon, the reserve price being about the income of an English bishop… And his favourite chromo-lithograph was disposed of at a price which in Europe only an authentic Titian can command, or an undoubted Mantegn
a.

  The Americans, he noted, ‘are great hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes’.25

  At Lincoln, Nebraska, he spent an interesting day with George E. Woodberry, the young English professor at the university there. Together they visited the state penitentiary nearby. Wilde was oppressed by the ‘poor, sad’ prisoners, in their ‘hideous’ striped suits, making bricks in the sun, although relieved that, at least, they were all very ‘mean-looking’. As he told Nellie Sickert, ‘I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face’. In one of the ‘tragically tidy’ little whitewashed cells he noted a translation of Dante. ‘Strange and beautiful it seemed to me,’ he remarked, ‘that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol.’ He was less impressed by the murderer who was spending the weeks before his execution ‘reading novels’; a ‘bad preparation,’ he thought, ‘for facing God or Nothing’.‡

  Amid the diversions and demands of travel, Wilde found time to carry forward the project for a new edition of Rodd’s poems. He had composed his preface, or L’Envoi: 3,500 richly woven words that tested, as he put it, ‘the rhythmical value of prose’26 (he was, finally, taking up the challenge of prose-writing that Pater had thrown down at their first meeting). The matter of the piece looked not only to Pater, but also to Whistler, and to Gautier – whom Wilde had been reading during his travels. It was the proclamation of an ‘important’ and novel artistic creed, one that signified – as Wilde informed Stoddart – ‘my new departure from Mr Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites’.27

  Elements of the creed had, in fact, already found expression in his lecture on the English Renaissance, but Wilde now brought his ideas together with a new intensity. Emboldened perhaps by the time he had spent at Whistler’s studio, he declared that he was casting aside the ‘ethical’ keystone of Ruskin’s aesthetic system – the belief that one ‘should judge a picture [or poem] by the amount of noble moral ideas it expresses’. In its stead he asserted ‘the primary importance of the sensuous element in art, [the] love of art for art’s sake’. Gautier was quoted, and Pater extensively paraphrased, as Wilde rejected ‘all literary reminiscence and all metaphysical idea’ from the province of art, in favour of the perfection of form and the expression of personality. The work of ‘modern Romantic’ poets such as Wilde (and Rodd) – men seeking to ‘perfect the English Renaissance’ – was described as ‘essentially the poetry of impressions, being like that latest school of painting, the school of Whistler… in its choice of situation as opposed to subject; in its dealing with the exceptions rather than with the types of life; in its brief intensity, in what one might call its fiery-coloured momentariness, it being indeed the momentary situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature, which poetry and painting now seek to render for us’.

  The true artist, Wilde claimed, guided by the ‘principle of beauty’, eschewed both ‘facile orthodoxy’ and ‘sterile scepticism’ for the fleeting impression, the changing mood – the search ‘for experience itself’ rather than ‘the fruits of experience’.28 This repudiation of Ruskin in the realms of poetry and painting did not extend to Wilde’s views on the ‘Decorative Arts’; his lectures on that subject continued to be dominated by Ruskinian notions about the virtues of handicraft and the uplifting effects of beauty in daily life.

  Wilde also busied himself over the details of book production: choosing a typeface, discussing design, selecting papers, proposing decorations.§ The title of the volume was changed to Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf. The original English edition of the book had been dedicated to Rodd’s father, but Wilde substituted a fulsome tribute to himself: ‘To / Oscar Wilde / “Heart’s Brother” / These Few Songs And Many Songs To Come’.29

  Preparing a book for the press was easier work than getting a play into production. Plans for Vera had become mired in difficulties. Wilde’s initial optimism, after the meetings with Clara Morris, had been briefly buoyed by his success in persuading D’Oyly Carte to interest himself in the project. He had assured Wilde that ‘something ought to come of it,’ as the piece seemed ‘a strong, affective and thoroughly artistic Drama’. He was prepared to offer the same terms as the lecture tour – a half-share of profits – with an advance of £200 once a New York production had been secured.30 Like Wilde, he was ‘aware how difficile’ Clara Morris could be, ‘and what practical dangers may attend the periling of [a production] on her’, but he seems to have thought it worth persisting with efforts to secure the actress rather than approaching other lesser lights.31

  Carte had urged Wilde to press ahead with writing a ‘Prologue’ to give a context to the drama, and while traversing the mid-west Wilde did complete a new opening scene, sketching a picture of czarist despotism and Siberian prison camps, and prefiguring some of the conflicts to be played out later in the drama.32 The new text, however, arrived too late. Although Morris’s husband had told Carte that her inability to commit to Vera was due to ‘uncertain health’, at the beginning of April it was announced that the actress would be taking the lead part in an adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd, opening at the end of the month. By that time it was impossible for Carte to look elsewhere, at least for the current spring season. Morse sought to reassure Wilde that the autumn would prove better for ‘heavy pieces’ – such as Vera – but it was a disappointment, another setback in his efforts to bring the play to the stage.33

  * Ambrose Bierce, in the Wasp (31 March 1882), reported rather less favourably on the occasion, with three paragraphs of vituperation, beginning: ‘That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde, has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The insufferable dunce has nothing to say and says it – says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft.’

  † Wilde was soon advocating capital punishment for a whole host of ‘bad’ artists. Commiserating with the Canadian watercolourist John C. Miles over the popularity of cheap chromolithgraphs, he declared that ‘[painting] will never by duly appreciated until one of those dreadful chromographers is hanged’. While, in discussing the antics of theatrical extras – or ‘supers’ – with the producer Steele Mackaye, he suggested that ‘we will have no serious dramatic art until we hang a super’.

  ‡ The condemned man confessed that he was, just then, reading Charlotte M. Yonge’s popular High Church romance, The Heir of Redclyffe, prompting Wilde to remark, later, to Woodberry, ‘My heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man, but if he reads The Heir of Redclyffe it’s perhaps as well to let the law take its course.’

  § Wilde told Alma Strettle (sister of Mrs J. Comyns Carr), when he met her in Denver, ‘Printing is so dull… There is nothing exquisite about it at present. In my next publication I am hoping to give examples of something more satisfying in this way. The letters will be of a rarer design; the commas will be sunflowers, and the semi-colons pomegranates.’ Floral punctuation, however, was one of the few innovations not attempted in Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf.

  5

  Different Aspects

  ‘I have already civilized America – il reste seulement le ciel.’

  oscar wilde

  Wilde got back to New York at the beginning of May, weeks after he had originally planned to finish his tour. Now, though, there was no thought of stopping. His exploits across the mid-west and beyond had enhanced his fame, and he was ready to seize the opportunity. New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Cincinnati were all anxious to hear him again. Canada expected him to visit. And there was a recently received proposal for a tour of ‘the
south’. Wilde was ready to push forward on all fronts – and to leave the disappointments of Vera behind, for the moment.

  He returned to Philadelphia on 10 May, calling on the handicraft arts school run by his friend Leland and acquiring several items with which to illustrate his talks, impressing all observers with his Colorado-acquired ‘cowboy’ outfit, and visiting Whitman a second time.* On the following day he lectured at a packed Wallack’s Theatre in New York. The great promoter and self-publicist P. T. Barnum was in the front row.1

  The handful of Canadian dates originally fixed for March had been rescheduled by Morse and augmented into a two-and-a-half-week tour of Ontario and Quebec beginning on 14 May. Colonel Morse considered that this, for Wilde, was ‘the most enjoyable part’ of his whole transatlantic trip – the Canadian audiences ‘more in sympathy with the man and his subjects’ than their American neighbours. Wilde himself was more at ease, ‘the constant work’ of the preceding months having given him ‘confidence and skill in delivery’ as well as allowing him to refine his talk. The houses, in the major cities, were large. The press – with a few exceptions – was generous and respectful. And at every stop there were entertainments, dinners and receptions. He was lauded by writers, and feted by artists. The Torontonian sculptor Frederick Dunbar even persuaded Wilde to sit for a bust.2

  In Toronto Wilde watched a lacrosse game between the ‘Torontos’ and the St Regis Indians (from a nearby reservation), and greatly enjoyed the spectacle. The Toronto Globe recorded him ‘laughing heartily when any of the players went unceremoniously to grass, or clapping his hands when a good piece of work was done’. He told the reporter that he thought the game – then Canada’s national sport – ‘charming’ and ‘far ahead of cricket for physical development’ as ‘everyone seems to get an equal share of the play – or hard work’, as Wilde considered it. From an Aesthetic point of view he particularly admired the play of the ‘tall, finely built defense man’ Ross Mackenzie, and was only disappointed that the ‘Indians’ were not wearing warpaint.3