Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Having returned to New York on 12 June, he then set off for his tour of the southern states – accompanied, as ever, by his valet, as well as by a new road manager, Frank Gray. Wilde was irritated to discover that the tour, under the direction of a Memphis promoter called Peter Tracy, had grown in length, if not in intensity. From a projected ‘three weeks’ it had extended to almost five. And yet there were only eighteen lectures to be given during this period, a ratio that Wilde considered ‘quite ridiculous’.4 Nevertheless he covered huge distances almost every other day, through Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia: Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans, Galveston, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans (again), Mobile, Montgomery, Columbus, Macon, Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta, Charleston, Wilmington, Norfolk and Richmond. For all the ‘excitement of lecturing’, especially ‘when one gets an interested audience’, Wilde had grown to loathe the travelling: ‘I hate punctuality and I hate time tables,’ he lamented. ‘The railroads are all alike to me. One is simply intolerable; another is simply unbearable.’5 This journey, moreover, was made more stressful by the threat of yellow fever; though, as Wilde remarked, ‘having survived [American] journalism one could always survive yellow fever’.6

  Despite such irritations, Wilde was touched by the pathos of ‘the beautiful, passionate ruined South’, as he called it, in a letter to Julia Ward Howe: ‘The land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance: picturesque too in her failure to keep pace with your keen northern pushing intellect; living chiefly on credit, and on the memory of some crushing defeats.’7 Nostalgia for the ante-bellum days pervaded everything. Wilde claimed that, once, on remarking to a Southern gentleman, ‘How beautiful the moon is tonight,’ he had received the reply, ‘Yes, but you should have seen it before the war.’8 He felt an affinity for the place, seeing a bond between the Southern Confederacy and the Irish: both had risen in arms to achieve ‘self-government’, and both had been defeated.9

  There was a family connection too. Wilde’s uncle Judge John K. Elgee (Lady Wilde’s older brother, who had emigrated to the US as a young man) had been a stalwart of the Confederate cause in Louisiana. He had died in 1864, but his memory was still revered. There were even excited reports that Wilde might have a claim to his old estate near Fort Adams. While admitting that it would be delightful to have ‘proprietorship of groves of magnolia trees’, Wilde dismissed the notion.10 He was content to come away from the south with only the honorary title of ‘Colonel’ – the preferred term of address in Texas.11

  Wilde made a special detour to visit Jefferson Davis, the defeated commander-in-chief of the Confederate States, on his plantation near Biloxi, Mississippi. Davis had extended an unlikely invitation, having been touched by Wilde’s comments about his leadership in a newspaper interview. Wilde was greatly impressed by his host, ‘a man of the keenest intellect’. The seventy-four-year-old Davis, however, seems to have found Wilde ‘indefinably objectionable’ – a harbinger, perhaps, of the new and uncongenial age. He excused himself early from the dinner.12

  Among the many beauties of the south – the ‘crystal sea’ at Galveston, the old Spanish ruins of San Antonio, the alligators of Louisiana and the Georgia forests – Wilde was best pleased by ‘the young negroes’ he saw everywhere, disporting themselves in the sunshine, or dancing in the shade, ‘their half-naked bodies gleaming like bronze’. Amidst the drab materialism of so much American life, they seemed to offer a rare ‘picturesqueness in human costume and habits’. He was astounded that American painters and poets did not use them more as a motif for art. Wilde, though he might exoticize them, seems to have engaged with their ways, and – at New Orleans – even attended one of their voodoo ceremonies.13

  He became distressingly aware, though, of the racial animosities that still divided the south. It was reported that he had inadvertently witnessed a lynching when his train passed through the town of Bonfouca, Louisiana, just as a poor ‘negro’ was being hanged from the railroad bridge.14 And on the journey between Atlanta and Savannah, having boarded the first-class sleeping car together with his black valet, he was informed by a railroad official that it was ‘against the rules of the company to sell sleeping-car tickets to colored persons’ (the ticket had been bought in advance by Gray, the road manager). Wilde was incensed and refused to alter the arrangements, pointing out that he had never had trouble before. But one of the black porters explained directly to the valet that if passengers boarding the train at Jonesboro found a black man sitting in a whites-only car they might well lynch him. The valet agreed to move.15

  The southern tour completed, Wilde returned to New York. It was the middle of July, and the city was in holiday mode. Morse, though, was still in the D’Oyly Carte office on Broadway. He rendered a full account of Wilde’s earnings and expenses over the previous six and half months. Total receipts were $21,946.56; the associated costs of the tour (travel, accommodation, promotion, the services of Vale and co.) were $9,579.42. This left a net amount of $12,367.14. Wilde’s half-share was an impressive $6,183.57 – about £1,100 – slightly more than the £1,000 with which he had hoped to return to England. But the matter was not quite so simple. Over the course of his travels Wilde had incurred private expenses (for wine, cigarettes, telegrams, newspapers, etc.) of $2,217.68. He had also already drawn $1,169.65 of the money owing to him: there had been sundry ‘drafts’ to Levy, Lady Wilde, to his American tailor, and other tradesmen. This left him with a rather more modest $3,344.07 (approximately £665) still due.

  The amount was not negligible. It would be enough for some months of leisure, travel and literary endeavour in Paris or Rome. Or maybe even Asia. For several months Wilde had been scouting the idea of a trip to Japan – ‘the most highly civilized country on the globe’. He mentioned it frequently in his interviews. He had half-hoped to persuade Whistler, or perhaps Walter Sickert, to accompany him, so that they might produce pictures for a book on the country that he would write. He did have a commission from Our Continent for a series of articles on Japanese art, and had even begun to gather letters of introduction to potentially useful figures in the country. Nevertheless he hesitated to carry through his plan.16

  He was becoming increasingly aware of other calls on his resources. Exaggerated reporting of his American successes, and American earnings, in the London papers had galvanized his many creditors. Lady Wilde’s letters brought regular news of old bills being presented with demands for settlement. She urged him to pay while he could. She also added regular plaints about her own precarious financial condition and Willie’s profligacies. Wilde felt that he needed to keep earning. He asked Morse to see if he could arrange some new lecture dates, and also to follow up the notion of a tour to Australia, where Forbes was now lecturing.17 To the press Wilde suggested that his desire to go the Antipodes had been prompted by looking at the map: when he saw ‘what an awfully ugly-looking country Australia is,’ he felt that he must go there ‘to see if it cannot be changed into a more beautiful form’.18

  Despite such plans, after his months of hard travel and hard lecturing, Wilde felt in real need of a holiday. He had received several invitations to visit friends at their seaside homes on Long Island and elsewhere, and was eager to accept. Morse devised a happy solution: an informal ‘summer tour’ of fashionable east coast resort towns and Catskill mountain retreats. Wilde would holiday with friends in between engagements. Distances would be short, the schedule light (some twenty dates spread over six weeks) and the atmosphere relaxed. Morse, moreover, was hopeful that he might secure as much as $100 per engagement.19 Summer lectures were a novelty, and Wilde remained a draw.

  Morse, who accompanied Wilde as his tour manager, recalled this tour as a particularly happy interlude. In these summer lectures – given often in not very commodious hotel reception rooms – Wilde was ‘at his best’:

  He had no longer to depend upon his manuscript, but varied his talks to suit the occasion, and often to suit the audience. Some of these addresses were f
ar more interesting than the more formal affairs of the platform. The afternoon meetings, when his audiences were ladies, in charming toilettes, were a source of inspiration to the speaker, and responded to by the enthusiastic yet subdued applause of his hearers. They sparkled with wit, epigram and metaphor; the illustrations were drawn from his own observations and later experiences; the higher intelligence of his audiences, appreciative of his best efforts, incited him to flights of fancy and oratory not reached before.

  Unfortunately, as Morse lamented, none of these talks was adequately reported or preserved.20

  There is a glimpse of Wilde lecturing in the Casino Theatre at Newport, Rhode Island, on 15 July, when he created ‘quite a sensation’ during his discussion of the enduring beauty of a well-designed dress, by remarking, ‘I am now speaking to those who are not millionaires, if any such be present’, at exactly the moment Mrs Vanderbilt made her entrance into the hall.21 From Newport Morse steered Wilde along a meandering route to Long Branch, Babylon, Long Beach, Ballston Spa, Saratoga and beyond.22

  The schedule allowed time for rest and recreation. Wilde accepted an invitation to stay for a few days with Julia Ward Howe at her farmhouse near Newport, although he threw the household ‘into a flutter’ with the announcement that he was bringing not only a ‘Cyclopean’ book-filled trunk (‘I can’t travel without Balzac and Gautier’), a hatbox and a portmanteau, but also his valet.23 He had a delightful time there, dubbing Rhode Island that ‘little island where idleness ranks among the virtues’.24 He did test the Ward Howes and their guests with some of his affectations: for one walk into the wooded valley he wore his black velvet outfit, along with a slouch hat and a salmon-coloured scarf, while holding a rose, which he sniffed as he chatted.25 But despite such stunts he was considered ‘a rarely entertaining guest’: he talked ‘amazingly well… all that was best in the man [coming] to the surface’. He recited his ‘noble poem’ ‘Ave Imperatrix’ under the trees one afternoon, and ‘told endless stories of Swinburne, Whistler, and other celebrities of the day’.26 At one dinner he out-talked both the ‘famous Boston wit’ Tom Appleton and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  The visit fuelled press speculation that Wilde had become engaged to the youngest Ward Howe daughter, Maud. The rumour was entirely without foundation. Mrs Ward Howe scotched it at once, telling the press that ‘if ever there were two people in the world who had no sympathy in common, those two were Miss Ward Howe and Oscar Wilde’. Nevertheless it was widely reported in the British papers; Lady Wilde was disappointed at having to deny the claim and turn aside the many ‘notes of warm congratulations’ that she received.27

  There are numerous other sightings of Wilde in holiday mode that season: resplendent in a bathing suit on the sands at Long Beach;28 surprising the family of William Henderson (the New York theatre proprietor) with his tennis skills and unaffected charm;29 cruising around the ‘Great South Bay’ together with the Fortescue family and ‘Uncle Bob’ Roosevelt in Heartsease, their new yacht (which he had earlier ‘christened’ with a bottle of champagne and ‘a neat little speech’);30 attending the start of the Newport polo season with Sam Ward, and taking ‘the deepest interest in the games’;31 dining à trois with Ward and Hurlbert at Long Beach with ‘moonlight on the ocean, and the setting sun, and the loveliest sea breeze’.32 Wilde had looked forward to talking ‘nonsense to flowers and children’ during his holidays, and there were opportunities for both. At the resort town of Babylon he entertained the young children at his hotel by inventing fairy stories, and recounting them in the ballroom before the music began.33 He also delighted the five-year-old Natalie Barney with ‘a wonderful tale’, spun on the sands at Long Beach, after he had rescued her from a posse of rough-housing boys.34

  He was introduced to Ulysses S. Grant, former president of the United States, and commanding general of the Union forces in the Civil War.35 He called on the naturalist John Burroughs, finding the disparity between the writer’s rustic appearance and literary talk ‘very oxymoronic, but very gracious too’. Burroughs found the disparity between his guest’s ‘splendid’ eloquence and ‘voluptuary’ manner rather less appealing, noting the oddly ‘disagreeable’ motion of his ‘hips and back’ as he walked.36 Wilde also made a well-publicized weekend visit to Julia Ward Howe’s ‘old crony’, Henry Ward Beecher, at his ‘beautiful villa on the Hudson’. Wilde thought the celebrated preacher and anti-slavery campaigner ‘a splendid fellow’; they shared similar physiognomies, gifts of eloquence and disdain for public opprobrium.37†

  The lecturing element of Wilde’s summer – for all its pleasures – had not proved particularly remunerative, and he resolved to continue working into the autumn. Morse contracted with a promoter for Wilde to make a short tour of the industrial towns of northeast New England, and up into the ‘maritime’ provinces of Canada.38 Using Boston as his base, Wilde lectured at Providence (‘the Beehive of Industry’), Lynn (‘City of Sin’ and shoemaking), Pawtucket (a thriving mill town), North Attleboro (button capital of the US) and Bangor, Maine (New England’s lumber hub). In several of these towns – with populations devoted to making things, and interested perhaps in how to make them beautiful – he got audiences of ‘about 500’.39 From Bangor he crossed over the border into Canada, lecturing at Fredericton (New Brunswick), before continuing on to the towns of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.40

  In Canada he was generally well received, though at Moncton (Nova Scotia) there was an unfortunate confusion when the local YMCA thought that they had secured Wilde to lecture under their auspices, only to find that he had, in fact, committed himself to a rival promoter. Incensed, they attempted to serve a writ preventing him from giving his talk. Fortunately the local sheriff was – as Wilde called him – ‘a gentleman of some knowledge of the world’ and ‘declined to do anything so uncalled for and so impertinent’. The lecture went ahead ‘very successfully’; the YMCA’s subsequent demand to Wilde for $100 in compensation was dropped before it came to court when the facts became clear, leaving Wilde to comment that ‘the whole thing shows the immorality of the most moral institutions’.41

  After giving his final lecture – on the afternoon of 13 October at St John, New Brunswick – Wilde returned to New York, ‘thoroughly exhausted’.42 He had been on tour, almost without a break, for nine months. He had given some 140 lectures in some 130 places. He had travelled over 15,000 miles, and seen more of the North American continent than most Americans ever did. He had been more interviewed and more paragraphed than any other figure in the country. His name had become a legend and his features were almost universally recognized. And if he had not made his fortune, he had certainly made money.

  He had also made an impression. Although his boast that he had ‘civilized America’ was the usual happy exaggeration, he had sounded a counterblast to the rampant materialism of the age.43 He had made beauty a byword, and Aestheticism a known term. He had outfaced the hostility of some sections of the press. It came to be acknowledged that there was a point to his occasional ‘grotesqueness and exaggeration’: without them he would not have secured such a hearing.44 Among the tens of thousands of people who had heard and seen him, on the lecture platform and off it, not a few had come away informed, encouraged or inspired. Some were fired to follow personal dreams, others to take up practical projects. F. Holland Day (the future publisher and photographer) regarded his youthful encounter with Wilde on the platform of Boston’s South Station as one of the turning points of his life. For years the autograph that he had solicited from ‘the Sun God’, together with the pencil used to write it, hung in his library as a relic.45 Among the many letters of appreciation that Wilde received during the course of his tour was one from an admirer thanking him for his ‘fructifying lecture’ – which taught ‘a gospel hitherto not heard here, and one which I believe will have a better effect than the foundation of a cotton factory’.46 The New York-based artist-potter Charles Volkmar considered that Wilde’s lectures, besides ‘greatly benefit[ing]’ h
is own work, bore ‘an important share’ in the ‘art advancement’ of the country. And it was a verdict that was echoed by others.47

  * It was probably on this visit that Whitman touched obliquely on the subject of same-sex desire. Although he mentioned that he had ‘resented’ J. A. Symonds’s too-direct ‘curiosity’ on the topic, Wilde came away with a clear understanding that Whitman was attracted to other men. They parted with an embrace, and ever afterwards Wilde was able to boast, ‘I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips.’

  † In 1874 Beecher had been embroiled in a scandal over his supposed adulterous relationship with the wife of his protégé. But – having outfaced his accusers in the courtroom – he had re-established his position.

  6

  The Dream of the Poet

  ‘How long it seems to take one to get any business done!’

  oscar wilde

  The tour finally over, Wilde was in no hurry to return to England. There were projects and pleasures to keep him a while longer in America. The imperatives of lecturing had not prevented him from maintaining an interest in his various literary schemes. Rodd’s Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf had come out, and Wilde was delighted with the beauty of the finished volume (as – initially – was Rodd who wrote to compliment Stoddart on the sumptuous production).1 Wilde now had hopes for a collected American edition of his mother’s poems, with an introduction by John Boyle O’Reilly. But, sadly, nothing came of the project.2 He himself did not take up the suggestion that he should start his own American periodical and bring his mother over to promote it.3