Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  ‘Garstrang — Edward Garstrang. I don’t have a card.’

  ‘But you do have a gun,’ said Oscar, smiling. ‘That I recall.’ He took another sip of coffee and looked about the deserted dining room. He leant across the table towards Garstrang and added, conspiratorially, ‘Was anyone hurt last night?’

  ‘No, I’m a good shot — and it was very close range.’

  ‘Why did you come to my rescue? Do you mind if I ask?’

  ‘You’re a visitor, and a distinguished one at that. We don’t get many poets in velvet knickerbockers passing through Leadville. You were being taken advantage of at the casino last night, Mr Wilde, and that’s not nice.’ Garstrang paused and smiled his disarming smile: he had tiny white teeth pressed tight together. He poured more coffee into Oscar’s cup. He added softly, ‘Of course, in my way, I was taking advantage of you myself.’

  Oscar’s brow furrowed. ‘Were you, Mr Garstrang? How?’

  ‘With my little gun I came to the rescue of the great Oscar Wilde. It’ll make a useful paragraph in the newspaper. I could use the publicity. I need to be noticed. I like to be talked about.’

  ‘For reasons of business or self-esteem?’ Oscar asked, leaning back and opening his silver cigarette case. The hot coffee was reviving him.

  ‘Both,’ replied Garstrang, striking a match and leaning forward to light Oscar’s cigarette. ‘Do you understand that? I think if anyone does, it should be you.’

  ‘I understand completely, Mr Garstrang. A man who is much talked about is always attractive, whatever the truth. One feels there must be something in him after all.’ Oscar drew slowly on his cigarette and gazed steadily into Garstrang’s blue eyes. Oscar was the younger man but they sat face to face as equals. ‘What brings you to Leadville, Mr Garstrang?’ asked Oscar.

  Garstrang laughed. ‘I was born in Leadville.’

  ‘You do not look like a man who was born in Leadville.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. I have travelled quite widely.’

  ‘To Europe?’

  ‘To New Orleans. I work on the riverboats that travel up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The bigger boats all have casinos now and that’s where I earn my living. I’m a professional gambler, Mr Wilde. I play cards.’

  ‘Is that exciting?’ asked Oscar. ‘I imagine it must be.’

  ‘I don’t play for excitement. I play for money. I am a gambler because, as a child, I realised that I hadn’t the physique to be a cowboy or a miner and I did not wish to be a sales clerk as my father had been. My father was as most men are — nothing much. He lived, he died, he left no mark upon the world: he might as well never have been born. I was fifteen when he passed away. What did I inherit from him? A facility for mental arithmetic and an old Colt percussion revolver, that’s all. I don’t know why he kept the gun: he never used it. When he died I had nothing but the Colt, a few sticks of furniture, a rented room and a change of clothes. That’s when I determined to make my fortune. That’s when I decided I was going to be rich. And famous. Or, if not famous, notorious.’ He refilled Oscar’s coffee cup and sat back, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr Wilde?’

  ‘I could not have put it better myself,’ replied Oscar. ‘Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. Fame and fortune are what our century worships. To succeed in our time one must achieve celebrity and gold. Nothing else will do.’

  A silence fell between them. Garstrang broke it, changing the subject and saying how much he had enjoyed Oscar’s lecture. He had heard him in Denver at the beginning of the week. They talked of this and that: of Oscar’s poetry, of Cellini’s autobiography, of Garstrang’s prowess at poker and his facility with a gun. Eventually another silence fell. Oscar extinguished his second cigarette and looked carefully at his companion. It was the milkiness in Garstrang’s blue eyes that made him appear so weak, he decided. And the fact that his narrow face was smooth and pale and hairless. Oscar reflected that he and Edward Garstrang were probably the only two white men in the entire State of Colorado that day not to be wearing either side-whiskers, a moustache or a beard.

  ‘Is your mother still alive?’ Oscar asked.

  ‘No,’ said Garstrang. ‘I never knew my mother. Rather, I knew her, but I don’t remember her. She passed away when I was small.’

  ‘Do you have brothers? Sisters? Uncles? Aunts?’

  ‘I have no family, Mr Wilde. I travel alone. I like it that way. I’m a loner, unbeholden.’

  ‘We have much in common, I think,’ said Oscar pleasantly, pushing his chair away from the table and rising from his seat. ‘We are both outsiders, Mr Garstrang, observing our lives even as we live them.’ He held out his hand towards his new friend. ‘To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life, I find.’

  Oscar had got to his feet because, over Garstrang’s shoulder, through the open dining-room doorway, he could see the silhouette of Washington Traquair, the valet, hovering anxiously behind the glass door that connected the outer entrance lobby to the hotel itself. As a Negro, Traquair was not permitted beyond the outer lobby. ‘My man is waiting for me,’ explained Oscar. ‘Kansas is calling.’

  ‘Thank you for your company,’ said Eddie Garstrang, getting to his feet as well and shaking Oscar warmly by the hand.

  ‘Thank you for yours,’ said Oscar, ‘both this morning and last night. This morning you entertained me. Last night you saved my life.’

  ‘I saved your wallet, that’s all,’ said Garstrang, laughing, ‘and your dignity, perhaps.’

  ‘My wallet and my dignity — that’s a great deal. I’m grateful. I won’t forget you, Mr Garstrang.’

  Oscar continued on his tour. He travelled from Colorado to Kansas to Iowa and Ohio, then up the east coast to Canada, then down to Memphis and New Orleans, across to Texas and up to New England and Canada once again. There were more memorable encounters along the way. In Salt Lake City, Utah, Oscar was presented to the President of the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and met five of that fine gentleman’s seven wives and one of his thirty-four children. Oscar noted that the opera house in Salt Lake City was the size of Covent Garden and ‘so holds with ease at least fourteen Mormon families’. In Atlanta, Georgia, Oscar came close to blows with the Pullman car attendant who told him that although his valet, Traquair, was indeed in possession of a valid sleeping car ticket, nevertheless, as a black man, he could not take advantage of it. It was against the railroad company’s rules.

  In Lincoln, Nebraska, Oscar got his first taste of prison. He was taken on a tour of the Lincoln penitentiary and introduced to a number of the inmates. ‘They were all mean-looking, which consoled me,’ he said, ‘for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face.’ He was shown into the cell of a convict who was due to be hanged in a few weeks’ time. ‘Do you read, my man?’ asked Oscar. ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the convict, showing Oscar a copy of Charlotte M. Yonge’s sentimental novel, The Heir of Redclyffe. As he left the cell, Oscar murmured to the prison governor, ‘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.’

  The tour ended in New York City in mid-October 1882. All in all, it had been a success. Oscar had earned himself a substantial sum (in excess of five thousand dollars, after expenses) and considerably raised his profile on both sides of the Atlantic. His mother wrote to him from London: ‘You are the talk of the town here. The cabmen ask me if I am somehow connected with you. The milkman has bought your picture! In fact nothing seems celebrated in London but you. I think you will be mobbed when you come back by eager crowds and will be obliged to shelter in cabs.’

  Oscar decided not to hurry home. He was enjoying being fêted in New York. ‘If my presence is advertised in advance,’ he reported to Lady Wilde with satisfaction, ‘the road is blocked by admiring crowds and policemen wait for me to clear a way. I now understand wh
y the Prince of Wales is in such good humour always: it is delightful to be a petit roi.’

  But Oscar stayed on in America for another reason. He was revelling in his present celebrity, certainly, but he was also making plans for the future. He had ideas for two plays that he wanted to write — period dramas that he hoped to see presented in New York the following year — and he was the recipient of an unusual literary commission from an unexpected source. The French actor-manager, Edmond La Grange, was preparing a new production of Hamlet and suggested to Oscar that he might like to assist him with the translation.

  Edmond La Grange was one of Oscar’s boyhood heroes. Oscar had seen him on stage in London and Dublin in several of his greatest roles. He had seen him in Paris, too, at the Théâtre La Grange on the boulevard du Temple, in Le Roi Lear. He had even met him once, briefly, on the seafront in Dieppe in August 1879. Oscar had felt emboldened to introduce himself because Oscar knew the actress Sarah Bernhardt — Oscar worshipped Sarah Bernhardt! — and Bernhardt and La Grange had recently appeared together in Molière’s Amphytrion. Now, in New York, in the autumn of 1882, Oscar got to know the great man. Oscar Wilde, aged twenty-eight, and Edmond La Grange, aged sixty, became friends.

  La Grange was in America doing what Sarah Bernhardt had done before him: taking the continent by storm. There were differences between the two great players, of course: Sarah’s storm was more spectacular than La Grange’s. La Grange was remarkable, but Sarah was divine. And Sarah was a woman. When Madame Bernhardt toured America in 1880, her personal luggage comprised forty costume crates and seventy trunks for her off-stage dresses, coats, hats, furs and fragrances, and her two hundred and fifty pairs of shoes. Monsieur La Grange travelled with three suitcases and a make-up box. Madame Bernhardt’s entourage included two maids, two cooks, a waiter, her maître d’hôtel and a bonne p’tite dame to act as companion and secretary. La Grange came with an elderly dresser and ‘Maman’, his eighty-two-year-old mother.

  Edmond La Grange’s repertoire was less extensive than Sarah Bernhardt’s — he brought five productions to America: she had brought eight — and his celebrity, his ‘star status’ as we call it now, could not rival hers. However, as actors, as masters of their craft, they were in the same league, and, according to the critics, his supporting company, though smaller, was superior to hers, and in New York, at Wallack’s Theater, playing in Molière, Racine and Corneille, in French, his takings equalled hers. And like Madame Bernhardt, Monsieur La Grange was paid in cash.

  It was perhaps surprising that Oscar’s and La Grange’s pathways had not crossed before. La Grange’s four-week Broadway season was the culmination of a four-month cross-continental tour and the great French actor and the young Irish aesthete were both appearing under the auspices of Richard D’Oyly Carte. Indeed it was Carte’s man, Colonel Morse, who eventually effected the introduction. ‘Edmond La Grange speaks damned good English, but he damn well refuses to do so,’ Morse complained to Oscar, chewing on the small cigar that appeared permanently fixed to the corner of his mouth. ‘La Grange maintains that French is the official language of diplomacy and therefore the only language to be used in international relations. Whenever I dine with him after the show, he jabbers away at me nineteen to the dozen and I can’t follow a word he’s saying. You speak French, Wilde. You can have dinner with him. You can talk to him. He’ll understand you. You might even understand him, God knows.’

  Edmond La Grange and Oscar Wilde understood one another well. They got on famously from the start. Oscar spoke fluent, flawless French, and was soaked in the culture and heritage of la belle France. He was honoured to have dinner with his hero and more than happy to talk with him. He was happier still to sit back, wide-eyed with admiration, listening to whatever the great man had to say. Oscar loved the rich, deep timbre of La Grange’s voice. Oscar revelled in the orotund, slightly archaic turns of phrase the actor employed. Oscar adored La Grange’s myriad theatrical stories: ‘They are full of base lies, of course, but they contain a higher truth.’ La Grange, at the time, was rising sixty-one, but he crackled with energy. He was not especially tall, but his posture was impeccable and his ‘presence’ undeniable. He was not especially slim, but he was loose-limbed and moved with a dancer’s grace. He had thick white hair swept back over a high, lined forehead. His face was weather-beaten, but he had a fine profile: strong cheekbones, a Roman nose and huge, humorous brown eyes. La Grange was an actor to his fingertips, as dramatic in his manner off stage as on, a gambler, a risk-taker, in love with the theatre, in love with life.

  La Grange and his company were set to return to Europe on the SS Bothnia on 27 December 1882. La Grange proposed to Oscar that he return to Europe on the same ship: it was steaming to Le Havre, via Liverpool: on the journey they could work together on their translation of Hamlet. And Oscar, learning that, while in America, La Grange’s old dresser — a faithful retainer who had been with the company for more than thirty-five years —had unfortunately died, proposed to La Grange that the Frenchman take on the young black valet, Traquair, as his new dresser. ‘I can vouch for him in every particular. He has laid out my shirts from Peoria to Pawtucket. He knows his business and you may trust him with your life. He has a face of jet and a heart of gold.’

  ‘Does he speak French?’ asked La Grange.

  ‘He speaks the language of devotion,’ answered Oscar.

  On the day of departure, Wednesday, 27 December 1882, Oscar was among the last passengers to board the ship. ‘Saying goodbye to a continent is not something that can be rushed,’ he explained. Besides, at the dockside there were admirers — and the press — to contend with. When, at last, as dusk was falling, he arrived on board, he found La Grange and his entourage already comfortably installed in the Bothnia’s grand saloon, drinking champagne. To Oscar’s surprise, there was an addition to the party. Standing immediately behind La Grange, leaning over his shoulder, whispering into his ear, was Oscar’s blue-eyed friend from Leadville, Colorado:

  Eddie Garstrang, the professional gambler.

  Garstrang straightened himself and bowed towards Oscar, quite formally.

  ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ asked Oscar in amazement.

  Edmond La Grange looked up at Oscar and smiled. ‘Monsieur Garstrang is my new personal secretary, Oscar. I won him at cards.’

  3

  Crossing the Atlantic

  It was true. Edmond La Grange had indeed ‘won’ Eddie Garstrang at cards. Oscar heard the whole story in less time than it took to drink a glass of champagne. As distant cheers went up on the main deck of the Bothnia and the ship’s siren sounded, and, in the background, stewards and porters bustled to and fro, La Grange sat in state, centre stage, surrounded by half a dozen members of his company (attendant lords and ladies), and told the tale. He told it with Gallic gusto, and extravagant hand gestures, while Garstrang stood sentinel, in silence, at his side.

  ‘You recall the Tabor Grand Opera House in Leadville, Colorado, Oscar?’ La Grange began. ‘A gem of a theatre with a perfect acoustic. We triumphed there, too, you know. Several months after your visit, towards the end of our tour, we played a week in Leadville — and to remarkably good business. The miners of the mid-West have a feeling for Molière as well as the English Renaissance, it seems.’ The sixty-year-old actor leant back in his chair and suddenly crossed and uncrossed his legs as if executing a little dance of delight. The attendant courtiers smiled. ‘After our first night — it was L’Avare and they loved it — I was taken down the street to the casino for a little celebration; and there it was that I met the redoubtable Monsieur Garstrang.’

  La Grange paused and looked up at his new secretary and raised his glass towards him. ‘We had a drink and we played cards. At Monsieur Garstrang’s suggestion we played a game that he called Bucking the Tiger. It was called Faro when I played it as a child. It’s a French game, invented to amuse Louis XIV. I played it with Monsieur Garstrang in Leadville, and I won. He seemed surprised. I was not.
I had just secured thirteen curtain-calls — I was on a winning streak that night.’ He beckoned a steward to refill his glass and he drank from it greedily.

  ‘The next night,’ La Grange continued, ‘I went back to the casino, and there was Monsieur Garstrang, waiting for me. We played again. I won again. We agreed to meet for a third night of cards, only this time Monsieur Garstrang proposed that we play poker. He said that it was a game born on the Mississippi River. We played — and he played well. But I played better. I won. And I won against the odds. That night I had given Leadville Le Cid and in the Rockies they don’t have quite the same appetite for Corneille as they do for Molière.’

  La Grange chuckled and drained his glass. ‘We met again, on each of the next three nights. We played poker again and each time we played we raised the stakes. Monsieur Garstrang played poker much as Sarah Bernhardt plays Phèdre — with terrifying intensity. He gave it his all. He was determined to recoup his losses. But even the divine Sarah sometimes loses a game. For six nights in succession Monsieur Garstrang lost and lost heavily. And on the Sunday morning, on the day of our departure from Leadville, he came to see me at my hotel. We took breakfast together and he told me that he could not pay me what he owed me. He told me that, in truth, he could not pay me one-tenth of what he owed me. He said that he owned a gun and could use it to shoot himself. I explained to him that my specialities are tragedy and comedy: melodrama is something I despise. And that’s when we came to our agreement.’

  ‘Your agreement?’ repeated Oscar, glancing between the great French actor and the pale-faced American who stood at his side.

  ‘As you know, I lost my dresser on this tour, Oscar. He died in Chicago. He was very old. Even when he was young, he was very old. But old Poquelin was more than a dresser to me. He was a friend. We played cards together — and he played well. When I act, I want to act with good actors. When I play cards, I want to play with the best. You have kindly found a new dresser for me, Oscar, and I’m grateful. I am hopeful that Traquair will give good service, but I doubt that he plays cards. Monsieur Garstrang plays cards. He is joining the Compagnie La Grange to be my secretary by day and to play cards with me by night.’