Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Such importunate ‘interviewing’ was entirely unknown in British journalism, and Wilde was taken aback. Nevertheless he maintained an admirable equanimity. The reporters were impressed by his easy grace, and his slow periods, with their peculiar emphasis on every fourth syllable. They were impressed, too, by his powerful physique (so very different from the popular image of the wilting aesthete), by his fur-trimmed Ulster, by his ultra ‘Byronic’ shirt collar; they even admired his teeth. And they enjoyed the ready laugh (a succession of broad ‘haw, haw, haws’) that punctuated his conversation.2

  The whole interrogation lasted barely ten minutes; deadlines for the next day’s editions allowed no more. Wilde’s answers had been bald, vague and brief. But, as the newspapermen were returning to their boat, various other passengers offered their asides on Wilde’s time on board. One mentioned that, after five days out at sea, Wilde had said to a gentleman with whom he was promenading the deck, ‘I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic. It is not so majestic as I expected. The roaring ocean does not roar. I would like to see a storm arrive and sweep the bridge from off the ship.’ This was more like it.

  The anecdote, appearing in several of the New York papers the following morning, captured the public imagination. ‘Oscar Wilde Disappointed with the Atlantic’ soon became a headline on both sides of that ocean, calling forth any number of satirical verses and sardonic commentaries over the coming weeks. ‘What,’ various papers wanted to know, ‘did the Atlantic think of Oscar Wilde?’3 The incident gave Wilde a first lesson in the workings of the American press, and its need for the quotable comment. It also served to portray him – at the moment of his arrival – as a humorous contrarian, rather than a sober scholar, a man calculated to amuse or annoy, depending on the taste of the listener.

  The next morning when the Arizona docked at its North River pier, there were more reporters waiting on the quayside, along with Colonel Morse and a bevy of interested ‘admirers’. While battling with the porter who was mishandling his luggage, Wilde gamely fielded further journalistic attempts to get him to ‘define’ and illustrate Aestheticism: ‘Where,’ asked one reporter, ‘is the beauty in that striking grain elevator which is the chief object in New Jersey’s landscape across the river there?’ Wilde excused himself on the grounds that he was too near sighted to see it.4

  From all this he was rescued by Morse, who whisked him off through the crowded streets of Manhattan to breakfast and the peace of a hotel suite.5* New York in scale and aspect was something entirely new to Wilde, with its broad grid-patterned streets, its towering buildings (some over ten stories high), its din and bustle. ‘Everybody’, Wilde later recalled, ‘seems in a hurry to catch a train.’ It appeared affluent, too, the people conspicuously well dressed, with an ‘air of comfort’ about them.6

  From the moment of his arrival, Wilde was treated as a celebrity. It was a new and delightful experience – very different from what he was used to in London. His New York lecture was not until the following week, on 9 January; in the meantime Morse was concerned to manage his charge carefully, maintaining his profile in the press, and his mystery with the public. Wilde was instructed not to ‘parade in the streets’. If he had shopping to do it should be done from a carriage that had been specially put at his disposal. ‘He should not make himself too common.’7 One of the first calls Morse directed Wilde to make was on Mrs Frank Leslie, the handsome widowed proprietress of a string of American papers. She was ready to offer the support of her various publications. When Wilde complained to her of being swarmed by ‘horrible reporters’ before he had even disembarked, and told her that he had ‘turned his back’ on them, she reproached him: ‘There you made a mistake, Mr. Wilde. If you come to America you must recognize the interviewer is a powerful institution. You represent to him so much capital. His business is to interview, the same as it is yours to lecture. If you don’t speak to him, he must earn his money all the same, and will write something which is certainly not likely to be complimentary.’8

  It was good advice and Wilde strove to follow it. But how should he present himself? He fully accepted that a certain amount of ‘bunkum’ might be necessary to promote his name in America, and to win him an audience. He was not averse to the double game being played by Carte, Morse and co. He had, after all, adopted the very ploy to establish his reputation in London, and he enjoyed many of its aspects. Nevertheless he chose to regard his ‘mission’ to America seriously, and he hoped others would do so too. His early interviews were full of earnest pronouncements about the nature of art. And there were plenty of them.

  Wilde joked that during his first week in New York there had been ‘about a hundred’ interview requests ‘a day’.9 Morse sought to ease the burden by moving Wilde out of his hotel to the seclusion of a ‘private apartment’ on 28th Street. The address was supposed to be kept secret, but a journalist for the New York Star very ‘shabbily’ printed it in his paper – having received a letter of introduction from Wilde. Despite the ‘great annoyance’ caused by this (interviewers soon appeared on the doorstep) the place was calm enough to allow Wilde to put the finishing touches to his lecture.10 He worked hard on the text. It was one thing to be the living embodiment of Aestheticism, another to try and define it. He was also able to fulfil his guinea-a-line commission for Our Continent, dispatching two twelve-line ‘Impressions’ in his best new Whistlerian manner: one (‘Le Jardin’) describing, as required, both the ‘lily’s withered chalice’ and the ‘gaudy leonine sunflower’, the other (‘La Mer’) giving a vision of the sea at night.11

  Ever since it had been announced that Wilde would be coming to America, photographers there had been vying for the right to take – and market – his photograph. Morse gave the commission to Napoleon Sarony. It was an excellent choice. The diminutive artist – barely five feet tall, with his huge nose, impressive moustache and habitual fez – had a rare ability to create dramatically compelling images of celebrities. All the stage stars came to his studio. Two years previously he had taken a series of memorable publicity shots of Sarah Bernhardt at the start of her American tour.

  A sitting was arranged for 5 January. The tiny photographer was delighted by his outsize sitter with his flowing hair, fur-trimmed coat and white walking-cane. ‘Here,’ he declared, ‘is a picturesque subject indeed.’

  Wilde had some experience of being photographed, and he had been adopting extravagant poses for much of his life. But in Sarony he found an artist ready to encourage him to new heights. The two men collaborated on an extraordinary series of images, fixing Wilde as the epitome of unconventional, self-assured, poetical genius – his long hair boldly parted in the middle, his eyes staring soulfully into the distance, glancing at the viewer, scanning the far horizon. There were several changes of costume, but in all save a handful of the pictures, Wilde was wearing his elegant and distinctive black knee-breeches.

  At this first session some twenty-four exposures were made, Sarony taking ‘extraordinary pains’ over the postures: he danced about, keeping up a constant strain of small talk, while ‘turning out the edges of [Wilde’s] Ulster, turning back this corner, smoothing out a line here and a line there, turning the subject’s hands this way and that way, putting him at side view, full face, three-quarters standing, sitting, his legs disposed so, and again so’, as he strove for the best effect.12

  Sarony had paid Bernhardt $1,500 for the privilege of taking her photograph, confident of recouping the amount against sales. And – with press interest rising – he was ‘glad to pay as much for Wilde’.13 Morse guaranteed Sarony exclusivity: the pictures he produced would be the only photographic representations of Wilde available during the period of his visit. They would fix Wilde’s image for the American public, and fix it as something flamboyant, fine and very different. Sarony considered that ‘he had never done such good photographic work before’.14

  Photography sessions and interviews were not Wilde’s only promotional obligations. There was also the stage-manag
ed ‘bunkum’ of his attending a performance of Patience to be seen to. It was arranged for the evening of 5 January. Wilde caused a flurry of excitement, arriving in the private box together with a fashionable party, midway through the first act. Beneath his fur-trimmed Ulster he was in evening dress. Morse had ensured that a reporter from the New York Tribune was also in the group. He was able to record that, as Bunthorne came on stage, ‘the whole audience turned and looked at Mr. Wilde’. Wilde – seemingly unconcerned by the scrutiny – was primed, with an epigrammatic line, borrowed from his lecture, at the ready. Leaning, with a smile, towards one of the ladies in the party, he said, in a voice loud enough for the Tribune man to hear, ‘This is one of the compliments mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.’15 At the interval Wilde drew more attention to himself by going backstage and affably congratulating the company.16 After the show the crowd lingering to catch sight of him as he left the theatre was so great that he had to ‘beat a retreat through the back door’.17

  Amid the succession of promotional duties there was also much social distraction. New York society had a reputation of generosity towards, and curiosity about, visiting celebrities. And Morse’s press campaign ensured that Wilde arrived as a celebrity. He came, moreover, with his myriad letters of introduction, and even a few established American connections. From the moment of his arrival invitations crowded in upon him: to an afternoon tea given by Mrs Augustus Hayes (wife of a dilettante travel writer); to dinner chez Mrs John Bigelow (wife of the former American ambassador to London); to an evening party at the 5th Avenue apartment of the wealthy Mrs Paran Stevens; to a literary reception hosted by the society journalist Mrs D. G. Croly (aka ‘Jennie June’) in honour of Louisa M. Alcott – and ‘Oscar Wilde’.

  Even here the potential for publicity was not ignored. Morse understood that Wilde’s social cachet would be part of his appeal to the wider public: his appearances in the salons and drawing rooms of Manhattan were assiduously recorded by the press:

  During the reception [given by Mrs Hayes] Mr. Wilde stood in the middle parlor, and back of him was a gigantic Japanese umbrella, covered with grotesque figures of gayly colored paper. The long, thick, bamboo handle rested on the floor under a table at Mr. Wilde’s left, and protected him on that flank. On the other side was the partition dividing the two parlors, and in the inclosure thus formed Mr. Wilde remained, like a heathen idol, most of the time between three and six p.m… His posture was full of grace, and strongly brought to mind the pictures seen in Punch, with the element of caricature of course left out… At one happy moment Mr. Wilde advanced a little from the seclusion made by the rod of the Japanese umbrella and the partition, and was instantly surrounded by ladies, who stood grouped in the form of a horseshoe, with the heels of the shoe represented by Mrs. John Bigelow and the Marquise Lanza.18

  It was claimed that Wilde’s manager ‘carefully scrutinized’ the guest lists to ensure only the ‘supremest cream of New York society’ was invited to meet his protégé. There was some exaggeration in this: New York’s grandest families, the Astors, Vanderbilts and their ilk, did not engage.19 Nevertheless it was a bright and fashionable crowd that welcomed Wilde to New York. In London, he had won a place in society, but as an eccentric and minor element – a curiosity. Here, though still a curiosity, he was the star and guest of honour. It was a new experience, and a delicious one. He wrote elatedly to George Lewis’s wife, ‘I now understand why the Royal Boy [the Prince of Wales] is in good humour always: it is delightful to be a petit roi.’20

  There remained, however, an anxiety. He had yet to deliver his lecture. Much depended upon his performance. Although Morse had already made provisional bookings for lectures in several other cities, definite plans would not be announced until after the test of his New York opening had been passed. As Wilde confided to Mrs Lewis: ‘If I am not a success on Monday, I shall be very wretched.’21

  The debut was scheduled for eight o’clock, at Chickering Hall on the corner of 5th Avenue and West 18th Street. The advertised title of the talk was, rather soberly, ‘The English Renaissance’; the word ‘Aestheticism’ had been eschewed. Nevertheless Morse’s marketing had been effective. The house was full, with over a thousand tickets sold at a dollar each. Most had been drawn by an ‘amused curiosity’ to see the much-talked-of young man. But, as the New York Tribune reported, there were also some devotees: ‘aesthetic and pallid young men with banged hair… leaning in mediaeval attitudes’ around the side walls of the stalls. The stage was dressed simply: an iron lecture-stand flanked by two chairs, set on a oriental rug, with a brown screen suspended from the ceiling, providing a plain backdrop.

  Waiting backstage for the auditorium to fill, Colonel Morse was impressed by Wilde’s air of calm (very different from many, more seasoned, performers). At around ten minutes past eight, the gaslights in the auditorium flared to full brightness, the audience broke into applause, and Wilde and Colonel Morse strode onto the stage. Wilde instantly drew all eyes, with his commanding height, his flowing hair, his black velvet ‘claw hammer coat’ and, most extraordinary of all, his Bunthorne-esque knee-breeches. He seemed a vision of artistic unconventionality. He and Morse settled themselves on the two chairs. The applause – mingled with some ‘tittering’ – quieted. Wilde was seen to flush slightly. There was then an awkward pause while some late-comers had to be seated. Wilde became the focus for ‘batteries of opera glasses’ as the details of his ‘picturesque’ costume were scrutinized. The breeches commanded the most attention. But then there was the large white necktie; the white waistcoat (from the pocket of which hung a heavy gold seal); the large diamond shirt-stud; the black stockings; the low-sided shoes ‘with bows’. The surprising absence of a buttonhole was noted. ‘Open and frank curiosity’, however, soon began to give way to ‘whispered comments’ and even some ‘veiled sarcasms’. The awkward silence lengthened. ‘Someone chuckled. This was followed by laughter from the rear of the hall.’ Morse registered, with dismay, a critical – ‘almost hostile’ – edge to the audience.

  The tittering increased, and was threatening to grow ‘to the full strength of a general laugh’, when Colonel Morse rose, stepped forward and announced to a suddenly silent house, ‘I have the honour to introduce to you Oscar Wilde, the English poet, who will deliver his lecture upon the English Renaissance.’ With a bow he then left the stage. Wilde, drawing out the dramatic moment, remained ‘calmly seated’ surveying the audience. Recognizing a lady in the stalls, he nodded to her. Then he rose and advanced to the lectern, rather dwarfing it with his size. Placing his manuscript upon the stand, he grasped the sides of the lectern, raised his eyes towards the ceiling, and began: ‘Among the many debts we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty of Goethe, is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete possible, to realize it, I mean, always in its special manifestations…’

  His voice, as one newspaper reported, ‘might have come from the tomb’. Wilde’s diction – so compelling and musical in the drawing room – became oddly flat and monotone as he read from the platform. ‘So in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver before you,’ he ploughed on, ‘I will not try to give you any abstract definition of beauty… but rather [try] to point out to you the general ideas which characterize the great English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as far as that is possible, and to estimate their future, as far as that is possible.’ He had chosen to call it ‘our English Renaissance’ because it was ‘indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire to produce a type of general culture, its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments’.

  This was not ‘Bunthorne in the flesh’. The tenor was serious, the ideas abstract, the argument involved. He began to trace the genesis of the new
artistic spirit, and new ‘expression of beauty’, from their origins in the ferment of the French Revolution up to time of the Pre-Raphaelites and their heirs. He sought to explain the movement’s character as a combination of the two great ‘forms of the human spirit’: Hellenism and Romanticism, the one with its calm ‘possession of beauty’, the other with its ‘intensified individualism’. The appeals to authority were many: Goethe was soon followed by Mazzini, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Rousseau, Shelley, Swinburne, Blake, Michelangelo, Dürer, Homer, Dante, Keats, William Morris, Chaucer, Theocritus, Cardinal Newman, Emerson, André Chenier, Byron, Napoleon and Phydias.

  The effect ‘was fast becoming painful’. A ‘grim silence’ reigned over the crowd. But then, coming to the artists inspired by the poetry of Keats, Wilde paused and smiled, ‘And these Pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the British public what is the meaning of the word aesthetics, they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado.’ At this there was a great laugh. It was a laugh of relief as much as amusement, and the relief was shared by the lecturer. He was much ‘gratified’ at the reception of his joke. The mood was changed. From thereon, as Morse put it, Wilde ‘found good sailing’. The sepulchral atmosphere was banished. The ‘novel and picturesque’ eloquence of Wilde’s style began to take hold, as the lecture unfolded – and he mapped out a vision of art for art’s sake, in which creative and imaginative work should be free from either political arguments or moral responsibilities.

  The success of his first quip was followed by others. Wilde’s claim that the early Pre-Raphaelites ‘had on their side three things that the English public never forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm’ provoked loud applause. His mot about ‘satire being the homage which mediocrity pays to genius’ (already delivered in the box at the Standard Theatre) was appreciated again. So too was his assertion that ‘to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt’. A burst of clapping, much of it said to come from the Irish element in the audience, attended his observation that the ‘commercial spirit of England’ had destroyed the ‘beautiful national life’ of the country, thus reducing the possibilities for great drama, that ‘meeting place of art and life’.