Wilde was charmed by the ‘little bare whitewashed room’ – with its big chair (for Whitman) and little stool (for himself), and its ‘pine table’ on which rested a copy of Shakespeare, a translation of Dante and ‘a cruse of water’. Winter sunlight filled the chamber ‘and over the roofs of the houses opposite were the masts of the ships that lay in the river’.8 If its austere simplicity made the room a fine setting for artistic creation, Wilde did also notice the piles of ‘newspaper cuttings’ littering many of the surfaces.9 Whitman, for all his vaunted naturalness, was an adept at courting the press. It was another bond between the two writers. They rapidly achieved an easy familiarity. When Whitman declared, ‘I shall call you Oscar,’ Wilde replied, ‘I like that so much.’10
Wilde sat at the older man’s feet (literally), and flattered him. ‘I have come to you as to one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle,’ he declared, telling of how his mother had read to him from Whitman’s work, and how he had taken Whitman’s books with him on his Oxford ‘rambles’. They talked of Tennyson and beauty and the practicalities of poetry. Whitman explained his own approach to ‘versification’ with ‘Well, you know I was at one time of my life a compositor, and when a compositor gets to the end of his stick, he stops short and goes ahead on the next line’ (Wilde subsequently introduced into his lecture the assertion that ‘in order to be a successful poet a man should learn to set type’).11 Wilde spoke of Rossetti and Morris, and of Swinburne (Whitman’s great champion in England), claiming a quite unfounded intimacy with the trio.12 And, seeking to use one connection to reinforce another, he offered to write to Swinburne, conveying Whitman’s compliments along with his photograph.*
Whitman found Wilde an engaging companion, later telling a reporter, ‘He seemed to me like a great big, splendid boy… so frank and outspoken, and manly.’ Moreover, as he confided to a friend, ‘he had the good sense to take a great fancy to me’.13 Wilde not only liked Whitman, he was awed by the natural grandeur of his spirit. Borrowing the estimate given by J. A. Symonds, he described him as ‘one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age… Strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet in modern times.’14 He recognized, though, with surprise and admiration that there was also an element of ‘poise’ in all this.15 The time raced by. Whitman made his guest a large glass of milk punch to soothe his thirst, and was impressed at the way he ‘tossed it off’. It was growing dark when Stoddart returned to collect his charge. The two poets parted with much friendly feeling, Whitman calling out, ‘Goodbye, Oscar, God bless you.’16
If the visit to Whitman was the highpoint, it was not the only interesting encounter of Wilde’s Philadelphia sojourn. Stoddart took Wilde to call on Fr Maturin at St Clement’s, his handsome neo-Romanesque church. The two Irish kinsmen enjoyed the meeting greatly, though Wilde declined his cousin’s offer to ‘put up’ at the clergy house, having glimpsed the ‘austere and somewhat meagre furnishings’ of the accommodation.17 There was a visit, too, to Florence Duncan, editor of the city’s leading literary and social magazine, Quiz. Although her publication had – until then – taken rather a satirical line on Wilde’s mission in America, Mrs Duncan was at once won over by the man, by his courtesy (in not referring to the magazine’s earlier attacks on him) and by the bright intelligence of his conversation. ‘He was at his best in talking of Keats,’ she reported in the next issue of her periodical. ‘A man who could talk about “The Ode to a Grecian Urn” as Mr. Wilde can, is a considerable distance from being a fool.’18
Having promised Rennell Rodd that he would try and find an American publisher for his volume of poems, Songs of the South, Wilde broached the topic with Stoddart. It was decided that the project could only work as an exercise in exclusivity. A plan was hatched to produce two choice – slightly amended – editions of the book, one ‘de luxe’ the other ‘ordinary’, but both aesthetically designed and graced with an ‘introduction’ by Wilde. Others, too, wanted Wilde to write for them. Robert Davis proposed a trio of articles from Wilde for Our Continent, touching on ‘Modern Aestheticism [as] Applied to Real Life’: one on ‘the Home’, one on ‘Costume’ and one on ‘What makes a masterpiece’. Although Davis was offering $100 per piece, Wilde was wary: an article was only paid for once; a lecture could be delivered many times.19
As a result he was more inclined to follow up Davis’s other suggestion, which was to use the same ‘practical’ template as the basis for a ‘second lecture’. After the ‘coldness’ of the Philadelphia audience, and his early difficulties in New York, Wilde was already recognizing the need to amend his talk. ‘The English Renaissance’ was perhaps too erudite, ‘too abstract’. Lady Wilde, reading reports back in England, certainly thought so: ‘Nothing to catch the attention,’ she declared; ‘give some personal descriptions’ of ‘modern celebrities… Ruskin, Mill, Carlyle.’20 More than this, on 19 January George Munro, publisher of the popular ‘Seaside Library’ pamphlet series, brought out a pirated edition of Wilde’s Poems, together with ‘His Lecture of the English Renaissance’. Pieced together from shorthand transcripts and press reports, this provided an all-but-full text of Wilde’s talk for just 10 cents.
In order to maintain an audience Wilde would certainly require a new lecture, and it would be well if it had a different slant. ‘The American people are nothing if not practical,’ Davis had explained:
They care little for the abstract, the rhetorical, the remote. But they are extremely ready to recognize and applaud the immediate, the practically useful. They ardently want instruction and cheerfully receive it. As a rule the education of audiences is superficial and their opportunities of art culture have been scanty. This must be taken into account. Our people are also impatient to apply what they learn. Whatever art-theory is laid down should be copiously illustrated by applications to daily life. This would teach them its meaning without effort.21
It was sound advice. And even if he had, for the moment, to persist with ‘The English Renaissance’, Wilde at once began to amend and cut it. Over the coming weeks he pruned away much of the theoretical argument and historical background, he introduced more colloquial asides and practical suggestions, and reduced the running time from almost two hours to an hour and a half.
The work of revision was already underway when, on 19 January, Wilde caught the train south from Philadelphia, heading for Washington. Morse had been obliged to return to New York, so arrangements for the trip were entrusted to an ‘office boy’. Wilde found himself sharing a Pullman coach with Archibald Forbes, who – coming to the end of his own American tour – had an engagement to lecture in Baltimore that evening. With their common attachment to the Carte Agency, and also to George Lewis, the two men greeted each other cordially.
Forbes, as a seasoned and able lecturer, was rather irritated at the fuss being made over Wilde. He had already written ungenerously to a friend back in England, that Wilde ‘can’t lecture worth a cent, but he draws crowds wonderfully and fools them all to the top of their bent – which is quite clever’. Convinced that Wilde only excited interest as a curiosity, he claimed – in an attempt at humour – that the circus impresario P. T. Barnum had asked him to appear as an ‘attraction’… along with ‘a baby elephant’, the king of the Zulus, and the body of Charles Guiteau (soon to be executed for assassinating President Garfield) – but only on condition that he always carried ‘in one hand a lily and in the other a sunflower’.22 † Forbes had also introduced into his own lecture facetious references to Wilde’s knee-breeches and love of sunflowers. And although they were mild enough, done largely in the hope of getting a laugh, they did carry a hint of disparagement.
During the course of the train journey his resentment may have been further increased by the fact that Wilde made a conquest of one of the two young women with whom Forbes was travelling. Joseph Pennell, recently graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, was also in the compartment, and – as he told h
is future wife, ‘you should have seen how [Wilde] literally fascinated a beautiful Baltimore girl – she was gone in five minutes’. Pennell himself had been almost as fascinated by Wilde’s conversation: ‘For more than half-an-hour,’ he reported,
I never heard a man talk as he did. There is no doubt of the fascination of his conversation, for unless he tells everyone the same things he told me it was simply wonderful, especially his descriptions of Whistler’s paintings… He has a way of getting close to you and looking right into your eyes and with his face about six inches from yours keeps up a sort of musical sound which you soon find out is his ordinary way of speaking.23
Nevertheless, when they reached Baltimore, Forbes and Wilde parted as friends. There had, at one time, been a plan that Wilde – together with Morse or Carte – might stop over in Baltimore, and attend Forbes’s lecture. But with Morse back in New York, and Carte having gone to Florida for his health, Wilde assumed the idea had been given up. He continued down to Washington. It was only that evening, having reached his hotel, that he learnt from a reporter that Baltimore had indeed been expecting him, and there was a rumour that his non-appearance had been caused by a disagreement with Forbes. Wilde scotched the idea, but was then surprised to receive a telegram from Morse urging him to return at once to Baltimore. It was, however, too late, and he was too tired.24
On the following day the reason for Morse’s dispatch became clear. Wilde was aghast to learn that there had been a large party prepared in his honour by a Mrs Carroll. It had had to be cancelled at the last moment, due to his non-arrival. There was also a malicious report abroad that Wilde had demanded a fee to attend a reception given by a Baltimore arts club. The whole city, it was claimed, was upset and offended.
The press worked hard to build up their story of a ‘miff’ between Wilde and Forbes. They ascribed various ‘sneering comments’ to both parties in an effort to support the story, and provoke further strife. And although neither Wilde nor Forbes rose immediately to the bait, the seeds of discord were sown. Wilde was moved to write to Forbes, asking if he might remove the jesting allusions to Aestheticism from his lecture (‘I feel bound to say quite frankly to you that I do not consider them to be either in good taste or appropriate to your subject’). Forbes took umbrage. His simmering irritation and ‘foolish’ jealousy came suddenly to the boil. In an ‘ecstasy of rage’ (as one observer put it) he lashed out at Wilde, refusing to ‘trim’ his lecture, and publicly denigrating Wilde’s motives for coming to America. Wilde’s understandable hope that he might earn money from his tour was twisted by Forbes into a supposed confession that he was only in America for ‘utterly mercenary’ reasons. Wilde attempted to defuse the situation, but it was too late. He was rudely rebuffed. Forbes then strove to lure his perceived rival into a newspaper controversy, and, failing that, resorted to making crude comments about him in the press. He only ceased on receiving a telegram (on 28 January) from George Lewis: ‘Like a good fellow don’t attack Wilde. I ask this as a personal favour to me.’25 But even then he kept up a clandestine campaign, feeding negative paragraphs about Wilde to the English papers.26
Certainly the whole affair was an upsetting distraction for Wilde during his time in Washington. Thanks to the good offices of Sam Ward, the American capital had been primed to receive Wilde graciously. Wilde was taken by the city, especially its ‘beautiful new houses in red brick’ with their ‘charming woodwork and balconies’.27 As in New York and Philadelphia, one splendid reception seemed to follow another: at the homes of Senator and Mrs George Pendleton, and Senator and Mrs Blaine, chez Edward G. Loring, at the exclusive Bachelors’ Club (where Wilde – so the papers reported – declined to join the dancing with the line, ‘I have dined, so I don’t dawnce. Those who dawnce don’t dine’). He attended a crowded meeting of the city’s literary club in the elegantly bohemian, sunflower-bedecked house of Dr Swann Burnett and his wife, Frances Hodgson Burnett.28
The schedule was exhausting. Wilde, always ‘on show’ and expected to perform, was rapidly coming to recognize that he needed to conserve his energies. He took to hiding away for at least part of any evening in his host’s study or ‘den’. In company he began to ration his efforts. ‘He says he never allows himself to be bored,’ one of Wilde’s admirers explained to a fellow party-guest. ‘He never disguises his annoyance and that gives him ample protection.’29 He needed it. At every gathering there were now those who resented Wilde’s apparent success. Following the most negative estimate of the American press in viewing him as a mercenary fraud, they were determined to show that they at least had not been taken in by his ‘vulgar’ antics.
It was perhaps at Washington that he was asked pointedly by one woman whether he had come to America ‘to amuse’ them. At his reply that he had come ‘rather to instruct’, she had remarked, ‘If that is your purpose, let me recommend that you wear your hair shorter and your trousers longer.’30 Certainly during his time in the capital he had to face a succession of challenging old maids and pert young misses. Abigail Dodge, referring to his espousal of Aestheticism, demanded bluntly, ‘How long is this joke going to last?’ (Wilde, although rather ‘staggered’ by the directness of the assault, replied ‘J-o-k-e? It is my life’).31 Caroline Healy Dall simply stared at him when they were introduced, and refused to offer her hand; while the pretty young Miss Nordhoff (daughter of the New York Herald correspondent) ‘with the deliberate intention that she should make him ridiculous’ asked, ‘Pray tell me, Mr Wilde, were you born great?’ Wilde replied, ‘Little girl, you had better go and get some ice cream.’32
A few Washington figures exerted themselves to avoid Wilde altogether. Clover, the wife of Henry Adams, boasted that she had ‘escaped his acquaintance’. She had told Henry James, who was also over from London and visiting Washington, ‘not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde [to her home] when he comes’ – adding ‘I must keep out thieves and noodles’. Although whether she considered Wilde a thief – for borrowing the ideas of Ruskin, Morris and others – or a ‘noodle’ (a fool), for parading about in knee-breeches, is unclear.33
The thirty-nine-year-old Henry James was scarcely a ‘friend’ of Wilde’s, though the chances of London’s cultural life had brought them together. Their differences were unlikely to attract: James was diligent, diffident and discreet while Wilde was effusive, effeminate and attention seeking. Although James could not but be flattered by Wilde’s admiration for his work (Wilde told an American reporter that ‘no living Englishman’ could be compared with the American-born James as a novelist) he seems to have found the younger man a disturbing presence, both personally and professionally. There was an odd savour of spite in his remark, to the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, that he had seen, at the Lorings’, ‘the repulsive and fatuous Oscar Wilde, whom, I am happy to say, no one was looking at’. The claim, apart from anything else, was completely false. The Lorings’ daughter, Harriet, gave a vivid account of how Wilde had ‘burst upon’ the gathering – ‘tights, yellow handkerchief and all’; and although he might have looked decidedly ‘gruesome’, it was at once clear that he was also ‘very amusing’: ‘Full of Irish keenness and humour and really interesting’ – and ‘very unaffected’. Her father, she reported, as well as other guests, had thought so too. By contrast she had found Henry James – the other ‘lion’ of the evening – dull, ‘very well meaning but very slow minded’ and wanting altogether the ‘divine spark’.34
James was too perceptive not to be aware that such comparisons could be made. He knew that he was no match for Wilde as a conversationalist – or as a draw. A huge crowd turned out to hear Wilde’s Washington lecture at the Lincoln Hall on the evening of 23 January; and if some of the reviews carped at his poor delivery, they agreed that what he said was ‘interesting’ and how he said it ‘decidedly eloquent’. They enjoyed his topical allusions, especially his remark that, although sculpture was the art for Washington, ‘I think you have taken quite enough motives from war. You don’t want any
more bronze generals on horseback, I dare say.’35
Such successes left James confused, disapproving and perhaps even slightly envious. He continued his shrill disparagements, calling Wilde ‘a fatuous fool and a tenth rate cad’, even ‘an unclean beast’. But he clearly relished Wilde’s line about Washington’s ‘bronze generals’: he later adopted it as his own.36 And he took the trouble to call on Wilde at his hotel on the day after his lecture. His motives remain unclear. Perhaps he was intrigued to discover the commercial realities of a new literary world in which a ‘writer’ with only one slim volume of poems to his credit could be launched on an international lecture tour.37 Wilde, unaware, of James’s animus, was overflowing with spirits. He irritated his guest with talk of ‘Bosston’. And when James remarked that he was nostalgic for London, Wilde irritated the great traveller and expatriate even more, by replying, ‘Really? You care for places? The world is my home.’38
The world certainly seemed to be opening up for Wilde. From Washington – piloted securely once more by Morse – he progressed to Baltimore, where he mollified the populace with his contrition and his enthusiasm for Edgar Allan Poe. From Maryland he went to Albany (state capital of New York), and on to Boston, before looping back to New York, with further lectures at New Haven, Hartford and Brooklyn.
Oscar Page 30
