His real enthusiasm lay elsewhere. It was as a playwright that he still wished to succeed. To support this ambition he had asked Morse, at the end of the summer, to resume the search for an actress or a producer who might bring Vera to the stage. First, in order to establish US copyright for the piece, Wilde paid for a small edition of the new, amended, text (with ‘Prologue’), to be printed and registered under Morse’s name at the Library of Congress. Copies were then dispatched to the actress Rose Coghlan, as well as to theatre managers in New York and Boston. After a month, though, he had received no very positive response.4
Impatient for success, Wilde also began work on a new theatrical project. He was keen to take up the idea of writing a Shakespearean verse-drama set during the Renaissance. He mapped out a scenario about ‘The Cardinal of Avignon’ – a prelate consumed with love for his beautiful young ward – and even produced some pages of dialogue. But then another notion took hold.5 Over the summer Wilde had sought out the hugely popular twenty-two-year-old actress Mary Anderson, who had a holiday home at Long Branch. Wilde had met Anderson in New York, and seen her act. He had been impressed by her talent, reportedly characterizing her as ‘pure and fearless as a mountain daisy; full of change as a river; tender fresh, sparkling, brilliant, superb, placid’.6 He had also remarked in the press that she was ‘a very beautiful woman’ – ever a useful prelude to befriending an actress.7 Wilde conceived the idea of writing a play as a showcase for her talents. It was to be a tragedy – with a commanding heroine – set in Renaissance Italy.8
The actual story – of the ‘Duchess of Florence’ (or ‘The Duchess of Padua’ as she was soon renamed) and her ill-fated love for a young courtier – existed only as a broad outline, and Wilde, seeking to bind Anderson to the project, insisted that he needed her collaborative input on the ‘scenario’. ‘All good plays’, he told her, ‘are a combination of the dream of the poet and that practical knowledge of the actor which gives concentration to action, which intensifies situation, and for poetic effect, which is description, substitutes dramatic effect, which is Life.’9 There were meetings and discussions. With his distinctive blend of flattery and optimistic enthusiasm Wilde strove to sweep her along: ‘I want you to rank with the great actresses of the earth [and] I doubt not for a moment that I can and will write for you a play which, created for you, and inspired by you, shall give you the glory of a Rachel [the celebrated early nineteenth-century French actress], and may yield me the fame of a [Victor] Hugo.’10 Wilde hoped that Anderson would, at once, purchase the play from the elaborated scenario, and commit to appearing in it. But, though she was clearly engaged by the idea, her enthusiasm was held in check by the counsels of her stepfather and agent, Hamilton Griffin. He was not to be rushed.
Wilde kept up the attack throughout September, sending Anderson ideas and sketches for costumes and scenery. He had, too, the support of a newfound ally. During his time in New York Wilde had come to know the visionary and indefatigable Steele Mackaye (playwright, producer, teacher, theatre manager, inventor and designer). They had met often in the bohemian setting of New York’s Lambs Club. Although in his forties, Mackaye had a youthful energy and a torrential eloquence to match even Wilde’s. He was an Aesthete too. He had studied painting in Paris, and was fascinated by stage design. He was also an innovator: among his many theatrical ‘inventions’ were the safety curtain, tip-up seats, indirect lighting, moveable stages, and the ‘nebulator’ – a machine for making onstage clouds. With more sense of style than economy, his various business ventures rarely prospered. In 1881 he had been ousted from his own extravagantly refurbished Madison Square Theatre by exasperated business partners. When Wilde met him, Mackaye was trying to raise funds for a new ‘Dream Theatre’ – a vast hotel-theatre complex to be constructed on the corner of Broadway and 33rd Street (neither the funds nor the theatre ever materialized).
A warm friendship was formed between the two men. Mackaye at once recognized Wilde’s talent – or potential – as a dramatist. He was greatly excited by the idea of a verse tragedy set in the Italian Renaissance, with Mary Anderson in the title role, and he proposed himself as designer-director. Anderson, for her part, seems to have been excited at the prospect of working with Mackaye. At a meeting with ‘the lovely creature’ and her guard, ‘the Griffin’, Wilde sold them the idea. ‘I told them [Wilde wrote to Mackaye] that you might be induced to accept the superintendence and management of the production… I explained that you must have absolute control of everything and everybody. They agreed.’ Anderson expressed a desire to have the production ready for 22 January. She recognized the need for lavish scenery and costumes. Mackaye estimated the costs of the production at $10,000; to Wilde’s delight Anderson announced that she was ‘ready to spend any money on it’.11
Despite this apparently satisfactory meeting, there were the further inevitable delays to be encountered, before a definite agreement could be reached with ‘the Griffin’. He was ‘a brute’, Wilde complained, ‘a padded horror, with nothing but the showman’s idea’ – in contrast to the ‘simple and good and tractable’ Mary Anderson.12 Wilde tried to precipitate matters by claiming – with what truth it is not known – that a rival actor, Lawrence Barrett, had made ‘a very large offer for the play’.13 And perhaps the ploy helped matters along. Anderson duly confirmed her commitment to the piece, but suggested that the production should be put off until the following September to give it more scope for ‘a long run’.14
It was a minor frustration: ‘Of course one is impatient in one’s youth,’ Wilde wrote to her, ‘but I am quite ready to wait a year in order to make our play the success it is entitled to be.’15 It took, though, almost eight more weeks for Wilde and Griffin ‘to come to terms’. A fee of $5,000 (giving Anderson outright ownership of the play ‘for ever’) was agreed, with Wilde to receive an advance of $1,000, and the rest once ‘Miss Anderson’ had received and accepted the work. A delivery date was set: Griffin’s draft contract suggested 1 March 1883; Wilde put it back until the end of that month. The contract marked a huge step for Wilde towards achieving his great ambition to have a play produced upon the professional stage. It merely remained for him to write what the document called, ‘a first class five-act tragedy’.16
Wilde’s agreement with Anderson, and the schedule it committed him to, convinced him to set aside plans for lecturing in Australia, at least for the time being. The decision proved wise, as Wilde’s first theatrical contract was soon followed by another. Mackaye, not content with working on plans for The Duchess of Padua, was also taking an interest in Vera. Wilde had given him a copy of the newly printed edition of the play, and though MacKaye thought the piece still needed some work, he was excited about its possibilities. He approached various actresses with a view to producing it.17 The most encouraging response came from the controversy loving young star, Marie Prescott.
In early November the twenty-nine-year-old Prescott, together with her husband, William Perzel, met Wilde and Mackaye over breakfast at Delmonico’s to discuss the project. She was impressed with the play – although, like everyone else, she thought some changes would be necessary. A New York production was mooted for the following year. The details of the contract needed to be ironed out, and Perzel proved an even less tractable negotiator than ‘the Griffin’, but it seems that Wilde received an ‘oral assurance’ from the actress ‘that all would be well’.18
These theatrical schemes kept Wilde in America as the winter advanced. His mother wondered whether he was ever coming home; the American press wondered whether he was ever going to leave. They ensured he was in New York when Lillie Langtry arrived, on 23 October, to make her American stage debut. He greeted her with lilies and squired her about the city. He was on hand to console her when the Park Theatre burnt down on the eve of her opening there. Surveying the conflagration from the windows of Langtry’s apartment, he remarked on its beauty.19
With Langtry’s company hastily relocated to Wallack’s Theatre, Wilde w
as commissioned to write, for the New York World, not a review of the opening night but an Aesthetic appreciation of the leading lady. He produced some dozen paragraphs eulogizing the perfection of her ‘pure Greek’ face – ‘the grave low forehead, the exquisitely arched brow; the noble chiseling of the mouth’, and so on. And to those ‘Philistines’ who might contend that ‘to be absolutely perfect is impossible’, he countered, ‘it is only the impossible things that are worth doing nowadays!’20
The two friends were delighted to see each other again. There was much laughter when they were together. J. E. Kelly recalled Langtry teasing Wilde about his ‘wavy locks’.21 When it was learnt that Wilde had been taking acting lessons from Steele Mackaye – studying Hamlet on the ‘Delsartian system’ (a method developed by the French actor François Delsarte, which used stylized gestures to communicate emotional experiences) – the press speculated excitedly that he was planning to appear as the Prince opposite Langtry’s Ophelia. Or perhaps as Orlando to her Rosalind in As You Like It.22 Lady Wilde was thrilled at the notion. ‘You would be a charming Orlando,’ she told him. ‘Try it. £100 a night… Orlando and Romeo – you and [Mrs Langtry] would make fabulous scenes.’ The plan, however, was never taken up, and there is no evidence that Wilde ever entertained any real thespian ambitions.23
Langtry, moreover, was soon drawn off by those familiar masculine currents of power, money and sex that always swirled about her. The imbalance in her relationship with Wilde reasserted itself. Besieged by suitors from the ‘fast set’, she took up with the wealthy young broker and horseman, Freddie Gebhard, provoking comment in the press and a break with Henriette Labouchère, who had accompanied her to America. She was already moving out of Wilde’s orbit before she left for Boston, at the beginning of December, to continue her theatrical tour.
Wilde, though, was able to console himself with his own advancing theatrical plans, and with the distractions of New York life. The grand receptions that had greeted his arrival were replaced with more intimate and bohemian gatherings: studio visits and convivial club dinners among poets, artists, actors and writers.24 Sam Ward secured him guest privileges at the Manhattan Club. There were literary jaunts: with Theodore Tilton (Henry Ward Beecher’s would-be nemesis) he visited ‘the old room, overlooking the Hudson’, where Poe had written ‘The Raven’.25
If Wilde was no longer the novelty he had been, his appearance could still attract attention. As the temperature dropped he adopted a conspicuous ‘high buttoned coat with rolling collar and big lapels’, such as was worn by the eighteenth-century ‘Incroyables’.26 He was ‘nearly mobbed’ when he attended the Grand Opera one evening (the ‘b’hoys’ in the gallery ‘hooted and yelled at him in the most disgraceful way’), and his visit to the stock exchange provoked such a display of ‘good natured derision’ that he had to escape by a back door.27 He witnessed the ‘contest of beauty’ at Bunnell’s Museum, but did not cast a vote for any of the beauties on view – perhaps because none of them was sufficiently ‘Greek’.28 He flirted with Marie Jansen, the pretty dark-haired actress who had just opened at the Standard Theatre in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe.* He made another visit to Philadelphia.29 And, on 27 November, he even delivered a final New York lecture at the Parepa Hall.30
These last two commitments gave at least a notional fillip to his finances. Some thousand people attended his New York talk. And during his stay in Philadelphia he received, from the wealthy and artistic Mrs Bloomfield Moore, several shares in one of her pet projects: ‘Keely’s Perpetual Motion Company’ (although Wilde lived in the hope that they might yield him a fortune, Keely’s invention proved to be a hoax).31 Money was needed. A regime of living in hotels or rented apartments, of dining out every day and attending the theatre most evenings, was expensive. And although Wilde’s summer and autumn lecture tours had brought him perhaps over $1,000 – and Mary Anderson had paid him the same amount again – he was making substantial inroads into his earnings.32 Always generous when in funds, he lent Mackaye $200 from the money advanced on the Duchess.33 Matters, though, could have been very much worse.
On 14 December Wilde was duped into a rigged dice game by a young man posing as Tony Drexel (son of A. J. Drexel, the noted banker and partner of J. P. Morgan). After winning initially, Wilde began to lose – and in an attempt to recoup his losses, lost more. As the afternoon wore on his cash was soon exhausted and he was obliged to write three successive cheques – for $60, $100 and $1,000 – in order to cover his losses. As he was signing the last cheque it (finally!) dawned on him that he was being fleeced. Making his excuses, and shaking off ‘Mr Drexel’ – who tried to leave with him – he leapt into a cab and raced to the Madison Square Bank, where he stopped payment on the three cheques. He then went to the 30th Street police station, confessing to the sympathetic officer that he had made ‘a damned fool’ of himself. On being taken through the photographic ‘rogues gallery’ of noted criminals, Wilde at once pointed out ‘Mr Drexel’ – who was readily identified by the officer as the notorious conman, ‘Hungry Joe’ Sellick. Despite the urging of the policeman, Wilde declined to prosecute. He claimed he had been ‘advertised enough, and didn’t want the American public to know he had been taken in by a shark’. And, perhaps won by Wilde’s frankness and contrition, the officer – uncharacteristically – did not release the story to the press.34
On top of this debacle Wilde’s health gave way. He suffered from an attack of ‘malaria’, perhaps contracted during his tour of the south. He considered it ‘an aesthetic disease’, but confessed to a reporter that it was ‘a deuced nuisance’.35 The time had come to go home. He booked a passage for Liverpool on the SS Bothnia, departing on 27 December.
Rumours of Wilde’s run-in with the ‘Bunco’ conmen had begun to leak out before he left the country. Approached at Delmonico’s on Christmas Eve by a reporter wanting to know if it were true that he had been swindled out of $1,000, Wilde confounded the man by answering cryptically (after a long drag on his cigarette), ‘I should object to losing $1,000, but I should not object to have it known if I had done so.’36
In a valedictory interview, the ever-disobliging New York Tribune claimed that Wilde had admitted that ‘his mission to our barbaric shores had been substantially a failure’ – and certain elements of the press were happy to support this notion.37 But if Wilde had not exactly changed America, he had made his mark. And, no less importantly, America had changed him. He had enjoyed an extraordinary year: of travel, of independence, of new sights and new sensations. He had more than achieved his ambition of ‘Fame’. He had made his ideas known across a continent. He had earned a substantial amount of money – and spent a large part of it. He had been feted and fussed over. He had met Whitman and Longfellow. And he had secured the interest of two leading actresses in his two dramatic projects.
* There is a charming letter from the actress, which reveals how Wilde’s own sense of fun called forth the sense of fun in others: ‘Dear Mr. Wilde, Upon hearing that murderers were the only people you conversed with – who did not bore you – I at once determined to make myself worthy of a chat or quarrel with you. All my leisure time has been employed in looking for a victim, but in vain – haven’t found a good first class one yet. Words cannot express my regret at having to confess my failure.’
-PART V-
The Devoted
Friend
1883–1888
age 28–34
Oscar Wilde on the Isle of Wight, 1884.
1
Over the Seine
‘I ought to be putting black upon white – black upon white.’
oscar wilde
The return crossing was a rough one. Wilde was obliged to admit that his previous criticism of the Atlantic had been ‘possibly somewhat harsh’, and he was glad to reach England. Even as he landed he was overflowing with traveller’s tales, rich in ‘originality and graphic eccentricity’. In his own mind he was arriving home as a conquering hero, an estimate shared by his m
other, with whom he stopped in London.1 A consultation was arranged with Edwin Levy about his finances, which were not as healthy as everyone supposed. He had spent heavily during his last months in New York, and back in England old debts were still being called in.2 But there was enough for his planned sojourn in Paris, and the prospect – once he had completed the script for Mary Anderson – of more to come.
During his few days in London he saw ‘a great deal of Jimmy [Whistler]’, perhaps wanting to be acknowledged for his tireless championing of the artist in America. Certainly he returned to Tite Street as a markedly bolder presence. And although he made a show of admiring Whistler’s new Venice etchings (‘such water-paintings as the gods never beheld’), he irritated some of the company that gathered at the studio with his newly assumed ‘Olympian attitude’ – as well as with his new and ‘fantastic suit of red plush’.
Rennell Rodd was among the irritated. He had come to feel himself compromised by Wilde’s handling of Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf. His initial enthusiasm for the exquisite volume had curdled into resentment. Wilde, it seemed to him, had hijacked the project – his too ‘effusive’ self-dedication, his too-too extravagant preface, ‘the somewhat grotesque vignettes’, all transforming the book into a sort of ‘advertisement… to notoriety’. A letter from Rodd laying out these objections, and warning Wilde of the ‘harm’ he was doing himself ‘by his extravagant performances’ across America, had, unsurprisingly, caused ‘profound offence’. To Wilde it seemed ingratitude combined with impertinence. Both parties had nursed their grievances, and they met again only to part in anger. It was the end of their friendship. Wilde affected not to regret it. He dismissed the letter with which Rodd closed the relationship as ‘like a poor linnet’s cry by the roadside along which my immeasurable ambition is sweeping forward’. Wilde would carry on his mission to ‘perfect the English Renaissance’ alone. In his commonplace book he inscribed the dictum, ‘The only schools worth founding are schools without disciples.’ Henceforth Rodd would be to him ‘the true poet, and false friend’.3
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