The Fall of the House of Wilde (32 page)

Oscar delivered his first lecture on ‘The English Renaissance' to a crowded Chickering Hall in New York on 9 January 1882. Crowds also filled the theatres of the east coast as the tour proceeded. Instant stardom fuelled his grandiosity. On 15 January he wrote to Norman Forbes-Robertson:

Great success here: nothing like it since Dickens, they tell me. I am torn in bits by Society. Immense receptions, wonderful dinners, crowds wait for my carriage. I wave a gloved hand and an ivory cane and they cheer. I have ‘Boy' [champagne] at intervals, also two secretaries, one to write my autograph and answer the hundreds of letters that come begging for it.

The same day, he wrote to Mrs George Lewis (the wife of his solicitor friend), ‘policemen wait for me to clear a way. I now understand why the Royal Boy [popular nickname for the Prince of Wales] is in good humour always: it is delightful to be a petit roi'.
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The first weeks saw him intoxicated by fame. Jane was equally excited. She wrote: ‘Your note of the 13
^th
[January] just arrived. I rejoice in the triumph. Bring home the bride. ¼ of a million. Take a house in Park Lane – & go into Parliament . . .' Others were more circumspect, Mahaffy certainly. He said to Jane, ‘Oscar should have consulted me – great mistake.'
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Certainly Oscar's appearance could drum up business, but more came to see a ridiculous apostle of a modish cult of beauty than to listen to what he had to say. Having found himself cast as a stock aesthete, thick with all the clichés then in vogue, Oscar assisted Carte's financial venture by donning a costume that stood proxy for Bunthorne. So rather than appear on stage in the fine attire he wore at the receptions given him throughout his tour, he dressed up in ‘knee breeches, black hose, low shoes with bright buckles, coat lined with lavender satin, a frill of rich lace at the wrists' and, famously, ‘a pair of silk stockings', that, as Oscar put it, ‘upset a nation'.
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He had been hired as a ‘character' or a send-up of the new movement in art, and his sensational appearance only confirmed the suspicions of many intellectuals – that he was a ‘fool'. It would have been difficult for those who met Oscar in America to think of him as one of the best Classicists of his generation, and the writer Henry James was not alone in dismissing him outright. Having met Oscar at a reception in Washington, James described him in a letter he wrote to a friend as a ‘fatuous fool', ‘a tenth-rate cad'.
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Clarence Stedman, an influential American writer and friend of the literary historian Edmund Gosse, wrote to the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, ‘This Philistine town [New York] is making a fool of itself over Oscar Wilde, who is lecturing on Art Subjects, appearing in public in extraordinary dress – a loose shirt with a turn-down collar, a flowing tie of uncommon shade, velvet coat, knee-breeches – and often he is seen in public carrying a lily, or a sunflower, in his hand.'
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A man less infatuated with stardom might have desisted from modelling himself on Bunthorne. Then again, if notoriety was his goal, he could hardly have hitched himself to a more obliging vehicle than D'Oyly Carte.

That said, the fizz of stardom evaporated very quickly. After whirling through the drawing rooms of New York, Oscar went from being feted as a prince to being treated as a freak. Press reaction to him went from bemusement to mere derision to downright cruelty. One of the most brutal snipes appeared in the
Washington Post
on 21 January 1882: a cartoon comparing Oscar to a simian figure identified as the Wild Man of Borneo. Oscar holds a sunflower, the monkey a coconut. The accompanying piece asks, ‘If Mr Darwin is right in his theory, has not the climax of evolution been reached and are we not heading down the hill toward the aboriginal starting point again?' The Wild Men of Borneo, Waino and Plutano, were the small, wiry Ohio farm boys P. T. Barnum exhibited as evolutionary throwbacks – their small fingers afforded them astonishing prehensile power, according to the publicity.

Jane sensed something was wrong when Oscar stopped sending her the press cuttings. ‘No newspapers have come since Philadelphia. I want Baltimore and Washington papers,' she wrote. More likely than not, Jane would at some stage have seen the
Washington Post
cartoon, or at least read about it in the British press. Such comments in her letters to Oscar as ‘what a tempest and tornado you live in!' or, on 19 February 1882, ‘The
Daily News
&
Pall Mall
continue to be sneering but still you are making your way,' or a week later, ‘The papers here are very angry with the knee breeches especially
Vanity Fair
,' leave no doubt that she was aware of much of what was being said. Ever sensitive to his pride, she tried to dress them up as the trivia of the press, and affectionately tried to assist him to stay confident. She was tireless in her applause of the tenacity and resilience he showed ‘against the bitter world', as she put it.
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Things got worse when Oscar met his nemesis in the form of another lecturer, Archibald Forbes, also managed by D'Oyly Carte. Forbes was a Scottish journalist who had covered several wars, and liked to show his manly bearing on the podium by displaying his military medals. Forbes was infuriated at the attention given to Oscar, as it distracted the press from his own show. To a friend he wrote, ‘[Oscar Wilde] lectures here tonight. He can't lecture worth a cent, but he draws the crowds wonderfully and he fools them all to the top of their bent, which is quite clever.'
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When Forbes and Oscar had to travel together from Philadelphia to Baltimore, where both were due to lecture, they did not see eye to eye, and Oscar took sufficient umbrage not to alight at Baltimore but to proceed to Washington. Morse wired Oscar, calling him back to Baltimore. Oscar ignored his order. Morse responded by leaving Oscar to fend for himself against the press.

On 24/25 January 1882, Oscar wrote to Richard D'Oyly Carte, ‘My dear Carte, Another such fiasco as the Baltimore business and I think I would stop lecturing . . . I had nine reporters . . . I must never be left again, and please do not expose me to the really brutal attacks of the papers. The whole tide of feeling is turned by Morse's stupidity . . . we must be very careful for the future.'
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Oscar suspected Forbes and Morse of conspiring against him.

Forbes added fuel to the fire by venting his rage at Oscar to reporters. Oscar replied through the press, avenging himself in a manner that only produced more negative comment. The heated nastiness of the exchange rattled Oscar. On 9 February 1882 he wrote to George Lewis, ‘Carte blundered in leaving me without a manager . . . and Forbes through the most foolish and mad jealousy tried to lure me into a newspaper correspondence. His attack on me, entirely unprovoked, was one of the most filthy and scurrilous things I ever read.'
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Malice did not square with Oscar's nature and he wrote promptly to Forbes, caressing the man's ego in an attempt to quell the dispute. But it was as if a wolf had been unleashed upon a lamb, and if Forbes was rich in male qualities, he was equally rich in obstinacy, and refused to be appeased by Oscar. He dismissed his ‘irrelevant expressions of cordiality', saying they ‘cannot affect the situation', and threatened to continue to defame him, and worse, expose what he described as ‘the utterly mercenary aim of your visit to America', unless Oscar retracted the statements he had made on him to the press. Forbes was determined to dictate the terms of retrenchment.
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He was settling accounts with a man who had stolen his publicity. Oscar's reputation received a blow from which it did not recover.

Oscar may have been a suave performer when called upon to draw publicity, but he was naive in the face of the press. A shaken Oscar turned for guidance to Dion Boucicault, the dramatist and friend of the Wilde family. Boucicault wrote openly to Mrs Lewis about his concerns for Oscar. He excused himself for writing at such length but justified it as the measure of their joint esteem for Oscar. Having described Oscar as ‘much distressed', ‘looking worn and thin', he proceeded:

Mr Carte has not behaved well, and Mr Forbes – well, I do not wish to trust myself with an expression of opinion. But I cannot help feeling that so long as Carte and Forbes thought Oscar was only a puppet – a butt – a means of advertising the Opera Comique of
Patience
 – they were charming, but when Oscar's reception and success threw Forbes into the shade, Forbes went into an ecstasy of rage . . .

Boucicault went on to say Carte had unleashed the press to make ‘a market of their caricatures to advertise him in connection with
Patience
and Bunthorne'. He enclosed a paper and a portrait as evidence of the ‘ridicule' to which Oscar was subjected.

Boucicault added that the whole tour was conceived in bad faith: ‘Carte thought he had got hold of a popular fool. When he found that he was astride of a live animal instead of a wooden toy, he was taken aback.' Boucicault also said, ‘Oscar is helpless, because he is not a practical man of business.' He advised Oscar to throw over Carte, and promised to help him financially. For whatever reason, nothing came of this offer. Oscar persevered. But derision continued, enough for Boucicault to write again in February, ‘I fear that he has no second visit here – those who undertake such enterprises tell me they would not be able to touch him.' He added, ‘still he might make a fair income – if better managed – and if he would reduce his hair and take his legs out of the last century'.
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Suffice it to say that the Carte plan was working. Attracting attention was Oscar's forte, so he was the perfect advert for the show.

The contempt of the press was making it difficult for Oscar to hold out. He wrote to George Lewis, asking him to press upon his friend, Whitelaw Reid, to silence his detractors at the
New York Herald
, the paper Reid owned. There were glimpses of failure of nerve. America became a far-off, lonely place. Only to Mrs Lewis did Oscar wear his heart on his sleeve. She had written to sympathise with the mauling he received by journalists and on 12 February he replied, ‘[Your letter] touched me and pleased more than I can tell you to receive such kindly words, I being so far away. It seemed a little touch and breath of home.'
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Even from students, he received a snubbing. The Harvard crowd was harmless enough. Refusing to be duped, they dressed in aesthetic attire even more absurd than Oscar's, and paraded sixty-strong into the lecture, ‘dressed in swallow-tail coats, knee-breeches, flowing wigs and green ties'. Their parody incited howls of laughter but the behaviour of Rochester students was altogether more threatening. They buried Oscar's voice with the din of their uproar. The evening ended with the police called in to quell the disturbance.
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The incident generated more humiliating criticism and brought a Rochester poet, playwright, lawyer and journalist, Joaquin Miller, to his defence. His kind letter to Oscar, expressing his ‘shame' for ‘the behaviour of those ruffians at Rochester', was published in the
New York World
, 10 February 1882.

Against all advice to tone down his appearance, Oscar ordered even more outlandish clothes. On 26 February 1882, he asked Morse to order from a ‘costumier (theatrical)' a ‘sort of François I dress: only knee-breeches instead of long hose . . . two pairs of silk stockings to suit grey mouse-coloured velvet'. ‘The sleeves' he wanted ‘flowered – if not velvet then plush – stamped with large pattern'. And with a perverse glee, he wrote, of the ‘great sensation' it would excite.
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This get-up would make it more difficult to win the acceptance of influential writers. He was insisting on the performative aspect and remained unrepentantly knee-breeched throughout the tour.

The most significant change he made was in the content of the lecture. By the second week in February, he stopped delivering ‘The English Renaissance' and for the next nine months his main lecture was ‘The Decorative Arts'. ‘The English Renaissance' was a misjudged piece, running for two hours, laden with quotations. It was the blatant lack of interest of the Philadelphia audience that spurred him to change the content beyond all recognition. He shortened the lecture by a half-hour, censored his favourite heresy – that one writes for oneself and doesn't give a fig for the public – dropped the theoretical stuff, and changed the focus to decorative art. He famously named himself the originator of the movement: ‘Let me tell you how it came to me at all to create an artistic movement in England,' a stroke that outraged and amazed the English public for its blatant braggadocio.
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The only generous explanation one can find for his claiming leadership was that was his credibility was at stake, and assuming origination for the movement might invest him with the authority he evidently lacked at the podium. However, he abandoned the claim early on and for at least seven months of the tour made no reference to it, though this move did nothing to mitigate the outrage of the English public at his audacity.

‘The Decorative Arts' was better received. In an interview in Philadelphia, he stressed the ‘democratic impulse' driving the movement. ‘The artisan class,' he said, ‘have toiled long enough in unloved labour and amid unlovely, hard, repulsive surroundings. A man's work should be a joy to him. Make him an artist, make him a designer, and you render it so. What a man designs he delights in bringing to completion.' He found ineffable comfort in enthusiastic audiences and took pride in the visible results of his visit. To Mrs Lewis, he wrote on 28 February:

I send you a line to say that since Chicago I have had two great successes: Cincinnati where I have been invited to lecture a second time – this time to workmen, on the handicraftsman – and St Louis. Tomorrow I start to lecture eleven consecutive nights at eleven different cities . . . Of course I have much to bear – I have always had that – but still as regards my practical influence I have succeeded beyond my wildest hope. In every city they start schools of decorative art after my visit, and set on foot to public museums, getting my advice about the choice of objects and the nature of the buildings.
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