The Fall of the House of Wilde (34 page)

From what evidence we have, Willie's life seems to be a narrative of withholdings, of all the things that are not spoken about. One of the few surviving letters to Oscar in America shows Willie atoning for some passion or transgression he has committed. ‘Go and burn a candle for me at some saint's shrine who knew remorse and hated harlots. Can't you find some battered old Carmelite? Some saintly swash-buckler that would teach me anodynes and sleeping draughts and potions that would kill the past?'
¹⁵

*

When Oscar arrived in America and told customs, ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius,' he spoke the truth. He staked his genius on the American market, on the new economy of spectacle and celebrity. Where conventional wisdom held that the virtuous man laboured and saved, the seemingly easy circumstances by which Oscar acquired his so-called fortune discredited this notion. Jane found it amusing that the English press speculated resentfully on how much he might be earning. She wrote gleefully to Oscar earlier in the trip, in March 1882, ‘they all say you are making heaps of money, and I smile and accept the notion – for it galls the Londoners'.
¹⁶
Jane always believed that earning money was the English person's measure of success. Her standoffish dismissal of money-oriented England was partly an expression of her pride, her reaction to those who looked down on and gossiped about her straitened circumstances.

How much money Oscar made from lecturing is open to speculation. Certainly newspapers assumed he was making a fortune. And he was, but only at the start of his circuit. Chicago and New York yielded him $1,000 per lecture, and smaller locations $200. But near the end of the tour, he was prepared to lecture at Moncton for $75, until a better offer of $100 came along. The gross takings for the lecture at Halifax were $400, so one could deduce he earned on average $500 to $700 per week. By October, he objected to receiving ‘only 250 dollars, and
no expenses at all
'.
¹⁷
If this were representative, Carte must have skewed the contract grossly in his own favour. Equally likely, the managerial costs to keep the tour on the road rose at a time when takings were falling. That Oscar tended to mishandle his financial affairs adds to the confusion.

What Oscar earned with ease, he spent with equal ease. Jane was exposed to his financial affairs, having been left to sort out bills he had incurred and left unpaid for the redecoration of Tite Street. ‘You seem to have lived luxuriously at Tite Street. I never saw the rooms so can only judge from the items.' This messiness tested even Jane's maternal patience. Apropos a demand for £10 that had been posted to Park Street, she wrote, ‘I advise you
pay all bills while you can
.'
¹⁸
By as late as July 1882, that is seven months after he left London, unpaid bills still arrived at Park Street.

Oscar did share a small sum of his spoils from America. In September 1882, he sent Jane £80 to clear his debts, which amounted to about £25, and allowed her to keep the balance. She used it to clear her own outstanding debts, and paid Willie's laundry and tailors' bills. This gesture of generosity on Oscar's part truly moved her.

My first impulse was a flood of tears over it – It is very noble and fine to think of us – Still I feel deeply sorry at taking your money, the product of your toil and many anxieties and fierce striving against a bitter world . . . I shall settle all your bills at once & will hold onto the house, at least over the winter – then will know better what the Moytura people will do.

The money to cover rent on Park Street was really only patching over things.

So uncomfortable was she in taking Oscar's earnings that, three days later, she sent him an exact tally of the debts his money had allowed her to clear, and added:

That leaves me with an overplus. And so I'll hold on here for the winter at least and then see what fate brings. It is dreadful taking your money. Destiny does such ill-natured things. Whenever one member of a family works hard & gets any money, immediately all the relations fling themselves on his shoulders – I hold you near my heart.
¹⁹

The woman who had shown such spunk and determination was losing courage.

24

‘Mr Oscar Wilde is “not such a fool as he looks”'

Things were going better for Oscar. He extended his tour to Canada and began to lecture there in May 1882. Canada proved to be a more receptive environment than America. This was in large part due to better management of his public image. His travelling manager, Mr J. S. Vale, preceded Oscar to each destination with favourable publicity to counter the negative opinion circulating. Vale distributed a complimentary portrait and a biography of Oscar, focusing mainly on the eminence of his parentage, and including a selection of favourable newspaper comment. The strategy paid rich dividends. The
Montreal Gazette
spoke for many when it welcomed ‘the refined poet and apostle of aestheticism', commended a ‘movement which has for its aim the best and noblest of aims – the cultivation of the beautiful', and condemned the English press's portrayal of Oscar as a laughable ‘ultra aesthetical'. It stated, ‘another, and we are assured the correct opinion, is rapidly gaining ground that Mr Wilde is a man of culture and refinement, a poet of distinction, and possessed of much common sense'.
¹

Not that he won favour everywhere, far from it, but many Canadians conceded the press had done him a disservice. An interviewer in Montreal, from the
Daily Witness
, concluded ‘that Messrs. Du Maurier, Burnand and Gilbert had all done him a grave injustice'.
²
The
Toronto
Globe
echoed this sentiment when it observed that in going to see Oscar Wilde the majority:

anticipated something bordering on burlesque and were prepared to see the lecturer make a fool of himself after the style of Reginald Bunthorne in
Patience
. Instead of this they heard a very sensible and suggestive discourse, directing attention to considerations much too neglected. Emphatically Mr Oscar Wilde is ‘not such a fool as he looks'.

His arrival in each city was accompanied by fanfare. He alighted amidst the energy and bustle that epitomises a train station and paraded languidly, with his long black cloak devouring space, and his valet, Davenport, following behind. At this juncture he often sported a wide-brimmed miner's hat on his head of long hair, reminding a reporter from
Le Monde
of ‘a brigand from a comic opera'.
³
The indispensible Davenport somehow had to contrive to perform the onerous task of hauling a trunk, two suitcases and several hatboxes.
⁴
Davenport was on hand when admirers grew irritating. He filtered reporters, autographed mailed requests on Oscar's behalf and saved him the embarrassment on one occasion of having to bend to retrieve a fallen glove, as it seems Oscar was in danger of bursting his tight-fitting clothes. Photos confirm that the endless count of banquets and receptions in his honour was having a conspicuous effect on his anatomy.

With his travelling manager's constant vigilance, more reputable sponsors were secured, usually leading professionals or businessmen. In Montreal, for instance, Dr F. W. Campbell and the committee for the Hospital for Women supported Oscar's lecture, and their standing in the city brought a gravitas to the occasion that enhanced Oscar's credibility. Dr Campbell had trained in Dublin under Dr Wilde and had met the four-year-old Oscar at Merrion Square. This connection to the Wilde family led Dr Campbell to embrace Oscar in a spirit essentially different from that which he received elsewhere. Dr Campbell assembled a small party of eminences at Montreal's exclusive St James's Club to meet Oscar, among them a physician and surgeon of Irish parentage, Dr William Hales Hingston, and an internationally trained pianist, Sheldon Stephens, a friend of Franz Liszt. As members of the Montreal Society of Decorative Art, these distinguished men were well disposed towards and supportive of the cause.

Oscar had become something of an expert in crafting his image. For reporters he would sit ‘reclining in an armchair', partly concealed by a haze of tobacco smoke. He rarely altered this pose for reporters, though he reclined more over the years, preferring a chaise longue to an armchair. He had also learned to take the initiative and direct conversation to what he called the results of his ‘campaign'. He had, ready at hand, tangible evidence. He showed one reporter a letter he had received from a Charles Leland, thanking him for the good work he had done in teaching the principles of art to the young children at his school in Philadelphia. Or he would flag up the change in fortune his attention brought to an artist. For example, a once destitute young sculptor Oscar promoted, Edward Donoghue, had subsequently received ‘ever so many commissions'.
⁵
Better still was to supply the press with figures, such as his having lectured to almost 200,000 people across America. These made memorable headlines.

Each day Oscar visited as much of a city or town as possible, usually in the company of a local dignitary. This helped him to make informed comments on the local art and architecture. He also spent hours in outlying neighbourhoods with artists and artisans, searching and often finding talent, which he then promoted. His approval of local art and artists gratified the public, who took his assessment as assurance that they had talent in their midst. That Oscar enjoyed disarming criticism in stylish phrases that could be taken away and quoted is undeniable. But so too is the fact that he held fast to his opinions. His most publicised discovery was an artist called Homer Watson. The special attention he gave to Watson, naming him ‘the Canadian Constable', altered the public's perception, and transformed the young artist's career. From Watson he ordered a painting for himself, for which he paid $50, and secured him commissions from an acquaintance in Boston and another in New York. The praise Oscar lavished on Watson's work, his inviting him to London, entertaining him in his house and at the Chelsea Arts Club, opening doors to artists of such high distinction as Whistler, and the alacrity with which he helped him get an exhibition in the New English Art Club, confirm Oscar's unswerving conviction of Watson's talent.

The Canadian satirical magazine,
Grip
, hitherto dismissive of Oscar, acknowledged his support of artists. ‘Whatever may be thought of Oscar Wilde's evening costume, or his long hair, or his “stained-glass attitudes”, he is undoubtedly doing good service to individual artists if not to American art in general. He appears to be inspired by good feeling, and delights in extending a helping hand to struggling genius.'
⁶
His lecture to a capacity audience of about a thousand at the Grand Opera House in Toronto caused a stir, for within days of his visit, an article appeared in the press advocating the establishment of an art school directly linked to manufacturers, an idea drawn from Oscar's lecture.

As ever, there were detractors. The
Evening Telegraph
devoted reams of print to his effete mannerisms and decried the methods he used. They grudgingly acknowledged the success of his
tour de force
exhibitionism, the formula he used to ‘pander to a public appetite', but deplored Canadians for being seduced by such dilettantism. So strenuously did the
Evening Telegraph
disapprove of the antics to which Oscar owed his notoriety that they compared them with those used by P. T. Barnum, the performer who populated the stage with such memorable grotesques as a two-headed calf. But the journalist was savvy enough to see that the excision of the scandalous would dampen attendance. It thus did not surprise him that Oscar should make such a spectacle of himself.
⁷
The
Evening Telegraph
was right, but it went too far. Oscar wanted to draw public attention to a worthwhile cause that until his arrival had received too little consideration. Exciting ‘a sensation', which was what he wanted his outlandish dress to do, meant packed houses. Besides, never was Oscar's audience allowed to leave the theatre without some practical ideas, as one convert put it:

Instead as we expected, of the lecturer picturing art to us as a thing quite apart from all common everything day life, a realm wherein the true aesthetic alone can languish in a cultivated scorn of real workers of the world, what was our delight to find, on the contrary, that beauty was inwrought with homely, honest, work-a-day life, that labour can be elevated and the labourer thereby raised from ignorance and degradation into the true beauty of living.
⁸

The more discerning often had his number. The impostor in Oscar found himself unmasked by an editor who had heard Ruskin lecture. As the editor put it,

We have heard John Ruskin, whom Mr Wilde claims as his master and inspirer, deliver much the same truths with his hands in the pockets of his breeches and supporting the flaps of his frock coat, such as Mr Wilde looks upon as a Philistine abomination. Each was picturesque in his own way, but with the master it looked like picturesqueness of greatness; with the pupil, of affectation.
⁹

While Oscar lacked the conviction of Ruskin, a man naturally drawn to grave matters and whose words were the fruit of deep study and long observation, he found it easy to captivate people with his creed, largely because he liked nothing better than for others to share the joy he got out of living and appreciating beauty. He loved praising people, boosting their self-belief in the way that Jane boosted him.

Oscar never really doubted himself, even when faced with some of the most vicious criticism imaginable. When towards the end of the tour he told one reporter that he had no time to listen to the ‘shrill voice of folly' – ‘one is not made or marred by newspapers. One makes or mars himself' – he spoke honestly.
¹⁰
His experience in America had taught him the value of a steely carapace. On his countenance he wore the mask of Oscar Wilde, the peacock strut and languid sensuality, half designed to outrage the bourgeois. The self-assertive swagger, which had been latent in Oscar before his arrival in America, now became integral to his being, and made him more ambitious for sovereignty in England's, even Paris's, cultural life. America boosted his ego to the extent that he pictured himself differently for ever after, and so did society.