Father of the cult of celebrity

The young Oscar Wilde toured America in a quest to achieve fame before he had even published a word, says Neil Hegarty

In January 1882, a young Irishman named Oscar Wilde met the American poet Walt Whitman at the latter’s home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman was celebrated as a pillar of American writing; Wilde had, by contrast, published scarcely a word. What he lacked in this department, however, he was more than making up for in confidence and public exposure. Already a fixture on the London social scene and admired for his wit and command of the English language, Wilde was now newly embarked on an American lecture tour, engaged to speak to the public on the unlikely subjects of aestheticism and the uses and importance of art. Oscar Wilde’s real aim, however, was to tell America a good deal about Oscar Wilde. Self-promotion begins all careers once the media for it exists – and here is Wilde at the birth of his career, setting out to make a spectacle of himself in America. David M Friedman’s thoughtful and engaging Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity follows his subject’s year-long journey across the continent, tracing the evolution of a public image and the means by which Wilde sought to control this process. This was his tangible connection with Whitman, who knew a thing or two about the manufacture of a successful and durable public image, having – as Friedman puts it – “pioneered the idea that a literary man in search of fame should fashion himself as a literary artefact”. Friedman begins his story, however, with the context necessary to comprehend Wilde and his journey: glancing at his student life at Oxford, his time among the rivalries and sparkling conversation of London society – and where it all began, in the candlelit, curtained salons of Victorian Dublin, including those in the imposing family home on Merrion Square that were presided over by his tempestuous mother Speranza. The book might at this point have explored another, perhaps more crucial influence: it was here in Dublin that the young Oscar Wilde learnt everything necessary about the rules of social projection – for such strictures governed life in Ireland, that most codified of societies in which such projection was something of an allabsorbing national pastime. The danger in such a topographically driven account – from one American city to another and on to another – is that the narrative may drag. Friedman, however, neatly skirts such a peril, largely because his descriptions of these peregrinations are so vividly realised. Wilde’s observations of racism in the South, his experience of a drinking game with a group