A WALK ON THE WILDE SIDE
Oscar Wilde certainly knew a thing or two about fame – he arrived in America unknown in 1882, and left a year later as famous as can be, but did he really devise a formula for stardom that celebrities still use today?
Wilde In America: Oscar Wilde And The Invention Of Modern Celebrity David M Friedman Norton€24.99
You wouldn’t necessarily expect Kim Kardashian to pop up in a book about Oscar Wilde, but these days even serious biographers are encouraged to keep things bang up-to-date. Thus, on page 16 of Wilde In
America, David M Friedman declares of Oscar Wilde that ‘decades before Kim Kardashian, he grasped that fame could be fabricated in the media’.
And Friedman is still at it on page 239. Wilde had, he says, devised ‘a formula for creating fame that other modern celebrities – all of them far more shallow than he – are using today, whether they know it or not. (Among them: Paris Hilton, Drew Pinksy, Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt, Nicole Richie, Kelly and Jack Osbourne, Meghan McCain, the Real Housewives of Wherever, and the entire Kardashian family.)’
Oscar Wilde arrived in America aged 27, a virtual unknown, with only one slim volume of poetry to his name. He left America 12 months, 150 lectures, 15,000 miles, and countless newspaper pieces later, extremely famous, even if not, as Friedman claims, ‘the second-most-famous Briton in America, behind only Queen Victoria’.
Before he set sail, Wilde had a growing reputation in Britain not as a writer but as a witty and flamboyant aesthete, guaranteed to add fizz to even the dullest party.
As an undergraduate at Oxford, he had cut a dash with his dandyish clothing and outlandish aperçus. After he declared: ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,’ he was condemned for hea heathenism from the pulpit.
After leaving Oxford, he became the toast of London. ‘ Whatt has he done, thiss young man, thatat one meets him everywhere?’ asked a visiting actress from Poland. ‘Oh yes, he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act – he does nothing but talk. I do not understand.’
His proposed lecture tour of America was the bright idea of Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario behind Gilbert and Sullivan’s comical operas.ras. Their latest opera, Patience, featured a satirical portrait of a foppish aes-aesthete called Bunthorne who was quite clearly based on Wilde; after its open-ening in New York, it was thought thatthat extra trade could be drummed upp by bringing over the man himself.
Never slow to seize an opportunity, Wilde was happy to go along with the jape. Though he had never delivered a lecture in his life, they booked him in for a series of well-paid lectures ($500 per show in 1882). There were only two conditions: first, he should dress just like Bunthorne in Patience; second, that he should mention the opera by name at least once in each lecture.
At that time, America was starved of camp, so his arrival there in satin breeches, black silk stockings, silver buckled shoes, a velvet coat with a lace trim, a black cape over his shoulder and ‘hints of powder and rouge’ was greeted with something approaching a frenzy. Journalists hired a small boat in order to board his ship before it docked. Those who had come to scoff at a weedy little aesthete were taken aback by his height, 6ft 3in, and his bulk. ‘His face is oval in shape, with a
rather massive chin, and a nose of more than ordinary size,’ wrote one. ‘His laugh was a succession of broad “haw, haw, haws”.’ In fact, to the modern eye, Wilde bears more than a passing resemblance to Jeremy Clarkson, but with the hairdo of James May.
His lectures on art and decoration were on the dull side, overblown but not witty. The reviews were mixed, to say the least. Nonetheless, his appearance and general attitude ensured him endless coverage: the Graphic alone ran 22 different items on him in the course of his first month in America.
Wilde made a bee-line for anyone more famous than him- self. His meetings with Walt Whitman and Longfellow went well, but with Henry James less so. ‘Repulsive and fatuous,’ was James’s unusually blunt verdict.
Other observers proved equally vituperative. ‘All true Englishmen will be glad if we can terrify him back to Britain so that they may kill him,’ declared The Washington Post, while the Louisville CourierJournal noted ‘an effeminacy of delivery best described as “sissy”. That great satirist Ambrose Bierce took particular offence. ‘There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft,’ he said.
But it was all water off a duck’s back. Oscar had been booked to perform a parody of himself, and so any ensuing outrage was, he felt, a tribute to his skills. As the tour progressed, he grew more iconoclastic, condemning Chicago as ‘positively dreary’ and describing the revered Tabernacle in Salt Lake City as ‘the most purely dreadful building I ever saw’.
These were the days of Jesse James and Wyatt Earp, and the delightful incongruity of Oscar Wilde in the Wild West makes for lively reading. If his coat was made of mouse-coloured velvet, his nerves were made of steel.
How odd, to think of Wilde delivering a lecture on ‘The Decorative Arts’ in the Leadville Opera House in Colorado, urging his audience to follow the example of 16th-century Pisa, with its ‘brilliantly lighted palace arches and pillars of marble and porphyry, noble knights with glorious mantles flowing over their mail riding in the sunlight...’ and so forth.
When he got on to the subject of the Renaissance silversmith and author Benvenuto Cellini, he was interrupted by a member of the audience who wanted to know why he hadn’t brought Cellini with him. ‘I explained that he had been dead for some little time, which elicited the enquiry, “Who shot him?” ’
He visited a voodoo ceremony in New Orleans, went in a bucket 100ft down a mine in the Rocky Mountains, and was defrauded of $1,000 by cardsharps in New York. But he never seems to have been afraid. Rather, he was amused by everything, no matter how frightening or unpleasant: this was surely his most endearing quality.
In a bar in Leadville, he spotted the notice ‘DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST. HE IS DOING HIS BEST’. It was, he said, ‘the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across’. Oscar Wilde arrived in America unknown, and departed a year later as famous as can be. This much is inarguable. But was he quite the pioneering celebrity that Friedman would have us believe? Did he really create ‘an enduring part of the world we live in today’?
I doubt it. There were plenty of other performers in America, rather more famous and with rather less talent: General Tom Thumb, for instance, or most of those touted by PT Barnum. Friedman himself mentions the poet Joaquin Miller, ‘the Byron of the Rockies’, who would recite his poems – Songs Of The Sierras – in a white buckskin suit, cowboy boots and spurs, all topped off with a sombrero.
Nor should we forget that, 25 years previously, Mark Twain had leapt to national fame with his own one-man show. ‘ The enraptured audience... peered back at the nation’s first rock star,’ wrote Twain’s biographer, Ron Powers, back in 2006.
‘A resemblance to Jeremy Clarkson but with the hair do of James May’