Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews
Edited by Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst
University of Illinois Press
188 pages, $40.
“I HAVE NOTHING to declare—except my genius,” he pronounced famously on arriving in the U.S. Or did he? There’s no sign of Oscar Wilde’s notorious response to a routine Customs inquiry in any of these 48 interviews with the Irish playwright, who was then known only for his poetry, and scarcely for that. The 26-year old standard-bearer of the Aestheticist creed undertook perhaps twice that many interviews on American soil in the course of his 1882 lecture tour. The editors of this volume have collated the most significant, presenting each in its entirety, replete with fulsome notes.
E. H. Mikhail’s Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections (1979) had previously offered some nineteen of these interviews, though some were altered or edited in obscure ways. Consequently, Hofer and Scharnhorst can legitimately claim to have recovered yet another substantial archive of material relating to Wilde, one largely familiar only to the authors of a handful of doctoral theses. Wilde’s many biographers, however, have drawn substantially on the richest material here. Whenever repetition is rife—in both the questions put to the author and the answers evinced—one wonders whether publishing selections from all 98 known interviews (helpfully listed in an appendix) might have resulted in a volume with a stronger narrative sweep, and one more consistently compelling, especially for the lay reader.
Yet I understood fully why the editors chose a different course. For every interview here throws up a few original lines of inquiry and the occasional genuinely off-the-cuff response. You have to glean these among a set of incessantly reiterated maxims, such as what we might term Wilde’s Holy Trinity of appreciated flora (“Sunflower … Lily … Rose”), the assertion that “America is not a country; it is a world,” and the description of California as “Italy without art.” Equally, the banality of the journalists’ questions, their common dullness and insularity, are themselves curiosities, as is the sense conveyed by this book of a rapid shift from Wilde captivating his public, to disturbing it, to being mocked and rejected by it—a trajectory he would, of course, experience more devastatingly a decade on in London.
Oscar Wilde played shamelessly to interviewers and their perceived readerships. It was a sign of mere good manners, doubtless, to loiter on the positive qualities of a given city or region (only Salt Lake City notably fails spectacularly to evince anything encouraging). But that’s another thing from contradicting oneself entirely, which Wilde often does from one interview to the next. Hanging over his incipient ideas about the land he was traveling through was the one truly vital encounter he had had on the East Coast—with Walt Whitman. Whitman himself had celebrated his capacity for inconsistency: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Wilde’s own reversals include the claim in July that “upon the whole I’d rather travel through a country rapidly.” Earlier, he repeatedly regretted his fast pace, pointing out that to know a country, as he had come to know Greece, one had to ride through it on horseback. Asked about the national character, Wilde often responded that, in the East especially, he had missed any trace of it: “You are not American enough. You are all too cosmopolitan.” Yet, asked on another occasion about the places he had most liked, Wilde boldly declared: “The best cities have a very high cosmopolitanism.”
Between the lines, San Francisco was an enduring favorite; and Wild
e was probably sincere when he regretted that the East Coast had felt to him like “a feeble reflex of Europe.” In California too he could be contradictory, or at least forgetful. When Mary Watson of the San Francisco Examiner noted in April 1882 that “you have never met a lady reporter,” Wilde agreed, despite having been interviewed by Lilian Whiting just weeks previously in Chicago. (Whiting, incidentally, is one of the few journalists to catch something beneath Wilde’s surface demeanor. Hers is a uniquely penetrating, if rather hostile portrait. On the basis of what he said in the interview and in lectures, Wilde, she decided, “is not great enough to merit so much attention”; he was neither a great nor an original thinker, though he was “remarkably assimilative of genius.”)
Wilde repeatedly praised Whitman’s democratic instincts in Leaves of Grass, distinct as they obviously were from the inspirations of his own verse. Whitman’s poetry, he argued, was “Homeric in its large pure delight of men and women.” There was “something so Greek and sane” about him. Of other American authors, Wilde rated Emerson and Hawthorne—while in New England anyway. “The greatest work of fiction ever written in the English tongue” was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. On one hand, this hyperbolic embrace of Hawthorne’s dissection of America’s Puritan origins fits squarely with Wilde’s own subsequent indebtedness to the Romance tradition, in the children’s stories and in The Picture of Dorian Gray. At the same time, I wondered whether this judgment—considered sincere by Hofer and Scharnhorst—actually involves Wilde playing a joke upon his interlocutor. He appeared, naturally, to be saying that Hawthorne’s book was a fine work of literature. But might he instead (or also) be implying that its systematic unveiling of the universal imperative in the sinner to repent was pure invention—the novel’s “greatest … fiction,” in other words?
By the time Wilde reached the South, Edgar Allan Poe had displaced Whitman or Emerson as “the best poet of America.” Herman Melville figures nowhere, sadly, though this does square with his generally low reputation then. Just two novelists beyond Hawthorne merit mention. Wilde compares William Dean Howells’s realism with that of Balzac: his novels helped him (somewhat) tolerate the infinite train journeys. (Perhaps he was drawn to the shockingly bleak account of the decay of a marriage in A Modern Instance of 1881, which appeared during Wilde’s sojourn.) He also mentions Henry James: “I have seen a Daisy Miller … the sight of her has increased my respect for Henry James a thousand fold.” Nor is he blind to the American male form, commenting carefully in Omaha that “he had seen many men of marvelous physique and many beautiful women in the West.” Of the Leadville miners, this: “One reason I liked them was because of their magnificent physiques.” He attempts a joke concerning the Mormons he encountered in Salt Lake City: “The Mormons are the most unintellectual people I have met in America, because they have the worst physiques I have seen. … The Mormons’ tabernacle is the shape of a teakettle and is decorated with the ornaments of a jail.”
Such slurs aside, it is surprisingly moving to recognize just how seriously Wilde took the notion of bringing artistic values to the widest American public: “I hope that the masses will come to be the creators in art,” he opined. This may have come into being in the subsequent century in ways that Wilde did not expect and would not have appreciated, but there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity. He continued to impart his message, notwithstanding the cynical cry, voiced often in these pieces, and exemplified by one comment from a Cleveland journalist: “his preparations for producing a regeneration in art are much less elaborate than his arrangements for swelling his own exchequer.” By this point, Wilde had long become resigned to being the butt of journalists’ jokes or, worse, the subject of open hostility. Just a month into his tour, he could refer to “the questionable courtesy I have experienced” at the hands of journalists. Poignantly, given what later befell him,Wilde consistently praised the English press over the American.
Sometimes Wilde is simply funny. A local painter had won a medal for a canvas on the subject of hog killing: Wilde insists that the journalist conveying this fact not apologize for the supposed crudeness of the subject. More commonly, I winced or brooded on the pathos we experience on reading these pieces, knowing of the author’s impending downfall. When he laments the crowds at the stations, “besieging” the coach windows, just to get a glimpse of him, I thought of the mob that would later taunt him as he changed trains at Clapham Junction after sentencing, bound for Reading Gaol. (Many of the curious Americans went home satisfied, it transpires, having in fact seen only a hand-waving impersonator on Wilde’s train, replete with an aesthetic wig). Similarly poignant is the moment when, on being asked if he found it “objectionable that the details of a man’s private life should be dragged before the public,” Wilde insisted that he had no private life. The reader thinks: “Not yet.”
Then there’s the young Wilde’s painful praise for Henry Labouchere, writer, politician and “the only brilliant enemy I ever had in England”—and the man who brought into law the notorious “Labouchere Amendment” or Gross Offences Act on which Wilde was later charged and condemned to two years’ hard labor. It is startling when Wilde argues here that “a novel writer must himself live what he portrays.” One thinks of his courtroom insistence on quite the reverse: on the autonomy of art, its total separation from the author’s own life. When a journalist notes that Wilde was “pained by the familiarity of the young men who called ‘Oscar’ at each rail station,” it is impossible not to think of his future relations with all manner of youths: “feasting with panthers,” as he termed it. “I hope that I am obliging beautiful young ladies, for I make it a point to grant my autograph to no others,” he quips at one point. Yet he did, of course, give his autograph away to young men—and much more. I recalled the sonnet, addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, which fatally fell into blackmailers’ hands and would compromise Wilde so deeply in the trials. “Boys have been my critics,” he notes in another apparently prescient moment. But this is actually merely a reference to the inexperience of the many journalists sent to interview him. (One he claimed must have been sixteen at most, and knew no French. Wilde sent him packing, with an orange.)
Certainly, most of the jokes made by interviewers are of the feeble, predictable kind. Wilde was “the lord of the lah-de-dah,” wrote one. Instead of a nourishing breakfast, he had eaten “the most nonaesthetic object on earth, a way-station sandwich,” a second sniped. Another, though, found him “amid the ruins of a substantial-looking breakfast.” He looked “ludicrously odd to the American eye in personal appearance,” carped a Sacramento hack. There was a difference between the public and private Wildes, thought a fifth, the latter version “distressingly like any other gentleman.” A more penetrating journalist picked up the precise source from which Wilde had appropriated his showy, velvety dress: it had “something after the style of Raphael’s famous portrait of himself.”
Wilde freely admitted that his speaking style was “abominable” at the public lectures. He was untested at the craft—no excuse, admittedly—and could not compete in a nation accustomed to sermons. Across the interviews, the notion of a first class wit, assuredly volleying back creative responses to every interrogation, quickly recedes. Still, there are moments of incisiveness, and a few that threaten to draw blood. Wilde especially took offense at the notion that his aestheticism was a craze: “Oh, do not call it a craze. … You Americans have such a way of treating serious things as a joke.And yet you are not a joyous people. … Everybody has a troubled, anxious look, and everybody is pushing forward in some business project” (Dayton, Ohio, May 1882).
HOFER AND SCHARNHORST are to be complimented for this rewarding, absorbing, and necessary book. Meanwhile, I had a few small cavils. The footnotes can be insightful, pointing to connections with the subsequent writings in particular. Others might be questioned. In the age of Google, does Ralph Waldo Emerson need a one-line footnote? Mark Twain too? Magdalen College, Oxford—Wilde’s alma mater—was indeed founded beyond the original city walls, as we are told, but whether it “retains a rural flavor even today” feels debatable. All Oxbridge colleges, surely, are predictably “collegiate” in flavor.
The editors point out that in a letter Wilde called his black valet on the tour “my slave.” Fair enough, though the context is unclear, and irony may well have been intended. The young man was removed from the whites-only section of a train at least once, and Wilde seems not to have objected. This is offered in the introduction as if to convey disappointment in Wilde’s lack of enlightenment; but how exceptional was this attitude in the 1880’s? In a rare reference to non-white Americans, Wilde refers to the “happy and careless” Negroes in Texas, “their half-naked bodies gleaming like bronze” and reminding him of lizards. Unlike Speranza, his mother,Wilde exhibited few progressive political opinions—over race or women’s social status in particular. In an isolated moment of political engagement, he calls Gladstone “the greatest prime minister England ever had”—presumably for his advocacy of Irish home rule. Yet throughout the Confederate South,Wilde frustratingly compares the Southern cause directly to Irish aspirations for self-government.What this really demonstrates is the simplification involved in current constructions of Wilde as a gay martyr (as Neil Bartlett’s 1988 book Who Was That Man? Argued long ago). Victims in one context can act as oppressors in another.
Still, let me close by commending one instance in which Wilde shows himself to be our contemporary. Confronted by a club’s “No smoking” sign, Wilde argued: “Great heaven, they speak of smoking as if it were a crime. I wonder they do not caution the students not to murder each other on the landings. … I wonder no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city [Cincinnati] as an excuse for his crimes!” When he returned to England,Wilde characteristically did not miss the opportunity to present a lecture on the oddness of the American character, neatly supplied in an appendix to this book. He had, he reported, barely survived “the noisiest country that ever existed,” but thrilled his audience with a spurious tale about a man west of the Rockies who had ordered a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo from Paris, only to sue the importers when she arrived lacking arms.
Richard Canning teaches at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, England. His most recent publication is Brief Lives: E. M. Forster
