‘Wilde in America,’ by David M. Friedman
By LIESL SCHILLINGERDEC. 5, 2014
Chances are you’ll never have a conversation as scintillating as the one Oscar Wilde was overheard conducting at a gathering in San Francisco in 1882. At the time, the 27-year-old Irish upstart had yet to write any of the works that would earn his fame. Undercredentialed as Wilde then was, his verbal verve and outlandish dress (satin breeches, velvet jackets, black cape) had made him a sought-after dinner guest in London and prompted a 10-month American tour, where his brio met with an ecstatic reception. “It was a superb performance, a masterpiece of sparkling wit and gaiety,” wrote one audience member in an account of the event. “Never before, or since, have I heard anything that compared to it.” Who was Wilde’s lucky interlocutor? It was a dressmaker’s dummy: The man was, in essence, talking with himself.
Wilde captivated an even unlikelier audience at the bottom of a mine shaft in Leadville, Colo., when he regaled a dozen silver miners with chat of Cellini and Renaissance metal working, then drank them under the table. By his own account, “I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause.” Lest you underestimate the dramatist’s (self-dramatist’s?) powers, keep in mind that Wilde also won over Walt Whitman, who invited him to his Camden, N.J., home for elderberry wine. Whitman approved Wilde’s mission of bringing the British aesthetic movement to the Yanks. “You are young and ardent,” Whitman told him. “The field is wide, and if you want my advice,” he added, “go ahead.” Wilde didn’t need to be told twice.
Without Wilde’s aptitude for self-promotion, there might have been no Andy Warhol, no Paris Hilton, no Kim Kardashian. In his new biography of the Irish playwright, novelist and provocateur, “Wilde in America,” the journalist and cultural historian David M. Friedman argues that Wilde was among the very first to realize that celebrity could come before accomplishment. “Fame would launch Wilde’s career,” Friedman explains, “not cap it.” Wilde’s choice of America as his rocket platform was serendipitous, but in hindsight it seems prescient; our country’s revved-up reporters furnished Wilde’s jet pack. “No one before Wilde had used the press so skillfully to establish a claim to renown,” Friedman argues, ably proving his point by following his subject from interview to interview, state to state, charting the shrewd steps Wilde took to build his brand, “devising 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.”
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to Dr. William Wilde, a rakish eye doctor and folklorist, and his “extravagantly extroverted” wife, the poet and saloniste Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee. Lady Wilde gave weekly soirees at the family’s Dublin home, where her young son absorbed the raconteur’s art. “It was from Lady Wilde that Oscar learned that identity is a kind of fiction,” Friedman writes, “and that being oneself is a form of playacting.” Wilde carried that lesson to Oxford, where he swiftly created a new role for himself, losing his Irish accent, buying new clothes and polishing his aphorisms. His aim, Friedman explains, was not merely to “become the self-anointed leader of Oxford’s student aesthetes, preaching to his classmates the Divine Gospel of Beauty.” “Somehow or other I’ll be famous,” he said, “and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.”
He would achieve both goals nearly simultaneously, in 1895, when he was put on trial for “gross indecency” (the words his era conferred upon the “crime” of homosexuality) six weeks after the premiere of his play “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Wilde would serve two years in prison and die soon after, at the age of 46. But on his American trip, there were no augurs of this unbeautiful denouement, only six-foot-high placards bruiting his name. The signs were in poor taste, he wrote to a friend, but “anything is better than virtuous obscurity.”
About the only thing of note Wilde had accomplished in London before boarding the ocean liner that took him to New York — apart from dropping bons mots at parties, wearing a coat that looked like a cello to an art opening and hosting an occult séance attended by the Prince of Wales — was to incur the mockery of the popular musical librettist W. S. Gilbert, who was so exasperated by the peacocking ways of Wilde and his ilk that he wrote an operetta satirizing the aesthetic movement. Called “Patience,” it starred a “grandiose boob” named Bunthorne who was given to “dandyish dishonesty and nattering narcissism.” When “Patience” hopped the Atlantic to Broadway, Gilbert and Sullivan’s producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, feared New Yorkers weren’t getting the joke. To fix the problem, he persuaded Wilde to travel to America and give talks on his decorative philosophy, clad in Bunthorne get-up. D’Oyly Carte’s office sold Wilde to promoters as a humbugging figure of fun, but Wilde got the last laugh. His tour earned him a small fortune; and he garnered more American press coverage in 1882 than any other Briton, including Queen Victoria.
If Wilde had left his public relations fate to D’Oyly Carte’s handlers, he might have bombed in Boston and quipped no more. Instead, he stewarded his own reputation, using his eloquent éclat and letters of introduction to gain access to the drawing rooms of America’s best-connected writers, scholars, salonistes and politicians, though he jawed just as jauntily with farmers, miners and cowboys. In his first weeks in Manhattan, Wilde arranged to sit for a formal portrait with the photographer Napoleon Sarony, whose sultry images of the actress Sarah Bernhardt (one of Wilde’s many diva friends) had fanned the flames of her notoriety. At the time of Wilde’s visit, New Yorkers were obsessed with collecting 4-by-6 cardboard-backed celebrity portraits, the Pokémon cards of the fin de siècle. The image-conscious Wilde instantly saw the value of the trend: The right photograph would burnish his image and magnify his mystique. Bringing his own costumes to the shoot, he made sure his pose projected “intelligence, poetic sensibility and the self-possessed attitude of a young artist coming into his own.” The results of that photo session so beguiled the public (“Wilde’s face ‘went viral,’ ” Friedman writes) that unscrupulous merchants stole his visage to advertise cigars, stoves, freckle cures and bust-enhancing tonics.
The Sarony close-ups weren’t the only shots Wilde stage-managed. The scores of reporters who followed him on tour found the same set dressing in every hotel room he occupied: lilies and sunflowers perching among teacups, party invitations and leather-bound books; animal skins tossed over a sofa. Upon entering, they would behold the main attraction — the pallid, 6-foot-3 orator himself — languidly lounging with a book of poetry, dressed in cloak, satin breeches and velvet slippers, primed for beauteous disquisition. Journalists who reviewed his public performances, expecting them to be fatuous, often found themselves enthralled by Wilde’s rhetorical flights. A reporter from The San Antonio Express, impressed by Wilde’s call for “inculcating in the minds of our rising youth a love of the beautiful,” wrote that he had wanted to mock the “much talked of and extensively advertised” speaker but couldn’t. “We can recall nothing to ridicule, even though we were so disposed,” he admitted. Wilde himself was surprised when he noticed that he was being taken “seriously.” In a letter to James Whistler bewailing his earnest interviewers, he asked, with plaintive self-parody, “What would you do if it happened to you?”
What Wilde did, of course, was to keep talking and carrying on, whether he was praised or censured — then return to London, where, buoyed by the renown he had achieved overseas (“The milkman has bought your picture!” his mother gushed), he would produce a dozen masterpieces of playwriting, criticism and prose before his notoriety overtook his fame. Oscar Wilde may indeed have deliberately made himself a commodity, as Friedman shows, and the reproducibility of his image and words can’t be denied. What makes him irreplaceable, however, is what was inimitable in him: the genius he reputedly declared upon setting foot in New York Harbor on a January day in 1882 — a genius that, whether he declared it or not, he possessed.
WILDE IN AMERICA
Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity
By David M. Friedman
Illustrated. 316 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
What Alana Found 