By Stuart Mitchner

Oscar Wilde died in Paris on this day, November 30, in the first year of the 20th century. He was 46.

“They could attack him, but they could not take their eyes off him. Derision was a form of tribute and, if it went on long enough, could not fail to be so interpreted. He could, moreover, appeal over the head of the journalists, to the people. This he did.” 

Appearances to the contrary, that paragraph is not taken from an op-ed analysis of the election of Donald Trump; it’s from Richard Ellman’s biography Oscar Wilde and refers to Wilde’s 1882 whistlestop lecture tour of America. Thirteen years later there was no appealing to the people and no trace of tribute in the derision when Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for “gross indecency.”

Flash forward to the fall of 2016 and not only is Wilde the most famous of the thousands of similarly sentenced men the British government intends to posthumously pardon, he’s been accorded a special tribute by the Reading prison compound where he was incarcerated from 1895 to 1897. In a beyond-the-grave reversal of fortune of dizzying magnitude, the once-disgraced author of The Picture of Dorian Gray has inspired a prison-wide art exhibit (“Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison”) and a series of Sunday readings from De Profundis, the book-length meditation in the form of a letter to his lover he penned while at Reading. For a stage, the readers, among then Patti Smith, Colm Toibin, and Ralph Fiennes, stood on the only surviving relic of Wilde’s time there, the door of his cell (“a sturdy piece of wood with heavy bolts and a peephole at the top”). No, I’m not making it up. You can read about it in the Sept. 14 issue of The New York Times (“Oscar Wilde Honored by the Prison That Once Detained Him”).

Under these circumstances, there’s nothing to do but quote Henry James: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

The Flavor of the Tour 

Besides Ellman’s biography and De Profundis, I’ve been reading Oscar Wilde Discovers America (Harcourt Brace 1936), a big, freewheeling, liberally illustrated work by Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith that includes photographs of Wilde in New York, the body of Jesse James, and Jesse’s wife posing with his guns. There are innumerable graphics capturing the flavor of the tour with titles like “The Iron Jaws that Smashed the Southern Pacific Mail,” “The Aesthetic Monkey,” “Mr. Wild of Borneo,” “Bathing at Long Branch,” not to mention lively travesties of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement, including a George DuMaurier cartoon of a Wildean aesthete preparing to make a “midday meal” of a freshly cut lily in a glass of water.

If Twitter had been available in 1882 Wilde might have tweeted this response to the press coverage of his American tour: “Praise makes me humble. But when I am abused I know I have touched the stars …. I am indestructible!”

Still in his twenties at the time of his coast to coast “beautifying” of America, Wilde looked the part of a 19th-century rock star. While he never experienced the adulation that would be lavished on the Beatles a lifetime later, his flowing locks, flamboyant manner and attire, charisma and quotability, suggest a preview of Beatlemania and David-Bowie glam. At the tumultuous New York reception that greeted the Beatles on February 7, 1964, it was their Edwardian dress, moptopped hairstyle, and gift for repartee that wowed a cynical press corps that came to ridicule “the Fab Four” and left with a wealth of catchy quotes. The reporters descending on Oscar Wilde in January 1882 were primed for an effeminate caricature like Reginald Bunthorne, the humorless aesthete inspired by Wilde and at once satirized and popularized in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience, playing at the time to sold-out audiences on Broadway. Instead of the delicate dandy “with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand,” they found a man “taller than they were, with broad shoulders and long arms,” the look of an athlete, a “burly” voice, and hands capable of being doubled into fists (Wilde’s only sport at Oxford was boxing). He was wearing a bottlegreen great coat that hung down almost to his feet, the collar and cuffs trimmed with sealskin, as was the round cap some compared to a turban; he had a ring set with a Greek classical profile on his pinky, a cigarette in the other hand. Unlike the Beatles, he gave the press nothing back for the silly questions they asked (what was the temperature of his bath water? did he like his eggs fried on one side or both? when did he get up in the morning?). After he complained that the voyage had been boring (he’d have preferred a stormy passage), the headlines read “Mr. Wilde Disappointed in the Atlantic.” Too bad no reporters were there to hear Wilde tell the customs officers, “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

Wilde in Freehold

Printed in full in Richard Ellman’s biography, Wilde’s daunting American itinerary takes up four pages, from early January to mid-October. By the time he celebrated his 28th birthday in Denver on April 16, he’d already covered 60 venues from New York to San Francisco lecturing on “The English Renaissance.” Heading east again, he passed through Jesse James country only weeks after Jesse’s murder, and on May 8, following stops in Dayton and Harrisburg, he arrived at, would you believe, Freehold, New Jersey?

Having just written about Freehold’s most famous citizen, I did some online research and found that the local response to the exotic visitor was fairly representative of the reception he received throughout the tour. The anonymous reporter for the Monmouth Democrat heralded the coming of “a man who has been more talked about and lampooned during the last six months than any other man in this country” and looked forward to “the probable profit of hearing from his own lips, eccentric though he be, that plea for his art which has made his name a public wonder.” A later preview spoke of “the great deal of newspaper gossip” Wilde “has been subjected to as the object of small wits of the press” while imagining him to be “a quiet unobtrusive gentleman who has made the beautiful in art his study.”

The May 11 account of the actual performance, a lecture on The Decorative Arts, was something else again: “Mr. Wilde was greeted with slight applause and much laughter as he appeared on the platform of Shinn’s Hall in outré apparel, dressed in a velvet coat, knee beeches [sic], silk stockings, and buckled slippers with his long hair parted in the middle falling down over his shoulders and an immense frilled shirt bosom …. Concerning his lecture, … his word painting was grand, his diction choice. But his delivery was poor; he mouthed his words; his elocution was simply offensive. Of a good physical form he, in proper dress, without affectation, would impress any appreciative audience. But with his outré appearance and lackadaisical manners he not only fails to impress his hearers with the necessity of the beautiful but repels and indeed disgusts them with his effeminacy.”

Richard Ellman offers a more polished summing up of Wilde’s American reception: “The whole tour was an achievement of courage and grace, along with ineptitude and self-advertisement …. However effeminate his doctrines were thought to be, they constituted the most determined and sustained attack upon materialistic vulgarity that America had seen. That the attack itself was a bit vulgar did not diminish its effect.”

The Statue

The blurb on the cover of Ellman’s Oscar Wilde rightly calls it “a lasting monument” to both the subject and the biographer. A gaudier style of monument can be found in Dublin’s Merrion Square, where Oscar lounges on a massive boulder across from his boyhood home, elegantly recumbent in a bright green smoking jacket with a lavender collar and cuffs, pants bright shiny blue and shiny black patent leather shoes. Given his fondness for precious objects, he would approve of the materials employed by sculptor Danny Osborne, who used a 35-ton mass of white quartz from the Wicklow mountains for the boulder, nephrite jade from Canada for the jacket, a rare semi precious stone called thulite from central Norway for the collar and cuffs, Guatemalan jade for the shaping of Wilde’s head and hands, larvikite, a crystalline stone from Norway, for the trousers, and black granite for the hosiery and footwear.

Nearby black granite pillars feature a sample of Wilde’s epigrams, inscribed as if casually, graffiti style, by various hands. When I was there a decade ago, I scribbled several of them in my notebook. Given his posthumous metamorphosis from disgraced inmate to honored guest, this one seems on the money: “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”

On the Cover

Fifty years ago this month the group whose arrival on these shores made Wilde-worthy headlines were at the summit of their career recording “Strawberry Fields Forever” at Abbey Road. When the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is celebrated next spring, Oscar Wilde will be there, peering over John Lennon’s shoulder on the iconic album cover’s composite gathering of saints and sinners, heroes and villains.