Monday, Jun. 01, 1936
Esthete in Philistia
OSCAR WILDE DISCOVERS AMERICA-- Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith-- Harcourt, Brace ($4.50). In 1881 the inimitable musicomedies of Gilbert & Sullivan were all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic. Shrewd Producer D'Oyly Carte was planning to send the authorized version of his latest G. & S. operetta, Patience, on a U. S. tour. It was also his notion to send ahead, as unconscious pressagent, the notorious original of Patience's esthete hero, Oscar Wilde. Carte put the scheme to Oscar as a lecture tour, a mission to preach beauty to the barbarians. Oscar bit. Authors Lewis & Smith have chronicled his U. S. peregrinations against a lavishly illustrated contemporary background. Result is a big (462-page) sprightly blonde of a book, as meaty and hearty as an oldtime burlesque queen. When Oscar Wilde landed in Manhattan he arrived in a U. S. that was already smiling behind its hand. The rumors of his long-haired, dandiacal appearance, his likeness to Gilbert & Sullivan's flower-devour-ing Bunthorne, had preceded him. Newshawks delightedly reported his first wisecrack, when he said to the customs inspector: "I have nothing to declare but my genius." Ace Photographer Sarony posed him in his lank locks, fur-trimmed coat and velvet knee-breeches. Society's biggest fish held aloof, but smaller fry came flocking. Skeptical Broadwayites made the first of several pseudo-hospitable attempts to drink Oscar under the table-- in vain. Columnists and cartoonists ribbed him unmercifully. But his first lecture (all of them were on Beauty) grossed $1,000. In Boston 60 Harvard boys marched in to his lecture dressed in caricature esthetic attire; Oscar, forewarned, had the laugh on them by appearing in fairly conventional evening dress. In New Haven, Yale copy-catted to no effect. But in Rochester, N. Y. the undergraduates staged a real riot. Chicago was insulted when Oscar made withering remarks about their water tower. In St. Louis the audience was impolite. In Denver up-to-date brothel-keepers showed their awareness of his approach by redecorating their cribs in pre-Raphaelite style, while the girls amazed their miner customers by screaming "Ut-terly utter!" Leadville, Colo, tried to frighten Oscar off with threatening letters, but nothing happened to him when he went there. When Griggsville, Kans. wired him an invitation to lecture on esthetics, he replied: "Begin by changing the name of your town." His tour netted Oscar -L-1,200, but his expenses came to nearly that. And he admitted that he had failed to convert the sprawling, striving, ugly U. S. to the cult of beauty. The U. S. was more interested in the killing of Jesse James, the trial of Guiteau, who shot President Garfield, the arrival of Lily Langtry, "the Jersey Lily." But Wilde did find two things to admire: Walt Whitman and the Rocky Mountains. He took the jibes of the Press in silence, but once he sent for the writer of a particularly outrageous story, asked him how much he had been paid for it. When the newshawk replied: "Six dollars," Oscar drawled, "Well, the rate for lying is not very high in America. That's all I wished to ascertain. Good day." Back in Manhattan, he annoyed Fifth Avenue dandies by asserting that the only well-dressed men he had seen in the U. S. were the Western miners. Oscar Wilde failed to change the U. S. but the U. S. changed him. His trip might have been a commercial failure but it gave him a sound commercial training. When he got back to London he laid away his knee-breeches, cut his hair, became the popular playwright of his generation.
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