Wilde in America by David M. Friedman

Author:David M. Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

AFTER BOARDING A train bound for Sacramento, some fifteen hundred miles away, Wilde was told he was riding “express.” He would soon learn, however, how imprecise that term was in 1882. The train came to a halt every thirty minutes or so to take on coal, water, mail, and additional passengers. Fortunately, he was traveling first class, which meant that, during the day, he sat in a reclining plush velvet seat and, at night, slept in a private pull-out berth—a few dozen yards (but a world away) from the traveling salesmen, farmers, miners, cowboys, card sharps, and prostitutes who sat and slept, cramped and uncomfortably, in the noisy second-class cars.

At first, Wilde was often induced to step out of the train during its many stops and wave to the crowd of gawking locals who had been informed of his presence on the train by the press. Though Wilde loved to preen, he eventually tired of these command performances. There was a ready solution available to him, however, right there in the first-class car. This was the actor John Howson, a member of the Conley-Barton Opera Troupe, traveling to San Francisco to mount the production of Patience authorized by the Carte organization. Howson was playing Bunthorne, so he had a long-haired wig, a pair of breeches, black silk stockings, and so on, which, on several occasions, he happily donned to greet the cheering groups hoping to see the famous aesthete from abroad. When the train stopped in Corinne, Utah, forty citizens of that town, many of them holding a sunflower, arranged for a brass band to greet Wilde. What they didn’t know was that the man effusively thanking them for their efforts was Howson.

In a letter to Norman Forbes-Robertson, Wilde described what he was seeing from his window when the train was moving: “At first grey, gaunt desolate plains, as colourless as waste land by the sea, with now and then scampering herds of bright red antelopes, and heavy shambling buffaloes, rather like Joe Knight”—a London theater critic—“in appearance, and screaming vultures like gnats high up in the air, then up the Sierra Nevadas, the snow-capped mountains shining like shields of polished silver in that vault of blue flame we call the sky, and deep canyons full of pine trees . . . and at last from the chill winter of the mountains down into eternal summer, groves of orange trees in fruit and flower, green fields, and purple hills, a very Italy, without its art.”

Finally, on March 26, four days after he left Omaha, a connecting train from Sacramento took Wilde to Oakland, where—dressed in brown trousers, a white shirt, a puce-colored tie, a black velvet frock coat, yellow leather gloves, and a wide-brimmed felt hat—he was met by Charles E. Locke and his minions, by journalists from all the major newspapers in San Francisco, and by hundreds of curious “civilians,” who moved (quietly and respectfully, the San Francisco Examiner reported) wherever Wilde moved at the train terminal, so as

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