The young Oscar Wilde toured America in a quest to achieve

fame before he had even published a word

By Neil Hegarty

In January 1882, a young Irishman named Oscar Wilde met the American poet Walt Whitman at the latter’s home
in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman was celebrated as a pillar of American writing; Wilde had, by contrast, published
scarcely a word. What he lacked in this department, however, he was more than making up for in confidence and public
exposure. Already a fixture on the London social scene and admired for his wit and command of the English language,
Wilde was now newly embarked on an American lecture tour, engaged to speak to the public on the unlikely subjects of
aestheticism and the uses and importance of art. Oscar Wilde’s real aim, however, was to tell America a good deal about
Oscar Wilde.

Self-promotion begins all careers once the media for it exists – and here is Wilde at the birth of his career, setting
out to make a spectacle of himself in America. David M Friedman’s thoughtful and engaging Wilde in America: Oscar
Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity follows his subject’s year-long journey across the continent, tracing the
evolution of a public image and the means by which Wilde sought to control this process. This was his tangible connection
with Whitman, who knew a thing or two about the manufacture of a successful and durable public image, having – as
Friedman puts it – “pioneered the idea that a literary man in search of fame should fashion himself as a literary artefact”.
READ: Wilde's 20 best quotations about America

Friedman begins his story, however, with the context necessary to comprehend Wilde and his journey: glancing at
his student life at Oxford, his time among the rivalries and sparkling conversation of London society – and where it all
began, in the candlelit, curtained salons of Victorian Dublin, including those in the imposing family home on Merrion
Square that were presided over by his tempestuous mother Speranza. The book might at this point have explored another,
perhaps more crucial influence: it was here in Dublin that the young Oscar Wilde learnt everything necessary about the
rules of social projection – for such strictures governed life in Ireland, that most codified of societies in which such
projection was something of an all-absorbing national pastime.

The danger in such a topographically driven account – from one American city to another and on to another – is
that the narrative may drag. Friedman, however, neatly skirts such a peril, largely because his descriptions of these
peregrinations are so vividly realised. Wilde’s observations of racism in the South, his experience of a drinking game with a
group of miners at the bottom of a 100ft shaft in a freezing Colorado silver mine (he was lowered down in an iron bucket,
and spent hours with his new subterranean friends), his first sight of San Francisco shining white on its bay – all of these
add new facets to our awareness of his taste for novelty. Nor does he emerge wholly unscathed. In his pursuit of attention,
he insults his hosts in ways that seem cheap: Chicago and Cincinnati, he tells the proud citizens of these cities, are nasty,
ugly places; Niagara Falls is not grand enough to please him. There were limits, it appeared, even to the originality of Oscar
Wilde.
Wilde’s interpretation of spectacle is absorbing: he appeared, Friedman tells us, in “patent leather shoes with silver
buckles, then black stockings and above them green velvet knee breeches” before a group of Boston society types – and
this was by no means the most outrageous of his many American outfits. Conversely, he kept a step ahead of his critics:
also at Boston, he was tipped off that a mocking audience would be clad in wigs and clutching blossoms like Regency
dandies – and so he emerged to foil them, clad in sober dinner jacket and trousers. And he is humanised by glimpses of his
own culture shock – at, for example, the interview culture that was at this point making headway in North America, but
which was wholly alien to Wilde. “We have no interviewing in England,” he told one reporter tartly – and for Wilde,
England was all the better for it.
His quest was to attain fame for its own sake – and this he achieved. The next aspiration, for Wilde as for Whitman,
was then to convert this into aesthetic achievement – and in a crucial coda, Friedman emphasises the point that Wilde’s
later career would indeed reveal him as a figure as devoted to substance as to style: a verbal and linguistic genius who
understood that his work would survive on its own terms, when its creator’s green velvet breeches were a distant memory.
And so, next time we look askance at the cult of celebrity, we can absolve Oscar Wilde of any responsibility: he understood
all too well that, by itself, celebrity is an empty vessel.