Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 52

[15 January 1882] New York

My dear Norman, I have been to call on Ian and his wife. She is so pretty and sweet and simple, like a little fair-haired Madonna, with a baby who already shows a great dramatic power and behaved during my visit (I stayed about an hour, breaking fifty-four engagements) like Macbeth, Hamlet, King John, and all the remarkable characters in Shakespeare. They seem very happy, and she is very loving to Ian, and unaffected.

I go to Philadelphia tomorrow. Great success here; nothing like it since Dickens, they tell me. I am torn in bits by Society. Immense receptions, wonderful dinners, crowds wait for my carriage. I wave a gloved hand and an ivory cane and they cheer. Girls very lovely, men simple and intellectual. Rooms are hung with white lilies for me everywhere. I have ‘Boy’ at intervals, also two secretaries, one to write my autograph and answer the hundreds of letters that come begging for it. Another, whose hair is brown, to send locks of his own hair to the young ladies who write asking for mine; he is rapidly becoming bald. Also a black servant, who is my slave – in a free country one cannot live without a slave – rather like a Christy minstrel, except that he knows no riddles. Also a carriage and a black tiger who is like a little monkey. I give sittings to artists, and generally behave as I always have behaved – ‘dreadfully’. Love to your mother and Forby and all of them. Ever your affectionate friend.

OSCAR

Initially Wilde’s tour was not without its incidents. Another lecturer, Archibald Forbes, a war correspondent whose tour was also managed by D’Oyly Carte, crossed swords with Wilde in a train while they were both travelling to lecture in Baltimore. Forbes’s disparaging remarks about aestheticism apparently needled Wilde who responded by staying on the train and going straight on to Washington. The dispute became public in the newspapers and threatened to jeopardise Wilde’s entire tour.