Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 65

[Circa 20 March 1882] Sioux City

Dear Mrs Lewis, I am sure you will be interested to hear that I have met Indians. They are really in appearance very like Colvin, when he is wearing his professorial robes: the likeness is quite curious, and revived pleasant literary reminiscences. Their conversation was most interesting as long as it was unintelligible, but when interpreted to me reminded me strangely and vividly of the conversation of Mr Commissioner Kerr.

I don’t know where I am: somewhere in the middle of coyotes and cañons: one is a ‘ravine’ and the other a ‘fox’, I don’t know which, but I think they change about. I have met miners: they are big-booted, red-shirted, yellow-bearded and delightful ruffians. One of them asked me if I was not ‘running an art-mill’, and on my pointing to my numerous retinue, said he ‘guessed I hadn’t need to wash my own pans’, and his ‘pardner’ remarked that ‘I hadn’t need to sell clams neither, I could toot my own horn’. I secretly believe they read up Bret Harte privately; they were certainly almost as real as his miners, and quite as pleasant. With my usual passion for personality I entertained them, and had a delightful time, though on my making some mention of early Florentine art they unanimously declared they could neither ‘trump or follow it’.

Weary of being asked by gloomy reporters ‘which was the most beautiful colour’ and what is the meaning of the word ‘aesthetic’, on my last Chicago interview I turned the conversation on three of my heroes, Whistler, Labou-chere, and Irving, and on the adored and adorable Lily. 1 send you them all.

I hope you are all well. Pray remember me to your husband, and to the Grange when you visit there next.

Colvin in a blanket has just passed the window: he is decked out with feathers, and wants me to buy bead slippers; it is really most odd, and undoubtedly Colvin, I could hardly be mistaken.

Give my love to Katie please!!! and believe me, most sincerely and truly yours

OSCAR WILDE

In a lecture at Louisville, Kentucky on 21 February, Wilde had quoted Keats’s ‘Sonnet on Blue’. By sheer coincidence, the poet’s niece was sitting in the audience. She so enjoyed Wilde’s lecture that she invited him home to see her uncle’s papers and three weeks later sent him the manuscript of the sonnet itself.