Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 71

6 July [1882] Augusta, Georgia

My dear Mrs Howe, My present plan is to arrive in New York from Richmond on Wednesday evening, and to leave that night for Newport, being with you Thursday morning and staying, if you will have me, till Saturday. I have an enormous trunk and a valet, but they need not trouble you. I can send them to the hotel. With what incumbrances one travels! It is not in the right harmony of things that I should have a hat-box, a secretary, a dressing-case, a trunk, a portmanteau, and a valet always following me. I daily expect a thunderbolt, but the gods are asleep, though perhaps I had better not talk about them or they will hear me and wake. But what would Thoreau have said to my hat-box! Or Emerson to the size of my trunk, which is Cyclopean! But I can’t travel without Balzac and Gautier, and they take up so much room: and as long as I can enjoy talking nonsense to flowers and children I am not afraid of the depraved luxury of a hat-box.

I write to you from the beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance: picturesque too in her failure to keep pace with your keen northern pushing intellect; living chiefly on credit, and on the memory of some crushing defeats. And I have been to Texas, right to the heart of it, and stayed with Jeff Davis at his plantation (how fascinating all failures are!) and seen Savannah, and the Georgia forests, and bathed in the Gulf of Mexico, and engaged in Voodoo rites with the Negroes, and am dreadfully tired and longing for an idle day which we will have at Newport.

Pray remember me to Miss Howe, and believe me very truly yours

OSCAR WILDE

Would you send a line to me at 1267 Broadway to say if it is all right.

The lecture tour, which was only planned to last until April, was extended to the middle of May when Col. Morse offered him a further two months in the Southern States and Canada. Wilde accepted and by the middle of July was glad of a two-week break (not three as it turned out) in Rhode Island and New York. The visit to Japan never took place because Morse arranged a further tour of New England in August, and Canada again in October. Wilde had met Donoghue when in Chicago and his championing of the young sculptor publicly in America made Donoghue’s career.