Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 75

‘I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few, I am gratified. If it does not, it causes me no pain.’

Wilde sailed home from New York on the Bothnia on 27 December 1882 and arrived in Liverpool on 6 January. During his year in America he had delivered nearly 150 lectures and earned himself around $6000. After two or three weeks in London he used what was left of his American earnings to spend three months in Paris. He stayed at the Hotel Voltaire on the Left Bank, had his hair curled in imitation of a bust of Nero in the Louvre and dressed in the height of fashion. ‘We are now concerned with the Oscar of the second period,’ he said, ‘who has nothing whatever in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly.’ Some years later he would further modify his account of this stunt by saying that he never carried a flower down Piccadilly: ‘To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it—that was a triumph.’

It was in Paris that he met and befriended a young English journalist, Robert Sherard, a great-grandson of Wordsworth. Sherard was later to become his first and most voluminous biographer, though in his muddle-headed way and spaniel-like devotion he entirely overlooked his friend’s homosexuality before his arrest and misunderstood it thereafter. It was through Sherard that Wilde met many of the foremost literary Frenchmen of the time: Verlaine and Victor Hugo, Mallarme, Zola, Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, as well as the painters Degas and Jacques-Emile Blanche. Impressing Paris was considerably more difficult than London or New York, which had looked upon his eccentricities and showmanship with amused tolerance; Zola and de Goncourt were especially critical, the latter writing rather unflatteringly of Wilde in his diary as ‘cet individu au sexe douteux, au langage de cabotin, aux récits blagueurs’.

The Duchess of Padua was duly sent off to Mary Anderson, who within a month had turned it down, which was as much of a blow to his finances as it was to his ego. However it must have been some consolation that he had almost finalised the arrangements for Vera to be produced with Marie Prescott in the title role in August.