On Jan. 2, 1882, Oscar Wilde, at 27 London’s reigning literary darling, arrived in New York for a speaking tour of America. Asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare, Wilde is said to have replied, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.”
While press critics lampooned Wilde as an effeminate aesthete with nothing to say — the newspaperman Ambrose Bierce wrote: “He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck” — Wilde’s tour of America was a smash success. The original four-month schedule stretched to nearly a year to accommodate the crush of ticket seekers. Though Wilde had yet to pen The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray or anything else that would establish his place in the literary canon, fans beseeched him for autographs and locks of his brown hair.
In late March, Wilde traveled to California to give lectures at Oakland, San Francisco, Stockton and San Jose. Northern California in the bloom of spring delighted Wilde. “Very Italy, without the art” he wrote of the Golden State in a March 27 letter to his friend Norman Forbes-Robertson. The “Apostle of Aestheticism,” as Wilde was billed in America, may have intended to spend time in Southern California. In that same letter, he boasts that the railroad has offered him “a special train and private car to go down the coast to Los Angeles, a sort of Naples here. …” For whatever reason, the trip did not take place.
For that, we are all the poorer. As an epigrammist, Wilde is without equal. His cleverest bon mots — “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,” for example — “turn conventional wisdom on its head,” writes UCLA professor and Wilde scholar Joseph Bristow. While a dusty agricultural outpost like 1880s Los Angeles would have held little appeal to someone who was accustomed to sipping iced champagne in gentlemen’s clubs, the city would surely have inspired a one-liner that would amuse us today.
Though he never made it to Southern California, Los Angeles — UCLA, to be precise — occupies a position of enviable status in the Wilde world. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, one of the special collections libraries of UCLA, holds the world’s largest and most significant collection of materials by and about Wilde. The collection is stunning in scope and breadth. Ensconced behind locked doors in a temperature-controlled basement room are more than 6,500 items, among them letters and manuscripts in Wilde’s neat script, photographs, oil paintings, caricatures, cartoons, news clippings, theater posters and programs. The most-requested items include Wilde’s letters from prison. Written in fountain pen on blue jail-issue stationery, the letters have the power “to bring people to tears” and often do, says librarian Jennifer Schaffner.
With interest in Wilde as keen today as ever, the Clark is a Mecca for Wilde scholars and researchers. Among them is the author’s grandson, Merlin Holland, who has written and edited a number of books that draw heavily on the Clark collection. Holland’s visits to the library are always a cause for excitement. Tall, with full lips and wavy brown hair, he bears a striking resemblance to his celebrated forbear.
Head Librarian Bruce Whiteman adds to the Wilde collection as items come on the market and as his budget allows. Recent acquisitions include a philosophy notebook that Wilde kept as a student from 1876–’78 at Magdalen College, Oxford. The red, cloth-backed volume, its contents hitherto unknown, has already generated interest among scholars for its insights into Wilde’s undergraduate reading. Purchased at the same time was the original manuscript of Without Apology, the autobiography of Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, Wilde’s lover.
The Clark has a reputation as a hidden treasure, due in no small part to its location. The library is 13 miles from campus in a stately 1926 mansion set amid restored Victorian and Craftsman homes in the historic West Adams district. Surrounded by a high, vine-covered brick wall, the Clark is almost easy to miss. Still, Wilde fans — more numerous each year — find their way here.
The arts patron and book collector William Andrews Clark Jr., son of a wealthy copper-mining magnate, was a passionate advocate of Wilde’s work when he began purchasing the author’s first editions in the early 1920s. Clark had no way of knowing that today Wilde manuscripts would command prices as high as those of any modern literary work. While his collection came to focus primarily on English literature and history of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Wilde was Clark’s first collection. Shortly after having the library constructed, Clark deeded in memory of his father the building, its contents and the property on which it sits to what was then the Southern Branch of the University of California.
The Clark collection includes a letter from Wilde to his loyal friend Robert Ross that makes the reader want to jump out of his chair and shout “Don’t do it!,” as if watching a horror film in which some unfortunate character is about to enter a forbidden room. In 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, angry at the relationship between his son, Alfred Douglas, and the writer, left a calling card at Wilde’s club accusing him of sodomy. “Since I saw you something has happened,” a distraught Wilde writes in the letter to Ross. “Bosie’s father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it. I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution … ”
Goaded by Douglas, who hated his father, Wilde moved forward with an ill-advised libel suit, a folly that set in motion his own ruin. When the evidence turned against him in court, Wilde withdrew his case, but it was too late. Tried and convicted of homosexuality, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor. He emerged from Reading Gaol, his career and reputation destroyed.
After Wilde’s release from prison, he reunited with Douglas. They parted after three months and Wilde wrote nothing more, devoting himself instead to conversation, which many considered his true forte anyway. Wilde’s contemporary George Bernard Shaw called him “the best talker of his time.”
“I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of heaven shut against him,” wrote Shaw after Wilde’s death in 1900. “He is too good company to be excluded.”
