The SS Arizona, on which Wilde made the first of his four Atlantic crossings.
At noon on 24 December 1881 the SS Arizona departed Liverpool. The ship arrived at New York quarantine nine days later, on the evening of 2 January. A group of interviewers clambered over the gunwale and went in search of the ship’s most famous passenger: Oscar Wilde. They quizzed the young poet on his mission in America. He revealed that he would give his first lecture in New York on the 9th. He intended to stage a play he had written. And he looked forward to seeing the country.
This was all fine copy, but it was a chance encounter with one of Wilde’s fellow passengers that brought the real scoop:
Wilde in the hat and coat he wore when interviewed on the SS Arizona.
On the journey over Mr. Wilde did not attain, it appears, to very great popularity among the passengers. Before the ship had been five days out he said to a gentleman with whom he was promenading the deck (and this gentleman kindly retailed the conversation to the writer), “I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic. It is not so majestic as I expected. I would like to see the ship’s bridge carried away!”‘Oscar Wilde’s Arrival’, The New York World, Semi-Weekly Edition (New York, NY), 3 Jan. 1882, 4, repr. Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, 31–5, 35
Reporters had been primed by caricatures of Wilde and his aesthetic ilk to see the visitor as a figure of fun, and an absurd story about his being disappointed with a body of water was just what they were after. Within days Wilde’s pronouncement was inspiring countless column inches on both sides of the Atlantic. It was by the far the most reproduced quip of his year-long sojourn in America.
But why was Wilde disappointed with the Atlantic? Was he just being flippant, or had he really expected the ocean to be ‘majestic’?
There is reason to believe that Wilde’s ideas about the Atlantic were based on three things: what he had heard, what he had read, and what he had personally experienced of maritime travel before he set sail on Christmas Eve 1881.
Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘abominable snowstorm’
Sarah Bernhardt (c. 1880). Image: Paris Musées.
Wilde had befriended the French superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1879. The next year the Divine Sarah embarked on her first American tour. When she arrived in New York she told an interviewer: ‘We had a very fair trip, but it was stormy the first two days and toward the end of the voyage too. The pitching of the steamer was something terrible.’‘Bernhardt in New-York’, New York Tribune (New York, NY), 28 Oct. 1880, 5
Decades later she would write in her memoirs of how an ‘abominable snowstorm’ had frosted the Amerique from rigging to rudder.
The sky was suddenly veiled from us by all this whiteness which fell round us in avalanches, completely hiding the horizon. I was facing the sea, and as Captain Jouclas pointed out to me, we could not see a hundred yards in front of us. I then turned round and saw that the ship was as white as a sea-gull: the ropes, the cordage, the nettings, the port-holes, the shrouds, the boats, the deck, the sails, the ladders, the funnels, the ventilators, everything was white. The sea was black and the sky black. The ship alone was white, floating along in this immensity.Bernhardt, S. (1907) My Double Life: Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt, William Heinemann, 354–5
We know that once Bernhardt had returned to Europe in 1881 she spoke with Wilde about her time in America.Wilde told American interviewers that Bernhardt had advised him that, when he visited the country, the two things he must see were the actress Clara Morris and the way hogs were slaughtered in Chicago (‘Oscar Back Again’, The Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), 1 Mar. 1882, 8, repr. Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, 229–35, 235). It seems quite likely that she would also have told him about her eventful Atlantic crossing.
Charles Dickens’s ‘staggering, heaving, wrestling’ steam-packet
Charles Dickens by Daniel Maclise (1839). Detail. Image: NPG, London.
Another celebrity who had preceded Wilde to America was Charles Dickens. In January 1842, at the age of twenty-nine, the author crossed the Atlantic for the first time. In his American Notes for General Circulation (1842) Dickens evocatively describes the furious storm that for days had battered his steam-packet. Awakened early one morning by a shriek from his wife, he found his cabin was ‘standing on its head’.
Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say, ‘Thank Heaven!’ she wrongs again. Before one can cry she is wrong, she seems to have started forward, and to be a creature actively running of its own accord, with broken knees and failing legs, through every variety of hole and pitfall, and stumbling constantly. Before one can so much as wonder, she takes a high leap into the air. Before she has well done that, she takes a deep dive into the water. Before she has gained the surface, she throws a summerset. The instant she is on her legs, she rushes backward. And so she goes on staggering, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving, jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking: and going through all these movements, sometimes by turns, and sometimes all together: until one feels disposed to roar for mercy.Dickens, C. (1842) American Notes for General Circulation, I, Chapman and Hall, 25–8
Wilde had probably read Dickens’s book. When he spoke of Dickens to interviewers, it was often to compare his own experiences in America with those of the English author. By the summer of 1882 Wilde was claiming that
he had had a better opportunity of acquainting himself with the subject [of American life and manners] than Charles Dickens had. He had seen more of the country, met a greater number of representative people and made a closer study of our institutions and affairs.‘A Chat With Oscar’, The Times (Philadelphia, PA), 2 Sep. 1882, 5, repr. Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, 456–61, 456. For other similar mentions of Dickens, see Marland, 144, 213, 218, 227.
Wilde cannot have helped but see in the young Dickens – with his long hair, flashy clothes, and transatlantic fame – a model for himself and his own American adventure. Wilde’s tour had to be bigger and better, so of course he was disappointed when the Atlantic failed to herald his advent as it had that of his predecessor.
Algernon Charles Swinburne’s ‘sea paved with flame’
Algernon Charles Swinburne (c. 1865). Image: NPG, London.
The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne never visited America, but he did witness a spectacular thunderstorm while crossing the English Channel in the summer of 1865. He wrote about the experience on the first page of his book Essays and Studies (1876):
Crossing over when a boy from Ostend, I had the fortune to be caught in midchannel by a thunderstorm strong enough to delay the packet some three good hours over the due time. About midnight the thundercloud was right overhead, full of incessant sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have life, and a delight in its life. […] Underneath and about us the sea was paved with flame; the whole water trembled and hissed with phosphoric fire; even through the wind and thunder I could hear the crackling and sputtering of the water-sparks.Swinburne, A. C. (1876) Essays and Studies, Chatto and Windus, 1–2. The experience would also inspire the lyric ‘A Channel Crossing’, though this was published after Wilde visited America and so cannot have influenced the younger man’s ideas of sea travel.
Wilde, as a young man, was hugely influenced by Swinburne.Schwab, A. T. (2006) Wilde and Swinburne: Part I, The Wildean, 29, 12–27 (view source) In fact, Wilde’s Poems (1881) was described by one reviewer as ‘Swinburne and water’.‘Swinburne and Water’, Punch (London, UK), 23 Jul. 1881, 26 (view source) The copy of Essays and Studies that belonged to Wilde has survived, and Thomas Wright has suggested that, because echoes of the text can be heard in Wilde’s writings in America, he probably took the book with him.Wright, T. (2015) The influence of Swinburne’s Essays and Studies on Oscar Wilde: an examination of Wilde’s copy, The Oscholars The likelihood that he re-read it on his crossing of the Atlantic seems high.
Wilde on the Aegean
Wilde, too, had experienced a storm at sea. Until he sailed for America, the longest sea voyage he had ever undertaken was in the spring of 1877, when he had sailed from Greece to Italy. In Chicago in February 1882 an interviewer asked Wilde about his rumoured disappointment with the Atlantic. Wilde replied:
That old folly still clings, it seems. Why, I am passionately fond of the sea. But what is the sea in a calm? It is motionless. It is nothing. The grandest sight I ever saw in my life was a storm when coming from Athens to Naples, when a cyclone came up from the desert.‘Oscar Wilde’, The Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago, IL), 11 Feb. 1882, 3, repr. Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, 158–62, 160
He also told a friend of how one of his travelling companions, probably the publisher George A. Macmillan, ‘during a frightful storm was sent crashing neck and crop to the keys of a piano in the small saloon’.[Otho Holland Lloyd], ‘Stray Recollections’, The Soil, Apr. 1917, 155–6
He must have hoped that, the Atlantic being bigger than the Aegean, the storms that raged over that ocean must be correspondingly imposing and impressive. His disappointment at not seeing such a storm now seems understandable.
Revenge on the Atlantic
Wilde’s criticism of the Atlantic followed him all over America, and even back-and-forth across the ocean itself. When he returned to England in January 1883 he was met at the gangplank by an enterprising cub reporter for the Liverpool Daily Post. The ‘crucial point’ was raised: had Wilde really been disappointed with the Atlantic?
“Certainly I was disappointed,” said Mr. Wilde, with an imperturbable gravity, relieved only by the faintest glimmer of a smile. “The Atlantic,” he proceeded to explain, “is greatly misunderstood.” His questioner ventured to hint that the mysterious phrase in which he had expressed his disappointment did not help to clear away the misunderstanding that existed with respect to this particular ocean. “Everything one says,” added Mr. Wilde, looking far away into the bank of smoke that hung over Liverpool, “should be in mystery, more or less.”
After this oracular statement, the unhappy interrogator saw no means of pursuing the argument; but in a moment or two the philosophical cloud that was gathering was cleared away by a sunshiny smile, and Mr. Wilde continued—“The Atlantic, as I first saw it, was wanting in all the elements of grandeur; it was a monotonous and uninteresting grey.” We inquired whether that opinion had been modified since, and he said, “Yes, considerably, for we had one very fine storm on the way home.”[Robert Batho], ‘An Interview with Oscar Wilde’, Liverpool Daily Post (Liverpool, UK), 8 Jan. 1883, 7, repr. Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, 517–23, 521–2
Wilde in New York in the summer of 1883.
The following summer Wilde was back in New York to attend the premiere of his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists. He was asked if he had changed his opinion of the Atlantic. He replied:
No; I must still quarrel with the Atlantic. It is not beautiful at all. There are no objects to give it distance; nothing but gray, gray sky and gray, gray sea. It is simply monotonous.‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’s Hair’, The New York Herald (New York, NY), 12 Aug. 1883, 10, repr. Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, 545–7, 546
But he told other interviewers that he had enjoyed his third crossing of the ocean very much. The weather had been delightful and the company pleasant. He had even been persuaded to take part in a game of deck cricket. He described ‘with some merriment how he had hit a sixer into the ocean that he had once despised’.‘Oscar Wilde’s Return’, The Times (Philadelphia, PA), 12 Aug. 1883, 1, repr. Marland, R. (2023) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews - Updates, u25 (view source)
Revenge at last!