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• introduction • “Interviewers are a product of American civilization, whose acquaintance I am making with tolerable speed,” the twenty-seven-year-old Oscar Wilde told an interviewer for the Boston Globe on 28 January 1882. “You gentlemen have fairly monopolized me ever since I saw Sandy Hook. In New York there were about a hundred a day. . . . But then,” he added, lest he seem unwilling to talk, “I am always glad to see you.” As he later explained, “We have no interviewing in England.” Celebrity interviews began to appear in American newspapers in the early 1870s, and traveling lecturers were a convenient source of “copy” for reporters. Though Charles Dickens sat for no interviews during his final U.S. speaking tour in 1867–68, for example, Mark Twain satirized his own experiences on the hustings as early as 1874 in “An Encounter with an Interviewer.” As the reporter in this sketch tells the author, “You know it is the custom, now, to interview any man who has become notorious.”1 Predictably, Twain declined most reporters’ requests to meet him except while he was on tour and wanted the publicity. Henry James also burlesqued celebrity interviewers in the characters of Matthias Pardon in The Bostonians (1886) and Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Henrietta even works for a gossip rag called the New York Interviewer, whose contents lead another character to remark that once “you had read the Interviewer you . . . lost all faith in culture.”2 Predictably, James studiously avoided reporters entirely. Moreover, unlike the Lyceum speakers before the Civil War, who spread a gospel of self-help, a lecturer of the new breed was expected not to edify but to entertain. He required a publicity mill, not a moral message, to attract an audience. i-xii_1-196_Wild.indd 1 8/4/09 9:11:28 AM 2 Introduction While James decried the new celebrity culture and Mark Twain held it at arm’s length, Oscar Wilde eagerly embraced it. Like Walt Whitman, whom Wilde admired, the young poet promoted himself adeptly, carefully cultivating his public image. Shortly after his arrival in New York, he sat for a series of twenty portraits at the Broadway studio of Napoleon Sarony, the leading commercial photographer in the country, who had obtained exclusive rights to distribute them. When an interviewer asked him on 25 February for “some details of [his] private life,” Wilde quipped, “I wished I had one.” As far as the public was concerned, Wilde existed only in the persona he had created or the way he was perceived. For the most part, he charmed and even pandered to interviewers when he and they met face to face; after all, they were his collaborators in the creation of his public image. He told a reporter in Cincinnati on 20 February, “some of the brightest hours I have passed in this country have been with the gentlemen of the press who have interviewed me, and I have found them among the most intelligent men I have met here.” A week later, speaking to an interviewer in St. Louis, he insisted, “My experiences with the press in the West have been very pleasant, and I have met gentlemen whose intelligent conversation I have enjoyed. They have talked with me of art and literature, and understood the subjects.” But Wilde railed against interviewers in private. As he wrote the poet Joaquin Miller in late February, Who are these scribes who, passing from purposeless alacrity from the police news to the Parthenon, and from crime to criticism, sway with such serene incapacity the office which they so lately swept? “Narcissuses of imbecility,” what should they see in the clear waters of Beauty and in the well undefiled of Truth but the shifting and shadowy image of their own substantial stupidity?3 Or as he wrote Mrs. George Lewis in late March, he was “weary of being asked by gloomy reporters ‘which was the most beautiful colour’ and what is the meaning of the word ‘aesthetic.’”4 In essence, he tired of the question—a feature of celebrity culture and the commodification of fame—“what are your thoughts on having your thoughts published so often?” In all, Wilde sat for at least ninety-eight interviews while touring North America between January and November 1882. He was interrogated by local reporters in the predictable venues, including all the major cities from New York and Boston to San Francisco. But he was also questioned in towns of...

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