The Wilde, Wilde West

It is pleasant to recall that, long before the debacle of his trial, Wilde prevailed handily over the machinations of no less august a body than the Bohemian Club. The internationally known, ultra-secretive Club and its Northern California retreat, the Bohemian Grove (a sort of nature camp for the power elite, where giants still walk the earth and mighty redwood trees are dwarfed by Gingrichs, Kissingers and Rockefellers), have been a gathering place for the great and inflated for over a century. In recent years, the Club has also become a favorite target of conspiracy hounds, snoopy journalists and other detractors who are irked by its policy of hyper-reticence and see the place as the ultimate symbol of a patriarchal evil empire. Others say the Bohemians are nothing more than overgrown fraternity boys, but with more money and larger prostate glands.

Whichever it is, their brethren's undoing at the hands (and tongue) of Oscar Wilde took place on a foggy San Francisco night over a decade before Wilde's legal problems. In 1882, the writer was in San Francisco as part of his year-long lecture tour of the United States. According to one report at the time, he was considered "a Miss Nancy" by the Bohemians, whom he had exasperated with his ceaseless evangelizing for aestheticism, to say nothing of his flamboyant demeanor and outrageous apparel -- velvet suits, yellow gloves. The club members felt that it was their responsibility to take him down a notch by getting him drunk and making a fool of him.

They succeeded in bringing the loquacious Wilde to their headquarters, where they fed him dinner and then started heavily laying on the booze. But after a few hours Wilde was clearly besting them, and the enormity of their miscalculation became apparent. They'd made two errors: First, they'd failed to take into account his Irishness. Ethnic stereotypes notwithstanding, the Irish -- certainly in the case of our hero -- were a breed well accustomed to sucking up goodly quantities of liquor while staying operational; and two, Wilde was a strapping 28-year-old with daunting intellectual energy and the stamina of a cape buffalo. He drank, and talked, the Bohemians literally under the table, and then strolled to his hotel in the morning light. When the Bohemians came to, they arranged for a photo-portrait to be made of their conqueror.

Of course, balance is everything in good journalism, so I called the Club to get its side of the story. The archivist told me that the photo was destroyed in the 1906 fire, as were any records that the powerful clique kept of that humbling evening. The archivist, a kindly gentleman, said he'd dig up more information and call me back. He took my number (twice), but for some strange reason I never heard from him.

The Bohemian Club's comeuppance recalls another evening during the American tour when a group of 60 Harvard boys attempted to embarrass the writer by entering a Boston lecture en masse in full aesthete regalia -- breeches, dinner jackets, and white locks, each young man languidly bearing a sunflower. Wilde, who had been warned, was conventionally dressed, and he proceeded to carve the hapless students into bite-sized pieces. Glancing casually at the front row, he said, "I see about me certain signs of an aesthetic movement. I see certain young men, who are no doubt sincere, but I can assure them that they are no more than caricatures. As I look around me, I am impelled for the first time to breathe a fervent prayer, 'Save me from my disciples.' But rather let me, as Wordsworth says, 'turn me from those bold, bad men.' "

The rout of the students was complete; it was one of Wilde's greatest triumphs.

"As they put their heads in the lion's mouth," Wilde later explained, "I thought they deserved a little bite."

-- Douglas Cruickshank

THE WORLD WILDE WEB Oscar Wilde, much to his pleasure, is abundantly present on the World Wide Web. By using one of the search engines (Lycos, Yahoo, InfoSeek, etc.) you can find dozens of sites that reference him, offer entire collections of his poetry and prose, and even one that will take you to his extravagant grave. Here are a few to start with: For more on the trial, check out "Oscar Wilde's 1895 Martyrdom". Wilde's last written work was "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." It can be read at the website of the University of Maryland at College Park . To see Wilde's tomb in Paris' Pere Lachaise, visit the World Wide Cemetery