Oscar Wilde Couldn't Find Anyone To Go With Him To Japan

One of the most poignant things I’ve ever heard about Oscar Wilde came from a lecture my wife Grace gave a few years back about her first book, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan. She mentioned offhand that Whistler had spent a few years planning on a trip to Japan with Oscar Wilde until their friendship broke up sometime in the late 1880s – and that every few years, for the rest of his life, Wilde would have some new friend or boyfriend that he swore up and down he was going to take to Japan with him, but that those plans all fell apart, too.

That never-to-materialize visit to Japan feels like a stand-in for Wilde’s ruin and premature death – it was his round-the-world sailing trip scheduled for one day after retirement, his rabbit farm where he could live off the fatta’ the lan’.

Candidate #1: Walter Sickert, post-impressionist artist and sometime Jack the Ripper suspect

“So every day I see something curious and new, and now think of going to Japan and wish Walter would come or could come with me.”

Letter to Helena Sickert, 1882

Status: Never took that trip to Japan together.

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Candidate #2: Going solo this time! I’ll make friends while I’m there, you know? I’m just going to go and be totally open to new experiences and whatever happens, happens, and yes, maybe sometimes it will feel a little weird to be eating dinner by myself in a country where I don’t know anyone, but you know what? No one is thinking about me as much as I’m thinking about me, and maybe I’ll make a lot of new friends while I’m there. Because people can tell when a person is open to making new friends. It draws them in. I’m going to do it!!

“I wish I could be in London to show you a few houses and a few men and women, but I will be in Japan, sitting under an almond tree, drinking amber-coloured tea out of a blue and white cup, and contemplating a decorative landscape. Will you again give me the address of the best school at Paris for two young American girls, and any reference to ateliers etc. which would be of service.”

Letter to Frances Richards, 1882

Status: Did not go to Japan