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THE OSCHOLARS: Special Teleny issue |
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Teleny and Wilde’s Missing Gay Texts |
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Jason
Boyd |
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Like the photograph that
was wrongly supposed to picture Wilde dressed as Salome,[1] Wilde’s involvement with Teleny is one of the many appealing
fictions that make up the construction of the ‘gay Wilde.’ At the most basic
level, the problem with the attribution of Wilde’s involvement with Teleny is the historical evidence we
have supporting it. As any serious scholar of Wilde biography knows,
anecdotes and recollections concerning Wilde – many of them generated many
years after his death after his legend had become well established – can
never be accepted as the pure and simple truth. In fact, all the biographical
materials relating to Wilde are impure in one way or another, and a scholar
who approaches these materials without a skeptical attitude and a willingness
to question both the reliability and possible motivations of the persons who
originated stories concerning Wilde – including Wilde himself – is simply
being naïve. There is no justification for taking at face value the 1934
account of publisher Charles Hirsch, a shadowy figure about whom very little
is known apart from his involvement with Teleny.[2] Since there exists no corroboration,
accepting Hirsch’s account is a matter of faith: one must simply trust that
Hirsch is telling the truth. But equally, the story could be a complete
fabrication: there is no evidence that Wilde was either a consumer of
‘Socratic literature,’ or a customer of Hirsch’s, and his account raises
questions and suspicions that suggest its fictionality -- the need to use his
shop as a drop-off/pick-up point for the manuscript being the least credible
of his many dubious claims. Thus, the so-called historical evidence is of
very little use in determining Wilde’s involvement in Teleny.[3] |
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If Wilde had not been
involved in writing Teleny, why
would Hirsch have associated Wilde’s name with the novel? In part, because by
associating an anonymously written uranian text – what Neil Bartlett has
described as ‘London’s first gay porn novel’ (83) – with the infamous (and
conveniently dead) symbol of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ made the
text more ‘significant’ and thus saleable. In hitching Wilde’s name to work
that was not Wilde’s, Hirsch would not have been the first to do so: Wilde’s
name (as ‘Sebastian Melmoth’) was so associated with a translation of
Jules-Amédeé Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel Ce
Qui Ne Meurt Pas – What Never Dies
(1902) – and of The Satyricon of
Petronius (1902) by the unscrupulous Charles Carrington, a publisher of
pornography who also published (and pirated) some of Wilde’s legitimate works
(see Straight, items 61, 112-13, 190, 205-12, 216-17, 236-9, 246, 273, 294).
Rod Boroughs, who has thoroughly investigated these publications, explains
Carrington’s motivations: |
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Here was an opportunity to
cash in by using the name of a famous English author to boost the sales of a
translation of a rather less well-known – at least to Carrington’s British
customers – French novelist [Barbey d’Aurevilly]. The opportunity was too
good to miss…. And then Carrington must have had a last-minute brain-wave:
since he had a translation of the Satyricon coming out at the same time, why not
put Wilde’s name on that too? – the author’s notoriety might even help point
up the homosexual content of the work. (25-6) |
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As with Carrington’s Wilde
translations, commentators who have accepted the validity of Hirsch’s account
of Teleny’s authorship have failed
to consider ‘the motives and reputation of the publisher who first made the
claim’ (Boroughs 11). |
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Another question Boroughs
asks regarding the Carrington translations can be helpfully reused in the
case of Teleny: ‘if the Wilde
ascription is utterly without foundation, how could [Hirsch] imagine that he
would get away with such an outrageous hoax?’ (11). Why would people believe,
indeed want to believe Hirsch’s claim? What is compelling about Hirsch’s
story is that it offers us a rare and intimate glimpse into Wilde’s gay life,
as a gay man and as a gay writer, as a part of, perhaps even the guiding muse
of, a network of men banded together in the creation of a recognizably gay
work of literature. This is the kind of story that fits in so well with, and
confirms and justifies, Wilde’s status as a gay icon, as the progenitor of
modern gay culture. As Neil Bartlett observes, Teleny ‘seems to relate our story, in our language, because it
seems that this text – hidden for so long and part of our dark, private
world, speaking a pornographic language which seems hardly to have changed at
all – this text speaks to how close to our history I am, of how we created
our own lives and desires even then’ (83).[4] Thus, reading Teleny not only illuminates gay history, but, for some
commentators, ‘contribute[s] to our understanding of Oscar Wilde’s
personality and his way of life’ (Kronhausen 143). |
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Wilde’s activities and
self-understanding as a gay man remains a lacuna in his biography. The
testimony of the trials is tainted, biased and constructs Wilde as a sexual
criminal and deviant, and Wilde never wrote as a counterbalance a sexual
autobiography like that of John Addington Symonds. De Profundis completely sidesteps discussing that life in any
detail by dismissing it as ‘unworthy of an artist’ (and Wilde is in any case
more interested in blackening Douglas’ reputation and elaborating his Christlike
self-development than in exploring his identity as a man who loves men). The
accounts by Alfred Douglas, Frank Harris, Robert Sherard and André Gide are
self-serving and/or distorted by retrospection. This lack, and the desire to
fill that lack with a narrative of Wilde’s gay life (and therefore of the gay
past) has led to many attempts at reconstruction: John Moray Stuart-Young
(1881-1939) wrote Osrac, the
Self-Sufficient and Other Poems with a Memoir of the Late Oscar Wilde
(1905), which included a number of clearly forged letters by Wilde that
provided material evidence for the fictional memoir of his association with
Wilde. ‘Osrac shows one reader’s
struggle to rehabilitate and understand Wilde’s sexuality’ (Newell 65), and,
implicitly, the reader’s own. It does so in the memoir by foregrounding and
enlarging, indeed creating, a narrative of Wilde’s active homosexuality while
the narrating and witnessing ‘I’ remains inviolate and celibate.
Stuart-Young’s attempts to provide a homosexual biography for Wilde would be
imitated numerous times (although not so idiosyncratically), most recently by
Neil McKenna in his biography The
Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003), which is written in what Marjorie
Garber terms the ‘could-have, might-have mode... – a mode we might call the
prurient wishful subjunctive’ (15). |
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However, Wilde remains
resistant to repeated attempts to assimilate him into the models of gay
identity and socialization emerging at the turn of and developing over the
course of the twentieth century. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argue that ‘Wilde ‘as
a person,’ does not make it particularly easy to assimilate his own
sexuality, even insofar as it is oriented toward other men, to either of the
then newly available models for male-male sexuality, ‘inversion’ and
‘homosexuality’’ (55-6), pointing out that Wilde’s sexuality is more informed
by the classical paederastic and platonic models that were being superseded
by the hetero/homo binary of sexual orientation (57-8). Likewise, Wilde’s
oeuvre has never been able to be satisfactorily assimilated into contemporary
definitions of gay literature, no matter how sophisticated the theoretical
framework. Even more recent and sophisticated attempts to create Wilde’s gay
corpus by finding in Wilde’s legitimate works a dense palimpsest of cleverly
concealed homosexual significations and subversions, while ingenious, have
been seen as unconvincing. For example, although it has been common to regard
The Picture of Dorian Gray as
Wilde’s ‘gay text,’ the novel according to such a definition is
unsatisfactory or a failure because, as Jeff Nunokawa writes, ‘Wilde’s text
declines to cooperate wholeheartedly with its après coup canonisation
as an Old Testament version of the exodus from the closet, a shadowy
precursor whose difference from the contemporary coming-out narrative is only
a matter of time’ (185). The homosexuality of the novel by now seems evident
from a casual viewpoint, but this impression evaporates if one goes looking
for homosexuality in the text: |
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According to a strong
critical consensus stretching from Wilde’s moment to the present, Dorian Gray
among other things engages in homosexual acts. But our certainty about this
‘fact’ is chimerical, since the novel nowhere specifies the content of the
rumours swirling about Dorian…. At the same time, nearly all readers
acknowledge that homoeroticism is something that must be read into this
narrative, since Wilde nowhere explicitly identifies same-sex love as part of
its content. (Arata 65, 66) |
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Similarly, in response to
Christopher Craft’s exuberant gay reading of The Importance of Being Earnest, Alan Sinfield bluntly states:
‘Most commentators assume that…there must be a gay scenario lurking somewhere
in the depths of The Importance of
Being Earnest. But it doesn’t really work. It might be nice to think of
Algernon and Jack as a gay couple, but most of their dialogue is bickering
about property and women; or of Bunburying as cruising for rough trade, but
it is an upper-class young heiress that we see Algernon visiting, and they
want to marry’ (vi). Even ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ cannot be read as a
transparently gay text: Wilde put an abrupt end to Edward Carson’s line of
questioning on this text when he replied, in answer to Carson’s ‘I believe you
have written an article pointing out that Shakespeare’s sonnets were
practically sodomitical,’ ‘On the contrary, Mr Carson, I wrote an article to
prove they were not so.’ Wilde went on to state, like Basil Hallward with
Dorian Gray, ‘I was explaining that the love of Shakespeare to the young man
to whom he dedicated them, was the love of an artist for a personality which
I imagine to be a part of his art’ (Holland 93). We run the risk of
misconstruing Wilde if we equate his concept of male love mediated by art
with what Carson wanted to interpret as ‘practically sodomitical.’ |
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This irresolvable
indeterminacy about if and how Wilde’s writing signifies his sexuality, and
if it does, what relation, if any, that sexuality has with contemporary
understandings of gay identity and gay literature has understandably created
a desire for a unproblematically gay text that is missing from Wilde’s
oeuvre. Just as Stuart-Young attempts to makes tangible Wilde’s homosexual
life through his fictional memoir, so too have others attempted to invent a
gay corpus for Wilde. In the years after Wilde’s death, this took the rather
blatant form of forgery and misattribution. An example of the latter is the
attribution to Wilde of John Francis Bloxam’s paederastic story ‘The Priest
and the Acolyte’ which Wilde had been questioned about in his libel action
against the Marquess of Queensberry because it was published in the same
issue of the Chameleon as Wilde’s
‘Phrases and Philosophies for Use of the Young.’ There existed no great
difficultly in determining that ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ was not written
by Wilde: newspaper accounts of the testimony make it clear that Wilde was
not the author, and both Robert Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, and
Christopher Millard (‘Stuart Mason’), Wilde’s bibliographer, protested
attempts to assign authorship to Wilde. The ‘misattribution’ of this story as
Wilde’s is not a question of missing facts about authorship but a response to
what is perceived as a failure on Wilde’s part, as a gay martyr/hero, to have
written a ‘real’ gay text. |
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The belief that Wilde
could have, would have, indeed should have written an unambiguously gay text
is bound up in a larger misconception of Wilde’s practices as a writer.
Although it has been argued that a major aspect of Wilde’s project as a
writer was ‘attempting to make sexual desire between men as visible as
possible’ (Bristow 45) – attempts, it is presumed, that were largely foiled
or perverted by the homophobia of British readers, playgoers, publishers,
critics, theatre managers – this, as Josephine Guy and Ian Small point out in
Oscar Wilde’s Profession (2000),
‘presupposes a politics of constraint and censorship which in turn assumes an
‘ideal’ work which Wilde wanted to write, but which he was constantly
prevented from so doing. Unfortunately, the evidence fails to support this
view’ (243). Guy and Small demonstrate that Wilde was foremost a professional
and, as he became a successful playwright, an increasingly conservative
rather than daring or subversive writer: |
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Wilde nearly always wrote
for money; paradoxically, as he became more successful and his earnings
increased, money became more rather than less important to him. The element
of versatility that characterized his early career virtually disappeared once
he found a market – the fashionable West End theatre – which combined social
and artistic prestige with income. …[F]inancial security did not propel Wilde
into any form of creative risk-taking; rather the opposite. (221) |
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It is therefore highly
unlikely that Wilde would have been involved in writing (or co-writing) a
work that did not have broad appeal and was not personally lucrative, and Teleny was neither. A letter from
Wilde to the actor-manager Norman Forbes-Robertson, written around the time
in which Wilde supposedly brought Teleny
into Hirsch’s bookstore, contrasts suggestively with Hirsch’s account and
accords with Guy and Small’s picture of Wilde as a resolutely pragmatic
writer (even when dealing with an old friend like Forbes-Robertson): ‘If you
want a play from me I would require £100 down on the scenario being drawn out
and approved of, and £100 on the completion of the manuscript, Then royalties
of course to follow. If you can give these terms, well and good. If not, I
fear I could not give up paying work for speculative. I am always in need of
money, and have to work for certainties’ (Wilde 454). |
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A shrewd observer, Vincent
O’Sullivan, noted that Wilde wrote for the market – ‘He had a full, even a
gross sense of what the public liked and could assimilate. He had the face of
a man born to popular success…and he would have been a perfectly enormous
success but for the accident that derailed him’ (43). Wilde only wrote what
he could sell to the broadest market and for the highest remuneration. Even
works like Salome were produced
with profit in mind: publication in French and English, French and English
readerships, a foothold in the French literary market, an edition illustrated
by the artist of the moment, Beardsley, a production starring the leading
French actress Sarah Bernhardt – all calculated to get a much money and
literary capital as possible out of this esoteric work. Wilde had neither the
interest nor the time to produce private writing nor anonymous or
pseudonymous writing for the small and clandestine readership of Socratic
literature. In sum, Wilde was not a writer invested in making same-sex desire
as visible as possible (although he may have seen potential in the
transmutation of this desire into a more aesthetic discourse in The Picture of Dorian Gray and
elsewhere) in large part because such a goal went against his practice of
producing saleable work for the literary market and promoting himself as a
writer of value. |
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This hard-headed
professionalism also goes against the image of Wilde as a confessional or
autobiographical writer, or even a writer in the romantic mode, that is, one
for whom writing is compelled by an overwhelming need for self-expression.
Although most scholarship on Wilde’s works has understood them within an
‘expressive aesthetic’ – as expressive of ‘Wilde himself,’ this is a
perception that is founded on the tragic legend of Wilde as a persecuted
(gay) artist rather than on the evidence of his practice as a professional
writer. If Wilde’s writing was prompted by a desire to write about same-sex
love, why, it might be asked, when released from prison, did Wilde not become
the ‘homosexual writer’ that his pre-trials persona as successful celebrity
author and playwright, it is implied, precluded? Surely once it was well
known by all what he was, then there was no reason any longer to fear
exposure. After prison, Wilde could have explicitly written on the subject
that all his previous works only imperfectly expressed, but, despite his joke
that he was thinking of writing a roman-a-clef about Reginald Turner called ‘The
Boy-Snatcher of Clements Inn’ (Wilde
1073), no such intention is indicated by what he did write (the Ballad of
Reading Gaol) and what he stated he intended to write. Indeed, Wilde’s
disinclination for writing after prison was related to his awareness that,
after the trials, any reader, knowing the ‘secret’ of his life, would presume
that one could discover the ultimate ‘secret,’ the interpretative clef,
of any text he should publish: after his trials, Wilde’s sphinxes would always
have a secret, and it would always be the same ‘secret.’ After the
trials, everything about Wilde having hardened into a single authentic
‘truth’ that everyone knew, what inclination could Wilde have for writing?
Having become a pathological pariah, Wilde saw his role as an artist as
impossible. When it was announced in the press by theatrical manager Horace
Sedger of the future production of a play by Wilde, even though Wilde had no
intention of actually writing the play, his judgment about the inadvisability
of this announcement was sound: ‘My only chance is a play produced
anonymously. Otherwise the First Night would be a horror, and people would
find meanings in every phrase’ (Wilde
1128). As Max Beerbohm observed, Wilde wrote for ‘success’ and since, after
his conviction and imprisonment, ‘his main motive for writing was lost’ it
was not surprising that he did not ‘find consolation in his art’ after his
release (333). Similarly, before his trials, Wilde’s art was not a means of
consolation for not being able to live openly as a homosexual. |
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For these reasons, I am
unconvinced by Hirsch’s story that Wilde was involved in the creation of Teleny. However, this by no means is
to suggest that Teleny is not an important
text: it is important, and this
importance is not dependent on Wilde’s having been one its co-authors.[5] Not only is it ‘a vivid exploration
of the homosexual aesthetic of the time’ (McRae 23), but it offers (among
other things) a glimpse into the forms of socialization of men who were
romantically and sexually interested in other men in an historical period
where there were no gay villages or gay bars or gay websites, and
homosexuality was a socially-vilified crime and thus a clandestine activity.
As such, I concur wholeheartedly with McRae’s assertion that Teleny is ‘worth recovering even
without any Wilde connection’ (23). It is an important historical document,
and, as such, McRae is to be commended for producing a definitive and
scholarly useable edition – something that still needs to be done for other
important texts like Sins of the Cities
of the Plain, or, Confessions of a Mary-Anne (hint, hint, John). Of
course, given its history, the novel will continue to have a ‘Wilde
connection’ as part of the mythology that has produced the complex,
many-sided and often contradictory Oscar Wilde we know today. And, although
they should not be confused, this mythology is as much a part of the gay past
as historical fact. |
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Works Cited |
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Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian
Fin de Siècle. Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP, 1996. |
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Bartlett, Neil. Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr
Oscar Wilde. Masks Series. London: Serpent's Tail, 1988. |
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Beerbohm, Max. More Theatres 1898-1903. Ed &
introd. Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1969. |
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Boroughs, Rod. ‘Oscar Wilde’s Translation of Petronius:
The Story of a Literary Hoax.’ English
Language in Transition 1880-1920 38 (1995): 9-49. |
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Bristow,
Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. New York:
Columbia UP, 1995. |
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Craft,
Christopher. ‘Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest.’ Another Kind of Love:
Sodomy, Inversion, and Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1897.
London: U of California P, 1990: 106-39, 211-18. |
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Garber, Marjorie. ‘Bisexuality and Celebrity.’ The Seductions of Biography. Eds. Mary
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Rhiel and David Suchoff. New York & London:
Routledge, 1996: 13-30. |
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Gray, Robert, and Christopher Keep. ‘‘An Uninterrupted
Current’: Homoeroticism and Collaborative Authorship in Teleny.’ Literary
Couplings: Writing Couples Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006. |
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Guy, Josephine M., and Ian Small. Oscar Wilde's
Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. |
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Holland, Merlin, ed. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde:
The First Uncensored Transcript of the Trial of Oscar Wilde Vs. John Douglas
(Marquess of Queensberry), 1895. Published in the UK as Irish Peacock
and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. London: Fourth
Estate, 2003. New York: Fourth Estate-HarperCollins, 2003. |
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Kronhausen, Phyllis, and Eberhard Kronhausen. Erotic Fantasies: A Study of the Sexual
Imagination. 1969. New York: Grove
Press, 1987: 143-7. |
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McRae, John, ed. & introd. Teleny. By Oscar Wilde and Others. London: GMP Publishers, 1986. |
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Newell, Stephanie. The
Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2006. |
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Nunokawa, Jeffrey. ‘The Disappearance of the Homosexual
in The Picture of Dorian Gray.’ Professions of Desire: Lesbian and
Gay Studies in Literature. Eds. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman.
New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995: 183-90. |
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O'Sullivan,
Vincent. Aspects of Wilde. London: Constable & Co., 1936. |
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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ‘Tales of the Avunculate: Queer
Tutelage in The Importance of Being Earnest.’ Tendencies. Q
Series. Durham: Duke UP, 1993: 52-72. |
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Sinfield,
Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment.
London: Cassell, 1994. |
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Straight, Sheryl. ‘Charles Carrington: A Bibliography
[by Title] of Works Published.’ The
Erotica Bibliophile. Accessed 1 June 2008. |
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http://www.eroticabibliophile.com/publishers_carrington_a_d.html |
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Wilde,
Oscar. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Eds. Merlin Holland and
Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Fourth Estate, 2000. |
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Return to the Table of Contents |
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