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THE OSCHOLARS: Special Teleny
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Teleny, Étude psychologique |
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Dominique Leroy |
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Introduction by
Dominique Leroy to the edition Teleny,
Étude psychologique published by Le Pré aux Clercs, Paris 1996, and now available
as an e-book from http://www.enfer.com. Translated
from the French by D.C. Rose. We thank M. Leroy for granting permission for this
translation. |
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Translator’s
note: I have not of course retranslated from the French the citations from
Wilde, but have copied the original English, using the Maine edition of the
Complete Works and the McRae edition of Teleny. |
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Published for the first
time in London in 1893 in an edition of two hundred copies, Teleny was originally published in
France in 1934, when three hundred copies were printed. |
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This 1934 edition,
produced for the Ganymede Club, was supplemented by a bibliographical notice
composed by Charles-Henri Hirsch, a French bookseller who ran the Librairie
Parisienne in Coventry Street, London.[1] He revealed that he had met Oscar Wilde for
the first time in 1889 when he, Hirsch, had just arrived in London, and was
as yet au fait with neither ‘contemporary English literature’ nor ‘the people
making their mark in society’. Here is
the description that he wrote of his customer: ‘Very much taken with our
literature, which he knew thoroughly, he bought all the books by good
writers: Zola, Maupassant, Bourget etc. It was only incidentally, when I came
to be in his confidence, that he risked ordering from me certain licentious
works, of a special character, which he described as “Socratic”, and I
procured for him, not without difficulty,
a fair number of books on this subject by both ancient and modern
authors, It was in this manner that I
furnished him with the translation from the Italian of Pallaviccini The Infant Alcibiades at School, the Letters of an Ignorantine Friar to his
Pupil, and, in English, The Sins of
the Cities of the Plain […] One day, I believe towards the end of 1890,
he brought me a thin notebook, of the sort used in commerce, tied and careful
wrapped up. He told me “One of my
friends will come to collect this for me, and will show you my visiting
card,” and he gave me a name which I have forgotten. |
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‘As it turned out, a few
days later one of the young gentlemen I had seen with him came to take
possession of the package. He kept it
for a while, then brought it back to me, saying in his turn, “You will kindly
give this to one of our friends, who will come for it on behalf of the same
person.” A similar ceremony was gone
through three times. The last time, however,
the reader of the manuscript, less discreet and less careful than the other
two, brought it back less well wrapped, tied with a simple ribbon, hardly
closed up at all… The temptation was too strong, and I confess that I
succumbed to it: I opened the packet and on the greyish paper which held
together the bundle of manuscript pages, I read the simple title written in
large letters, TELENY…’ |
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From his reading,
Charles-Henri Hirsch has left us his comments: “One detail struck me in
course of the hasty reading that I gave it, namely the borrowings that the
author had made from Holy Writ, from the Bible, from the Gospels. With each chapter, quotations and passages
from sacred writings had been adapted in accordance with the incidents of the
novel… Add to that numerous reflections from classical literature, both Greek
and Latin, examples taken from mythology or ancient religions, and finally,
phrases borrowed from foreign languages: all that composed a veritable
hotchpotch completely different from what one usually finds in modern erotic
works. In short, extensive learning,
an elaborated style, a sustained dramatic interest – all the marks of
manufacture by a professional writer.’ |
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Later on, the bookseller
discovered the identity of the author of the manuscript, which allowed him to
make certain cross-checks. ‘… To go back to my customer himself, I
subsequently saw him often at the bookshop, and even one day at his house
when I took him a little provision of new publications when he was confined
to bed in his house in Tite Street. I
thus had a chance to glance round the artistically disposed interior, very
originally done, and I found there certain strange elements in furnishing,
tapestries and ornaments which corresponded pretty well with description
which I had read in Teleny…’ |
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In his introduction to the
English language edition of 1984, Winston Leyland reminds us that in Teleny one finds typically wildean
phrasing, and gives two examples of aphorisms dear to Oscar Wilde, Sin is the only thing worth living for,
and It is not hell that we dread, but
the low company we might find there. |
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Some phrases to compare
with these thrusts from the person of Des Grieux in Teleny: |
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If you have nothing to
repent, what is the point of religion? |
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Virtue possesses the sweet
savour of sin; but vice – that is the tiny drop of prussic acid, equally
delicious. Withou either one or the
other, life would be insipid. |
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·
Gratitude is an
insupportable burden for human nature. |
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Winston Leyland asks us to
note likewise that one can read the same references in the work of Wilde,
notably in Salomé: |
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Like
the god-corpse of Antinoüs, seen by the silvery light of the opaline moon,
floating on the lurid waters of the Nile… |
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The moon is always a real
presence in both Teleny and Salomé, as much as the references to
the ancient Greeks and ancient Egypt. |
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Oscar Wilde described
London and the Thames in one of his poetic works, ‘Impression du Matin’: |
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The Thames nocturne
of blue and gold |
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Changed to a
Harmony in grey : |
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A barge with
ochre-coloured hay |
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Dropt from the
wharf : and chill and cold |
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The yellow fog came
creeping down |
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The bridges, till
the houses’ walls |
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Seemed changed to
shadows, and St. Paul’s |
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Loomed like a
bubble o’er the town. [CW p.730] |
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In Teleny, one reads a similar description: |
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The
river, like a silvery thoroughfare, parted the town in two. On either side, the huge shadowy houses
rose out of the mist; blurred domes, dim towers, vaporous and gigantic spires
soared, quivering up to the clouds, and faded away in the fog. [T p.109] |
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Alexandrian, in his History of Erotic Literature, narrows
this down: ‘Oscar Wilde at this period reigned over the Café Royal in Regent
Street, surrounded by a court of young admirers whom he enthralled with his
“spoken tales”. The novel Teleny was an intellectual and carnal
game which he played with certain disciples. He declared what the subject
would be, and kept certain episodes for himself. Among those collaborating, doubtless, were
Robert Ross, then aged nineteen, with whom Wilde had his first homosexual
affaire; the designer Graham Robertson, the poet John Gray… In the preface,
dated July 1892, Wilde was to announce ‘It is a true story: the dramatic
adventure of two handsome human beings of refined sensibility, highly
strung”. [T p.192]’ |
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As an aside, it is not
without significance that we owe the first London edition of Teleny to Leonard Smithers, who was
also the publisher, in 1897, of The
Ballad
of Reading Gaol,
printed for the first impression under the
transparent pseudonym of C.3.3., the number of Oscar Wilde in Her Gracious
Majesty’s prison). Leonard Smithers
was also the publisher of Alfred Douglas and of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar
Wilde wrote to him on many occasions. |
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It was Maurice Girodias,
the ‘demonic’ publisher of the 1950s, who in his English language edition for
the Olympia Press in 1958, definitely ascribed this text to Oscar Wilde. |
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1996 brought to Paris the
commemoration of the centenary of Oscar Wilde’s incarceration in Reading
Gaol, after a remarkable trial where he was convicted for homosexuality. First, there was the notable play C.3.3. by Robert Badinter, followed by
the publication of the complete works in La Pléiade, the biography by Richard
Ellmann brought out by Gallimard, the new extended edition of Robert Merle’s Oscar Wilde, and finally, on the Paris
boards, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of being Earnest. Nor must be forgotten the dramatic reading
of De Profundis, the long letter
written to Lord Alfred Douglas during his imprisonment at Reading, one of
Oscar Wilde’s last works. |
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One should know that none
of these biographies dating to 1996 mention Teleny (but then the biographers of Apollinaire did not always
attribute to him his ‘accursed’ works), although the most serious H.
Montgomery Hyde, in his last biography (London, 1975) as well as in his
introduction to the edition of Teleny
published by Icon Books in London in 1966, attributed the paternity of this
book to Oscar Wilde. |
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Written shortly after The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Teleny (1891) states with great
clarity the split of someone who makes his aim the life of a hedonist: ‘I
have put my genius into my life, only my talent into my work.’ |
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Dying in Paris in the
misery that was abhorrent to him, and amid general indifference, abandoned by
the intellectuals of Paris, the convict who, in the manner of Paul Verlaine,
would wait for a friend to pass by to settle his bill at the Café Procope,
left for all that an erotic novel of rare quality. |
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Oscar Wilde was not at all
a homosexual who proclaimed his difference, like Francis Bacon. Besides, could that have been possible
under the Victorian iron rod? On the
other hand, very rapidly, he accepted what nature had thrust upon him, took it
on, and even vaunted his bisexuality.
Married, father of two children, he purposely paraded himself with his
lovers in good London society, his faubourg Saint-Germain. He incidentally made the mistake of at the
same time not wanting to disguise himself like the man with the cattleya, and
of wishing to throw down a challenge.
Thus he became the instrument of his own destruction. Dandy to the uttermost end, he would
declare ‘I would do anything to regain my youth, except to get up early, take
exercise and become respectable’.
Steeped in notoriety, he held in contempt the rigid laws of Victorian
England. |
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One cannot deny that Teleny was written by Oscar Wilde: one
finds there all his referents, Antinoüs, his reading of the Bible, his
aphorisms, his descriptions, his people. |
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Teleny
is a prolongation of The Picture of
Dorian Gray with the disguises removed.
All is there: the pursuit of pleasure, the intimations of a crash, his
literary foibles, and above all the unchallengeable autobiographical
character. Oscar Wilde is both Teleny
and Des Grieux: seducer, unfaithful, passionately amorous, a sensualist,
impenitently jealous, accepting the pernicious sentiment of possible
redemption. |
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Return
to the Table of Contents |
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