4. Teleny: a tale of two cities

Will Visconti

Teleny is credited with being one of the earliest English-language works explicitly addressing male homosexuality. It was written in the wake of other works such as Jack Saul’s Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881) and A Marriage Below Zero (1889), by Alan Dale (a pseudonym for Alfred Cohen),¹ and occupies a stylistic space between the two. Where Sins of the Cities was written by a male sex worker, it is a memoir or at least inspired by real events, while Marriage was fiction written by a heterosexual man and narrated by a heterosexual woman about two men in a relationship. Both works were written under noms de plume whereas Teleny was published anonymously.

Teleny (with the full title Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-day) was written collaboratively by several authors, one of whom is believed to have been Oscar Wilde.² The veracity of this claim has been the subject of much debate in the century since its publication, and it has been extensively discussed whether or not, or to what extent, Wilde was involved in Teleny’s publication as author, editor or prime mover. He had an established professional relationship with the publishers responsible for the first editions in English and in French: Leonard Smithers, who published the first edition of the novel in 1893, and Charles Hirsch, who oversaw the publication of the French translation in 1934. Hirsch had previously procured material in French for Wilde, including books ‘of a Socratic nature’.³ In editions published non-anonymously over the last 50 or so years, Oscar Wilde is often mentioned on the cover, either explicitly as author, or variously as ‘attributed to Oscar Wilde’, ‘Oscar Wilde and others’ and more.

The novel was first distributed in a limited run of 200 copies, with the events of the novel taking place in Paris. An anecdote recounted by Hirsch suggests that the manuscript was underway or completed as early as 1890 and in its first iteration was set in London.⁴ When the novel was edited and translated into French in 1934, it was entitled Teleny: Étude Physiologique (‘physiological study’ rather than ‘romance’). In this edition, the setting was switched back to London. The details of cities are not always given, with sparse references to specific landmarks or venues, another reason why the transposition was easier to achieve. An avant-propos was added to the narrative in Charles Hirsch’s publication of the first French translation, excised from the English edition, he said, as was a further introduction.⁵ John McRae’s 1986 edition of Teleny ‘restores’ this prologue. The non-fiction introduction (a Notice bibliographique) tells of Hirsch meeting with Wilde in 1890, the occasion when the former claimed the manuscript was initially brought to him, and their subsequent acquaintance after Wilde’s release from prison.⁶ The delay between Teleny’s composition in 1890 and its publication by Leonard Smithers in 1893 raises the question of what else was contained in the 1890 version and its initial editing. The decades-long delay before the French translation is another mystery, but may be attributable to Hirsch seeking to capitalise on nostalgia for Wilde’s writing, as a strategy to boost sales. More significantly, Hirsch’s Notice bibliographique seems to vacillate between describing the author (not authors) as someone who could only be Wilde, while mentioning events that feature Wilde by name as if he was the sole author, at the same time as pondering the author’s ‘true’ identity.⁷ He poses the question of whether a clergyman was responsible, since there are religious references, or someone familiar with mythology because its classical allusions separate the work from other erotica of the period; or perhaps, he posits, the author is a family man with a wife and children, while drawing parallels to Wilde to pique curiosity in the novel. Certainly, Hirsch explicitly mentions the presence of Wilde’s ‘disciples’ in his company, and it is these admirers who are broadly identified as collaborating on Teleny, thereby making it implicitly Wildean, if nothing else.

The novel’s story is structured as a confession made by Camille Des Grieux to an unnamed friend and interlocutor, with numerous digressions into other memories or mise-en-abîme whereby Des Grieux includes tales, or stories within stories, which are told by characters within the primary narrative. The progression of the plot is also punctuated by Des Grieux’s asides and questions or the interruptions of his companion. The avant-propos is presented as an episode where the same unnamed companion describes meeting Des Grieux close to his death, two years after the events of the novel, and explains how he came to record them.⁸

The plot details the lives of the young businessman Camille Des Grieux and the Hungarian pianist René Teleny, with whom the former falls in love while he performs at a charity benefit. Des Grieux, watching the recital with his mother, has an ecstatic visionary experience which he learns afterwards Teleny also shared, setting a precedent for episodes of sexual telepathy and out-of-body experiences between the two. Despite Teleny’s involvement with and attraction to other characters during the novel, he and Des Grieux begin a passionate affair, punctuated with the latter’s stories about his own sexual experiences and memories. These tales all feature women and are at best unsatisfactory, and at worst lead to fatalities. They include the attempted seduction of a maid, Catherine, which eventually leads to her suicide after another character rapes her, and a visit to a brothel where a woman dies of consumption. These episodes are constructed as a counterpoint to the transcendent love the men feel for each other. Along the way there are blackmail attempts, introductions to secret societies of men who have sex with men (some of whom are dressed as women), and eventually the discovery of Teleny having sex with Des Grieux’s mother after she offers to pay his debts. Teleny eventually stabs himself – but with his dying breath the couple reconcile. In the prologue, it is explained that Des Grieux dies of tuberculosis shortly after Teleny’s suicide, and the two lovers are buried together.⁹

The key elements of the novel discussed in this chapter are the influence on Teleny and its publication of the twin trends of Francophilia in Britain and Anglophilia in France, the laws around homosexuality at this time, and attitudes towards the Other. While the interplay of influences across the Channel was always significant, the longstanding rivalry between the two countries continued unabated. The to-and-fro of setting and publication reflect the ongoing ‘culture wars’ between France and England with pornography, literature and art at the heart of the matter, and the involvement of figures such as Prime Minister William Gladstone.¹⁰ Teleny’s style and content cherry-pick from Wildean and French sources amidst classical and biblical allusions, self-consciously trying to situate itself within a milieu and tradition of decadent writing at the same time as it explicitly positions itself as part of the emerging body of literature that addresses expressions of same-sex sexuality.

Publishing Teleny

Everything about Teleny and its creation remains uncertain and unreliable, from its authorship to its setting and its publication. In addition to there being no definitive authorial voice (or voices), the publisher, Cosmopoli, is fictional and remains difficult to pin down. This is because of the network of individuals, Leonard Smithers among them, who have been identified as potentially responsible for the creation of the first edition as much as aiding its distribution. A note on the inside cover of the 1893 edition, held in the University of British Columbia Library, includes Edward Avery and H.S. Nichols as potential publishers; Charles Carrington may be another. ¹¹

The first three editions were small, since after the 1893 edition, that of 1906 only consisted of 200 copies, and the 1934 French translation had a run of 300 copies. Divided into two volumes, the novel cost five guineas and was available via subscription.¹² When translated into French, the work was similarly sold in two volumes, available to members of the ‘Ganymede Club’, about which little is known beyond its name (alluding to the beautiful youth abducted by Zeus as a lover, who then became the god’s cupbearer on Olympus).¹³ The limited circulation of the book made it easier to remain discreet. So too did the subscription-only nature of its distribution, like its anonymous authorship, limited circulation and the fabricated publishing house. Moreover, the anonymity of the author(s) offered a degree of protection against legal action being taken on the grounds of obscenity.

Since the 1950s several single-volume editions have been published, in multiple languages besides French and English, as well as stage adaptations in Spanish, Italian and English. One of the most recent was a 2014 production of Teleny, staged in Melbourne, Australia. The dialogue draws directly from the novel, though the 2014 production made edits of its own, shifting the time period to the 1920s.¹⁴ As with the urban setting, authorship and publishing of the novel, even the time period in which it is set has remained a slippery matter for scholars, since references in the text are not entirely congruous with each other, and mean that the story could take place any time between roughly 1871 and 1891.¹⁵

As part of Operation Tiger, Teleny was among the novels seized during the raid carried out on Gay’s the Word bookshop in 1984 (see chapter 6). The books were seized under a law implemented during the living memory of Teleny’s first readers: the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876, rather than the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. Like other works seized, Teleny was accessible via the British Library and Senate House Library. In the British Library, copies of the first and subsequent editions of Teleny, including translations, are held in a separate collection of rare books since they are classified as pornography.

In terms of classification and genre, the novel contains elements of Gothic fiction and melodrama common in the 19th century, as well as the interweaving of ideas about the psychic phenomena that were popular at the time of publication. Explicit pornographic sequences also occur throughout the narrative. Historically, Teleny’s publication is bookended by the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, when a number of men were implicated in a raid on a male brothel in central London, and by Oscar Wilde’s arrest in 1895 for ‘gross indecency’. This climate of anxiety about the exposure of one’s private life pervades the story, as do questions of nature and sexuality, which subtly offer a challenge to the classification of same-sex attraction as unnatural and criminal.

The French translation does make some substantive changes to the English text; however, these do not affect the progression of the narrative. If anything, the Hirsch edition is tighter than the Smithers edition, because the digressions within digressions are trimmed, as are the asides about acquaintances or use of language. These are present to such an extent that even within the narrative, characters interrupt one another to stay on track.¹⁶ In the digressions and quips lie the evidence of multiple hands at work on the novel, jockeying for control over a potentially unruly narrative and attempting to tie disparate threads together. At the same time the authors use the novel as a chance to showcase their erudition by means of populating the anecdotes with constant classical and religious allusions, and providing links to Uranian thought and literature of the same period.¹⁷ While proving its mettle as a work of learned contributors, the novel does demonstrate awareness of the writings of sexologists like Havelock Ellis, and the argument for same-sex attraction being viewed as part of an august heritage with precedents in antiquity.¹⁸

Part of Teleny’s positioning within literary traditions of same-sex attraction or decadence can be found in the publishing process, making links more explicit through cover art. The very printing of the first editions in French and English offers subtle physical suggestions of literary decadence through colour and decoration. The 1934 translation frames the text in purple printed borders on each page, a colour commonly used to represent decadence. Associations with literary decadence and queerness are established or reinforced through cover art of subsequent editions, as with the 1991 Laertes edition. On the cover is a still from the 1919 film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) featuring the actors Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel. The use of an image from the film – one of the first to address homosexuality but in a sympathetic manner – overlaps with other plot elements of Teleny, such as blackmail and suicide, as well as the prominence of music in the plots of both novel and film. The 1984 Gay Sunshine Press and 2010 edition within the Valancourt Classics series feature cover art which reproduces images by Wilhelm von Gloeden, famous for his homoerotic photographs during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and who may have met Oscar Wilde during his travels in southern Italy. The earlier edition uses his photograph of a boy as the god Hypnos (with Wilde superimposed over his shoulder); the latter, a self-portrait of von Gloeden in ‘orientalist’ costume. Both of these connect to classical or orientalist motifs within the text. Beyond this, the alleged link to Oscar Wilde is used as equal parts marketing and literary continuity, with some editions showing his face on the cover.

Law and language between Britain and France

Legally speaking, there were a few key differences between France and Britain. Sodomy or homosexuality were not illegal in France, which explains rumours that several men fled to France in the wake of Wilde’s trial in 1895 to avoid arrest or implication in similar scandals.¹⁹ Wilde, too, moved to France following his release from Reading Gaol. French law had removed sodomy from the Penal Code in 1791. In practical terms, however, men who had sex with men still faced opprobrium.²⁰ This may have been another reason why the setting of Teleny was shifted from London to Paris, as a means of offering a marginally more forgiving setting, even though instances in France remained where men were faced with public scandal and their careers ruined.²¹ Contemporaneous with the 1885 Labouchère Amendment and the Cleveland Street Scandal was the shift in other countries away from the persecution of same-sex-attracted individuals. In Italy, the Zanardelli Code decriminalised homosexuality, making the country a safer place to live, adding to its popularity as a destination for British travellers or expatriates seeking warmer climes.²² Like France, however, homosexuality was no longer illegal but still not unreservedly accepted, and the attendance of Italian guests at the symposium in Teleny reminds the reader of the continued need for discretion.

When Britain’s laws against pornography became more stringent in the second half of the 19th century, the links to France became stronger, and often material was sourced from across the Channel, another reason on a more practical level why the country, or more commonly Paris, was seen as rife with pornographers and as a hotbed of vice. There were networks between establishments like Hirsch’s Librairie Parisienne, based on Coventry Street beside Leicester Square, and those in Paris. They dealt in the trade and publication of French-language works for the urbane Londoner, with sidelines in rare or pornographic material. These trade links extended to France, and to pornographers operating out of the Netherlands.²³ An equivalent establishment to the Librairie Parisienne was located on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and another close by, within the Palais-Royal in the centre of the city.²⁴ In London also shops used to line Holywell Street (since razed for the expansion of the Strand where the Gladstone Statue now stands). These included numerous pornographers.²⁵

Within the decadent and aesthetic movements that rose to prominence in Europe (particularly in Britain and France) during the late 19th century, there are a few marked differences, and these should be considered in relation to the impact of these movements on novels like Teleny. The idea of transposing the narrative to Paris instead of London also has echoes of the censorship faced by Oscar Wilde in mounting his play Salomé. Its performance before paying audiences was banned in Britain on the grounds of a law prohibiting the representation of biblical figures, rather than objections to the interconnected narratives of sexual transgression of characters within Wilde’s script. No such limits existed in Paris, where Wilde hoped to engage Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role.²⁶ As a result, the original text of the play was in French and then translated. Stylistically, parallels have been drawn between some parts of the language in Salomé and Teleny, and the influence of the former has been argued as evidence of Wilde’s involvement with the project. More likely, his writing had an impact on some of the men with whom he kept company, and the phrasing that evokes Salomé imitates his writing.

Aside from the translation between English and French, the novel employs a threefold process of translating language, nationality and space to both play with notions of alterity and transgression and to trade on perceptions of specific cultures. The translation of urban spaces as much as language offers glimpses of subculture within urban space, be it bohemian, queer subculture or hubs of sex work. When a group of men (Des Grieux and several heterosexual companions) visit a brothel, the Latin Quarter is reconfigured for French readers as ‘the end of Tottenham Court Road’ (ostensibly Soho) and identified as a space where sex work takes place.²⁷ Rather than bohemian Montmartre in English or the squalid East End in French, the choice of each district forms additional links to other texts. The Latin Quarter was likely inspired by Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, and Giacomo Puccini’s operetta inspired by the same text. Travelling to Soho during the same episode in the Hirsch edition reinforces Franco-English connections, given the district’s long history as a French enclave. Conversely, when Des Grieux follows Briancourt and Teleny along the edge of the river through a space frequented by men cruising for sex, the ‘Quai de ---’ is left anonymous in French as au quai, beside the Thames. Elsewhere, parts of the city, such as bridges or the river that flows through it, are left nameless and suitably vague.²⁸ One element that remains in both editions is the fog enveloping the couple as they stand on a bridge. A vestige of the original edition when it was set in London, this remains in the Parisian setting despite having entered lore as the ubiquitous ‘London fog’ of Gothic, crime or period novels.²⁹

In tandem with the vagueness of urban spaces is the deliberate choice of some characters’ nationality, which remains consistent in both the English and French apart from Camille Des Grieux and the ‘locals’. In Teleny, setting the male characters’ queer sexuality at a remove by making them foreign diffuses a potential affront to the English amour propre, to quote Leonard Smithers, and also renders them more exotic.³⁰ Moreover, Teleny himself is doubly othered. In both iterations of the novel he remains Hungarian, and he repeatedly speaks to Des Grieux in his mother tongue. Reference is made to ‘Asiatic’ or Romany heritage, enhancing the sense of alterity and possibly wildness.³¹ When he speaks in Hungarian, the words are not written but rather described. Afterwards, a translation is given within the dialogue, as when he utters the phrase ‘oh, friend! My heart doth yearn for thee!’ His words are described by Des Grieux as being from ‘an unknown tongue, so low and musical, that they almost seemed like a spell’.³² Just before the couple have sex for the first time, Teleny does the same thing, saying in ‘a low tone, in that unknown, musical tongue, “my body hungereth for thee, soul of my soul, life of my life!”’³³

Teleny’s speech is also peppered with phrases from other languages, including Italian. Sometimes they are translated, but not always, which suggests that at least some of the idioms used were understood by the (limited) readership. The French translation minimises the use of other languages, particularly since Des Grieux repeatedly uses terminology like merle (‘blackbird’, deployed euphemistically instead of saying ‘penis’). Such turns of phrase are often accompanied by asides to his listener (‘as the Italians call it’) that are excised in the Hirsch edition.³⁴ Phrases like nouer l’aiguillette (‘tying the cord’, a spell to induce impotence) appear in both editions, but without translation into English.³⁵

In some passages the language is euphemistic and deliberately foreign, as if affecting a worldly voice mindful of the audience’s delicate sensibilities, whereas other sections are much more explicitly worded. Still others veer from the poetically explicit to the bluntly technical, or the vaguely childish. This even applies to a section describing Des Grieux and Teleny having sex, in which the author jumbles words together, from the clinical ‘glans’ and Des Grieux’s blood being changed into ‘molten lead or scalding quicksilver’, to the somewhat less delicate ‘[Teleny’s] pointed tongue dart[ed] in the hole of my bum’.³⁶ It is the hyperbolic and flowery turns of phrase that have lent weight to assertions of Wilde’s involvement, given that some of the text can be compared to the rich descriptiveness of Wilde’s language in Salomé’s dialogue. The archaic phrasing is absent in the French, and some although not all of the more vulgar vocabulary is rendered more simply or clinically. Anus is used instead of ‘bum’, yet verge (‘cock’) appears in both versions.³⁷

Some of the characters mentioned elsewhere are also doubly othered. At a symposium hosted by the aristocrat Briancourt, who harbours an unrequited love for Teleny, are two elegant-looking couples seen curled up together, whom Des Grieux identifies as two men with their female companions in fashionable dresses. When he remarks upon the beauty of the women in each couple, he is told that they are in fact all men. One of the two males dressed in a lady’s toilette is an Italian marchese from one of the oldest families in Rome, according to Teleny.³⁸ This reinforces the othering of sexual transgression and its expression. Moreover, it feeds into the representation of the Italian male as effete or more likely to engage in homosexual activity. This too has an older precedent, with popular trends during the 18th century of cicisbeismo, or even potentially the representation of the macaroni as a foppish, dandified character as a precursor to the aesthete of the late 19th century.³⁹

Similarly, the presence of the character Achmet, Briancourt’s new lover, alludes to the popularity of orientalism alongside Anglophilia or Francophilia during the late 1800s. There are also colonial overtones, be they French or British, and assumptions about the deviant Other, particularly around same-sex sexuality in Middle Eastern countries. The writings of Sir Richard Burton and colonialist sexual fantasies featuring slavery and foreign bodies are also prominent in the literature of the late 1800s.⁴⁰ Briancourt is a dilettante painter, who uses Achmet as his model. Among Briancourt’s works are religious pieces for which Achmet poses as John the Baptist.⁴¹ Other connections between Teleny and Salomé are the presence of a character identified as Syrian and the inclusion of John the Baptist. In both cases, the role is filled by Achmet, who does not speak. The novel also expands the fetishisation of the orientalist Other across art, allusions to literature, and Achmet’s public performance on Briancourt’s arm. Moreover, Achmet is referred to as ‘My Syrian’ during the orgy he hosts.⁴² The inclusion of orientalist motifs, including Teleny being identified as having ‘Asiatic blood’, provides an identity against which European culture can measure itself.⁴³ It also means that the space imagined for sexual experimentation is constructed as Other, but becomes a virtual space to conceive of sexuality beyond domestic confines for characters and readers alike.⁴⁴ The same applies to the Anglo-French division, with each being placed at a remove from the other in such a way as to defuse the ‘threat’ of transgressive behaviour by rendering it as a foreign rather than a local vice. Othering deviance extends from art to life, with the book traders who are described as ‘purveyors of filth’ being explicitly identified mostly as Italian or French.⁴⁵

In a discussion which crosses between French and English contexts, a consistent othering of vice with an entrenched cultural or linguistic precedent is observable. Like the earlier references to genitals, this serves as another example of how transgressive sex is inherently linked to foreignness, by no means limited to France and England. When talking about subjects such as condoms, venereal disease and sodomy, one country often blames another for what they describe as imported predilections. Consider that syphilis is described as the ‘French sickness’ in English and Italian while ‘Frenchified’ is a term for carrying venereal disease more broadly, or the othering of sexual practices. Sodomy is described as the ‘French vice’, and the French in turn attribute the ‘vice’ to the Germans or Florentines. In French, slang terms for condoms include une capote anglaise (‘English coat’, a joking reference to greatcoats worn by soldiers); in English they are ‘French letters’.⁴⁶ The reason for the condom’s nickname of the ‘French letter’ partially derives from the fact that they were sent from France, along with the traffic in contraband reading material, and posted across the Channel.⁴⁷

The use of language around sex and profanity holds a dual function: it enhances the fashionable ‘frisson of Frenchness’, and thereby of difference and transgression that McRae mentions, at the same time as it self-censors by refraining from including swearing in English.⁴⁸ At the end of the brothel scene in the Latin Quarter, when a prostitute dies of consumption, the madame says ‘la sale bougre’, as if using French swear words offsets the shocking nature of the scene, or any of the novel’s other goings-on. Then in the next sentence she calls the woman a slut.⁴⁹ During Briancourt’s all-male orgy one of the men in attendance is given the title maître des langues. The use of ‘tongues’ has the same double meaning in the French and English languages, so the joke translates easily, but in keeping the French term for a teacher in the English text, the authors once more implicitly foreground French culture.⁵⁰ In this way, the inconsistency of the authors’ vocabulary highlights the work of multiple hands on the manuscript, as does the fact that the text is a mixture of Gothic, romantic, melodramatic and erotic narrative threads.

Literature and culture across the Channel

During the late 19th century, France was a key signifier to the British and to Wilde, but it was often a contradictory one. In English literature, France and the French language is perceived as ‘sophisticated, urbane and decadent’ at the same time as it is ‘degenerate, self-indulgent and reprehensible’.⁵¹ There also existed an image of France and French culture (that is, of Parisian culture) as an object of desire. This permeated all social classes, particularly in the wake of events such as the Exposition Universelle in 1889 – also the centenary of the French Revolution and the year the Eiffel Tower was opened – and the 1900 Exposition held in Paris, which Wilde visited. Paris was viewed as an idealised international capital, an arbiter of taste and a democratic paradise. For the English it was the simultaneous epitome of liberty, refinement and fashionable status.⁵² Even the terms that Smithers uses in discussing the book are tinged with French, as a means of signposting associations with culture and refinement. When offering his account of Teleny’s composition and publication, he describes an ‘eminent littérateur’ (Wilde) who allegedly came to him with the manuscript.⁵³

The spaces of same-sex sexuality were often also linked to culture, refinement and the demonstration of fashionable status in London and in Paris. Many of the spaces used by men to cruise for sex are similar in the two cities, such as theatres, nightspots and shopping arcades, including London’s Burlington Arcade, and Paris’s Passage de l’Opéra and Passage Jouffroy. Cruising spots at the less grand end of the spectrum include public urinals, known in Paris as vespasiennes.⁵⁴ Some spaces, like the shops and garden around the Palais-Royal, were centres for the pornographic book trade and also hubs for sex workers, male and female.⁵⁵

While homosexuality was technically decriminalised in France, authors still tended to self-censor before their pages even reached editors and publishers, wary of putting their name to work that was explicitly queer. One example is Proust’s short-story writing, from which he excised overtly queer content.⁵⁶Some of these stories have now been posthumously published.⁵⁷ Proust’s writings are roughly contemporaneous with Teleny, and address some similar themes. Like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the French translation of Teleny replaces the threat of arrest and explicit illegality with damage to one’s reputation and social standing. In Teleny, the couple are sent blackmail letters; the same risk is present in À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust writes of the Duc de Châtellerault’s anxiety when it is discovered he has sex with men after he crosses paths with a former partner at a party hosted by the other man’s employer, the Princesse de Guermantes.⁵⁸ Also noteworthy is the Duc’s use of English as a (failed) alias during their initial encounter.

Not only were there concurrent attitudes of approval and fascination, but there was cross-pollination of influences, be they conscious or not. In literature, performance and in language, ‘the English aesthetes affected Gallicisms, the French aesthetes affected Anglicisms. Teleny is a meeting point of these aesthetic trends.’⁵⁹ The popular tradition among singers or dancers of giving themselves French stage names if they were English, and vice versa, to lend an air of cosmopolitanism or foreignness to their act, or to signpost linguistic ability and fashionable status, provides additional evidence of this. Parisian dancer Jane Avril is one example, as is Londoner Marie Lloyd.

The French references that populate Teleny indicate the vogue for French literature and culture among Anglophones, not just in relation to decadence or décadence, but more broadly. Camille Des Grieux’s name, for instance, alludes to Manon Lescaut’s lover, the Chevalier Des Grieux. Both Des Grieuxs outlive their lovers, and are drawn into their partner’s financial difficulties. Manon Lescaut holds an additional layer of significance, like Huysmans’ À Rebours, since both are read by the protagonist in The Picture of Dorian Gray.⁶⁰ À Rebours is identified as a text with a corrupting influence on Dorian, either for its content or simply its Frenchness, and it informs the ‘urban sexual escapades’ of both Dorian Gray and Teleny. At the same time, its influence is felt in descriptions and tastes in interior furnishings, settings and spaces described within the text.⁶¹ In addition to Wilde’s novella and Huysmans’ writing, Teleny evokes Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (in Teleny’s reliance on sex with women as currency), but also other works in English, such as the writings of John Addington Symonds. The connection to Symonds ties in with both Teleny’s publication history and Symonds’s exaltation of same-sex sexuality, including references to classical literature or culture.

At the same time as combining genres and sources, Teleny sought to position itself clearly as allied to British aestheticism, which links back to the impact on it of The Picture of Dorian Gray. One can see glimpses of the rise in popularity of the aesthetic movement in how it is represented in literature, and the construction of identity during the fin-de-siècle. Des Grieux’s fondness for majolica, while a marker of queerness, is linked to aestheticism via Oscar Wilde’s quip that he hoped to be able to ‘live up’ to his blue china, and to the goal of aestheticism or decadentism as art for art’s sake.⁶² A taste for blue-and-white porcelain as a signifier of aestheticism or queerness is then presented as akin to the wearing of a green carnation, something apparently traced to Paris, rather than Britain, despite the novel The Green Carnation being written in English, and as a satire about Wilde and Alfred Douglas.⁶³ Wearing a green carnation was at one point attributed to Wilde as a trend. He admitted he was not responsible but expressed regret that this was the case.⁶⁴ The links between Oscar Wilde and porcelain also form part of the broader prevailing popularity of orientalism in interiors. The choice of specific flowers or porcelain is carried over into The Picture of Dorian Gray, but they are ambiguous since they have been identified as suggesting same-sex attraction or more simply aestheticism, as exemplified by the Peacock Room transplanted from the London residence of Frederick Richards Leyland to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.

Where Dorian Gray is allusive in its references to same-sex activity, and Teleny is the story’s counterpoint by making explicit everything that Wilde does not, there remain some curious silences. Despite the abundant references to classical same-sex intimacy and the opportunity for frank exploration of sexuality in an anonymous work, the same justification or philosophising cannot be found in Teleny as elsewhere in Uranian writing or sexological research. Des Grieux certainly alludes to what amounts to the view of sexuality that one was ‘born this way’, yet it lacks the intellectual engagement present in later texts like Anders als die Andern and Mae West’s The Drag, which explicitly cite science and research on sexology by including figures like Magnus Hirschfeld himself.⁶⁵ There is no real philosophising or engagement with these ideas, however, which means that Teleny remains more closely allied to aesthetic or decadent literature by focusing on beauty, feeling, art and music rather than a scientifically or even philosophically based argument in support of same-sex attraction.

Conclusion

The instability of the novel’s setting speaks to the unstable and changing nature of the world as experienced by its characters through visions, flights of fancy, dreams and out-of-body moments, termed ‘shared sensory synaesthesia’ by Colette Colligan.⁶⁶ Similarly, the plot’s unpredictability and intertextual references reflect the instability and sense of unease faced by its potential readership. The intertwining of Paris and London from the point of view of inspiration, influence and production are as much a reflection of the novel’s composition at a nexus of creative movements as of the diverse foci and creative influences of the authors who composed Teleny in the first place. These authors seem to have been literary magpies, drawing on material found in other publications of the late 19th century in French and English, and most particularly from Oscar Wilde’s oeuvre, while breaking new ground in the literary representation of unambiguously queer sexuality. By drawing on extant works to create heretofore unseen work that spans so many connected forms of transgression (across the sexual, spiritual and moral), the writers of Teleny offer a narrative that is queer in both its content and in its upturning of common modes of production or publication of literature through collaboration.

______________

1 Anon. (attributed to Oscar Wilde et al.), Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-day, 2 vols. (London: Cosmopoli, 1893); also see Jack Saul, Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or, The Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism (London: privately printed [William Lazenby?], 1881); Alan Dale, A Marriage Below Zero (New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1889).

2 An argument can also be made for crossover between Teleny and one of Wilde’s other works, The Portrait of Mr W.H. See William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 192.

3 Anon., Teleny, Étude physiologique. Traduit de l’anglais sur le manuscrit original révisé par l’auteur, 2 vols. (Paris: privately printed, 1934); Robert Gray and Christopher Keep, ‘“An uninterrupted current”: collaborative authorship and homoeroticism in Teleny’, in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, eds. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 193–208 (194).

4 Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 1, 5, 7; Colette Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890–1960 (Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 213.

5 Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 1, 7, 9, 12.

6 Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise, 213; Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: W.H. Allen, 1972), 27. Croft-Cooke adds that the story was recounted to the publisher Maurice Girodias, himself responsible for a later French edition of Teleny.

7 Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 1, 8.

8 See Oscar Wilde et al., Teleny, ed. John McRae (London: GMP Publishing, 1986), 191–2.

9 John McRae, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., 7–24 (12); Oscar Wilde [attributed], Teleny: A Novel Attributed to Oscar Wilde, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco, CA: Gay Sunshine Press, 1984), 22. Leyland is more explicit in identifying Wilde as the author. McRae’s edition was among those seized during Operation Tiger, along with numerous other, less controversial publications. Other books were automatically deemed obscene because they were published by the Gay Sunshine Press.

10 Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise, 214.

11 James Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, and Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 291.

12 McRae, Teleny intro., 8.

13 The term ‘Ganymede’ (Catamitus in Latin, the origin of the term ‘catamite’) also became a slang term in English and French for a homosexual, particularly a younger man.

14 Margaret Wieringa, ‘Review: Fly on the Wall Productions Presents TELENY’, 30 May 2014, online <https://theatrepress.com.au/2014/05/30/review-fly-on-the-wall-theatre-presents-teleny>.

15 McRae, Teleny intro., 12–13.

16 Teleny, vol. 2, 97, 112.

17 ‘Uranian’ was a term coined before the widespread use of ‘homosexual’. It refers to an intermediate sex as defined in the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and was subsequently adopted by a coterie of English poets who constructed an idealised image of male same-sex desire or behaviour modelled on Ancient Greece. Wilde is recorded as using the term once in a letter to Robbie Ross, describing it as a ‘noble’ love. Oscar Wilde to Robbie Ross c. 18 Feb. 1898, quoted in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Croft-Cooke (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 1019.

18 See James Wilper, Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German (West Lafayette, OH: Purdue University Press, 2016).

19 John Cooper, ‘Primary sources’, Oscar Wilde in America blog, 13 Oct. 2015, online <https://oscarwildeinamerica.blog/2015/10/13/primary-sources/>.

20 Michael Kirby, ‘The sodomy offence: England’s least lovely criminal law export?’, in Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Commonwealth: Struggles for Decriminalisation and Change, eds. Corinne Lennox and Matthew Waites (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 2013), 61–82 (64).

21 Anon., ‘Tribunaux’, Le Rappel, 1 Jan. 1877, 3.

22 See Chiara Beccalossi, ‘The “Italian Vice”: male homosexuality and British tourism in southern Italy’, in Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914, eds. Valeria Babini, Chiara Beccalossi and Lucy Riall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 185–206.

23 Colette Colligan, Obscenity and Empire: England’s Obscene Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century (unpublished thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont., 2002), 18.

24 Colette Colligan, ‘Teleny, the secret touch, and the media geography of the clandestine book trade (1880–1900)’, in Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch, ed. Margaret Linley (London: Routledge, 2016), 215–38 (225).

25 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press), 189–203.

26 Will Visconti, ‘The queerness of Salomé: putting the spotlight on Oscar Wilde’s controversial one-act play’, Senate House Library blog, 27 March 2018, online <https://www.senatehouselibrary.ac.uk/blog/queerness-salom%C3%A9-putting-spotlight-oscar-wildes-controversial-oneact-play>.

27 Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 1, 70.

28 Teleny, vol. 2, 16; Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 2, 12.

29 Teleny, vol. 2, 24, 33, 66.

30 Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 1, 10; McRae, Teleny intro., 11; Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise, 213; Colette Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 215.

31 Teleny, vol. 1, 11–12, 32.

32 Teleny, vol. 1, 37.

33 Teleny, vol. 2, 40.

34 Teleny, vol. 1, 115–16.

35 Teleny, vol. 1, 123; Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 1, 104–5.

36 Teleny, vol. 2, 37, 43, 56.

37 Teleny: Étude Physiologique, vol. 2, 24, 28.

38 Teleny, vol. 2, 101.

39 Dominic Janes, ‘Macaroni and sexuality in 18th-century’, 25 Feb. 2017, online <https://brewminate.com/macaroni-and-sexuality-in-18th-century/>.

40 Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley, 14.

41 Teleny, vol. 2, 90, 102.

42 Ibid., 90. The more general use of deliberately old-fashioned and formal language in Teleny (most noticeably words like ‘quoth’) could be an additional linguistic nod to Salomé and its formal, archaic phrasing.

43 Teleny, vol. 1, 32; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 5; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3, 7.

44 Gray and Keep, ‘“An uninterrupted current”’, 197.

45 Colligan, Obscenity and Empire, 8.

46 Michel Souvais, Moi, La Goulue de Toulouse-Lautrec: Souvenirs de mon aïeule (Paris: Publibook, 2008), 114, 194.

47 Colligan, Obscenity and Empire, 8; Therese Oneill, ‘A dying syphilization: syphilis, the scourge of the Victorian sex worker’, The Whores of Yore, 9 July 2017, online <https://www.thewhoresofyore.com/sex-history/a-dying-syphilization-syphilis-the-scourge-of-thevictorian-sex-worker-by-therese-oneill>.

48 McRae, Teleny intro., 11.

49 Teleny, vol. 1, 92.

50 Teleny, vol. 2, 119.

51 William Cohen, Queer Universality and the French Oscar Wilde (Seminar presentation, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 2 Dec 2009).

52 See H. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

53 McRae, Teleny intro., 9.

54 William Peniston, ‘Love and death in gay Paris: homosexuality and criminality in the 1870s’, in Homosexuality in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 128–45 (132); William Peniston, ‘Pederasts, prostitutes and pickpockets in Paris of the 1870s’, in Homosexuality in French History and Culture, eds. Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2001), 169–87 (177).

55 Iwan Bloch, Marquis de Sade: His Life and Works (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002), 85; also see Michael Sibalis, ‘The Palais-Royal and the homosexual subculture of nineteenth-century Paris’, in Homosexuality in French History and Culture, eds. Merrick and Sibalis,117–29.

56 See Finn Turner, ‘I Do Not Speak French’: Cruising, Magic, and Proust’s Queer Sociability (Unpublished thesis, Portland, OR: Portland State University, 2018).

57 See Marcel Proust, Le Mystérieux correspondant et autres nouvelles inédites, ed. Luc Fraisse (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2019).

58 Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–9), vol. 3: Sodom et Gomorrhe, 35; William Carter, Proust in Love (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 181–2; Daniel Karlin, Proust’s English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46–7.

59 McRae, Teleny intro., 11.

60 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. James Gifford (Victoria: University of Victoria, 2011), 29, 89; Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise, 212.

61 Joseph Bristow, ‘Remapping the sites of modern gay history: legal reform, medico-legal thought, homosexual scandal, erotic geography’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007): 116–42 (138).

62 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 43–4.

63 Teleny, vol. 1, 55; Matt Cook, ‘“A new city of friends”: London and homosexuality in the 1890s’, History Workshop Journal 56.1 (2003): 33–58 (36); also see Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation (New York: Appleton, 1894).

64 Dominic Janes, Queering Desire (Seminar presentation, Senate House, London, 11 May 2017).

65 See Three Plays by Mae West, ed. Lillian Schlissel (London: Nick Hern Books, 1997); Richard Oswald (dir.), Anders als die Andern (Richard Oswald-Film, Berlin, 1919).

66 Colligan, ‘Teleny, the secret touch, and the media geography’, 234.