by Neil McKenna
Two years later, in court, Oscar recalled the events of that April evening. It was about a quarter to eight and Oscar was about to have dinner. `I was told by my servant that a Mr Allen wished to see me on particular business, and I went down to the hall.'
`I suppose you have come about my beautiful letter to Lord Alfred Douglas,' Oscar told Allen. `If you had not been so foolish as to send a copy to Mr Beerbohm Tree, I would gladly have paid you a very large sum of money for the letter as I consider it to be a work of art.'
`A very curious construction could be put on that letter,' Allen replied.
`Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes,' Oscar parried.
`A man has offered me sixty pounds for it,' Allen said.
`If you take my advice,' said Oscar, `you will go to that man and sell my letter to him for sixty pounds. I myself have never received so large a sum for any prose work of that very small length.'
Allen was taken aback at Oscar's bravura. `This man is out of town,' he said weakly.
`He is sure to come back,' Oscar replied smartly. When he reiterated that he `would not pay one penny' to get his letter back, Allen started to plead poverty, telling Oscar that `he hadn't a single penny.'
`He had been on many occasions trying to find me in order to talk about this matter,' Oscar recalled. `I said that I couldn't guarantee his cab expenses, but that I would gladly give him half a sovereign.'
Allen took the money and went away, but not before Oscar had told him that the letter in question was a prose poem that `will shortly be published in sonnet form in some delightful magazine'.
`I will send you a copy,' he told Allen as a parting shot.
About five minutes later, Oscar's servant came to him in the library and told him that another man wanted to see him. This time it was Cliburn.
`I really cannot be bothered any more about this letter,' Oscar told him. `I don't care tuppence for it.' Much to his surprise, Cliburn pulled the original letter out of his pocket.
`Allen has asked me to give it back to you,' said Cliburn.
`Why?' Oscar said. `Why does he give me back this letter?'
`Well, he says that you were kind to him and there is no use trying to rent you as you only laugh at us.'
Oscar noticed that the letter was extremely soiled. `I think it quite unpardonable that better care was not taken of an original manuscript of mine,' Oscar said, giving Cliburn half a sovereign. `I am afraid you are leading a wonderfully wicked life.'
`There is good and bad in every one of us, Mr Wilde,' said Cliburn.
`You area born philosopher,' Oscar replied.
The version of that evening's events given to the court by Oscar was a wittily embroidered version of the more menacing and nerve-wracking reality. Oscar confessed to Frank Harris that he was in fact `empty with fear' during these exchanges. This was not quite the end of the affair however. There was another copy of Oscar's `madness of kisses' letter still in circulation, a copy which, in due course, would find its way into the hands of Queensberry. Nor did Oscar's entanglement with Robert Cliburn end. In fact, the two became friends, and maybe even lovers. Cliburn was noted for his good looks. George Ives, who refers to Cliburn several times in his diary, reported that Oscar once asked Cliburn, the `notorious boy scoundrel', what his feelings were for his victims. `What I want to know,' Oscar asked Cliburn, `is did you ever love any boy for his own sake?"No, Oscar, I can't say that I ever did,' he replied. Towards the end of 1893, Ives recorded in his diary that Oscar, with `his strong love of nature study', had said he `would much enjoy witnessing a meeting between the bold scheming enchanting panther and the cold disciplined Hellenist'. Oscar clearly wanted to watch Cliburn and Ives having sex. Years later Ives amplified his diary entry. `I suppose this means that OW would have liked to have witnessed a meeting between me-and- one Robert Cliburn -a beautiful but very dangerous youth.'
Despite the blackmail, Oscar was growing increasingly heedless, increasingly reckless and increasingly passionate about his sexual preferences. `Vague whispers, all the more awful, perhaps, for their very vagueness, passed from masculine lips about the horror of his inner life,' wrote the New York Herald. `The whispers did not reach the blazonment of print, they did not pollute the ears of the innocent. None the less, they caused Oscar Wilde to be shunned by those whose taboo is a stigma and a reproach.' Oscar's flaunting of his lovers, and his radical political views on reform of the laws on sex between men, were beginning to alarm and alienate some of those closest to him. According to Robert Sherard, there were `evil rumours' doing the rounds about Oscar and `renunciations by mutual friends began to occur, distressing me greatly'.
Frank Harris recorded how he came across Oscar in the Cafe Royal one day, enthroned between two working-class boys of `vulgar appearance'. Harris was perhaps describing the Parker brothers. `They looked like grooms,' Harris wrote. One of the boys struck Harris as depraved, the other was nice-looking in a fresh boyish way, `with rosy cheeks, hair plastered down in a love-lock on his forehead, and low cunning eyes'. To Harris's astonishment, Oscar was talking about the Olympic Games, talking brilliantly, says Harris, and telling how in ancient Greece:
the youths wrestled and were scraped with strigulae and threw the discus and ran races and won the myrtle-wreath. His impassioned eloquence brought the sun-bathed palaestra before one with a magic of representment. Suddenly the younger of the boys asked: `Did you sy they was niked?' `Of course,' Oscar replied, `nude, clothed only in sunshine and beauty.' `Oh, my,' giggled the lad in his unspeakable Cockney way.
Harris `could not stand it' and left. At about this time, the publisher John Lane and the poet Richard Le Gallienne jointly warned Edward Shelley to keep away from Oscar, and the journalist John Boon recalled how a number of `very unpleasant stories' about Oscar `began to be freely circulated in the West End of London'. Boon took the unusual step of warning at least three young men that their friendship with Oscar placed them in `a dangerous situation'. Boon and Oscar were members of the same club, and one day Boon seized `a favourable opportunity' of telling Oscar that he should be `glad if he ceased his visits altogether'. Oscar made no reply but was never seen in the club again. 'By this time,' Boon recalled, `I think he must have been aware that his life was attracting a great deal of grave criticism.' `Poor Oscar!' Max Beerbohm told Robbie Ross, after spying Oscar from a cab `walking with Bosie and some other members of the Extreme Left'. Oscar, said Beerbohm, `looked like one whose soul has swooned in sin and revived vulgar. How fearful it is for a poet to go to bed and find himself infamous.'
`The Extreme Left' was an apt description for those Uranians, like Oscar and Bosie, who were passionately, fiercely committed to the Cause. For Oscar and Bosie, the personal had become the political. To believe in the Cause was not enough. They needed to realise their erotic selves, to proclaim their sexual orientation to the world. `Nothing is serious except passion,' Wilde wrote in A Woman of No Importance. The choice was perfectly clear: promiscuity or puritanism. `The real enemy of modern life, of everything that makes life lovely and joyous and coloured for us,' wrote Oscar, `is Puritanism, and the Puritan spirit.' Only those with the courage and vision to sin promiscuously, to squander, to spill their sexual seed have any hope of self-realisation. `The wildest profligate who spills his life in folly,' Oscar wrote, `has a better, saner, finer philosophy of life than the Puritan has. He, at any rate, knows that the aim of life is the pleasure of living, and does in some way realise himself, be himself.'
Part of the air of corruption that seemed to swirl around Oscar may have had something to do with the publication of the anonymous and highly sexually explicit novel Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal. It was published in a limited edition of two hundred copies at some point during 1893 by Leonard Smithers, who Oscar once called `the most learned erotomaniac in Europe'. Smithers issued a `Prospectus' announcing the forthcoming publication of the novel at the prohibitively expensive price of five guineas a copy:
This work i
s, undoubtedly, the most powerful and cleverly written erotic Romance which has appeared in the English language during recent years. Its author - a man of great imagination - has conceived a thrilling story, based to some extent on the subject treated by an eminent litterateur who died a few months ago - i.e. on the Urning, or man-loving-man. It is a most extraordinary story of passion; and, while dealing with scenes which surpass in freedom the wildest licence, the culture of its author's style adds an additional piquancy and spice to the narration. The subject was treated in a veiled manner in an article in a largely-circulated London daily paper, which demonstrated the subtle influence of music and the musicians in connection with perverted sexuality. It is a book which will certainly rank as the chief of its class, and it may truthfully be said to make a new departure in English amatory literature.
The Prospectus gave rise to considerable speculation among London's wealthier Uranians about the identities of the two men mentioned in connection with the novel. The `eminent litterateur' could be none other than John Addington Symonds, and there were whispers that the `man of great imagination' who had written what promised to be the most audacious book on love and sex between men was none other than Oscar.
What little is known about the authorship of Teleny comes from just one man: Charles Hirsch, a French citizen who had opened a shop in 1889 - the Librairie Franfaise in London's West End - specialising in French books. Among his first and best customers was Oscar who, in addition to purchasing the more usual French publications, also asked Hirsch to order a number of what he called `Socratic' works. Hirsch was happy to oblige, and supplied Oscar with explicitly homoerotic works in both French and English, including Monsieur Venus by `Rachilde' and Jack Saul's Recollections of a Mary Ann. According to Hirsch, Oscar rarely came to his shop alone:
He was usually accompanied by distinguished young men who seemed to be writers or artists. They showed him a familiar deference. In a word he seemed the Master surrounded by his pupils.
Towards the end of 1890, Oscar turned up at the Librairie Franfaise with a wrapped and carefully sealed package and asked Hirsch if he would be kind enough to keep it for him. `A friend of mine will call for this manuscript and will show you my card,' he told Hirsch. A few days later, one of the young men Hirsch had previously seen in Oscar's company called at the shop, showed him Oscar's card, and took the package away. Some days later, this young man returned the package to Hirsch and informed him that another young man would call for it shortly. In all, three young men called for and returned the package. On the last occasion, Hirsch noticed that it had been badly wrapped and left unsealed. He could not resist investigating. Gingerly untying the strings, he unwrapped a manuscript entitled Teleny, written in several different hands with numerous crossings-out, emendations and additions. `It was evident to me,' Hirsch recalled many years later, `that several writers of unequal merit had collaborated on this anonymous but profoundly interesting work.'
John Gray and Robbie Ross may well have been two of the three young men who had a hand in writing Teleny. But Hirsch was convinced that Oscar's was the dominant voice. When he read the manuscript, Hirsch noted that some of the furnishings and decorative details of Rene Teleny's rooms were remarkably similar to those Hirsch had noticed in Oscar's house in Tite Street where he had had occasion to call and deliver books. `I can easily see why, with his wife, children and servants, he could not leave this compromising, and extralicentious manuscript at home,' Hirsch wrote.
Teleny tells the story of the love affair between Camille Des Grieux and Rene Teleny. Like many men, Des Grieux - whose initials curiously echo those of Dorian Gray - has `always struggled against the inclinations of my own nature' and has made several abortive attempts to love women. When he finally confronts the fact that he is attracted to other men, Des Grieux is disgusted and revolted. He is on the point of suicide when he is rescued, spiritually and sexually, by the darkly handsome pianist Rene Teleny to whom Des Grieux is irresistibly drawn by the magical power of his music. In his treatise on sex between men, Uranisme et Unisexualite, Andre Raffalovich suggested that the word `musical' had a special sense for men who loved men, that to be `musical' not only signified the special affinity for music experienced by men who loved men, but also functioned as a code-word indicating their sexual orientation. Certainly, by the beginning of the twentieth century, `being musical' was in comparatively common usage in England as a badge of sexual orientation.
Sex with Teleny is not only profound, potent and rapturous, it is also revelatory. The morning after the night before, Des Grieux wakes up; his shame and self-loathing at his unnatural desires are banished, replaced by pride and exultation:
Far from being ashamed of my crime, I felt that I should like to proclaim it to the world. For the first time in my life I understood that lovers could be so foolish as to entwine their initials together. I felt like carving his name on the bark of trees, that the birds seeing it might twitter it from morn till eventide; that the breeze might lisp it to the rustling leaves of the forest. I wished to write it on the shingle of the beach, that the ocean itself might know of my love for him, and murmur it everlasting.
Teleny has received short shrift from biographers and critics. It has often been described - unfairly - as crude and coarse. In its detailed and powerful descriptions of sex between Des Grieux and Teleny, the book is certainly extremely explicit, but it is at the same time poetic, passionate and quite beautiful, and certainly not unworthy of Oscar's hand. Unlike much Victorian pornography, the central theme of Teleny is rapture: rapture at the discovery of the erotic self and rapture at erotic fulfillment. Teleny is as much about love as about sex. From shame to rapture, Des Grieux's erotic odyssey follows that made by Oscar and by many of his friends and contemporaries. The story ends unhappily when Teleny commits suicide, and Des Grieux is caught up in the ensuing scandal. Des Grieux's final words have an ominously prophetic ring:
Then, Heaven having revealed my iniquity, the earth rose against me; for if Society does not ask you to be intrinsically good, it asks you to make a goodly show of morality, and, above all, to avoid scandals.
The proposed publication of Teleny may have contributed to John Gray's final rupture with Oscar. In March 1893, John Gray was the first of Oscar's close friends to abruptly terminate their friendship. He wrote to Pierre Louis, `About the falling out with Oscar. I say it to you only and it is absolute. It will suffice that I recount its origins when I see you in London.' Gray had become increasingly unhappy about his friendship with Oscar. It was more than jealousy at Bosie's unassailable position of primacy in Oscar's affections, though Gray would have had to be a saint not to feel slightly jealous at being ousted as Oscar's officially beloved. Oscar was making waves, drawing unwelcome attention to himself and to his friends, including Gray.
Swirling rumours were solidifying into specific allegations. Oscar had left his wife, and had taken up with Lord Alfred Douglas. Oscar had been thrown out of the Savoy after an incident with a boy. Oscar had been seen in the Cafe Royal with two obvious renters. Max Beerbohm wrote - not altogether in jest - that, had Oscar lived in the days of Socrates, he, too, would have been impeached on charges of `corrupting the youth'. Indeed, Beerbohm wrote, `the harm that Mr. Wilde has done within a certain radius is incalculable'. Beerbohm thought John Gray was `one of the corrupt', certainly corrupted and perhaps corrupting, or on the verge of becoming corrupting. Oscar was not only `preaching corruption', said Andre Raffalovich, he was also practising it, by seducing vulnerable young men, turning their heads, riding roughshod over their feelings and emotions.
Gray, now a Catholic convert, no longer wanted to be part of what he saw as this web of corruption, blackmail and prostitution surrounding Oscar and Bosie. Nor did he wish to be identified with the Cause, to be seen as part of a crusading, proselytising movement which, as far as he was concerned, could only damage his reputation and his career. If Oscar was indeed the chief author of Teleny, and Gray one of the three young men who
had helped to write the novel, then the prospect of its publication would have appalled and enraged him. It would be a reminder as well as a constant reproach of a period in his life he now preferred to forget.
In any case, Gray could afford to take the moral high ground. He was no longer dependent on Oscar's goodwill, his literary connections or his financial assistance. For several months now, Andre Raffalovich had been assiduously courting him, offering him not only his patronage but also his single-minded devotion. Oscar had been prepared to pay John Lane to publish Gray's first volume of verse, Silverpoints, but at the very last minute, Raffalovich stepped in instead. Gray's new-found reticence about his sexual orientation was reflected in his choice of poems for the book. He decided not to include some of his more openly homoerotic poems. The book was an exquisite and expensive flop. Writing in the Uranian-inclining magazine The Artist and Journal ofHome Culture, Theodore Wratislaw said that Gray was `a young man with a promising career behind him'. Wratislaw may have been making a rather acid reference to Gray's physical attractions and what was seen as his successful exploitation of these assets. When Ada Leverson saw `the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin' in Silverpoints, she suggested to Oscar that he should `publish a book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts'.
Pierre Lout's was not long behind John Gray in terminating his friendship with Oscar and was rather more forthcoming about his reasons. Bosie was the problem. Lout's disliked Bosie and the more he saw of Bosie, the more he disliked him. The visit Lout's made to London in the spring of 1893 confirmed all his doubts. Lout's wrote to his brother Georges three days after the premiere of A Woman of No Importance to say that `Oscar Wilde has been charming on my behalf, I have lunched with him almost every day. But I should have been glad if he had provided different company.' In Paris, three weeks later, Lout's called on Oscar at the Hotel des Deux-Mondes. There was a terrible scene. Lout's began by accusing Oscar of cruelty to Constance and other `frightful things' concerning Bosie. Oscar responded by telling Lout's that he should not believe every piece of tittle-tattle he heard, that it was not fair and that, in any case, he did not recognise Louys's right to judge him. Lout's told Oscar that he had said what he had come to say, that he was not going to stay a moment longer and that Oscar would have to choose between his friendship and his `fatal connection' with Bosie. Needless to say, Oscar chose Bosie. `I wanted to have a friend,' was Oscar's parting comment to Lout's. `From now on I will only have lovers.'