Teleny, the 1893 erotic novel linked to Oscar Wilde

In 1893 a London publisher of erotica printed 200 copies of an anonymous novel about a love affair between two men, a pianist and his admirer. Forty years later a bookseller claimed that the manuscript had passed through Oscar Wilde's hands, and the name has stuck to it ever since.

Paris, 1934. An old bookseller named Charles Hirsch publishes a French translation of an English erotic novel, printed privately for the members of a society that calls itself the Ganymède Club de Paris. In front of the text he puts a few pages of memories. Forty years earlier, he writes, he kept a shop in London, and one of his customers was Oscar Wilde. One day in 1890 Wilde left a sealed parcel at the counter¹.

The book was Teleny, first published in London in 1893 in an edition of 200 copies. It tells the story of a love affair between two men, and Hirsch's few pages are the only reason the name of Oscar Wilde has been attached to it ever since. This is the story of the book, of the men who sold it and of how much of the legend can be trusted.

A parcel in Coventry Street

Hirsch was a Frenchman who ran the Librairie Parisienne in Coventry Street, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. He sold French books and, as he later admitted, erotica printed abroad or under false imprints. In his account Wilde bought French literature from him and, he claimed, some of the other kind too, including The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, an anonymous English book of 1881 about male prostitution in London¹.

The parcel came with instructions. A friend of Wilde's would call for it, showing Wilde's card. The friend came, took it away and some time later brought it back, with the same instruction for another man. Hirsch says this happened several times before the parcel returned to Wilde.

At some point Hirsch opened it. Inside was a manuscript called Teleny, written, he said, in several different hands, with corrections in yet another. From this he concluded that the novel had been written by a group of young men in Wilde's circle, each adding a section in turn, with Wilde revising it¹.

Two hundred copies from Cosmopoli

The novel was printed in 1893 in two small volumes by Leonard Smithers, a former Sheffield solicitor who had moved to London and gone into publishing, and the printer Harry Sidney Nichols. Their Erotika Biblion Society issued classics and novelties of erotic literature to subscribers, under imprints that named no real place. The title page of Teleny reads "Cosmopoli, 1893", and the back of the half-title states the size of the run: Edition, 200 copies³.

The full title was Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-day. The phrase "the reverse of the medal" is the hidden side of something, here the side of a fashionable man's life that society did not see. Smithers's prospectus called it the most powerful and cleverly written erotic romance to appear in English in recent years, and hinted, without naming him, at an author of great culture⁴.

According to Hirsch, the printed book differed from the manuscript. A prologue had been cut and the setting changed¹. The printed text, in fact, never names the city where it takes place.

Smithers would later become Wilde's publisher in earnest. In 1898, when no one else would touch him, he brought out The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he went on to publish Wilde's last plays. He also pirated Wilde's work after his death and died in poverty in London in 1907⁴.

A pianist, a concert and a dagger

The book opens in the middle of a conversation. "Tell me your story from its very beginning, Des Grieux," says an unnamed listener, and Camille Des Grieux, a rich young man, starts to talk³. Everything that follows is his confession.

It began at a grand charity concert, where his mother was one of the lady patronesses. At the piano was René Teleny, a Hungarian pianist just starting to make his name. As Teleny plays, Camille sees visions, and he discovers that Teleny has seen the same ones: a kind of telepathy binds them from the first evening.

Camille fights the attraction. An attempt to prove to himself that he desires women ends with the death of a servant, a tragedy he blames on himself. Then he gives in. The two become lovers, and through Teleny he discovers a hidden world of men who desire men, with its private parties, its codes and its blackmailers.

The ending is a Victorian melodrama. Teleny is deep in debt. Camille finds him in bed with his own mother, who has been paying those debts. After a separation, and an attempt by Camille on his own life, the two are reconciled, but too late: Teleny has stabbed himself in remorse and dies in his lover's arms.

Between these events the book is fully explicit, in the language of the erotic trade of its day. What sets it apart is the frame around them: a love story between two men, told seriously and with sympathy, that ends in tragedy because of debt, scandal and the impossibility of living openly.

Did Wilde write it

Nobody knows. No manuscript survives, no letter of Wilde's mentions the book and no contemporary witness except Hirsch connects him with it². Before 1934 the link was only a rumour. Smithers's prospectus hinted at a famous author, and by 1910 the occultist Aleister Crowley could already list "Wilde in Teleny" among homosexual writings.

Some scholars see Wilde's hand in the style, in the epigrams and in the mixture of art, music and sensation that recalls The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Others point out that the prose is uneven, as one would expect from several authors, and that the case for Wilde rests on the memories of a single interested bookseller, written down decades later.

The most careful editors have taken a middle road. When John McRae edited the novel for the Gay Men's Press in London in 1986, he presented it as a probable collaboration among young men of Wilde's circle, with Wilde perhaps acting as editor rather than author, as Hirsch had described⁵. Robert Gray and Christopher Keep later studied the novel as a case of collaborative authorship, in which writing together was part of the erotic game⁶. Katerina García-Walsh, on the other hand, counts Teleny among the works falsely attributed to Wilde, together with the satire The Green Carnation and the story "The Priest and the Acolyte"².

The Victorian trade under the counter

Teleny belonged to a business that operated in the shadows of the law. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 allowed the police to seize and destroy indecent books, and after 1885 the Labouchere Amendment made any act of "gross indecency" between men a crime. A novel like this one was therefore illegal twice over: as pornography and as a description of acts for which men went to prison.

The historian Lisa Z. Sigel has shown how this trade worked: small runs, high prices, subscription lists, false places of publication, books often printed on the Continent and sold under the counter to men of means⁷. Pornography was a luxury, and its readers were mostly educated, which explains the literary ambitions of a book like Teleny.

Two years after the book appeared, the danger became public. In 1895 Wilde was tried and sentenced to two years' hard labour for gross indecency, and for decades any book with his name on it, or rumoured to be his, carried the smell of scandal.

From a club edition to the paperback

For half a century Teleny existed only as a rarity for collectors. Smithers reissued it, and in 1899 an anonymous prequel, Des Grieux, told the earlier life of its narrator. Hirsch's French edition of 1934 claimed to follow the original manuscript.

In 1958 the Olympia Press of Paris, which published erotic books in English for travellers, reprinted it with a strong hint at Wilde. A cut paperback followed in 1966 from Icon Books. Then came the gay liberation editions: Winston Leyland's at Gay Sunshine Press in San Francisco in 1984, which presented it as Wilde's, and McRae's in 1986⁸. Valancourt Books published a scholarly edition in 2010, edited by Amanda Mordavsky Caleb⁹.

Today Teleny is in print, studied in universities and translated into several languages, and it is often called one of the first novels in English to put love between two men at its centre. Who wrote it remains a mystery. The wider story of Wilde's world, of Taormina, Sandow and the first gay magazines, is told in the chapter on the Arcadian photographers.