Let’s get this out of the way quickly: it’s not Oscar. It’s definitely of the same period and style, packed with languorous heroes, heady perfumes and ludicrous metaphors, but I’m not sure any serious academics do think it’s written by him any more. Though I can see where the mistake would be made. Victorian decadent gay fiction by an anonymous author? Who else! And there are similarities – particularly the way Camille meets Teleny, which mimics Basil’s meeting with Dorian. Camille is, like Dorian, Teleny’s artistic inspiration – and Teleny is, like Dorian, gorgeous and cruel in equal measure. But nowadays, surely, it is merely the economic benefit of putting “Oscar Wilde” on the cover that keeps the rumour going.
Firstly and most important: my gut reaction says no. I do place some faith in my instinct. There’s a short Oscar Wilde fragment they dug up, two lines long, and published in the back of the Penguin Collected Short Fiction. The moment I glanced at it I just knew, from two lines alone, that it was definitely his. I’m still upset by a recording of Reading Gaol, attributed to him, because I just don’t know based on the voice and I feel I should. The Picture of Dorian Gray is remarkable for giving me intense phantom smells all the way through: Teleny just doesn’t feel or smell the same. Even without that, it reads like an imitation. The phrases just don’t have that perfection, and the dialogue is appalling. Yes, Oscar Wilde could do appalling dialogue too (see Salome or Duchess of Padua), but it was a very particular sort of awful. The scattered epigrams lack wit and seem like pale shades. To my mind, this is the racy rip off published in Dorian’s wake – like the scores of Vampire Romances suddenly filling our shelves. The evidence for Wilde’s authorship, aside from the textual similarities, is based mostly o€€€n the comments dropped by the original publishers. But surely they had as much to gain by linking it with Wilde’s name as modern publishers do? (read a good defence of this position, one with footnotes)
I have more stock in the other idea: that it was passed around and co-written by Wilde’s circle, and that he brushed it over at some point. Yes, that would make sense of a lot of things: the fact it looks like but doesn’t always feel like his work, plus the rather fragmentary nature of the plot. You can easily imagine some of the more irrelevant chapters being added in by extra authors – even the publishers commissioning a bit more screwing to pad it out. At one point, it does begin to feel like the story has been jettisoned entirely in favour of increasingly obscene subplots. Rather like those sandwiches Scooby Doo used to eat, with a tiny bit of bread on the top and bottom, packed out with hundreds of fillings. I wonder if anyone’s ever done a serious study to attribute different parts to different writers?
As for the story itself – it’s sillier than Twilight, fantastically loopy high melodrama. Camille falls in love with the pianist Teleny the first moment their eyes meet, and at the same moment gets a prophetic vision of his death! Teleny falls in love with him, because he is the only person who gets the same visions when he hears him play! A brilliantly romantic concept. Camille tries to keep away from him, but also obsessively stalks him – at one point, he sees Teleny take a woman home and has a vivid hallucination about what they are up to. When he tells Teleny this, it all turns out to be exactly as he imagines! Which you might think was rather ridiculous, but the narrator refers us to the “Psychikal Society” for proof that such things do exist. And yet, at times it is genuinely moving, as our hero struggles with his unnatural desires and rails against the cruel world he is stuck in.
All this is well and good, and I might even have enjoyed this for the daft brilliance it is, were it not very very porny – porny in a decadent way, all mossy clefts, little acorns and Classical references, but still far more explicit than I had expected. And certainly enough to make reading it on the Tube a pretty shady experience. It’s basically Victorian erotica: PWP, as they would call it on Livejournal, Porn Without Point. It frequently derails the story of romantic obsession for all sort of irrelevant (but horny) digressions, like introducing a maid only to violate her three times, recounting the tale of My First Orgy, and presenting what must be the literary precursor of One Girl, One Bottle. Even while our hero claims he’s never fancied a woman, you do get at least ten (by my last count) sex scenes involving them – this is equal opportunities arousal. Which I suppose is the point of porn – thin narrative stringing together titillating scenarios – but combined with the heady style, it feels a bit like being raped by Georgia O’Keefe.
This rather random selection of increasingly tacked on sex scenes is, I think, fairly intriguing proof that it was written as a collaboration. Particularly the chunk about the maid, which seems pretty incidental; or the Eyes Wide Shut symposium which is so much nastier than one would possibly expect (even from the rest of the book) that it’s tempting to see it as a beefed up addition. In that context, I almost feel there’s a place for the readers to expand on it as a work in progress. When one fellow at the symposium stands up to tell a naughty story, it feels as if every dinner guest could have recounted something equally ribald, and maybe in time it would have been expanded by the Writing Team. I’m also bemused they didn’t reach the natural conclusion of the Teleny/Camille/Bryancourt love triangle: it seemed like such an obvious plot development.
Yet it is also very cleverly written: we know our hero must get off with Teleny eventually, but it keeps you on tenterhooks for about eight chapters of longing glances, with only a stolen distant kiss and a lot of adjectives to tide you over. When Camille does finally talk to Teleny – they meet at the moment he is about to throw himself into the Thames due to the torments of passion! – Teleny whisks him home to a specially prepared chamber of white silk, just like white heliotrope. At one hilarious moment, he apologises:
“I cannot give you a banquet, though I expected you; still there is enough to satisfy your hunger, I hope.”At which point I, as a student, expected Teleny to offer him beans on toast – but no:
“There were some luscious Cancale oysters – few but of an immense size; a dusty bottle of Sauterne, then a pate de fois gras highly scented with Perigord truffles; a partridge with paprika or Hungarian curry, and a salad made out of a huge Piedmont truffle, as thinly sliced as shavings; and a bottle of exquisite dry sherry...then came a dish of Seville oranges, bananas, and pineapples, flavoured with Maraschino and covered with sifted sugar. It was a saviory, tasty, tart and sweet medley, combining together the scent and flavour of all those delicious fruits. After having washed it down with a bottle of sparkling champagne, we then sipped some tiny cups of fragrant and scalding Mocha coffee.”
And all this in a house which, we are told, is safely free of servants. Oh, how I love the decadents! Whenever the plot cranked up again, I did genuinely enjoy this book – silliness and all. The central love story is a moving one, the characters were well drawn, and the conclusion was pretty devastating. While lots of the screwing was gratuitous (PWP, remember?), it was also at times used to brilliant effect – that first kiss, the climactic ending (one of those brilliant moments where you know with a sinking feeling what has to happen, and totally justified in its sickly voyeuristic detail) – even the chapter-and-a-half which Teleny and the Narrator spend rolling about in a timeless, luxurious eternity adds to the atmosphere. There are great Freudian undertones, particularly if you mirror the ending with the Teleny-as-sister dream sequence; and as a gay novel, is a brilliant study of a man struggling with his desires. It’s just a pity that the florid decadent noodlings so frequently tip it over from erotic back into laugh-out-loud bad. I particularly enjoyed a man dismounting: “all covered with perspiration, date syrup, sperm and spittle”. There’s something about the culinary detail which struck me as particularly bathetic. It's so Victorian - not erotic, merely accurate...
Final verdict? Attributing this to Wilde is rather like attributing Traci Lords of the Rings to Tolkien, or Team America: World Police to Gerry Anderson or Michael Bay. It has the trappings of a Dorian, but none of the intelligence – no musings on art and life (or none of any significance), no depth. I’m not sure that Wilde could have written something completely unconcerned with his pet projects – it’s possible that he was involved somewhere down the line, but he was certainly not the sole author. One wonders if he would have put the screwing back into Dorian Gray, had he been allowed to. One thinks not – it would lose that unsettling ambiguity. But I do wonder whether he ever read Teleny, and what he thought of it.
The Oscholars have a special issue on the novel:
http://www.oscholars.com/TO/Specials/Teleny/ToC.htm
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