Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

"An Uninterrupted Current”: Homoeroticism and Collaborative Authorship in Teleny

Described by Neil Bartlett as “London’s first gay porn novel,” Teleny: Or The Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-Day first appeared in 1893 in a private edition of two hundred copies. No author’s name was given, but its publisher, Leonard Smithers, issued a prospectus in which he described the writer of the new work as “a man of great imagination . . . [whose cultured] style adds an additional piquancy and spice to the narration.” Rumors soon circulated that the “man of great imagination” in question could only be Oscar Wilde, whose novel The Picture of Dorian Gray had appeared three years earlier amid much clamor concerning its “mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction .”1 Wilde was indeed well known among the burgeoning gay subculture of the early nineties. Sporting the green carnation that was the distinguishing mark among homosexuals in Paris, the popular playwright , critic, and novelist openly—even recklessly—flouted his homoerotic lifestyle. Among his acquaintances was Charles Hirsch, owner of the Librairie Parisienne, a bookshop that specialized in French literature but also carried on a thriving sideline in erotica. Wilde was a regular customer there and Hirsch had furnished him not only with works 193 “An Uninterrupted Current” Homoeroticism and Collaborative Authorship in Teleny      by Zola and Maupassant but also with others of a more “Socratic” nature—the popular euphemism for pornography. Hirsch is the source for the story concerning Teleny’s authorship. He claimed that in late 1890 Wilde arrived at his shop with a carefully wrapped package. He arranged to leave it with the bookshop owner, saying that it would be picked up by another man bearing his card. The man Wilde named appeared shortly thereafter and retrieved the package , only to return in a few days’ time with the same package and instructions that it would be picked up by yet another man. This procedure was repeated several times over the next few months until, on one occasion, Hirsch’s curiosity got the better of him and, taking advantage of a loose ribbon, he opened the package and found a manuscript bearing the single word “Teleny” on the title page. The package that had made its way from man to man by way of his shop was the manuscript of a pornographic novel that had apparently been written in chainletter fashion, each author contributing a chapter to the text before passing it on to the next. According to Hirsch, the manuscript (which is apparently lost or in some private collection) was an “extraordinary mixture of different handwriting, erasures, interlineations, corrections, and additions obviously made by various hands.”2 It was this manuscript that was published in the edition brought out three years later by Smithers. If Hirsch’s account is to be believed, Teleny’s anonymity preserved not the unique and consequently vulnerable identity of a specific artist but instead served to acknowledge that the text was, in effect, the work of a community as opposed to an “author” in the proper sense. Subsequent criticism of Teleny has largely revolved around the issue of Wilde’s putative involvement in the text, with biographers, editors, and critics lining up on either side of the “he wrote it / he couldn’t possibly have written it” divide. Rupert Croft-Cooke, for example, vigorously denounces the attribution, noting that “the style is totally foreign to Wilde’s way of thinking or writing. Nothing in the whole novel has, or could have, the slightest suggestion of Wilde’s talent in it.” Winston Leyland , however, claims that “internal evidence certainly points to Wilde’s involvement in the novel as either principal author or chief collaborator /instigator.” He imagines a time when the issue will be decided by “advanced computers” that can compare “the syntax, vocabulary, and style” of Teleny to “all of Wilde’s known prose fiction.”3 Modern editions regularly feature photographs of Wilde on their dust jackets and include introductions by critics supporting Wilde’s authorship as a means of offsetting the fact that the text is only “attributed” to him.4 194      Such attempts to return the novel to the monological authority of a single, identifiable personage whose “genius” would somehow legitimize its otherwise marginal status as “literature,” or to protect that selfsame “genius” from the contaminating influences of the paraliterary, have much the same result. As opposed as they may seem, such approaches foreclose upon the more radical implications of...