IN THE LATE 1880s and early 1890s Wilde often visited the Librairie Parisienne in Coventry Street, Leicester Square, a bookshop which specialised in French literature. The owner of the shop, Charles Hirsch, said that Wilde was invariably accompanied by a retinue of young men who ‘accorded him familiar deference’. The nineteenth-century Socrates browsed the shelves and chatted to the proprietor in French, the language Wilde insisted on using in the store. He purchased several contemporary French novels, sometimes asking Hirsch to deliver them to his Chelsea home. The pair struck up a bookish acquaintance and, when Wilde felt confident of the book dealer’s discretion, he enquired if Hirsch also sold ‘certain licentious works of a special . . . “Socratic” (i.e. homoerotic) . . . genre’.1
Given Wilde’s familiarity with the erotic works of the ancient world his interest in modern examples of the genre is hardly surprising. Nor was his curiosity exceptional among writers and gentle man of the period. Wilde knew of Swinburne’s mania for titillating titles, which he satisfied by extensive forays into the library of erotica assembled by his friend Lord Houghton.2 Wilde himself is likely to have explored Houghton’s celebrated collection. Having been introduced to the patrician poet and politician by Mahaffy, he visited, on several occasions, Houghton’s country house, which became known as ‘Aphrodisiopolis’ on account of its library.
Wilde was drawn to works of nineteenth-century French literature that had a piquant erotic element. One of his ‘bedside books’ was Charles Baudelaire’s verse collection Les Fleurs du Mal which he described as full of ‘poisonous honey’.3 The ‘poisonous and perfect’ poet had famously defended the volume in court against a charge of offending public morals, partly on account of the graphic obscenity of some of its contents. There is a grisly eroticism about ‘Une Charogne’, one of Wilde’s favourite Baudelaire poems. In it the poet imagines his beloved’s corpse rotting beneath the earth, her beautiful body explored by worms and devoured by their kisses.4
Théophile Gautier’s racy Mademoiselle de Maupin was another of Wilde’s golden books: during his 1882 tour of America, he could not bear to travel without it.5 D’Albert, the novel’s hero, searches for his ideal of feminine beauty. He finds it incarnate in an unexpected body – that of the pageboy Théodore. At the denouement, D’Albert’s master-mistress is unmasked as a girl called Madeline, but not before D’Albert admits to himself the possibility that he loves a young man. The novel ends happily ever after with an orgasm, and the pair slip into a delicious slumber in each other’s arms. As soon as D’Albert is asleep, however, Madeline stirs and tiptoes off to the bed of another woman.
During his Parisian honeymoon with Constance in the summer of 1884 Wilde read J-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours. The novel recounts the long and occasionally lovely aesthetic suicide of Duc Jean Des Esseintes, who renounces human society and the natural world. The jaded epicurean locks himself up in his country home and devotes himself exclusively to artistic pleasures. He luxuriates in the memory of his ancient love affairs, which include relationships with society women, whores, a boy he picks up in the street, and a female ventriloquist who recites, with motionless lips, passages from Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony as they lie in bed together. À Rebours provided Wilde with a model for the ‘poisonous’ book which overwhelms and corrupts Dorian Gray. Its effect on Wilde was profound: he described it as ‘one of the best’ novels he had ever read.6 Over the course of his career he would return to drink from it, as from a brandy bottle, when he needed inspiration in his writings.*
At around the same time Wilde devoured Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Vénus. Wilde narrated its plot to his ‘purple’ friends with visible excitement, and it is not difficult to see why.8 Raoule, the novel’s heroine, engages in a bitter struggle with an older man known as Le Baron for the love of the young androgynous transvestite Jacques Silvert. In a scene that turns on its head the conventional world of marriage Wilde had recently entered, Raoule, dressed as a man, takes the beautiful young cross-dresser as his wife. When Le Baron hears about the wedding, he shoots Jacques out of jealousy; at the sight of the dying boy, however, he is filled with remorse and bends down to kiss him. ‘Leave me alone,’ Jacques implores him with his final breath, ‘your moustache is tickling me.’9
All of these Gallic authors were associated with the Decadent move ment in art and literature; À Rebours became known as the ‘breviary of decadence’. The movement was a reaction against the art lessness and optimism of French Romanticism, and against the belief in unlimited and inevitable progress engendered by the scientific and technological advances of the early nineteenth century. It was also unequivocally anti-bourgeois. Decadent works celebrated art over nature, decay over progress, corruption over innocence, and sickness over health. One of its propagandists hailed the movement as a ‘new and beautiful and interesting disease’.10
Towards the end of the nineteenth century decadence crossed the English Channel. Pater’s Renaissance is, in the author’s words, a paean to ‘that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence’; Wilde described it as the ‘very flower of decadence’.11 In the melodious music of Swinburne’s passion-tormented poems, the decadent note could also be resoundingly heard.12
In fin-de-siècle England Wilde became the movement’s visible symbol: he seemed indeed to ‘exhale Paris’.13Dorian Gray, with its exploration of artificial worlds and exotic sins, is the English equivalent of À Rebours: one reviewer said it was ‘spawned from the leprous literature of the French Décadents’.14Salomé, denounced by its first critics as ‘morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive’, takes as its themes incest and necrophilia.15
Wilde’s biblical play was originally written in French, a language he ranked, for beauty, with ancient Greek, and far above English. It was penned in 1891 during one of his many sojourns in Paris. ‘I wanted,’ Wilde said, apropos of his decision to write in French, ‘once to touch this . . . instrument . . . which I had listened to all my life . . . to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it.’16 Wilde made the acquaintance of many Decadent authors during his stay in the French capital, and it was in the hothouse of their company that the monstrous flower of Salomé grew. In life, as well as in literature, he attempted to imitate the Decadents. To stimulate his ‘visions and desires’, he knocked back absinthe after absinthe on the boulevards, and chain-smoked ‘opium-tainted’ cigarettes.17
The distinction between works of erotica and outright pornography is largely one of style. The former aim at refinement of treatment and aspire to the status of literary art; in the latter, words are regarded simply as a means of arousing the reader. Unsurprisingly, this stylistic difference weighed heavily with Wilde, who famously declared that style was everything, and subject nothing. While it is impossible to imagine him objecting to pornography on moral grounds, it is easy to see how stylistically crude pornographic productions might offend his fastidious aesthetic sensibility.
Wilde showed little enthusiasm for John Bloxam’s tale ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’, which was published in the Chameleon – the Uranian magazine to which Wilde and Douglas also contributed. Wilde criticised the story’s crude and slipshod style. It was, besides, ‘too direct: there is no nuance: it profanes a little by revelation: God and other artists are always a little obscure’.18*
Some of the erotic publications of Leonard Smithers, whom Wilde probably came to know in the first half of the 1890s,20 were elegant enough for his taste. Brash, flamboyant and spectacularly hedonistic, the publisher and book dealer from Sheffield was, Wilde claimed, ‘the most learned erotomaniac in Europe’.21 Smithers boasted that he would ‘publish anything the others are afraid of’, and justified the claim on numerous occasions. Under the imprint of the Erotika Biblion Society, he issued translations of masterpieces of erotic literature by authors such as Casanova and Ovid in small and clandestine editions; Wilde would tease him about his fondness for ‘bringing out books limited to an edition of three copies, one for the author, one for yourself, and one for the Police’.22 Wilde was familiar with Smithers’s edition of Catullus, which he may have picked up on a visit to the publisher’s shop at 3 Soho Square, outside which the dealer would sometimes display the sign ‘SMUT IS CHEAP TODAY’.23
Wilde also seems to have enjoyed some of the contemporary erotica Smithers published. The appropriately named White Stains, a volume of verse by Aleister Crowley, who would later become famous as a master of the black arts, is representative of Smithers’s modern productions.24 The titles of the poems alone give a taste of its quality: they include ‘Necrophilia’, ‘Ballade de la Jolie Marion’ and ‘A Ballad of Passive Paederasty’. The volume is obscene, but by no means devoid of humour, intellectual interest or literary merit. Wilde was eager to obtain a copy, after hearing it described by a friend of Smithers – it sounded, he said, like a ‘wonderful book’.25
The distinction Wilde made between erotica and pornography is illustrated by his dealings with Charles Hirsch at the Librairie Parisienne. His enquiry as to whether the dealer sold homoerotic works under the counter elicited an affirmative response. Over the ensuing months Hirsch supplied him with titles such as Alcibiade, enfant à l’école [Alcibiades the Schoolboy], the Lettres d’un frère à son élève [Letters of a Monk to his Pupil] and The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, Or The Recollections of a Mary-Ann by Jack Saul. Hirsch also furnished Wilde with some ‘more recent pamphlets, with ribald titles, printed in Amsterdam’, but their ‘vulgarity’ ‘displeased’ him and he returned them to the shop.26 ‘Vulgarity’ – the cardinal sin in Wilde’s personal catechism – doubtless refers to the style as well as to the content of these pornographic books.
The 1881 volume The Sins of the Cities of the Plain is the most famous of the titles Wilde purchased. ‘Jack Saul’, a Mary Ann, or male prostitute, offers a colourful and kaleidoscopic tour of the homosexual underworld of late Victorian London, thinly veiled as fiction. The reader is shown houses where gentlemen pay vast sums of money to be introduced to soldiers; they are also taken inside private rooms where aristocrats dance the night away with men in drag. Saul’s description of one such party features the two most notorious transvestites of the period, Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, (a.k.a. ‘Fanny’ and ‘Stella’). ‘Boulton was superbly got up as a beautiful lady, and I observed Lord Arthur [Clifton] was very spooney about her. Park was there as a lady, dancing with a gentleman from the City, a very handsome Greek merchant’.27
Along with such carnivalesque scenes Saul describes darker episodes in which rent boys blackmail their aristocratic customers, who knew that exposure meant certain social ruin and possible imprison ment. Between 1892 and 1895 Wilde and Douglas would explore the underworld evoked in Saul’s book, with fervent and reckless enthusiasm. Their experience there was the reverse of the medal of their spiritual Platonic love.
Wilde relished the excitement of his perilous encounters with rent boys. He loved the sex, and the ‘camp’ banter and masquerade that accompanied it in what, to his eyes, must have seemed like a real-life version of ‘fairy-land’. It is hardly surprising then that he read The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. He may even have used Jack Saul as his guide to the labyrinth of London’s homosexual underworld. While the author is certainly explicit, his style is by no means uncouth or shoddy. He has an eye for evocative detail and a fine ear for the rich and witty argot of London homosexuals, which he serves up with considerable energy and panache.*
* Wilde’s bedside book during the spring of 1895 was a collection of medieval antiphons (verses from the Psalms) entitled Le Latin Mystique. Les poètes de l’antiphonaire et la symbolique au moyen âge. [Mystic Latin. The Poets of the Antiphonary and the Symbolism of the Middle Ages]. The anthology contained pieces from the Bangor Antiphonary, a copy of which stood on the shelves of Des Esseintes. It is possible that Wilde bought the volume after coming across Huysmans’s reference to it, so perhaps À Rebours influenced his reading as well as his writing.7
* During Wilde’s cross-examination at the Queensberry trial in 1895, he repeated his criticism of the tale. ‘I suppose,’ Queensberry’s barrister asked him, ‘I may take it that in your opinion the piece was immoral?’ ‘Worse,’ Wilde replied, ‘it was badly written.’ Trying to pin Wilde down, the barrister persisted: ‘Did you think the story blasphemous?’ ‘I thought the end,’ Wilde responded, ‘violated every canon of beauty . . . blasphemous is not my word.’19
* Given the distinction Wilde made between erotic literature and pornography it is hard to believe Charles Hirsch’s claim that he either edited, or penned, parts of Teleny: Or the Reverse of the Medal, the most famous work of homoerotic literature of the 1890s.
According to Hirsch, towards the end of 1890 Wilde brought a thin notebook into his shop, which was tied up with ribbons and stamped with a wax seal. Wilde told Hirsch that one of his friends would soon drop into the shop to pick it up, identifying himself with one of Wilde’s cards. A few days afterwards, a young man came and collected the manuscript. A little while later, he returned it with the instruction to pass it on to yet another young man who would also come bearing Wilde’s card. The process was repeated several times until, one day, curiosity got the better of the dealer. Hirsch opened the notebook to discover inside a homoerotic story entitled Teleny: Or the Reverse of the Medal, written and revised by several hands. In 1893, a slightly amended version of the novel’s text was published, in a limited edition of two hundred copies with pink salmon wrappers, by Leonard Smithers.28
Could Wilde have had a hand in the novel’s production? The most cursory examination of its style makes it appear highly unlikely. Just as Wilde said that the chief argument against Christianity was the leaden prose style of St Paul, so the strongest objection to his authorship of Teleny is its cliché ridden and ultra-realistic prose. The graphic sex scenes in Teleny aspire to naturalistic ‘truth’ rather than beauty, and they certainly achieve it. The problem with attributing them to Wilde is that he utterly abhorred realism and disliked ‘vulgar’ pornography.