Gaya Scienza

Dorian Gray in its original text

Antoine Deléry's biography of Peyrefitte (Roger Peyrefitte - Le sulfureux, H&O Éditions, 2011,  336p, in French) is not the most exciting book around. At least it's a quick read. One of its interests lies in the extensive quotations of Peyrefitte's public letter to François Mauriac after the famous columnist wrote a harsh paper on him after watching a documentary on the movie adaptation of Les amitiés particulières.

The Lettre ouverte à M. François Mauriac, prix Nobel, membre de l'Académie française, published by Arts on May 6th 1964, is nothing other than a public outing of Mauriac (as we would say today), supported by quite graphic allusions, like the mention of some love letters to Cocteau...

Qui êtes-vous mon cher maître? Un écrivain que nous admirons, mais un homme que nous ne pouvons plus supporter. Vous vous êtes impatronisé du rôle officiel de moralisateur, beaucoup moins pour défendre la morale que pour vous punir, aux dépends d’autrui, de votre pendant irresistible à l’immoralité. (Who are you my dear Master? A writer we admire, but a man that we can no longer stand. You have endorsed yourself with the official role of moralizing, much less to defend morality than to punish you, at the expense of others, for your irresistible inclination to immorality.)

Among the abundant book production of Peyrefitte chronicled in the biography, L'exilé de Capri, his fictionalized biography of Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen, the founder of Akademos, the first homosexual journal in France, stands out. After a scandal involving boys in 1903 Fersen has to flee Paris for Capri where he lived until his death in 1923. A sad life. Apparently Peyrefitte's book includes an interesting painting of homosexual Paris in the early 20th century. Deléry claims that after L'exilé Peyrefitte's style will never again display the 'joyous irony and the cheerfulness' that characterized his earlier production.

The last part of the biography is dominated by what Deléry describes as the great love of Peyrefitte's life: Alain-Philippe, a young actor, had a minor role in the movie Les amitiés particulières. They met during a visit of the author to the shooting location. Alain-Philippe was 12 years old. Peyrefitte 57. Irronically, when Alain-Philippe grew up, after causing the financial ruin of Peyrefitte through dubious investments in the show business, he will marry Amanda Lear... Another sad story.

Philippe Jullian's biography of Oscar Wilde, first published in 1961 and recently reissued (Éditions Bartillat, 2011, 430p, in French), is another story. It is not as definitive as Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde, nor as crisp as Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde.  A very pleasant read, though, with a lively and mastered style. It made me want to read again The Portrait of Dorian Gray, especially in the scholarly edition recently provided by Nicholas Frankel (Harvard University Press, 2011, 296p), which features for the first time Wilde's original text, more explicit on the gay context than the previously known editions... According to Jullian,

Dorian Gray est, en somme, le premier roman pédérastique écrit depuis le Satiricon (...). Il faudra attendre vingts ans, avec la Mort à Venise, de Thomas Mann, pour trouver un beau livre aussi complètement homosexuel. (Dorian Gray is, in short, the first gay novel written since the Satyricon (...). It will take twenty years, with Death in Venise by Thomas Mann, to get a beautiful book, so thoroughly homosexual.)

Oscar's Books

While the Senate was confirming Sonia Sotomayor in Washington, retired Justice David Souter was moving from the family farmhouse in New Hampshire where he used to live, 'a rustic abode with peeling brown paint, rotting beams and plenty of the solitude he desired,' reports Katie Zezima in The New York Times (Off the Bench, Souter Leaves Farmhouse Behind), to a single floor, more modern, house in a neighboring town.

Justice Souter told a Weare neighbor, Jimmy Gilman, that the two-story farmhouse was not structurally sound enough to support the thousands of books he owns.

As a matter of books, Michael Shae reviews Thomas Wright's Built of Books - How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (Henry Holt and Co, 2009, 384pp) in Sunday's edition of the Times Book Review (Wilde's Library). Not very kindly though:

The result gives a stronger sense of Wilde’s school and prison years — with what besides reading does one occupy oneself in either place? — than of the triumphant decade and a half between his leaving Oxford and entering Reading Gaol, for which we get more character study, casual literary history and speculation than serious biography. If we seek a fuller view of the celebrity who wrote brilliantly, conversed wittily, teased stolid British culture and indulged in Greek love with louche ephebes indifferent to his rhapsodies about the Greek ideal, we should look elsewhere.

Michael Dirda, in The Washington Post back in May (The Importance of Reading in Earnest), is more enticing:

Given its subject, Built of Books couldn't fail to be fascinating. (...) Still, Built of Books is thoroughly entertaining and useful -- even though this American edition leaves out an entire suite of colored plates. When you read about the glories of an edition of Wilde's "The Sphinx" "bound in vellum and gold from a design by Ricketts (see plate 9)," you will have, quite literally, nowhere to turn.

Joseph Bristow, in the December 5 edition of the TLS, wrote a more balanced review (Many uncut) of the British edition (Oscar's Books, Chatto & Windus, 2008, 192pp), which was published last year, concluding:

In the end, even if his sense of Oscar Wilde's reading looks selective, it cannot be denied that scholars can learn much from Thomas Wright's discoveries.

Neil Bartlett, the great British novelist, who wrote, several years ago, one of the most personal books on Oscar Wilde (Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, 1988), provided a good review in The Guardian last September (Straight off the shelf):

Some books end better than they start, and in so doing, may even earn themselves the right to be reread. This might well be one of them. It is only on his last page, after 40 chapters on Wilde's career as both a typical and untypical Dublin-born and Oxford-educated 19th-century reader, that Thomas Wright reveals, in a highly personal afterword, that he has spent 20 years attempting to complete the strange - indeed, devotional - task of tracking down and reading every single book that Oscar Wilde is known to have ever read or owned, preferably in the same editions and even, where possible, using Wilde's copies. (...)
The result is this handsomely bound and illustrated new biography-cum-study of Wilde, which promises to measure out the life not by the familiar biographical landmarks, but by a chronological excavation of Wilde's life-long reading list. (...)
if you're a newcomer to the wonderful world of Wilde, and can't face either the length or the near-censoriousness of the now-official Ellmann biography - well, it's probably as good a 300-page introduction to the life, work and art as you could want to start with. One hundred and eight years after his demise (with his dying eyes fixed, in Wright's commendably lurid imagination, on a shelf of books), we still seem not to have run out of things to say about Wilde - and Wright's novel slant allows quite a few of them to be said again with both knowledge and flair.

Overall the book is certainly worth reading, preferably in the British edition...

2009.08.09

Rose-Leaves

The recent publication of a paperback French edition of Teleny in Jean-Jacques Pauvert's collection Lectures amoureuses (Paris, La Musardine, 2009, 192p) provided me with the opportunity to read the erotic novel attributed to Oscar Wilde. At Les Mots à la Bouche, where several copies were displayed in a stack, I was first attracted by the cover which features a portrait by Egon Schiele.

I was surprised by how explicit and detailed the descriptions of the sex scenes are...

Teleny was first published anonymously in England in 1893 by Leonard Smithers. According to Charles Hirsch, a French bookseller established in London who had seen the manuscript, the published version had been significantly amended by Smithers: the Prologue which introduced the characters was omitted, and the action was switched from London to Paris.

Hirsch came into possession of the manuscript after Smithers's death and in 1934 a French translation of Teleny, based on the manuscript, was published in Paris, under the Ganymède Club imprint, with an introduction by Hirsch. This is, apparently, the text of the current paperback edition. The manuscript has since been lost.

Teleny is thought to have been in part written by Oscar Wilde, with the possible collaboration of three close friends. Its composition is contemporary with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), "the most explicit novel about love and sex between men that had ever been published - at least by a respectable publisher. There had been works of pornography like The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, but these had never had the mass audience reached by Dorian Gray,"  writes Neil McKenna in his excellent, though provocative, biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London, Century, 2003, 535p), adding:

Teleny tells the story of the love affair between Camille Des Grieux and René 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 severzl 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 René Teleny to whom Des Grieux is irresistibly drawn (...).

Sex with Teleny is not only profound, potent and rapturous, it is also revelatory.

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.

In the first part of the novel Des Grieux gives an account of some of his not-so-satisfactory sexual encounters with women. During one of them, in a dirty brothel, he hears for the first time the expression 'rose-leaf' and he is puzzled(*):

At last, the consumptive girl, clasping with her hands the backside of the other one, and thus opening the huge pulpy buttocks, called out:

'A rose-leaf.'

Of course I greatly wondered what she meant, and I asked myself where she could find a rose-leaf, for there was not a flower to be seen in the house; and then I said to myself - having got one what will she do with it?

I was not left to wonder long, for the cantinière did to her friend what she had done to her.

Needless to say that when he gets to explore his sexuality with Teleny later on, he finds rose-leaves a 'thrilling sensation.'

Most available English editions of Teleny reproduce the text of the faulty 1893 edition. The best editions seem to be the Gay Sunshine Press (San Francisco) edited by Winston Leyland (1984) and the Gay Modern Classics (London) edited by John McRae (1986). None are currently in print.

***

Graham Robb, who wrote the best biography of Rimbaud in English, reviews on two full pages the third Pléiade edition of Rimbaud's works by André Guyaux (see Rimbaud in Pléiade, version 3.0) in the April 17th issue of the TLS (Top of the class). He calls it a "splendid edition" and mentions "Guyaux's careful erudition". He adds, though: "A scrupulous textual critic with relatively little interest in biographical minutiae, and still less interest in Rimbaud's post-literary adventures, Guyaux is unusually sensitive to the poet's unrebellious side." And: "Poems of which no manuscript in Rimbaud's hand survives are printed in a smaller typeface. This is a curious act of editorial ostentation. It means that Le Bateau ivre, which is known from a copy made by Verlaine, looks less significant than some of Rimbaud's jokes and jottings: lacking official documents, the poet literally fades from sight." This is indeed annoying for a spendid edition. In his acknowledgments Guyaux thanks Graham Robb, among others, for having contributed, through intellectual exchanges, books and articles, to his better understanding of Rimbaud's works...

***

There were two good news this week, upon my return. The first was that Maine became the fifth state to legalize gay marriage, when the Governor signed the same-sex marriage bill voted by the Legislature on Wednesday. A popular challenge will probably lead to a referendum this November or on June 2010. In the meantime the new law will be suspended... The other good news was that the Obama administration has decided to reopen the access to the Statue of Liberty's Crown starting next July 4th! It had been closed for security reasons since 9/11.

2009.05.10

(*) I discovered the lovely expression last year when reading an article on gay porn in Critique (see my blog post of March 23 2008)...

Gloomy Times

Under the gray and wet skies and mild temperatures we have had lately in this part of the world, I thought it was a perfect moment to open Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance (Gyles Brandreth, Touchstone, 2008, 368 pp.).

The story is told by writer and journalist Robert Sherard (1861-1943) who acts as a perfect Watson to an improbable but very credible Sherlock Holmes, his best friend ("but not lover") Oscar Wilde. Wilde, after meeting Arthur Conan Doyle himself through their common American publisher, is drawn to investigate the brutal murder of Billy Wood, a beautiful boy of his acquaintances, in foggy London...

With great mastery, British writer and former member of Parliament Gyles Brandreth provides us with a thrilling tale of murder, love and deception which has all the ingredients of a page turner. With a good dose of humor.

The author "is planning nine books in the series and they will cut back and forth across Oscar Wilde's remarkable career - from the first murder he encounters as a young Oxford undergraduate in the 1870s to the time, shortly before his death in 1900, age only forty-six, when, to secure food and drink, under the name Sebastian Melmoth, he solves crime for money. Eventually the Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries will follow Wilde's travels across Europe and America and touch on many of the extraordinary - and traumatic - events in his roller-coaster life: his upbringing in Ireland; his audience with the pope at the Vatican; his adventure-filled lecture tour of the United States; his triumphs as a poet and playwright in London, Paris and New York; his fall from grace; his trial at the Old Bailey; his imprisonment; his exile..." All this with a "rich - and realistic - flavor of the remarkable era in which he lived - the age of Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria, and Mark Twain." The second novel in the series, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder (Touchstone, 2008, 416 pp.), has just been published.

A great read for these gloomy times...

2008.11.16