Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse
Edited by Derek Sandhaus
Earnshaw Books. 336 pages, $39.99
SIR EDMUND BACKHOUSE (1873–1944) has long been considered one of the prime homosexual self-fantasists of the last century—as delusional and self-created as “Baron Corvo,” the pederastic social climber who appointed his fictionalized self as Pope in the novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904) and inspired A. J. A. Symons’s classic sleuth biography The Quest for Corvo (1934).
Yet some have always wondered: what if Backhouse’s reminiscences of gay life in Peking a century ago were based on the truth? Had he witnessed the many types of homosexual coupling indulged in in the ironically named hammam, “The Hall of Chaste Pleasures”? Had he also been serviced by the all-accommodating passive employees of the Peking Opera? What if he had been the kept boy of the last Dowager Empress (and was regularly penetrated anally by her outsized clitoris), as he had claimed in a late manuscript held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, entitled Decadence Mandchoue (1943)? Still others have argued that—notwithstanding the unlikelihood of Backhouse’s chief assertions—the manuscript remains a triumph of the embroiderers’ art: a fine piece of fiction.
In his Hermit of Peking (1976), historian Hugh Trevor-Roper did much to demolish Backhouse’s claims, asserting that his two last works—The Dead Past and Decadence Mandchoue (both from 1946)—“can in fact best be entitled ‘the imaginary sexual life of E. T. Backhouse, 1. in the literary and political world of the 1890’s, 2. at the court of T’zu-hsi.’” Backhouse painted himself as a central figure in Oscar Wilde’s circle in London in the 1890’s, and also indicated that he was taken up by an itinerant schoolmaster, Arthur Rimbaud, a claim that stretches credibility to the breaking point, since Rimbaud never went near Backhouse’s school when he visited England. He readily placed the surely improbable figure of Henry James overseeing the goings-on in the Jermyn Street sauna and confessed to “a slow and protracted copulation with Lord Rosebery,” the man whose sexual predilections were said to have given rise to prosecution of Wilde. Backhouse even mentions Oscar’s supposed compliment to himself for his “charming tool.” After Wilde’s disgrace, and his own bankruptcy, Backhouse took himself to China, never to return, and always to live as a recluse. He retained enough fin de siècle temperament to remember, late in life, to convert to Catholicism.
Trevor-Roper cannot be said, of course, to have been Backhouse’s ideal reader, in sexual terms, and inevitably some of his objections to the author’s late memoirs sound censorious: they constitute a “pornographic novelette’; “no verve in the writing can redeem their pathological obscenity.” Backhouse had anticipated the objection—opening Decadence Mandchoue with an acknowledgment that the reader might consider his account as “from the pen of a depraved, peradventure even if a talented man.” By contrast, the mysterious Swiss physician who had come to know Backhouse in his dotage and agreed to convey his late memoirs to the Bodleian, Reinhard Hoeppli, was apparently all too credulous. He carefully typed out Backhouse’s script and wrote a postscript for Decadence Mandchoue. Hoeppli believed the memoirs were “fundamentally based on facts” but conceded that Backhouse struggled to separate truth from fiction under mild cross-questioning. To further complicate things, many of the claims made by Backhouse resembled aspects of the plot of French novelist Victor Segalen’s 1922 book René Lys, which concerned the foreign lover of the last Dowager Empress.
It is a remarkable proposition to have Decadence Mandchoue available today—and not just as a literal transcription of the Bodleian manuscript. Shanghai resident Derek Sandhaus has given us a carefully edited version, which, as it were, argues for the much greater likelihood that much of what Backhouse recalled was either true, or substantially based on the truth. But he allows the reader who wishes the chance to side with Trevor-Roper and discount the entirety as fantasy. For, as Sandhaus points out, Backhouse himself had conceded the hybrid nature of these memoirs within Decadence Mandchoue: “Memory and imagination; the first counts as nothing without the second which is verily the ode of the agnostic to immortality and gilds old age with the after-glow of youth. These dear phantoms of the past, if they cannot restore happiness to one who moveth in what is certainly not an ampler ether, a diviner air, at least make life easier to be borne. ‘Ich habe gelebt und geliebt’: is there more to say?”
Let us take a step, then, in indulging Backhouse, to identify the most scandalous material presented to us in Decadence Mandchoue. This doubtless refers to his being sodomized by the Dowager Empress T’zu-hsi. In chapter IV, Backhouse pulls no punches:
Then Her Majesty bade me place my scented fingers inside her vulva and apply my lips to its ample surface. As I expected, she next told me to kneel over the couch in the full glare of the garish light and the reflection of the mirrors which presented the counterfeit resemblance of my buttocks which she graciously likened to a peach; she minutely inspected the fundament until she bade me open up with my two forefingers and caressed it with her long-nailed index, inserting it (to my discomfort) inside the anus. Then she drew closer and brought her erect clitoris into juxtaposition of my trou fignon which she poetically compared to a rose-bud. She worked the member … backward and forward inside my anus; until, after perhaps five minutes or more, the gratifying titillation caused her to exclaim: “Shu fu,” “Hao Shou.” Agreeable, pleasing sensation. I cannot explain why, but a definite discharge of a sticky fluid wetted me in and around the anal cavity.
“Ta Yen’rh,” said she. “Large anus: I’ll warrant that it has seen service.”
“Yes, your Majesty, I’ll not deny it and plead guilty to the impeachment.”
“How many times?”
“Innumerable as the hairs on the head,” replied I unblushingly.
Other pleasures include repeated beatings at the hands of T’zu-hsi and others, bestiality involving apes, and more. She is also said to have amply enjoyed watching homosexual coitus in the discrete hammams. A late chapter recounts the hideous death of T’zu-hsi and various resulting betrayals at court.
Backhouse’s literary style and sense of a good story are both so acute that progressively, as one devours Decadence Mandchoue, it seems to matter less and less whether any of this is true. The manuscript is an extraordinary literary feat in itself, even if I tend to think of it as overwhelmingly fantastical, and of its author, as Trevor-Roper thought, as a charlatan. It is a minor miracle, in any event, to have such an intelligent and well-presented addition to gay studies published by such an obscure press. Sandhaus and Earnshaw Books deserve our gratitude.
Richard Canning’s edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory
