What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to
the Irish. For
us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is
really only with other people that we become Irishmen. I once said to William Yeats that we were a
nation of brilliant failures: but I have since discovered that in failure there
is a great strength to be earned. The
Irish nation has sought its bread in sorrow; like Christ it knows how weary the
way has been and, like Dante, how salt the bread when it has been found - and
yet out of these sufferings has sprung a race of incomparable poets and
talkers.
Of course
exile, for me, has been a life-long romance.
If I did not always bear the mark of the leper on my brow, as I do now,
I have never ceased to carry the mark of Cain in my heart. And yet it is one thing to feel distinctive
and so to walk apart, quite another to know that one is alone. When I climb the dark staircase of my hotel,
I recall with the poet how steep are the stairs in houses of
exile. Once the world watched me
in amazement; now it has let me go, and does not care which direction I take in
my wanderings. Goethe said of
Winckelmann, that great scholar who abandoned the sombre house of his native
culture for the free light of Hellenism, that 'the image in which one leaves
the world is that in which one moves among the shadows'. Well, then, I shall be a perpetual boulevardier
watching the angels - I presume there will be angels - hurrying by.
I would go
mad if I sat in this room for too long, among the relics of my former
life. Regret and remorse rise up in
front of me and the sight is intolerable: I flee from the hotel like a guilty
thing and enter the streets. I walk
joyfully through them only because I do not know where I am going - although
sometimes, I believe, my companions do.
It is remarkable how interesting life becomes when one has ceased to be
a part of it. In the old days, when my
personality was the golden chain which bound me to the earth, the world seemed
unreal, a painted scene against which I stood in relief like a satyr upon an
Attic vase. Now it seems to me to be
perpetually bright, renewed daily, quite meaningless in its expense of daily
activity but wonderful nonetheless - as long as one does not care to pierce its
mystery. And yet even this tires me: I
can do nothing for very long. As a
dramatist I looked upon other people as sources of amusement or pleasure; now
they crowd around, and jostle me. It is
as if their personalities invade me and leave me exhausted: I know that it is
only in the company of others that one becomes truly
oneself, but now I am positively Whitmanesque. I contain multitudes. Although I possess the wonder of Miranda, I
have also the faintness of Prospero who forswears his art as soon as life has
quite matched his expectations.
I believe
that poverty is responsible for my remarkable gift of passive
contemplation. I used to think that the
only way to waste money was to save it; I did not know that, when one no longer
has green pieces of paper in one's pocket, one has nothing. Only the other day I was forced to borrow a
few francs from Maurice - he had news only of Dreyfus, so I refused him lunch -
simply in order to leave my room. I ask
for money because I deserve it and yet friends insist that they have none to
give me, that I must learn to work again. Poverty teaches many bitter lessons, but the
hardest is that revealed in other men's hearts.
I still recall a terrible scene with Bosie,
last month, outside the Café de la Paix.
'Alfred,' I
said in a perfectly friendly manner, 'I need your help.'
'When you
call me Alfred, I know you want money.'
'Alfred, Bosie dear, I am about to be thrown out of my hotel.'
'Why? Did the boy make too much noise, or did you?'
'That is
unworthy of you. You know how I hate to
discuss matters of finance -'
'Only when they concern yourself, Oscar.'
'Please, Bosie, do not violate our friendship with words of scorn.'
'Our
friendship, as you call it, was violet from the beginning.'
I had quite
forgotten that he aspired to being a poet.
'Quite
frankly, Bosie, I need the money. I need it desperately. I have left my clothes at the Hôtel Marsollier and the
proprietor threatens to sell them if I do not pay what is owing to him.'
'Oscar, you
used that excuse last month.'
'Oh, did
I? I had forgotten, I
am so sorry. It shows the utter
collapse of my imagination under the influence of penury. Nevertheless my situation never changes, Bosie, I am depending on your good will.'
He took out
from his pocket some franc notes, threw them upon the ground, and left the
café, shouting as he did so, 'You know, Oscar, you have the manners of a
prostitute.'
I picked
the notes up at once, and ordered another drink. Do you find this dishonourable? Well, then, you see to what pass I have
come. When you can no longer change the
world, the world changes you. The poorer
I become, the more terrible
But, if
poverty leads to contemplation, contemplation guides one towards sloth. Idleness is the supreme condition of the
artist, but idleness must walk with joy.
When idleness exists merely, apart from joy, then, in Bunyan's charming
phrase, one is 'the robin with the spider in his mouth'. Only the memory of my art lingers, like shades
around my head. I may wander among the
living but, since Apollo killed me, my soul has already travelled down to the
Asphodel Fields. The beautiful Roman
word umbratilis is perhaps closest to my
condition, but I do not think the Romans would apply it to me. At most I might play a role in one of Plautus's more horrifying comedies. I might be the old lecher, his face painted
and his hair dyed, who is an object of ridicule to the audience whenever he
appears - although the audience does not know that it is laughing at
itself. The world always laughs at its
own tragedies: it is the only way it has been able to endure them. Now I am going for a walk.
I decided to take the omnibus instead: I have an
especial affection for the ill-starred 13 which travels between the Place Clichy and the Palais-Royal. I sit on the top of it and look out - a
modern city should always be seen from the air; sometimes I even listen to what
is being said. The French have tried to
turn conversation into an art, but their language lacks the darker shades which
bring speech to life. English, for
example, is remarkable for the number of colour words with which it can express
gloom - they are quite unknown in French.
Baudelaire was responsible for adding despair to the French tongue, but
he succeeded only in being euphonious.
But I
digress into matters which no longer concern me. Now, like a cook's traveller, I am forced to
see the world. I sit in cafés for hours at
a time and watch people whom, before, I would not even have considered
momentarily. Every small gesture
interests me, and from the face or manner of each person I invent an entire
history. For the first time I have
noticed the lost and the lonely - how, with their curious apologetic gait, they
move through the world like strangers.
And I weep. I admit it: I weep.
There is a
passage in one of Balzac's novels where he describes the poet as one 'who seems
to be doing nothing but nevertheless reigns over Humanity once he has learned
to depict it'. Indeed, it is possible
that a new form of drama might be created out of the ordinary talk and gestures
of the people - and, when I sit in a café and watch them pass, I imagine a
miracle through which all of their sounds and movements could be turned into a
strange, multicoloured art. But I do not
think it is my role to create the drama of literature of a new age: I can
manage Lamentations, but not Revelations.
I have
called myself idle but, really, I am not a prey to idleness but rather to
stupefaction. Only Edgar Poe has
properly understood the lethargy of the will, the curare that annihilates the
nervous elements of thought and motion.
Will was always an important element in my success: like Lucien de Rubempré in that terrible moment of self-knowledge, when he
realised that the heart and the passions of the heart had nothing whatever to
do with his genius, I, too, sacrificed everything to the fame I saw approaching
me. Of course one is always given what
one needs, not what one wants - that was my great miscalculation. Or perhaps like has been finally revealed as
Poe himself knew it to be, although I took care not to know it myself - we do
not understand what we really want, and so we proceed by indirection or by
chance to the goal which is already hidden within us.
That would
be the most terrible irony of all - that my success and my fame were but small
staging posts on my grand journey to infamy and, finally, to oblivion. I am neither in Heaven nor in Hell. I am, as Dante said, sospeto. I explore my position with some interest.