20 September 1900

 

Now that, like Dante, I have walked into the twilight world, the ghosts of the past come hurrying to greet me.  There were other boys, whose names did not emerge at the time of my trials; and, although I was convicted of many sins I did not commit, there were others which were not placed in the indictment against me.  When young men wrote to me about my work, I would arrange interviews with them and plan schemes of seduction.  I needed continually the excitement of the chase, and did not care about the nature of the quarry.  So it was that I ended in the hands of the lowest renters, like Wood and Taylor.  I liked them because they were dangerous - simply that.

      But, although I longed for the pleasures which they and their kind provided, I did not enjoy them when they had been found.  My physical excitation waned and, although I used to fondle the boys, it was no more than helpless affection - not the sordid and mechanical delirium which has been trumpeted to the world.  My real joy was to watch two boys together in the various acts of love, and to pleasure myself as they did so.  I think I have been primarily a spectator always - I had become a spectator even of my own life, so that everything seemed to come to me from an infinite distance.  And I enjoyed the spectacle of love, I admit it - it is a strange illusion that only in one's member is lust to be found.  That is a modern heresy.  The pleasures of watching seemed greater to me, for there is also a lust of the mind.

      But you can understand, can you not, why I experienced a sense of damnation in the midst of this life, and why I was drinking so excessively that even my friends began to whisper about me?  When intelligence peeped through these pleasures, I became horrified at my delirium and, in my despair, threw myself back into it again.  I trembled when I read Anatole France's scarlet tragedy, Thäis, of the despair that succeeds excess, the torment that follows the swift feet of riot.

      But indeed I think in the midst of my lust I longed for an end to it - that might be the secret of my fall.  I was weary of all that I knew, and I grew terribly tired.  I could not now look upon Constance or my young sons without shame.  I had allowed my real work to fall away from me.  In the last years I wrote only for money, the money which I spent on company unworthy of me, and the applause, the applause which turned too quickly to the hoots and catcalls of derision.  I had lost myself in my sins; with my own hands I had blinded myself and I stumbled into the pit.  I can write no more: I must lie down and rest my head.