8 October 1900

 

Prison breeds strange vices: one is the illusion that one deserves to be in such a place, that one belongs as a blind, underground creature might to that world of silence and darkness.  When I walked out of prison, the sky dazzled me and I was afraid of falling: for the first time in my life, the world seemed to me to be too large a place.  I travelled in a closed carriage from Pentonville to Bloomsbury on that first morning and, while resting in the house of a friend, I wrote a letter to Farm Street couched in terms of humility and sorrow, asking if I might go into retreat.

      It seems inconceivable now to me that I should have done so, although I have always had a great affection for the Pope.  Perhaps the sight of modern London prompted me to return at once to the safety of a cell, and perhaps I wished to study thee the mysteries of love and suffering which had been revealed to me – I do not know, I cannot remember.  But my request was refused.

      And so I was compelled to face my life, to give it direction and purpose on an alien shore.  I crossed to Dieppe on the ferry in the late afternoon and, as I saw the shabby coast of England receding, I felt much like Captain Nemo on board the ship which will take him eternally away from the sight of men.  England was never to see me again.

      I travelled to Berneval in the first stage of my exile.  I took the precaution of doing so under a false name – Sebastian Melmoth, the name by which I am still known to tradespeople.  I was free, I quite understood that, but freedom is a curious thing: when one has it, one can think of nothing whatever to do.  The sky, the sea, and the simple countryside of Normandy were enchanting, but they lacked the capacity of surprise.  I knew that the world should be for me a joyful place, but the secret of that joy was still locked within my breast; I was dazzled by life as if by a grand house – but I was a guest, no longer master.

      People visited me in order to see if I had survived the penny papers.  They were curious to know if I had changed.  I believe I had, although I took care not to show it.  Since of all things affection and laughter were precious for me, I did not want to lose them by showing the convict arrows that still pierced my heart.  The kindness of others affected me very much, and yet it also exhausted me.  Once I had enjoyed being the perpetual object of display, but what had been before an advanced personality was now something of a mannerism.  And how could it have been otherwise?  In my cell I had seen what a scintillating effect that personality had had upon me: it had almost led me to the lunatic asylum.

      But if I could not yet redeem myself, if I was in effect ‘lost property’ still, I could at least assert myself as an artist. I began writing The Ballad of Reading Gaol as soon as I was settled in a small hotel in Berneval.  I wanted to demonstrate to English society that it had not destroyed me as an artist, that by some strange paradox it had only provided me with fresh materials for my art.  I refused to play the part of a reformed convict: I remember one of the prisoners in Reading, Arthur Cruttenden, saying once of the world that we had left behind, ‘Damn the whole boiling of them,’ and the phrase had stayed in my mind.  It was what I felt but had not yet expressed: my poem would be the only revenge I could take, but it was a glorious one.  I wished to show to those people who had convicted me what a world they had constructed; and how I, whose art had been devoted to exposing their follies, had witnessed the ultimate shame and folly of which they were capable.

      This pleased me, and in the first weeks of my liberty I was as happy as I have ever been.  I wrote, I took reasonably long walks, I bathed daily and, like Aphrodite, I renewed my virginity in the sea.  And then, when my friends left me to return to their own lives and my own inspiration began to fail, I became disconsolate again.  The shock of my freedom had released in me one great poem, just as it had released a first wild joy, but, alone, I felt the shades of the prison house closing around me again – not the prison which others had constructed for me, but that which I had fashioned for myself.

      The life I had once known was gone, and I did not feel that I was capable of renewing it.  I began to realise, by slow degrees, what I had known in the year before I was sent to prison.  I had died as an artist.  The Ballad had been wrenched from me as a cry from a wounded animal but, once the pain was gone, I was left with nothing to express.  I toyed with the idea of writing religious drama, but I had no stomach for it.  I felt that I could do little with my life except drift with it until it ran into the sands.  One never leaves prison.  Every convict knows that.  One merely relives the memory of it.

      And so it was that I went back to Bosie: I had no one else to turn to.  My wife had quite properly left me, my children were living under another name, and the friends of my infamous years were, as theatrical agents say, ‘not available’.  Of course I knew Bosie was ruinous for me, but I believe that even Jesus was in league with Judas to hasten his own death.  Robbie Ross wrote me a pained letter telling me that it was a great mistake to ‘resume relations’, as he put it, with ‘that young man’, but I sent him a telegram: THOSE CAPABLE OF GREAT DEEDS ARE ALLOWED TO COMMIT GREAT ERRORS.

      Bosie and I travelled to Naples together: really, I could have written a Neapolitan Tragedy.  We trudged in the yard of our doomed friendship like condemned men.  And then, quite without warning, Bosie left me.  His mother had threatened to cut off his allowance if he remained with me and although he loved the poor, at least in Naples, he did not love poverty.  I was alone once more, and solitude reduced me to a shadow.  The merest shock would unnerve me; I felt sensitive to every slight, and I would write long but hasty letters insulting those who loved me and attacking those who tried to help.  Why do you not send money, I would write, why do you spread false rumours about me in London clubs, what has happened to my Ballad?

      My life was insupportable alone, and so I made my way here in weariness and in pain.  I have always been a part of great cities – I am, after all, a monument now to the grosser aspects of urban civilisation – and, where I had lived, I wanted to die.  Like Villon and Baudelaire, my home is the ‘paysage de métal et de Pierre’.  And so for the last two years my life has been as it is now; a mathematical problem rather than a romantic one.  I have had to beg for every penny I have.  My clothes are positively Norwegian in their shabbiness: I have become like an elderly but amusing aunt.  It is strange how people treat me now – they confide in me, when once they simply listened.  They know I cannot be shocked, but they also believe that I cannot be bored.

      Frank Harris even took me with him to Cannes so that I might listen to him composing – they ought to build a stadium for that man.  And, last spring, Harold Mellors journeyed with me to Rome.  He paid, of course.  And, although I do not care for Mellors, I wished to see the Pope.  God went to so much trouble to make St. Augustine a bishop, at least according to St. Augustine, that I thought he might spare time for my own conversion.  I had considered a deathbed repentance but rejected it as too predictable under the circumstances.  I always prefer to settle such matters in advance.

      I saw the Pope – indeed, I think he saw me first – and then the miracle occurred.  My umbrella did not blossom as I had been led to expect, but in that damp and cavernous cathedral, filled with the chant of Easter pilgrims, the entire shape of my life became clear to me.  I realised then that I could not have escaped my destiny, and that it was necessary that I should be destroyed before I was permitted to rise again: now I can look death in the face.  But I did not become a Christian.  In the face of death, I have become a pantheist, polytheist and atheist all at once.  I gather all the gods about me because I believe in none.  That is the secret of classical civilisation: in Thermopylae, behind the temple of Hercules, there is an altar erected to Pity – and it is there that I prostrate myself still.

      And indeed I am quite recovered.  If my first year of liberty was a burden to me, it was because I tried to place my old life upon my back and, naturally, I fell beneath its weight.  But all that has gone.  I have left my art, and I have outgrown the personality which I constructed with it.  Now I stand still and wonder at the inexhaustible fullness of things which before I tried to master and control.  Napoleon said that ‘deep tragedy is the school of great men’ and I have realised that for myself at last – what I created was nothing, less than nothing, in the face of the mystery of life.  Only in the individual, as poor and as helpless even as I am, and in the mystery of individual lives, is meaning to be found.  Life, and the current of life, survives everything.  It is greater than myself and yet, without me, it would be incomplete: that is the real miracle.

      I was again in great pain this morning and, since my room sometimes has the atmosphere of a tomb, I walked out into the Rue des Beaux Arts – slowly now, with difficulty, but with a sense of wonder.  There was a boy playing beside an old accordionist on the corner of the Rue Jacob; he picked up the few sous tossed at the old man, and placed them painstakingly beside him.  Just across the street, an old woman was being helped up the stairs of her house by two young men who supported her – there was such gaiety in their faces that the load on my own heart was lightened.  A boy patted fondly his dog, which had put its paws on his shoulders.  In such details does my mind and heart now dwell.  On this day, the eight of October, 1900, such things will last for ever.