Sigbjørn Wilderness, an American writer in Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship, paused on the steps above the flower stall and wrote, glancing from time to time at the house before him, in a black notebook:
Il poeta inglese Giovanni Keats mente maravigliosa quanto precoce mori in questa casa il 24 Febbraio 1821 nel ventisessimo anno dell’età sua.
Here, in a sudden access of nervousness, glancing now not only at the house, but behind him at the church of Trinità dei Monti, at the woman in the flower stall, the Romans drifting up and down the steps, or passing in the Piazza di Spagna below (for though it was several years after the war he was afraid of being taken for a spy), he drew, as well as he was able, the lyre, similar to the one on the poet’s tomb, that appeared on the house between the Italian and its translation:
Then he added swiftly the words below the lyre:
The young English poet, John Keats, died in this house on the 24th of February 1821, aged 26.
This accomplished, he put the notebook and pencil back in his pocket, glanced around him again with a heavier, more penetrating look – that in fact was informed by such a malaise he saw nothing at all but which was intended to say ‘I have a perfect right to do this’, or ‘If you saw me do that, very well then, I am some sort of detective, perhaps even some kind of a painter’ – descended the remaining steps, looked around wildly once more, and entered, with a sigh of relief like a man going to bed, the comforting darkness of Keats’s house.
Here, having climbed the narrow staircase, he was almost instantly confronted by a legend in a glass case which said:
Remnants of aromatic gums used by Trelawny when cremating the body of Shelley.
And these words, for his notebook with which he was already rearmed felt ratified in this place, he also copied down, though he failed to comment on the gums themselves, which largely escaped his notice, as indeed did the house itself – there had been those stairs, there was a balcony, it was dark, there were many pictures, and these glass cases, it was a bit like a library – in which he saw no books of his – these made about the sum of Sigbjørn’s unrecorded perceptions. From the aromatic gums he moved to the enshrined marriage licence of the same poet, and Sigbjørn transcribed this document too, writing rapidly as his eyes became more used to the dim light:
Percy Bysshe Shelley of the Parish of Saint Mildred, Bread Street, London, Widower, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin of the City of Bath, Spinster, a minor, were married in this Church by Licence with Consent of William Godwin her father this Thirtieth Day of December in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixteen. By me Mr Heydon, Curate. This marriage was solemnized between us.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY | |
In the presence of: | |
WILLIAM GODWIN |
Beneath this Sigbjørn added mysteriously:
Nemesis. Marriage of drowned Phoenician sailor. A bit odd here at all. Sad – feel swine to look at such things.
Then he passed on quickly – not so quickly he hadn’t time to wonder with a remote twinge why, if there was no reason for any of his own books to be there on the shelves above him, the presence was justified of In Memoriam, All Quiet on the Western Front, Green Light, and the Field Book of Western Birds – to another glass case in which appeared a framed and unfinished letter, evidently from Severn, Keats’s friend, which Sigbjørn copied down as before:
My dear Sir:
Keats has changed somewhat for the worse – at least his mind has much – very much – yet the blood has ceased to come, his digestion is better and but for a cough he must be improving, that is as respects his body – but the fatal prospect of consumption hangs before his mind yet – and turns everything to despair and wretchedness – he will not hear a word about living – nay, I seem to lose his confidence by trying to give him this hope [the following lines had been crossed out by Severn but Sigbjørn ruthlessly wrote them down just the same: for his knowledge of internal anatomy enables him to judge of any change accurately and largely adds to his torture], he will not think his future prospect favourable – he says the continued stretch of his imagination has already killed him and were he to recover he would not write another line – he will not hear of his good friends in England except for what they have done – and this is another load – but of their high hopes of him – his certain success – his experience – he will not hear a word – then the want of some kind of hope to feed his vivacious imagination –
The letter having broken off here, Sigbjørn, notebook in hand, tiptoed lingeringly to another glass case where, another letter from Severn appearing, he wrote:
My dear Brown – He is gone – he died with the most perfect ease – he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd at half past four the approaches of death came on. ‘Severn – lift me up for I am dying – I shall die easy – don’t be frightened, I thank God it has come.’ I lifted him upon my arms and the phlegm seemed boiling in his throat. This increased until 11 at night when he gradually sank into death so quiet I still thought he slept – But I cannot say more now. I am broken down beyond my strength. I cannot be left alone. I have not slept for nine days – the days since. On Saturday a gentleman came to cast his hand and foot. On Thursday the body was opened. The lungs were completely gone. The doctors would not –
Much moved, Sigbjørn reread this as it now appeared in his notebook, then added beneath it:
On Saturday a gentleman came to cast his hand and foot – that is the most sinister line to me. Who is this gentleman?
Once outside Keats’s house Wilderness did not pause nor look to left or right, not even at the American Express, until he had reached a bar which he entered, however, without stopping to copy down its name. He felt he had progressed in one movement, in one stride, from Keats’s house to this bar, partly just because he had wished to avoid signing his own name in the visitors’ book. Sigbjørn Wilderness! The very sound of his name was like a bell-buoy – or more euphoniously a light-ship – broken adrift, and washing in from the Atlantic on a reef. Yet how he hated to write it down (loved to see it in print?) – though like so much else with him it had little reality unless he did. Without hesitating to ask himself why, if he was so disturbed by it, he did not choose another name under which to write, such as his second name which was Henry, or his mother’s, which was Sanderson-Smith, he selected the most isolated booth he could find in the bar, that was itself an underground grotto, and drank two grappas in quick succession. Over his third he began to experience some of the emotions one might have expected him to undergo in Keats’s house. He felt fully the surprise which had barely affected him that some of Shelley’s relics were to be found there, if a fact no more astonishing than that Shelley – whose skull moreover had narrowly escaped appropriation by Byron as a drinking goblet, and whose heart, snatched out of the flames by Trelawny, he seemed to recollect from Proust, was interred in England – should have been buried in Rome at all (where the bit of Ariel’s song inscribed on his gravestone might have anyway prepared one for the rich and strange), and he was touched by the chivalry of those Italians who, during the war, it was said, had preserved, at considerable risk to themselves, the contents of that house from the Germans. Moreover he now thought he began to see the house itself more clearly, though no doubt not as it was, and he produced his notebook again with the object of adding to the notes already taken these impressions that came to him in retrospect.
‘Mamertine Prison,’ he read … He’d opened it at the wrong place, at some observations made yesterday upon a visit to the historic dungeon, but being gloomily entertained by what he saw, he read on as he did so feeling the clammy confined horror of that underground cell, or other underground cell, not, he suspected, really sensed at the time, rise heavily about him.
MAMERTINE PRISON [ran the heading]
The lower is the true prison
of Mamertine, the state prison of ancient Rome.
The lower cell called Tullianus is probably the most ancient building in Rome. The prison was used to imprison malefactors and enemies of the State. In the lower cell is seen the well where according to tradition St Peter miraculously made a spring to baptise the gaolers Processus and Martinianus. Victims: politicians. Pontius, King of the Sanniti. Died 290 B.C. Giurgurath (Jugurtha), Aristobulus, Vercingetorix – The Holy Martyrs, Peter and Paul. Apostles imprisoned in the reign of Nero. – Processus, Abondius, and many others unknown were:
decapitato
suppliziato (suffocated)
strangolato
morto per fame.
Vercingetorix, the King of the Gauls, was certainly strangolato 49 B.C.. and Jugurtha, King of Numidia, dead by starvation 104 B.C.
The lower is the true prison – why had he underlined that? Sigbjørn wondered. He ordered another grappa and, while awaiting it, turned back to his notebook where, beneath his remarks on the Mamertine prison, and added as he now recalled in the dungeon itself, this memorandum met his eyes:
Find Gogol’s house – where wrote part of Dead Souls – 1838. Where died Vielgorsky? ‘They do not heed me, nor see me, nor listen to me,’ wrote Gogol. ‘What have I done to them? Why do they torture me? What do they want of poor me? What can I give them? I have nothing. My strength is gone. I cannot endure all this.’ Suppliziato. Strangolato. In wonderful-horrible book of Nabokov’s when Gogol was dying – he says – ‘you could feel his spine through his stomach.’ Leeches dangling from nose: ‘Lift them up, keep them away…’ Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Mann, ditto brother: Buddenbrooks and Pippo Spano. A – where lived? became sunburned? Perhaps happy here. Prosper Mérimée and Schiller. Suppliziato. Fitzgerald in Forum. Eliot in Colosseum?
And underneath this was written enigmatically:
And many others.
And beneath this:
Perhaps Maxim Gorky too. This is funny. Encounter between Volga Boatman and saintly Fisherman.
What was funny? While Sigbjørn, turning over his pages toward Keats’s house again, was wondering what he had meant, beyond the fact that Gorky, like most of those other distinguished individuals, had at one time lived in Rome, if not in the Mamertine prison – though with another part of his mind he knew perfectly well – he realized that the peculiar stichometry of his observations, jotted down as if he imagined he were writing a species of poem, had caused him prematurely to finish the notebook:
On Saturday a gentleman came to cast his hand and foot – that is the most sinister line to me – who is this gentleman?
With these words his notebook concluded.
That didn’t mean there was no more space, for his notebooks, he reflected avuncularly, just like his candles, tended to consume themselves at both ends; yes, as he thought, there was some writing at the beginning. Reversing this, for it was upside down, he smiled and forgot about looking for space, since he immediately recognized these notes as having been taken in America two years ago upon a visit to Richmond, Virginia, a pleasant time for him. So, amused, he composed himself to read, delighted also, in an Italian bar, to be thus transported back to the South. He had made nothing of these notes, hadn’t even known they were there, and it was not always easy accurately to visualize the scenes they conjured up:
The wonderful slanting square in Richmond and the tragic silhouette of interlaced leafless trees.
On a wall: dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.
Sigbjørn chuckled. Now he clearly remembered the biting winter day in Richmond, the dramatic courthouse in the precipitous park, the long climb up to it, and the caustic attestation to solidarity with the North in the (white) men’s wash room. Smiling he read on:
In Poe’s shrine, strange preserved news clipping: CAPACITY CROWD HEARS TRIBUTE TO POE’S WORKS. University student, who ended life, buried at Wytherville.
Yes, yes, and this he remembered too, in Poe’s house, or one of Poe’s houses, the one with the great dark wing of shadow on it at sunset, where the dear old lady who kept it, who’d showed him the news clipping, had said to him in a whisper: ‘So you see, we think these stories of his drinking can’t all be true.’ He continued:
Opposite Craig house, where Poe’s Helen lived, these words, upon façade, windows, stoop of the place from which E.A.P. – if I am right – must have watched the lady with the agate lamp: Headache – A.B.C. – Neuralgia: LIC-OFF-PREM – enjoy Pepsi – Drink Royal Crown Cola – Dr Swell’s Root Beer – ‘Furnish room for rent’: did Poe really live here? Must have, could only have spotted Psyche from the regions which are Lic-Off-Prem. – Better than no Lic at all though. Bet Poe does not still live in Lic-Off-Prem. Else might account for ‘Furnish room for rent’?
Mem: Consult Talking Horse Friday.
– Give me Liberty or give me death [Sigbjørn now read]. In churchyard, with Patrick Henry’s grave; a notice. No smoking within ten feet of the church; then:
Outside Robert E. Lee’s house:
Please pull the bell
To make it ring.
– Inside Valentine Museum, with Poe’s relics –
Sigbjørn paused. Now he remembered that winter day still more clearly. Robert E. Lee’s house was of course far below the courthouse, remote from Patrick Henry and the Craig house and the other Poe shrine, and it would have been a good step hence to the Valentine Museum, even had not Richmond, a city whose Hellenic character was not confined to its architecture, but would have been recognized in its gradients by a Greek mountain goat, been grouped about streets so steep it was painful to think of Poe toiling up them. Sigbjørn’s notes were in the wrong order, and it must have been morning then, and not sunset as it was in the other house with the old lady, when he went to the Valentine Museum. He saw Lee’s house again, and a faint feeling of the beauty of the whole frostbound city outside came to his mind, then a picture of a Confederate white house, near a gigantic red-brick factory chimney, with far below a glimpse of an old cobbled street, and a lone figure crossing a waste, as between three centuries, from the house toward the railway tracks and this chimney, which belonged to the Bone Dry Fertilizer Company. But in the sequence of his notes ‘Please pull the bell, to make it ring,’ on Lee’s house, had seemed to provide a certain musical effect of solemnity, yet ushering him instead into the Poe museum which Sigbjørn now in memory re-entered.
Inside Valentine Museum, with Poe’s relics [he read once more]
Please
Do not smoke
Do not run
Do not touch walls or exhibits
Observation of these rules will insure your own and others’ enjoyment of the museum.
– Blue silk coat and waistcoat, gift of the Misses Boykin, that belonged to one of George Washington’s dentists.
Sigbjørn closed his eyes, in his mind Shelley’s crematory gums and the gift of the Misses Boykin struggling for a moment helplessly, then he returned to the words that followed. They were Poe’s own, and formed part of some letters once presumably written in anguished and private desperation, but which were now to be perused at leisure by anyone whose enjoyment of them would be ‘insured’ so long as they neither smoked nor ran nor touched the glass case in which, like the gums (on the other side of the world), they were preserved. He read:
Excerpt from a letter by Poe – after having been dismissed from West Point – to his foster father. Feb. 21, 1831.
‘It will however be the last time I ever trouble any human being – I feel I am on a sick bed from which I shall never get up.’
Sigbjørn calculated with a pang that Poe must have written these words almost seven years to the day after Keats’s death, then, that far from never having got up from his sick bed, he had risen from it to change, thanks to Baudelaire, the whole course of European literature, yes, and not merely to trouble, but to frighten the wits out of several generations of human beings with such choice pieces as ‘King Pest’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, and ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, not to speak of the effect produced by the compendious and prophetic Eureka.
My ear has been too shocking for any description – I am wearing away every day, even if my last sickness had not completed it.
Sigbjørn finished his grappa and ordered another. The sensation produced by reading these notes was really very curious. First, he was conscious of himself reading them here in this Roman bar, then of himself in the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, reading the letters through the glass case and copying fragments from these down, then of poor Poe sitting blackly somewhere writing them. Beyond this was the vision of Poe’s foster father likewise reading some of these letters, for all he knew unheedingly, yet solemnly putting them away for what turned out to be posterity, these letters which, whatever they might not be, were certainly – he thought again – intended to be private. But were they indeed? Even here at this extremity Poe must have felt that he was transcribing the story that was E. A. Poe, at this very moment of what he conceived to be his greatest need, his final – however consciously engineered – disgrace, felt a certain reluctance, perhaps, to send what he wrote, as if he were thinking: Damn it, I could use some of that, it may not be so hot, but it is at least too good to waste on my foster father. Some of Keats’s own published letters were not different. And yet it was almost bizarre how, among these glass cases, in these museums, to what extent one revolved about, was hemmed in by, this cinereous evidence of anguish. Where was Poe’s astrolabe, Keats’ tankard of claret, Shelley’s ‘Useful Knots for the Yachtsman’? It was true that Shelley himself might not have been aware of the aromatic gums, but even that beautiful and irrelevant circumstantiality that was the gift of the Misses Boykin seemed not without its suggestion of suffering, at least for George Washington.
Baltimore, April 12, 1833.
I am perishing – absolutely perishing for want of aid. And yet I am not idle – nor have I committed any offence against society which would render me deserving of so hard a fate. For God’s sake pity me and save me from destruction.
Ε.Α. POE
Oh, God, thought Sigbjørn. But Poe had held out another sixteen years. He had died in Baltimore at the age of forty. Sigbjørn himself was nine behind on that game so far, and – with luck – should win easily. Perhaps if Poe had held out a little longer – perhaps if Keats – he turned over the pages of his notebook rapidly, only to be confronted by the letter from Severn:
My dear Sir:
Keats has changed somewhat for the worse – at least his mind has much – very much – yet the blood has ceased to come … but the fatal prospect hangs… for his knowledge of internal anatomy…largely adds to his torture.
Suppliziato, strangolato, he thought… The lower is the true prison. And many others. Nor have I committed any offense against society. Not much you hadn’t, brother. Society might pay you the highest honors, even to putting your relics in the company of the waistcoat belonging to George Washington’s dentist, but in its heart it cried: – dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch!… ‘On Saturday a gentleman came to cast his hand and foot…’ Had anybody done that, Sigbjørn wondered, tasting his new grappa, and suddenly cognizant of his diminishing Guggenheim, compared, that was, Keats and Poe? – But compare in what sense, Keats, with what, in what sense, with Poe? What was it he wanted to compare? Not the aesthetic of the two poets, nor the breakdown of Hyperion, in relation to Poe’s conception of the short poem, nor yet the philosophic ambition of the one, with the philosophic achievement of the other. Or could that more properly be discerned as negative capability, as opposed to negative achievement? Or did he merely wish to relate their melancholias? potations? hangovers? Their sheer guts – which commentators so obligingly forgot! – character, in a high sense of that word, the sense in which Conrad sometimes understood it, for were they not in their souls like hapless shipmasters, determined to drive their leaky commands full of valuable treasure at all costs, somehow, into port, and always against time, yet through all but interminable tempest, typhoons that so rarely abated? Or merely what seemed funereally analogous within the mutuality of their shrines? Or he could even speculate, starting with Baudelaire again, upon what the French movie director Epstein who had made La Chute de la Maison Usher in a way that would have delighted Poe himself, might have done with The Eve of St Agnes: And they are gone!… ‘For God’s sake pity me and save me from destruction!’
Ah ha, now he thought he had it: did not the preservation of such relics betoken – beyond the filing cabinet of the malicious foster father who wanted to catch one out – less an obscure revenge for the poet’s nonconformity, than for his magical monopoly, his possession of words? On the one hand he could write his translunar ‘Ulalume’, his enchanted ‘To a Nightingale’ (which might account for the Field Book of Western Birds), on the other was capable of saying, simply, ‘I am perishing… For God’s sake pity me…’ You see, after all, he’s just like folks… What’s this?… Conversely, there might appear almost a tragic condescension in remarks such as Flaubert’s often quoted ‘Ils sont dans le vrai’ perpetuated by Kafka – Kaf – and others, and addressed to child-bearing rosy-cheeked and jolly humanity at large. Condescension, nay, inverse self-approval, something downright unnecessary. And Flaub – Why should they be dans le vrai any more than the artist was dans le vrai? All people and poets are much the same but some poets are more the same than others, as George Orwell might have said. George Or – And yet, what modern poet would be caught dead (though they’d do their best to catch him all right) with his ‘For Christ’s sake send aid’, unrepossessed, unincinerated, to be put in a glass case? It was a truism to say that poets not only were, but looked like folks these days. Far from ostensible noncon formists, as the daily papers, the very writers themselves – more shame to them – took every opportunity triumphantly to point out, they dressed like, and as often as not were bank clerks, or, marvelous paradox, engaged in advertising. It was true. He, Sigbjørn, dressed like a bank clerk himself – how else should he have courage to go into a bank? It was questionable whether poets especially, in uttermost private, any longer allowed themselves to say things like ‘For God’s sake pity me!’ Yes, they had become more like folks even than folks. And the despair in the glass case, all private correspondence carefully destroyed, yet destined to become ten thousand times more public than ever, viewed through the great glass case of art, was now transmuted into hieroglyphics, masterly compressions, obscurities to be deciphered by experts – yes, and poets – like Sigbjørn Wilderness. Wil –
And many others. Probably there was a good idea somewhere, lurking among these arrant self-contradictions; pity could not keep him from using it, nor a certain sense of horror that he felt all over again that these mummified and naked cries of agony should lie thus exposed to human view in permanent incorruption, as if embalmed evermore in their separate eternal funeral parlors: separate, yet not separate, for was it not as if Poe’s cry from Baltimore, in a mysterious manner, in the manner that the octet of a sonnet, say, is answered by its sestet, had already been answered, seven years before, by Keats’s cry from Rome; so that according to the special reality of Sigbjørn’s notebook at least, Poe’s own death appeared like something extra-formal, almost extraprofessional, an afterthought. Yet inerrably it was part of the same poem, the same story. ‘And yet the fatal prospect hangs…’ ‘Severn, lift me up, for I am dying.’ ‘Lift them up, keep them away.’ Dr Swell’s Root Beer.
Good idea or not, there was no more room to implement his thoughts within this notebook (the notes on Poe and Richmond ran, through Fredericksburg, into his remarks upon Rome, the Mamertine Prison, and Keats’s house, and vice versa), so Sigbjørn brought out another one from his trousers pocket.
This was a bigger notebook altogether, its paper stiffer and stronger, showing it dated from before the war, and he had brought it from America at the last minute, fearing that such might be hard to come by abroad.
In those days he had almost given up taking notes: every new notebook bought represented an impulse, soon to be overlaid, to write afresh; as a consequence he had accumulated a number of notebooks like this one at home, yet which were almost empty, which he had never taken with him on his more recent travels since the war, else a given trip would have seemed to start off with a destructive stoop, from the past, in its soul: this one had looked an exception so he’d packed it.
Just the same, he saw, it was not innocent of writing: several pages at the beginning were covered with his handwriting, so shaky and hysterical of appearance, that Sigbjørn had to put on his spectacles to read it. Seattle, he made out. July? 1939. Seattle! Sigbjørn swallowed some grappa hastily. Lo, death hath reared himself a throne in a strange city lying alone far down within the dim west, where the good and the bad and the best and the rest, have gone to their eternal worst! The lower is the true Seattle… Sigbjørn felt he could be excused for not fully appreciating Seattle, its mountain graces, in those days. For these were not notes he had found but the draft of a letter, written in the notebook because it was that type of letter possible for him to write only in a bar. A bar? Well, one might have called it a bar. For in those days, in Seattle, in the state of Washington, they still did not sell hard liquor in bars – as, for that matter, to this day they did not, in Richmond, in the state of Virginia – which was half the gruesome and pointless point of his having been in the state of Washington, LIC-OFF-PREM, he thought. No, no, go not to Virginia Dare… Neither twist Pepso – tight-rooted! – for its poisonous bane. The letter dated – no question of his recognition of it, though whether he’d made another version and posted it he had forgotten – from absolutely the lowest ebb of those low tides of his life, a time marked by the baleful circumstance that the small legacy on which he then lived had been suddenly put in charge of a Los Angeles lawyer, to whom this letter indeed was written, his family, who considered him incompetent, having refused to have anything further to do with him, as, in effect, did the lawyer, who had sent him to a religious-minded family of Buchmanite tendencies in Seattle on the understanding he be entrusted with not more than 25c a day.
Dear Mr Van Bosch:
It is, psychologically, apart from anything else, of extreme urgency that I leave Seattle and come to Los Angeles to see you. I fear a complete mental collapse else. I have cooperated far beyond what I thought was the best of my ability here in the matter of liquor and I have also tried to work hard, so far, alas, without selling anything. I cannot say either that my ways have been as circumscribed exactly as I thought they would be by the Mackorkindales, who at least have seen my point of view on some matters, and if they pray for guidance on the very few occasions when they do see fit to exceed the stipulated 25c a day, they are at least sympathetic with my wishes to return. This may be because the elder Mackorkindale is literally and physically worn out following me through Seattle, or because you have failed to supply sufficient means for my board, but this is certainly as far as the sympathy goes. In short, they sympathize, but cannot honestly agree; nor will they advise you I should return. And in anything that applies to my writing – and this I find almost the hardest to bear – I am met with the opinion that I ‘should put all that behind me’. If they merely claimed to be abetting yourself or my parents in this it would be understandable, but this judgement is presented to me independently, somewhat blasphemously in my view – though without question they believe it – as coming directly from God, who stoops daily from on high to inform the Mackorkindales, if not in so many words, that as a serious writer I am lousy. Scenting some hidden truth about this, things being what they are, I would find it discouraging enough if it stopped there, and were not beyond that the hope held out, miraculously congruent also with that of my parents and yourself, that I could instead turn myself into a successful writer of advertisements. Since I cannot but feel, I repeat, and feel respectfully, that they are sincere in their beliefs, all I can say is that in this daily rapprochement with their Almighty in Seattle I hope some prayer that has slipped in by mistake to let the dreadful man for heaven’s sake return to Los Angeles may eventually be answered. For I find it impossible to describe my spiritual isolation in this place, nor the gloom into which I have sunk. I enjoyed of course the seaside – the Mackorkindales doubtless reported to you that the Group were having a small rally in Bellingham (I wish you could go to Bellingham one day) – but I have completely exhausted any therapeutic value in my stay. God knows I ought to know, I shall never recover in this place, isolated as I am from Primrose who, whatever you may say, I want with all my heart to make my wife. It was with the greatest of anguish that I discovered that her letters to me were being opened, finally, even having to hear lectures on her moral character by those who had read these letters, which I had thus been prevented from replying to, causing such pain to her as I cannot think of. This separation from her would be an unendurable agony, without anything else, but as things stand I can only say I would be better off in a prison, in the worst dungeon that could be imagined, than to be incarcerated in this damnable place with the highest suicide rate in the Union. Literally I am dying in this macabre hole and I appeal to you to send me, out of the money that is after all mine, enough that I may return. Surely I am not the only writer, there have been others in history whose ways have been misconstrued and who have failed… who have won through… success… publicans and sinners… I have no intention –
Sigbjørn broke off reading, and resisting an impulse to tear the letter out of the notebook, for that would loosen the pages, began meticulously to cross it out, line by line.
And now this was half done he began to be sorry. For now, damn it, he wouldn’t be able to use it. Even when he’d written it he must have thought it a bit too good for poor old Van Bosch, though one admitted that wasn’t saying much. Wherever or however he could have used it. And yet, what if they had found this letter – whoever ‘they’ were – and put it, glass-encased, in a museum among his relics? Not much – still, you never knew! – Well, they wouldn’t do it now. Anyhow, perhaps he would remember enough of it… ‘I am dying, absolutely perishing.’ ‘What have I done to them?’ ‘My dear Sir.’ ‘The worst dungeon.’ And many others: and dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son – !
Sigbjørn finished his fifth unregenerate grappa and suddenly gave a loud laugh, a laugh which, as if it had realized itself it should become something more respectable, turned immediately into a prolonged – though on the whole relatively pleasurable – fit of coughing…