Gerald Burns
Melmoth
A mistaking of prettiness for beauty gets you into trouble. A quote I'd not have
recognized, says Harvard Magazine, comes from Oscar Wilde's "Sphinx" poem.
Shut up in a cell with the scent of ordure, Warden Martin's kindness rewarded
with dismissal (one of his best letters) he got as few have, Genet? Burroughs?
a new take on the sordid, living with the slang of our culture as his medium,
incarceration an image of his own exclusions. One of the Papillons I helped breed
in Texas, small, lively and intelligent dogs, we named Sebastian Melmoth,
Wilde's nom de Dieppe, as it were, alias he lived on a while abroad.
Is this pathos rather than tragedy as Alistair Cooke, reporting on the Hiss case,
thought he thought? Being in, he says, at the sentencing purifies the spectator
like a birth or a burial. The shop sign across the street, big gilt letters unobscured
by snow says THE PERFUME HOUSE, ground-floor boutique known to stock
pre-revolutionary Russian attars, ambergris, that kind of thing, its customers dressed
better than pedestrians. The photographs of Barrymore in Galsworthy's prison play
show him in the gray overall with broad black arrows, same outfit as Wilde's which
on the railway platfonn elicited guffaws. There is a down side to celebrity. It doesn't
matter if our compassion is engaged, Alger Hiss amused at Chambers' pumpkin cache,
wearing his clothes so well until the verdict at the second trial. Berrigans
found prison grayed the principle for which you went. Wilde found it hard
to forgive silly chaplains who'd leave, in your cell, a tract, his Bible
Greek, and said what prison teaches you is cunning, these things experiences
after all, Justice kissing your lips as your head lies in a dish. Declassed in
seconds by a judgment, foreseeing the biographies and intelligent films, signed copies
of books by friends sold up to pay your debts, what thoughts had Socrates or Jesus
reported by fellow-travelers (dismay in every line of this thin paper) in Greek, in Greek?
Copyright © 1995 Gerald Burns
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