believethat I am speaking not entirely from selfish motives. Books
about imprisonment I like perhaps the best of all literature, and I
haveread a great many; although of course one is often disappointed
in them in spite of the subject-matter. Take
The Enormous Room.
HowI envied the author of that book! But there was something art-
ificialabout it, something that puzzled me considerably until I realized
that it was due to the fact that the author had had an inner convic-
tionof his eventual release all during the period of his imprisonment,
-a flaw, or rather an airbubble, that was bound by its own nature to
reach the surface and break. The same reason may account for the
perpetual presence of the sense of humor that ange~ed me so much. I
believethat I like humor as well as the next person, as they say, but it
has always seemed a great pity to me that so many intelligent people
nowbelieve that everything that can happen to them must be funny.
This belief first undermines conversation and letter-writing and
makesthem monotonous, and then penetrates deeper, to corrupt our
powen;of observation and comprehension--or so I believe.
The Count of Mount Cristo
I once enjoyed very much, although
now I doubt that I should be able to read it through, with its ex-
posureof "an injustice," its romantic tunnel-digging, treasure-hunting,
etc.However,. since I feel that I may well be very much in its debt,
and I do not wish to omit or slight any influence, even a childish
one, I set the title down here.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
was an-
other of the writings on this subject which I never could abide,-it
seemedto me to bring in material that although perhaps of great
humanintere.st, had nothing whatever to do with the subject at hand.
"That little tent of blue, Which prisoners call the sky," strikes me as
absolute nonsense. I believe that even a key-hole of sky would be
enough,in its blind, blue endlessness, to give someone, even someone
whohad never seen it before, an adequate idea of the sky; and as for
callingit the "sky,"-we all call it the sky, do we not; I see nothing
patheticwhatever about that, as I am evidently supposed to. Rather
giveme Dostoyevsky's
House of the Dead)
or
Prison Life in Siberia,
Evenif there seems to have been some ambiguity about the status of
prisonersthere, at least one is in the hands of an authority who real-
izesthe limitations and possibilities of his subject. As for the frequent-
ly published best-sellers by warders, executioners, turn-keys, etc., I
havenever read any of them, being determined to uphold my own
point of view, and not wanting to introduce any elements of self-
consciousnessinto my future behaviour that I could possibly avoid.
I should like a cell about twelve or fifteen feet long, by six feet
wide.The door would be at one end, the window, placed rather high,
at the other, and the iron bed along the side,-I see it on the left, but
IN PRISON
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