CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE

EXSUL

1

WHEN I WAS A CHILD in Brussels, brought up bilingually in French and English, I used to think that the word exile meant "ex-île," out of the island; not, I feel pretty certain, because of the British Isles, to and from which I was constantly taken and to which I nominally and paternally belonged, but because islands are magical to a child: Treasure Island, Crusoe's island, Peter Pan's never-never land, Paul et Virginie on their island, Coral Island, or whatever, a no-man's-land all the way to the island of solitudinous reading I loved to be in and hated to be suddenly thrust out of. And are not many utopias, even dystopias, islands, from Pindar's and Plato's to More's and Swift's and Golding's? Even science fictions planets and galaxies and alternative worlds are felt as islands, isolated from our round earth's imagined corners of reality.

But no: exile (L. exilium, earlier exsilium; exul, earlier exsul, a banished man) was long thought to be linked to solum, soil, but is now (by Andrews 1987 [1879]) related to the root sal, Sanskrit sar (to go), L. saline/saltare; and L. exsilio meant "spring forth." But then later, in Old French, exilier or essilier meant "to ravage," "to devastate," a shift in meaning still traceable in exterminate, literally "to drive beyond boundaries."

Thus the clanging connotations are of suffering in banishment, but also of springing forth into a new life, beyond the boundaries of the familiar (beyond the boundaries of the island-self, I obstinately add, since no man is an island, even in no-man's-land). "Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!" Shelley wrote in 1818 (Julian and Maddalo: 1.57). That's for the springing forth connotation. But Pope Gregory VII's last words are said to have been: "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; wherefore I die in exile" (quoted in Bowden 1840, 2: bk. 3, chap. 20). This is a bitter adaptation of Psalm 45.7 Revised Standard Version:

Thou has loved righteousness and hated iniquity,
wherefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee
with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

That's for the suffering connotation, a suffering felt as unjust, a punishment for righteousness instead of the promised reward. To be sure, Gregory VII (Hildebrand) was not a poet or other writer of fiction (except perhaps in those last words), and in many ways deserved his fate in the deadly struggle for supremacy, between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, that bedeviled the whole of the Middle Ages. The emperor Henry VII had captured the "Leonine" city (after Leo IX) in 1083, Rome itself surrendered in 1084, but Gregory held out in the castle of Sant' Angelo. Then the pope's ally Robert Guiscard at last came to the "rescue," brutally sacking Rome and taking Gregory, almost as a captive, to the safety of Salerno, where he died on May 31, 1085.

It may seem absurd today that mere writers should ever have been considered powerful or influential enough to deserve exile, as opposed to political figures or, for that matter, to bakers and carpenters. But they have, and, being writers, offer a good deal more variety than political figures.

2

There are so many different kinds of literary exile. At random from memory, in roughly chronological, nonevaluative order: "Isaiah" (and in a very wide sense, all Jewish writers of the Diaspora), Ovid, Virgil, Cavalcanti, Dante (from Florence under Charles de Valois), Petrarch (to Provence), Thibault de Champagne (to his new kingdom of Navarre), Charles d'Orléans (imprisoned by the English), Voltaire, Mme de Staël, Adam Mickiewicz, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Cyprian Norwid, Charles Baudelaire (debts), Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Gabriele D'Annunzio (debts), W. B. Yeats, Edith Wharton, Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, H. D., Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, Radclyffe Hall, D. H. Lawrence, Max Beerbohm, Somerset Maugham, Stefan Zweig, Bertolt Brecht, André Breton, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, Malcolm Lowry, Witold Gombrowicz, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jorge Semprún, Luis Cernuda, Milan Kundera, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry Matthews, Italo Calvino, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, and no doubt many others, all the way to the modern "foreigners" or "postcolonials" who write in English or French today, from Kazuo Ishiguro to Salman Rushdie, an exile within an exile.

Clearly, this list alone covers a great variety of exiles, from temporary (e.g., Hugo) to permanent, though the exile can't always know this; early (e.g., Ishiguro, who came to England at six from Nagasaki) or en fin de carrière (Wilde). But the most obvious and commonly made distinction is between the following:

1. Involuntary exile, usually political or punitive ("Isaiah," Ovid, Dante, Thibault, Charles d'Orléans, Byron, Mickiewicz, and all the moderns such as Ionesco, Semprún, Cernuda, Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, etc., alas). And these can be further divided into those exiled for their books or their behavior (Ovid, Byron, Mme de Staël, Victor Hugo, Wilde, Solzhenitsyn) and those who as private persons fled from political conditions or war.

2. Voluntary exile, usually called expatriation, itself for many more personal reasons: social, economic, sexual (e.g., Radclyffe Hall and the lesbian group in Paris in the twenties), or simple preference (Beerbohm retired in Rapallo, Ezra Pound choosing Italy).

Involuntary exiles may tend to be unhappy, poor, bitter (like Gregory VII), nostalgic about the society left behind, self-righteous; voluntary exiles may tend to be happy, comfortable, satiric about the society left behind, self-righteous. But that is obviously a useless generalization, with too many exceptions on any one feature, and some, like Byron (a sexual scandal but rich and noble) or Wilde (a sexual scandal but...