...With... BOOK and VERSE

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 30, 6 February 1931, Unnumbered Page

...With... BOOK and VERSE

By

John

O'Dreams

Mrs. VIRGINIA WOOLY, in a recent series of articles, told the world how impossible it-is for a woman . to uéhiéve memorable literary work and do justice to her imaginative faculty, unless she has a-settled income, and, if not a house, at least a room of her own, which can be locked at will, and the insistent, clamouring world left on the other side. Many of us would be disposed to think she. is right, including the male as well as female of the species, remembering how carks and cares.‘bear heavily on artistic temperament, which is easily thrown off its pivot and quickly disturbed and distressed by ugliness and’ stridency of the world we live in. Yet one remembers that Charlotte Bronte wrote great novels within the shadow of the sad. restricted and unhappy atmosphere in which her sister Emily achieved the immortal "Wuthering .. Heights’; while Mrs. Gaskell, amid the everyday cares of a country vicarage, roved herself admirable wife and mother, open-hearted hostess and unfailing friend, and yet found time to jay us under a debt of gratitude by writing the lovely literary. cameo "Oranford," and other keenly observed, though less well known, studies of life in those days. The writer remembers rank Morton, one of New Zealand’s ablest journalists, dashing off brilliant and scholarly criticisms of the drama

amid babel of reporters’ room and general din of a newspaper office’ at midnight. Gissing starved in a_ garret. Balzac strove long and painfully before achieving fame. Thomas Burke evolved his poignant dramas of the underworld amid sordid and povertystricken surroundings of his youth. Mrs. Woolf, profound student of the ways of men, and wife of a poet, insists upon solitude and economic security for creative achievement; but the fact remains that many works of genius have been brought to birth under the lash of circumstance. ae * Ba ora than three decades ago, in _ Paris, a brilliant Nnglish novelist, poet and playwright, passed to where beyond these voices, it may be,

his tempestuous heart found that peace which was denied him in life. Now at this late date come some intimate details of those last few years. According to the "Sunday Times," in the spring of 1897 there arrived at the Hotel d’Alsace, in the Rue des Beaux Arts, a tall, stout Englishman. who gave his name as Sebastian Melmoth, took a bedroom and _ sittingroom, and lived there for 34 years. His real name was Oscar Wilde. "When he wanted anything," said the proprietor, M. Dupoirier (now retired), "he always asked for me, ‘Go and get me some brandy in the Avenue de V’Opera,’ he would say. It was mag-. nificent brandy, very expensive at that time, and: in the early days of his sojourn Mr. Melmoth consumed four or five bottles of it a week,

"Myery day 1. served. his preakfast," proceeded his former landlord and friend, "and about. two o’clock a mutton -eutlet and two hard-boiled eggs. He never varied his menu. Inthe afternoon he read or: wrote, in the, evening he went’ out, and did not re turn before two or three in the morning. He was very patient during his last illness, when injections of more phia were necessary -to give him relief. Two nurses were in attendance, and: before he died he was converted to. the Roman Catholic faith, Some days before the end his sight went, and he asked the nurses to read poetry to him. He died one morning at about nine o’clock, after heaving two. or three sighs. On his coffin were but two wreaths of the flowers:he loved, one from a friend, the other from the proprietor and staff of the hotel." One wonders what poets were chosen to solace the last hours on earth of that unhappy genius, *