On Exile and Self-Exile

I have been dipping into The Oxford Book of Exile (OUP, 1995), edited by John Simpson.

I was given the book by an Australian friend, Professor John Milfull (with whom I had collaborated at UNSW's Centre for European Studies) as a farewell present when I was about to leave Australia after seven years in the country. He inscribed it with the words “With best wishes for a happy exile in Sweden!” It has accompanied me to several countries and  happy ‘places of exile'.

In his introduction, John Simpson writes that ‘each of us is an exile’. He doesn’t stick to the standard definition, but stretches it to include categories like “writers who needed a quieter or a more stimulating atmosphere in which to work”. Exile, he writes, is “a broader and more varied subject than alienation and can take in…the angst of an Albert Camus and the wanderings of a Jack Kerouac. It can even include Edward Lear…”

It made me start to think of some of the writers he didn’t include, like Euripides (Medea), Yannis Ritsos, Lawrence Durrell, George Johnston, Charmian Clift, D.H.Lawrence, Robert Graves, Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, Nikos Kazantzakis, Stefan Zweig and Ismail Kadare, quite a few of them 'self-exiled' or simply 'resident overseas'.

Simpson includes a poem by Philip Larkin (not in any sense an exile) called Poetry of Departures

Here are two extracts:

"Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move".

"So to hear it said
He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious..."


The poem, a reading on YouTube


Obituary for Emeritus Professor John Milfull (UNSW)

"When he vacated his office upon retirement, he called himself "John Evictus".

*****

A Song about Self-Exile in Australia:

He's On the Beach, Kirsty MacColl