The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  At such a point, the servant of the word has truly become its creator and master. Someone once reproached him (in another context) for having fabricated a word that did not exist in the dictionary: “This is not French!”

  “Now it is,” Hugo replied.[16]

  * * *

  Half of the misery in this world is caused by people whose only talent is to worm their way into positions for which they otherwise have no competence. Conversely, how many talented individuals remain forever in obscurity for the lack of one ability: self-promotion? Hugo presents the rare example of a prodigiously gifted man who was also the shrewd impresario of his own talent. From a very early age, he learned how to please influential people, and he also knew when, and how far, he could judiciously offend them. At the age of twenty, he was granted a pension from King Louis XVIII (in reward for a sycophantic poem), but seven years later, he cleverly declined another pension from Louis’s successor, the most unpopular Charles X. During the 1840s, he cultivated fairly close and cordial relations with King Louis-Philippe, without ever compromising his independence or becoming a mere courtier. Thus, with a cunning mixture of respect and iconoclasm, he succeeded in securing the favours of the Establishment without alienating the enthusiastic devotion of his own young followers; he was simultaneously rewarded by the political and literary authorities, and idolised by poets with dishevelled hair and crimson waistcoats. He was made a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur at twenty-three—an exceptionally young age for such an honour. (Shortly after, on a journey, wearing the ribbon of this much coveted distinction, he was arrested by a gendarme who suspected him of impersonation!)

  The tumultuous staging of his drama Hernani in 1830 consecrated his position as the guiding star of the Romantic movement—he was then twenty-eight. But being universally acknowledged as the leader of the literary revolution did not prevent him entering a few years later the prestigious fortress of literary conservatism, the French Academy. Neither did the political right penalise him for his fashionable anti-conformism: he was made a pair de France (more or less the equivalent of a life-peer in the British House of Lords). Thus, before reaching the middle of life, he had achieved all the goals and reaped all the honours which ambitious writers and politicians would normally take twice the time to obtain.

  Trollope famously observed that “success is a necessary misfortune of human life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.” This is true, but only for most of us who make up the plodding majority. For a man like Hugo, who was truly ambitious (I mean, who desired genuine greatness), early success was a blessing: he got success out of his system—it freed his mind for better things. The frantic race for the wretched baubles that keeps us running on the social treadmill until we collapse of old age was already over for him while still young. Ribbons, honours, titles, prizes, medals—the paltry rewards, the laughable carrots which we docilely pursue on a lifelong chase—he won them all in the first part of his career; what would have been the point of slaving for another fifty years, merely to add a few more knick-knacks to his dusty collection?

  Halfway through life, he found himself free—free to risk everything, free to become himself, to be idealistic, brave, generous, reckless and noble, free to take once and for all the side of Justice—this permanent “fugitive from the side of victory.” In 1851, when Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon’s nephew, “who stuffed the Eagle” with his “cadaverous face of a card sharp”) staged his coup against the Republic and restored the Empire, turning himself into “Napoléon-le-Petit”—as Hugo was to call him, with lethal wit—the poet stood up against the despot (though he knew his cause was desperate) and lent his voice to the victims, the losers, the downtrodden, the misérables. He made a vain attempt to organise popular resistance against the usurper, but the secret police of Louis Bonaparte already had the situation under control. Overnight, Hugo had to forsake everything: his position, his public audience, his home, his country; he had to hide and to flee, he was a fugitive with a reward on his head—he was forced into permanent exile.

  He escaped to Brussels, and from there went to the Channel Islands, first taking refuge in Jersey, then finally settling in Guernsey. His exile was to last nearly twenty years. Now he could say at last: “The literary revolution and the political revolution have effected their junction in me.” What a liberation! Youth had suddenly burst into his life: “Those who become young late in life, stay young longer.”[17] He was to stay young till his death in 1885, at age eighty-three.

  Hugo’s writings are full of prophetic insights on his own destiny. Some twenty years earlier, commenting on the life of Rubens during a first visit to Belgium, he observed: “A great man is born twice. The first time as a man, the second as a genius.”[18] Exile was to be Hugo’s second birth—the chance of his life. And he had the wisdom to see this. Three years into his new life, he noted:

  I find increasingly that exile is good.

  It is as if, without their knowing it, the exiles were near some sort of sun: they mature quickly.

  These last three years, I feel that I am on the true peak of life; I can distinguish the real lineaments of all that people call facts, history, events, successes, catastrophes—the huge machinery of Providence.

  At least, for this reason alone, I should thank Mr. Bonaparte who exiled me, and God who chose me.

  Maybe I shall die in this exile, but I shall die a better man. All is well.

  Five years later:

  What a pity I was not exiled earlier! I could have achieved so many things which I fear I shall not have the time to complete.

  Eight years later:

  In exile, I said the word that explains my entire life: I grew.[19]

  In his dashing early days in Paris, he had been the centre of an ebullient court of admirers, fellow writers, followers, idlers and parasites. His house was invaded by endless cohorts of visitors, he did not even have the time to answer his mail, and from dawn till night his door was simply left open. Now, however, not many of his fair-weather acquaintances would still find the courage to brave the mists and storms of the Channel to make a pilgrimage to the exile’s rock, or be bold enough to run the gauntlet of the spies and secret police who kept Hugo’s outside contacts under close surveillance. As a result, the poet found himself left with only two interlocutors—but with these at least, he felt on the same footing: God and the ocean.

  No wonder these years of solitude and contemplation were the most productive of his life. They were also happy years—for himself at least, if not for his family. (His daughter Adèle went insane; his wife[20] and grown-up sons could not bear the loneliness and eventually moved back to Brussels, where Hugo would from time to time pay them a visit, on the way to one of his occasional continental jaunts.)

  Most of his masterpieces date from this period, climaxing in 1862 with his monumental novel, Les Misérables—less a novel than an immense prose poem, perhaps the last and only genuine epic of modern times. Hugo’s passion for language found here its hugest and wildest outlet. The book is like a foaming and thundering Niagara of words; it is also a dumbfounding patchwork in which philosophico-socio-political dissertations constantly interrupt the narrative. There are passages of comedy, of drama, of satire, of breathtaking action; there are tender elegies, realistic sketches, huge historic frescoes; there are essays on the most disparate topics, such as the linguistic structure of slang, the economics of sewage recycling—a prodigious display of encyclopaedic interests (which influenced Jules Verne)—and yet these heteroclite fragments are all swept together and eventually merge in one powerful poetic stream.

  By its very nature, such a book should be untranslatable. And yet it was soon to become a part of all the main cultures of the world and to touch millions of readers in many different languages.[21] What is the power latent in the original that enables it to survive translation and to remain operative, even in a mutilated form? Les Misérables has a mythic dimension that directly taps into the deeper sources of our
common humanity. It is popular literature in the same sense as Homer is popular literature: it addresses all mankind.

  The book was first printed in Brussels (1 April 1862); other editions immediately followed, nearly simultaneously, in Paris, Madrid, London, Leipzig, Milan, Naples, Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro.[22] From the start it exerted a universal appeal: the original publication was delayed at the printers by the tears of the typographers who were reading and composing the galley proofs. Their emotion and enthusiasm were soon to be shared by the most diverse readership—French and foreign, young and old, naïve and sophisticated. At the remotest end of Europe, Tolstoy secured without delay a copy of the book and was overwhelmed. One may say without exaggeration that Les Misérables triggered War and Peace.[23] Giants breed giants.

  * * *

  Hugo’s prodigious creativity during the years of exile found another outlet—more intimate, but no less intense and powerful—in his pictorial activity. Though critics have not ignored it, it seems to me that this aspect of his genius has remained somehow underestimated. For instance, instead of talking of Hugo’s drawings, it would be much more accurate to speak of his paintings—borrowing a concept from Chinese traditional aesthetics, which would be particularly appropriate in his case.[24] For the Chinese, all the graphic improvisations, or “ink-plays” which scholars and literary men execute during their leisure hours, simply using the basic tools they need for their daily writing (calligraphic brush, ink and paper) are not only considered as fully fledged paintings but, more than the large-scale, showy productions of professional artists, they achieve the very perfection of what a true painting should always aim at: they are a visible “imprint of the heart” of the painter.

  Delacroix said that the highest feat for a painter is to inject reality into a dream.[25] Here lies precisely the haunting power of Hugo’s visionary works: his imagination, however bold and wild, was always sustained by a technical proficiency acquired through a long practice of sketching. (During his early journeys through Belgium and Germany, Hugo recorded with vivid accuracy, in pen or pencil, monuments and scenic spots: his sketch books were to him what cameras have become for today’s travellers.)

  Hugo said that “every great artist, at his beginning, remakes the whole art to his own image.” This is particularly true for Hugo’s paintings. Most of these were not shown in his time, and for good reason: the public for such an art was not yet born. It is only now, through a familiarity with the developments of twentieth-century painting, that we are able at last to appreciate Hugo’s graphic experiments.

  Hugo’s exile came to an end with the fall of the Second Empire. His return to France was triumphal, and the last fifteen years of his life were one long protracted apotheosis. He continued to produce: poems, political addresses, polemical essays (the eloquence and ferocity of Histoire d’un crime—1877—contributed to saving the Republic from the menace of a new coup), and one last magnificent novel, Quatre-vingt-treize. But not even death could put an end to his career: posthumous publication of his private papers (notebooks, drafts, prose and verse fragments, diaries, correspondence, etc., which equal the published works in quantity, and sometimes even exceed them in interest) have occupied another three-quarters of a century.

  * * *

  Four years ago, Graham Robb published a splendid biography of Balzac. He has now applied the same winning methods—sharp judgement, wit, lively style and vast information—to the writing of a new biography of Hugo. If his Victor Hugo does not afford the same delights as Balzac, it is, I think, through no fault of the biographer. It simply would be unfair, and foolish, of us to expect that the same methods applied to a different object may achieve identical results.

  Balzac is an essentially endearing character. But if one had to characterise Hugo’s multi-faceted personality, a hundred adjectives may come to mind, yet “endearing” would certainly not be one of them. In fact, it is precisely when dealing with figures such as Hugo that one feels obliged once again to question the desirability, if not the very feasibility, of literary biography.

  It is not simply that giants do not bear close scrutiny (as Gulliver discovered to his utter discomfort when he had to climb into the bosoms of the court ladies of Brobdingnag) but, more essentially, there is this basic truth: the only thing that could justify our curiosity is precisely what must necessarily escape the biographer’s analysis—the mystery of artistic creation. Hugo’s long exile was the climax of his life, but these momentous twenty years could be described in merely one sentence: He stood in front of the ocean and he wrote.§

  The thesis that literary biography is doomed to fail by its very nature is not new, and creative artists have expounded it most persuasively. Proust wrote an entire treatise on the subject, Contre Sainte-Beuve, and it would be rather fatuous for me to attempt rehashing it here. Closer to us, Malraux summed up the issue quite pointedly: “Our time is fond of unveiling secrets—first because we seldom forgive those whom we admire; secondly, because we vaguely hope that, amid these unveiled secrets, we may find the secret of genius. Under the artist, we wish to reach the man. But when you scrape a fresco, if you scrape it down to its shameful bottom layer, all you get in the end is mere plaster.”[26] But well before him the indignation that a poet must experience before our indiscreet appetite for biographical information was most memorably expressed by Pushkin: “The mob reads confessions and notes, etc., so avidly because in their baseness they rejoice at the humiliations of the high and the weaknesses of the mighty. Upon discovering any kind of vileness they are delighted. He’s little like us! He’s vile like us! You lie, scoundrels: he is little and vile, but differently, not like you.”[27]

  Note that I am quite aware of my own contradictions. If my readers derive any enjoyment from this little article, they should also keep in mind that a great deal of its information was directly drawn from Robb’s work. And even as I question the point of writing literary biographies, I know all too well that I shall continue to read them—especially when they are as intelligent and readable as this one.

  * Review of Graham Robb: Victor Hugo: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1997).

  † My italics.

  § Hugo used to write standing at a high desk.

  VICTOR SEGALEN REVISITED THROUGH HIS COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE

  WHEN VICTOR Segalen died in 1919 at the age of forty-one, he had published only one book, Les Immémoriaux (1907), and two slim collections of poetry, Stèles (1912) and Peintures (1916), and he was barely known beyond a small circle of intimates.[1] His widow Yvonne—a devoted wife who had supported and loved him with intelligence and followed him with courage—strove to preserve his memory by arranging for posthumous publication of two manuscripts, René Leys (1922) and Équipée (Expedition, 1929). Despite her efforts, it was to be feared that the writings and even the name of the poet were doomed to oblivion.

  In this connection I must ask the reader’s forbearance if I now insert a personal parenthesis (rest assured, it will be the last). In 1971, when I published The Chairman’s New Clothes,[2] I needed, at short notice and for trivial bureaucratic reasons, to sign the book with a pseudonym. If I was bold enough to borrow my false surname from Segalen’s masterpiece, it was solely because at that time René Leys was completely out of print and had been impossible to find for over twenty years, so that the name had no resonance save in the memories of a handful of faithful admirers of Segalen, lovers of literature and somewhat smitten by things Chinese. It was to this happy few—my like, my brothers—that I was directing an innocent wink. Had I had the slightest notion at that time of how Segalen’s work was to become the object of an extraordinary renewal of interest, I would have modestly chosen some other banal Flemish patronymic—Beulemans, say, or Coppenolle—but now it is rather too late for that.

  As a matter of fact Segalen’s triumphant return had been foreshadowed by Professor Henri Bouillier’s magisterial biography Victor Segalen (Paris: Mercure de France, 1961). The same Henri Bouillie
r has now given us the poet’s correspondence.[3] Thirty years after Bouillier’s biography, Gilles Manceron’s Segalen appeared (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1991); so far from duplicating the earlier biography, it rounded it out admirably.

  In the interim, thanks above all to the devoted efforts of Victor’s daughter Annie Joly-Segalen (1912–1998), the issuing of unpublished manuscripts and posthumous fragments, reprints, selected works, popular editions, scholarly editions, collector’s editions, commemorative exhibitions and international conferences all proliferated. Segalen became the subject of a steady flow of books, essays, studies and articles; as far away as the Antipodes, doctoral theses focused on him, while in Brest a university has now been named after him.[4]