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

by Leys, Simon

  * * *

  A few years previously, he had witnessed the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty. He had not taken the establishment of the Republic seriously—he viewed it as a deplorable lapse of good taste. “Sun Yat-sen is a perfect cretin,” he had promptly averred at the sight of the president’s frock-coat and detachable collar, which he considered too ordinary. As for the Revolution, it seemed to him no more than “one of those uprisings that China absorbs, digests and eructs from time to time like wind from some great flatulent gut.”

  The overthrow of the Empire appalled him and filled him with despair—not that he had had any illusions about the Manchu regime, whose corruption, negligence and obscurantism were only too obvious; it was just that “the sublime fiction of the Emperor as the son of a Pure Sovereign Heaven was too admirable to be allowed to disappear. . . . I hate the rebels for their conformist attitudes, their humanitarianism, their Protestant obsession with cleanliness, and above all because they help diminish the difference between China and us; and you know how exoticism alone is truly dear to my heart.”

  In conclusion, Segalen said that his only hope was “soon to see a new despot arise who will spur his little yellow citizens on—I would welcome such a man with the deepest gratitude!” In the meantime, however, “the whole of the so-called modern, new and Republican China must be deliberately eliminated. . . . This is sheer apery, pitiful Bovarysm, small-mindedness, cowardice of every sort, and boredom—boredom most of all.”

  Well before the Revolution, however, Segalen had been disillusioned by the China of the present; as compared with his Polynesian experience, he wrote, “it is true, this country is devoid of all sensual gratification.” Even Peking had only the mythical prestige of its “imperiality” with which to offset “the bleak sadness of its filthy orgies with their croaking chanteuses.” As for the people, “the Chinese character is not to my liking . . . It inspires in me neither admiration nor any sense of grandeur or strength. Its every manifestation in my vicinity is tainted by infantilism or senility. [The Chinese] cry like little girls, fight like pug dogs, grimace like clowns, and are an irredeemably ugly people.”

  So why was Segalen over there at all? “At bottom it was not China that I came here to find, but a vision of China. That vision is now mine, and I have sunk my teeth into it.” This is a key statement, and one that solves a mystery: this subtle poet had absolutely no knowledge of the sublime poetry of the Chinese; this fine connoisseur of art seems never to have looked at a single Chinese painting.[7] (In his whole correspondence he makes but one reference to that incomparable art, and then only in abstract terms, and accompanied by a foolish remark: “I am working on Chinese painting. Ancient, naturally. Contemporary does not exist.”)

  What is even more bewildering is that this passionate music lover was ignorant of the very existence of classical Chinese music—the music of scholars, a music of the soul and of silence, as played on a seven-string zither, the guqin. And he dared complain of living in “a country without musicality” which knew nothing but noise! He never sought to meet Chinese masters who could have initiated him into the varied disciplines of their culture; he had no social contact with either scholars or artists; indeed he seems never to have had a single conversation with any educated Chinese person.

  So it was not China that was finished—“over, sucked dry”—for him, a China that he had never bitten into, but solely his “vision.” And what was that vision? He described it in what he conceived as his magnum opus, Le Fils du Ciel (The Son of Heaven). Unfortunately, Segalen’s Son of Heaven resembles the Emperor of China much as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado resembles the Emperor of Japan—except for the fact that the former is not very amusing.

  Yet, for all that, Victor Segalen left us the miraculous accident of his René Leys,[8] a novel of failure and derision—and one faithful, this time, to the author’s actual experience: the narrator, striving desperately to penetrate an impenetrable China, eventually succeeds only in getting himself led down the garden path by a seductive if pathetic trickster. This masterpiece escaped Segalen almost involuntarily, and in retrospect left him perplexed: a month before his death, after having his great friend Hélène Hilpert read the manuscript, he wrote her: “I find it amusing that René Leys amused you a little. But how far away it seems, how youthful . . .”

  As a rule, conventional critics and commentators do not linger long over this book, for it makes them a little uneasy. After all, it’s a kind of joke, surely? And yet it is by virtue of this “joke” that Segalen is guaranteed a passage to posterity. It is not I who make this claim, but Claudel and Rilke—hardly casual readers.

  Back in France, exhausted by his prodigious efforts as physician, traveller, Sinologist, archaeologist and writer, Segalen fell into a profound depression exacerbated by a condition that medicine could not diagnose.[9] He simply felt life slipping away from him. At this juncture his wife Yvonne, frightened by the gravity of his affliction, had to call for support upon Hélène Hilpert, a very old and intimate childhood friend. Hilpert herself was in a tragic situation: she had four little children, but her husband had gone missing at the front a year earlier and she did not know whether he was dead or a prisoner. (As it turned out, his remains were found only ten years later.)

  * * *

  Right away, Segalen in his state of nervous collapse recognized another soul mate in the person of Hélène. The last year of his correspondence—from May 1918 until May 1919, just before his death—consists mostly of the eighty-nine letters that he wrote her, and as a matter of fact they constitute the most touching portion of the whole collection. These letters have nothing clandestine about them: Yvonne frequently added a personal note at the bottom of the pages written by her husband; but it pained her to see Victor, with whom she had hitherto shared everything, pursuing a dialogue with Hélène on a level to which she herself had no access.

  When Yvonne had married Segalen, she had also espoused his agnosticism—and this in a quite comfortable and untroubled way. Segalen, on the other hand, was by nature a mystical soul who in a muddled way had never really come to terms with the fact of having lost his faith. Hélène was a fervent Catholic; she was also an intelligent and highly sensitive woman; she perceived Segalen’s distress, and realized how very ill he was; she possessed, perhaps, ways of helping him in his present state, but she could not allow herself, or allow him, to put a foot wrong.

  In a moment of particularly acute distress, Segalen exposed his difficulties to Claudel, who, with more generosity than tact, seeing the breach that was opening up in his correspondent’s unbelief, charged through it like a rhinoceros, offering to come over post haste, take Segalen by the scruff of the neck and drag him into a confessional box. Segalen was touched by this heartfelt enthusiasm but chose to evade it, preferring to confide instead in his sweet friend. Who among us would not prefer to enter paradise led by the hand of a Beatrice rather than rushed there on the back of a galloping pachyderm?

  How much longer would Segalen have managed to confine his tumultuous feelings to the exclusively amicable channel dictated by Hélène? We shall never know. In the spring of 1919 Segalen spent a few days of solitary rest at an inn on the edge of the legendary Huelgoat forest. The last two letters he wrote were addressed the one to Hélène and the other to his wife. They glow with a like tender feeling for his friend and for Yvonne. The next day he went walking in the forest, but did not return. Two days later his body was discovered stretched out beneath a tree. He had a wound at the ankle and had died from the resulting haemorrhage, which he had vainly sought to stanch by means of an improvised tourniquet. Those who knew Segalen called it suicide. Those who loved him called it an accident.

  Today Segalen’s biographers incline to the latter view, pointing out that a doctor intending to commit suicide might be expected to have less primitive means at his disposal. But what of a doctor wishing to spare his nearest and dearest the cruel discovery that he has deliberately abandoned them? His last two
letters are by no means letters of farewell—and yet, ten years earlier, he had already confessed to his wife that “Truly intimate matters are never written of.”

  CHESTERTON*

  The Poet Who Dances with a Hundred Legs

  IDEALLY, the title of a public lecture or a book should define or sum up the topic that is going to be treated. Therefore, allow me to explain briefly the choice of this peculiar title.

  First, Chesterton the poet. Chesterton once said that he suspected Bernard Shaw of being the only man who had never written any poetry. We may well suspect that Chesterton never wrote anything else.

  But what is poetry? It is not merely a literary form made of rhythmic and rhyming lines—though Chesterton also wrote (and wrote memorably) a lot of these. Poetry is something much more essential. Poetry is grasping reality, making an inventory of the visible world, giving names to all creatures, naming what is. Thus, for Chesterton, one of the greatest poems ever written was, in Robinson Crusoe, simply the list of things that Robinson salvaged from the wreck of his ship: two guns, one axe, three cutlasses, one saw, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat flesh . . . Poetry is our vital link with the outside world—the lifeline on which our very survival depends—and therefore also, in some circumstances, it can become the ultimate safeguard of our mental sanity.

  One of the many misunderstandings we often entertain on the subject of Chesterton is to picture him as a big, benign, jolly fellow, inexhaustibly possessed by innocent laughter; a man who seems to have spent all his life blissfully unaware of the nocturnal side of the human condition; a man securely and serenely anchored in sunny certainties; a man who seemingly was spared our common anguishes, and doubts and fears; a man from another age perhaps, and who could hardly have had an inkling of the terrors and horrors that were to characterise our time. At the end of this hideous twentieth century—arguably the most savage and inhumane period in all history—we may well wonder: with his permanent and unflappable good cheer, isn’t Chesterton some sort of monument from another era—if not from another civilisation? Shouldn’t he appear to the modern reader as an endearing but irrelevant anachronism? For, after all, we are the children of Kafka: how could Chesterton address our anxiety?

  Yet the fact is that Kafka himself found in Chesterton a mirror for his own anxiety. From the testimony of his young friend and admirer Gustav Janouch we know that he particularly admired The Man Who Was Thursday (which is indeed Chesterton’s most accomplished and most haunting work of fiction). On the subject of this book, it should be noted that Chesterton himself once complained that most readers seemed never to register its full title: The Man Who Was Thursday: A NIGHTMARE. But this last word certainly did not escape Kafka.

  When Chesterton was still an idle and dreamy young man who had half-heartedly drifted into art school, he underwent a shattering crisis. He experienced a terrifying confrontation with evil—evil not as an external menace, but as a presence in the mind, a spiritual reality generated from within himself. At that moment, he had the intuition of the central paradox which he was to explore all his life and would finally sum up near the end of his career in his masterly book on Thomas Aquinas: Christianity has reversed the old Platonic belief that matter is evil and immaterial spirits are good. In fact, the opposite is true: having created the world, God looked on all things and saw that they were good:

  There are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions . . . But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh, have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But the devil cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone is material—the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.

  As a young man, for a certain time Chesterton felt he was in danger of becoming trapped within the spiritual hell of his own hyperactive mind—and for quite a while, he literally tottered on the edge of madness. In this situation, it was poetry that finally preserved his sanity. For the gift of the poet (which is also the gift of the child) is the ability to connect with the real world, to look at things with rapt attention. Both the poet and the child are blessed with what Chesterton called “the mystical minimum”: the awareness that things are—full stop. “If a thing is nothing else, that is good; it is—and that is good.”

  By the way, it is interesting to note that, at the other end of the earth, a thousand years ago, the great mystics of China and Japan (whom Chesterton never knew) developed exactly the same view. I am referring here to the masters of Zen Buddhism, who taught only through poems, paintings, paradoxes, jests and riddles. For instance, in a classic anecdote, a young disciple asks an old monk, “What is the Buddha?” The master replies, “The Buddha is a two-pound cabbage from the vegetable market in Chaozhou.” The lesson is, hold on to reality: if you can fully grasp but one fragment of reality, however humble, in its irreducible concreteness and singularity, you hit the rock-bottom of truth, and from there, can reach salvation. Hold on to reality—just like Robinson Crusoe holds on, for dear life, to the things he salvaged from the wreck of his ship. “Two guns, one axe, three cutlasses, one saw, three Dutch cheeses . . .”

  Secondly, I said that Chesterton is not merely a poet—I said he is “a poet who dances with a hundred legs.” The phrase is actually borrowed from Chesterton himself. He used it in an interview to describe the most extraordinary character he ever created: Sunday, the enigmatic giant with two faces—huge, boisterous, elusive, who pulls all the strings in his sublime metaphysical fable, The Man Who Was Thursday. He wrote the book when he was barely thirty, but strangely enough, twenty years later, he himself in physical appearance came to look like Sunday, as various friends and visitors were to remark. (See, for instance, a letter which Valery Larbaud wrote to Paul Claudel, reporting on a visit he had made to Beaconsfield—or again, Bernard Shaw’s affectionate description of his old sparring partner and friend as “A man-mountain, not only large in body and mind beyond all decency, but [who] seems to be growing larger as you look at him.”)

  But the practical problem for us is this: how do you sketch the portrait of a man who dances with a hundred legs? How do you keep his image in focus? This is an impossible task—and therefore don’t blame me if you find that my talk is hopelessly rambling. But in the end this may not greatly matter, for I shall draw many quotes from Chesterton’s writing, and these quotes alone should provide you with enough incentive to turn back to his works—what more could I wish for?

  * * *

  When I was invited here, I confess I felt very hesitant at first at the idea of addressing a Chesterton Society on the subject of Chesterton. I have no particular expertise on this topic. The great edition of Chesterton’s Collected Works which is now being published in the United States will count some fifty volumes: half of them have already appeared, and of this half, my own reading has barely covered one fifth (though I am pursuing my exploration with endless delight). As you see, I am a hopeless amateur. Yet, from a Chestertonian point of view, this very lack of qualifications should constitute the best qualification. Chesterton always attached special value to this notion of the amateur, as opposed to the professional. In his Autobiography, he composed a loving portrait of his father, whose occupation was in real estate (in fact, the old firm is still active today, and when walking in the streets of London—or Sydney, or Perth—you can still see the name of Chesterton posted on houses for sale) but who at home, for the delight of his children, cultivated a wide range of talents and hobbies: drawing, painting, photography, magic lanterns, stained glass:

  There had been some talk of his studying art professionally in his youth; but the family business was obviously safer, and his life followed the lines of a certain contented and ungrasping prudence. He never dreamed of ever turning any of his plastic talents to any mercenary account, or of using them for anything but his own private ple
asure and ours. The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father, sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. To us (children) he appeared to be indeed The Man with the Golden Key, the magician opening the gates of goblin castles . . . but all this time he was known to the world, and even to the next door neighbours, as a very reliable and capable, though rather unambitious businessman. It was a very good lesson in what is also the last lesson in life: that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole, I am glad that he was never a professional artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career—his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousands of things he did so successfully.

  The superiority of the amateur over the professional is an important and provocative notion—all the more provocative because it is not commonly held in Western culture, where a more general view usually considers that only the professional can be serious, whereas the amateur’s approach is necessarily tainted with frivolity (we shall see what Chesterton had to say on the subject of seriousness versus frivolity). For me, Chesterton’s position on this question has a particular appeal, since it precisely coincides with a basic tenet of Chinese classical aesthetics—a field that has occupied my interest for many years. This principle should in fact have a deep and universal relevance. Think of it: you can, and should, be fully professional insomuch as you happen to be a real estate agent, a solicitor, a grave-digger, an accountant, a dentist, etc.—but you could hardly call yourself a professional poet, for instance. If, on a passport or an immigration form, you were to write under “Occupation” the words “Human being” or “Living,” the bureaucrat behind his counter would probably wonder if you were in your right mind.