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

by Leys, Simon

  Let me mention one last reason—but not the least—for us to be mystified. For any sensitive and imaginative young man, and a fortiori for a young poet of genius, the very first sea voyage aboard an oceangoing sailing ship must be a rough, overwhelming and unforgettable adventure. In Michaux’s case, however, the experience left strictly no trace in his poetic output with the exception of a couple of short sibylline sentences in a prose piece on a completely different subject: “Poor A., what are you doing aboard that boat? Months pass; suffering, suffering. Sailor, what are you doing? Months pass; suffering, suffering.” By contrast, when Michaux sailed to Ecuador some seven years later, the three-week crossing from Amsterdam to Guayaquil inspired the superb opening of his Ecuador—some twenty pages. In other words, his modest, indeed banal and routine experience as a simple passenger on a semi-cargo ship was enough to sharpen his capacity to observe and stir his imagination far more thoroughly than his supposed two years as a seaman!

  In their chronology at the beginning of the first volume of the Pléiade edition of Michaux’s complete works, the editors Raymond Bellour and Ysé Tran conclude, apropos of the years 1919–1921, that “No document exists offering details of Michaux’s voyages as a sailor besides those particulars that he himself shared or made public.” And Jean-Pierre Martin confirms this: “Of these crossings there is no trace. All we have is Michaux’s own brief and retrospective testimony. Only a biographical note written by him over thirty years later.” Yet Martin draws no inference from this.

  For my own part, so long as we have no proof of the reality of this maritime chapter, I shall continue to think that it belongs to the sphere of the imagination. Which is not by any means to call Michaux a liar. He is a poet. And I take the word in the first two meanings assigned it in Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary: “Poet: an inventor; an author of fiction.”

  MICHAUX’S TOMB

  I am afraid—afraid that, once dead, I shall have in some sense to live even longer.

  —HENRI MICHAUX, “Note sur le suicide”

  In these bibles [the Pléiade editions] errors become definitive.

  —ARAGON, as reported by Matthieu Galey, Journal I

  One day, a good twenty years ago, because in my writings on China I had several times expressed my admiration for Michaux, I received a letter from an unknown reader who wanted to know how it was possible for me to give so much consideration to an author who had so stupidly truckled to Maoism. When you publish books you are bound to receive a quantity of eccentric or bizarre letters, but this one seemed to break all bounds. The qualities that make Michaux especially dear to us are precisely his tonic disrespect, his honed intelligence and his absolute originality: all his ideas were arrived at independently, thanks to a sort of wild naïveté, and he never allowed himself to follow any kind of fashion. It should be added that when he was traveling in China (1932) the very name of Mao was still largely unknown. Clearly my correspondent must be a crazy compulsive letter-writer. I tossed the letter away, but the memory of it continued to nag vaguely at me, for, as absurd as its content had been, its form and style in no way suggested that the writer was a lunatic. But what could the letter possibly refer to?

  The answer to the puzzle was revealed to me only many years later, when the first volume of Michaux’s complete works came out in a Pléiade edition. There I learnt that from 1963 to 1972 Michaux had worked on a reissue of all the works he had published with Gallimard; and that with this in mind he had undertaken to revise, correct and rewrite a number of his old texts. This vast revision was disastrous overall (we shall see why in a moment)—but, alas, this was the version that the Pléiade editors chose to follow blindly[5]—forgetting, apparently, that the first duty of a literary editor is to exercise critical judgement, and that the first duty of a critic is sometimes (as D.H. Lawrence said) to keep a work out of the hands of its creator.[6]

  The phenomenon of writers of genius who, late in life, cease to understand their own greatest achievements, who disavow and distort their own work, or set about recasting and mutilating it, is certainly alarming, but it is by no means unusual. Had his death not supervened, Gogol would have utterly ruined his Dead Souls by adding a frightful second part in the shape of a moral sermon. Tolstoy in his old age judged that he had been guilty of wasting his time writing a frivolous novel such as Anna Karenina, and that he would have been better employed producing religious propaganda. At the end his life, Henry James undertook to rewrite a number of his novels for a new edition of his complete works; a certain tortured verbosity which is often thought to typify his style is in reality the result of this late and unfortunate revision, which at the time elicited a horrified reaction from the New York critics: “One wishes Mr. James would demonstrate more respect for the classics, not least those that came from his own pen.” And Conrad, suffering in the twilight of his days from a veritable paralysis of the imagination, renounced the rich ambiguity of the great novels of his maturity. Even the creators of comic books may fall victim to this deplorable revisionitis: Hergé redrew all the Tintins of the early part of his career, and in so doing killed all the verve and spice that had infused the graphics of the original plates.[7]

  The greater a work’s originality and perfection, the greater its vulnerability to the risk of later ill treatment at the hands its creator. An inspired work is one which has by its very definition escaped its author; this creates the danger that the author will want to recapture it and strive maladroitly to regain control over it. No artist dwells on a par with his finest creations, and this gap can become a source of perplexity and hostility in him. It is not surprising, therefore, that in Michaux’s case it was A Barbarian in Asia—his masterpiece—that was the most cruelly manhandled by his revisions.

  Michaux’s struggles with his rebellious child prodigy were initiated rather early. Discomfort was already apparent in the author’s new preface of 1945: “Twelve years now separate me from this voyage. It is there. I am here. . . . It cannot be developed. Nor can it be corrected.”

  In point of fact, however, Michaux was itching to correct it! His preface to the American edition (New York: New Directions, 1949) did not bode well. Although stupidity was never his strong suit, he was led to say stupid things. He bleated edifying platitudes quite beside the point: “Man needs a vast far-sighted aim, extending beyond his lifetime. A training rather than a hindrance for the coming planetary civilisation. To avoid war—construct peace.” Blah, blah, blah. (One is reminded of Chaplin, who, having had the genius to make The Great Dictator, felt the need to attach to it a long schmaltzy sermon addressed to every belle âme on the planet.) Finally, in the new edition of 1967, thirty-five years after Barbarian was written, Michaux could restrain himself no longer: this time he would take on the text itself and fix it once and for all. He began by writing a new preface in which he apologised for ever perpetrating such a work, one that “embarrassed and offended” him, that made him ashamed.

  He would have liked, he went on, as a “counterweight,” to introduce elements that were “more serious, more thoughtful, more profound, more experienced, more educated.” But (thank the Lord!) the book put up a resistance. So what could be done? First of all, cut—cut more or less everywhere, removing all those disrespectful passages that Michaux now found shocking and intolerable. Later, in the wake of a last visit to Japan, Michaux edulcorated Barbarian even further for the new edition of 1989. For want of space, let me cite just a few samples of this self-censorship—instances chosen completely at random (I have signalled deleted matter by means of italics)[8]:

  . . . Hindu religion [is] double-faced, one for the initiated, the other for fools. Humility is certainly a quality of the highest order; but not degradation.

  The Hindu is often ugly, with an ugliness that is vicious and poor.

  In France you tell dirty jokes and you laugh at them. Here [in India] you tell them, you absorb them without laughing. You follow them dreamily. You visualise the interplay of organs.

 
; [The literature of] the Chinese which is almost devoid of heartbreak poetry, of complaint, has no charm whatsoever for the European, excepting a hundred or so librarians, who by dint of reading know nothing whatsoever about anything.

  A Chinese general who does his business in his trousers, who begs the colonel to take his place in the battle, surprises no one. No one calls for his trousers to be displayed. Everyone thinks this quite natural. One day I saw five officers who were swearing to exterminate I don’t remember whom. They looked like rabbits.

  [The Chinese:] An old, old childish people that does not want to know what is at the bottom of anything, that has no principles, but “cases”; no law, but “cases”; no morals, but “cases.”

  A Chinese prostitute is less obviously sensual than a European mother of a family. She immediately shows affection. She seeks to attach herself.

  [In Japan] The men are ugly, without sparkle—they are sad, wasted and dry . . . The look of very little men, petty clerks without a future, of corporals, subordinates, servants of Baron X or of Mr. Z or of the papaland . . . little pig eyes and decayed teeth. The women . . . are stocky, short, for the most part solid, and all flank from leg to shoulder. The face is sometimes pleasant, but the pleasantness lacks purpose and emotion; the head is always so big, big with what? With emptiness? Why such a big head, for such a small face and still less expressiveness? . . . The same in character as in appearance: a great indifferent, insensitive blanket, but a trifle touchy and sentimental (like soldiers), laughing in little wild bursts like a servant girl. . . .

  A religion of insects, exactly the religion of ants, Shintoism with its famous cult of the anthill, an ant people.

  [Japan is] a country . . . where a young girl who is not very rich is normally sold to a brothel keeper, to serve the multitude (as far as they have individuality!) Service, always service!

  In the censored and rewritten version of 1989, Michaux felt it necessary to add a special note of apology at the beginning of the chapter on Japan, asking that he be forgiven for certain pages that he read “with embarrassment, even stupefaction in places. Half a century has elapsed, and the portrait is unrecognisable.” (In point of fact they were droll and glaringly true to life!) Michaux ends this preliminary note on a tone that is soothing and sycophantic, not to say insufferably priggish and patronising: “The Japan of that time, with its cramped, suspicious and tense feel, has been surpassed. It is clear that, at the far end of the earth, Europe has now found a neighbour.”

  * * *

  Michaux’s excisions are frequently combined with rewriting. The new version of A Barbarian in Asia sets out to file down all sharp points, smooth all angles, and dull the tone overall. So much effort expended to humour everyone, to offend no sensitive ear! No indecency, no familiarity! Respect all taboos! Tread on no one’s toes! Consideration for the old and the crippled, compassion for every widow and orphan! Thus the Brahmins, originally described as “jealous as hunchbacks, but always ignorant as carp,” are now taxed soberly with being merely “jealous, often ignorant.”

  Or again: “The priest is a pimp and his temple is full of women” is demurely reduced to “the temple has women.”

  In the original, as compared with the natural nobility of Arabs and Hindus, “the Europeans here all look like plain workmen or errand-boys.” Revised version: “the Europeans seem fragile, secondary, transitory.”

  In the original, as opposed to the exquisite modesty of Bengali women, “European women seem like whores.” The newer text, after likewise evoking the modesty of Bengali women, is content to interject a chaste “How different from European women!”

  The idiom becomes academic and starchy. Where the original has “a poor blind man in Europe automatically arouses a distinct compassion. In India, if he thinks he can count on his blindness to move people, just let him try,” the revised version reads: “In India, let him not count on his blindness to move people.”

  The delightful sideswipes vanish. For instance, “The poetry of a people is more deceptive than its dress; it is manufactured by aesthetes, who are bored and who are only understood among themselves” is prudently neutralised: “The poetry of a people, which at any period is manufactured by aesthetes, is more deceptive than its dress.”

  Vigorous expression gives way to reverences (along with gratuitous cultural parentheses as guarantors of the author’s good breeding). For example, consider this original text: “While many countries that one has liked become, as the distance from them increases, almost ridiculous or insubstantial, Japan, which I frankly detested, grows almost dear to me.”—and compare it with the revision: “While many countries that one has liked tend, as the distance from them increases, to fade away, Japan, which I rejected, now takes on greater importance (the memory of an admirable Noh play has made its way into my mind and is extending its sway over me).”

  Strong words are replaced by feeble ones. “Who will gauge the weight of the imbeciles in a civilisation?” becomes “Who will gauge the weight of the mediocre in a civilisation?”

  With the passage of thirty-five years, the poet is a convert to the use of soap. Originally, he had noted approvingly that the Chinese “detests water (dirt, moreover, is excellent for the personality)”—words that disappear completely in the revised version. Elsewhere in Barbarian, he had written: “In the opinion of a relatively dirty man like myself, washing, like a war, is a trifle puerile, because it has to be done all over again after a while.” In the corrected version, the general idea is retained, but the touching personal allusion goes by the board.

  A scatological tendency had long been spontaneous and natural for Michaux, but the revision meant purging his prose of any reference, even the most figurative, to alimentary functions. The Indians, he had written, “are all constipated. . . . This constipation is the most irritating of all, a constipation of the breath and the soul.” This is turned in the corrected version into “The Indians are all rigid, set in concrete. . . . This constriction, the most irritating of all, that of the breath and the soul. . . .” The same obsession with decency led him, in the case of Ailleurs, to suppress “La Diarrhée des Ourgouilles”—a whole section of earthy Bruegelian imagining describing “diarrhea accompanied by autophagy: man is digested and evacuated little by little by his own gut.”[9]

  By cutting and rewriting so many passages, Michaux certainly damaged A Barbarian in Asia, but what put the finishing touches to the destruction were his additions. I have shown how he disavowed his critical vision of Japan—a distinctly perverse disavowal when one considers that in 1932 he had very accurately grasped the nature of a society suffocating under a sinister military-fascist regime. (By analogy, intelligent and sensitive visitors to Berlin in the late 1930s who testified in all honesty to their revulsion would scarcely need to apologise today!) But on the subject of China, things are even worse: Michaux unquestioningly accepts the image of China put about by Maoist propaganda in France during the “Cultural Revolution.” He denies a reality he so clearly perceived in the past on the basis of crass lies being fed him in the present. From the start, in the new preface, he strives to invalidate his masterpiece: “In China, the [Maoist] revolution, by sweeping away habits and ways of being, acting and feeling unchanged for centuries, even for millennia, has also swept away a great many opinions, including not a few of mine. Mea culpa—not only for not seeing well enough, but even more for failing to feel what was gestating, what was about to undo the seemingly permanent. Did I really see nothing? Why? Ignorance? . . .” This is enough to make one weep. And then, throughout the book, Michaux inserts new notes intended to rectify, in the light of the sacred revelations of Maoism, everything heretical in his earlier thoughts.

  “In a single generation,” he writes, “politics, economics and the transformation of the social classes have created a new ‘man in the street’ in China. The man I once described and the one that I and other visitors once observed is no longer recognisable. . . . China has returned to life. We should
be happy no longer to recognise it, to perceive it differently: as ever startling, ever extraordinary.” Michaux comments as follows on a passage in which he had evoked the fear that restrained the Chinese from making connections with foreign visitors: “How extraordinary it must feel for anyone returning there now—in the very towns where people once shrank away from them—to encounter self-confident faces, no longer evasive but smiling, friendly, open.” By a grim irony, Michaux added this note while the “Cultural Revolution” was in full spate, at a time when passers-by in the street dared not give you directions, because the mere act of exchanging a couple of words with a foreigner could immediately be treated as a crime. Similarly, whereas the first edition of Barbarian simply stated that “No city has gates as massive as Peking,” the revised version embellishes: “No city in the world has gates as massive, as beautiful, or as reassuring as those of Peking.” How true! But how in the world could Michaux have made these additions at the very moment when the “Cultural Revolution” was completing the demolition of those very gates?

  The poet who fifteen years earlier had so very well understood that “One who sings in a group will, when asked, put his brother in prison,” now joined the vast chorus of “useful idiots” singing the praises of Chairman Mao—that “man of boldness, author of the Little Red Book, so simple, so reasonable. . . . Mao Zedong who turned China around, utterly transforming a thousand-year-old society in a few years, who conceived the boldest of projects, some of which were unrealisable, but were realised [sic], others almost harebrained in their audacity, as for example the setting up of small village blast-furnaces to produce steel, an idea that bucked the advice of all the technicians, or the creation of new villages with collective dormitories. . . .”