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

by Leys, Simon

  These views were maintained in European culture. Samuel Johnson was merely stating the evidence of common sense when he observed that “all intellectual improvement arises from leisure.” But a century later, Nietzsche was to note the erosion of civilised leisure under what he considered to be a deleterious American influence: “There is something barbarous, characteristic of ‘Red-skin’ blood, in the American thirst for gold. Their restless urge for work—which is the typical vice of the New World—is now barbarising old Europe by contamination, and is fostering here a sterility of the mind that is most extraordinary. Already we are ashamed of leisure; lengthy meditation becomes practically a cause for remorse . . .‘Do anything rather than do nothing’: this principle is the rope with which all superior forms of culture and taste are going to be strangled . . . It may come to a point where no one will yield to an inclination for vita contemplativa without having an uneasy conscience and feeling full of self-contempt. And yet, in the past, the opposite was true: a man of noble origin, when necessity compelled him to work, would hide this shameful fact, and the slave worked with the feeling that his activity was essentially despicable.”

  Now the ironical paradox of our age, of course, is that the wretched lumpenproletariat is cursed with the enforced leisure of demoralising and permanent unemployment, whereas the educated elite, whose liberal professions have been turned into senseless money-making machines, are condemning themselves to the slavery of endless working hours—till they collapse like overloaded beasts of burden.

  THE PARADOX OF PROVINCIALISM

  In a homage to Henri Michaux (arguably the greatest poet in the French language this century), Borges made an interesting point: “A writer who was born in a big country is always in danger of believing that the culture of his native country encompasses all his needs. Paradoxically, he therefore runs the risk of becoming provincial.” Naturally, the poet from Buenos Aires was in a good position to detect the secret strength of the poet from Namur (Michaux loathed his birthplace—the province of a province).

  In the time of Goethe, Weimar was a town somewhat smaller than Queanbeyan today. I wonder if there was not a direct relation between the universal reach of Goethe’s antennae (not only did he keep abreast of the latest developments on the English and French literary scenes, but he even displayed an enthusiastic interest in newly translated Chinese novels!) and the narrow horizon of his provincial abode. My point is not that Queanbeyan is shortly going to produce a Goethe—though this remains of course entirely possible; the emergence of genius is always arbitrary and its manifestation presents no necessity. I merely wish to underline Borges’s paradox: cosmopolitanism is more easily achieved in a provincial setting, whereas life in a metropolis can insidiously result in a form of provincialism.

  People who live in Paris, London or New York have a thousand convincing reasons to feel that they are “where the action is,” and therefore they tend to become oblivious to the fact that rich developments are also taking place elsewhere. This is something which educated people who live in a village are unlikely ever to forget. (Still, needless to say, there is one thing worse than ignoring the outside world when in New York, and that is ignoring the outside world when in Queanbeyan.)

  Culture is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. In this sense, “national culture” is a self-contradiction, and “multiculturalism” a pleonasm. The death of culture lies in self-centredness, self-sufficiency and isolation. (Here, for example, the first concern—it seems—should not be to create an Australian culture, but a cultured Australia.)

  When modern navigators reached Easter Island, they were confronted with an enigma: What was the meaning of the colossal stone monuments that stood on top of the cliffs? Who had carved these monoliths? By what feats of sophisticated engineering were they erected? Since the local population could not offer the slightest clue to answer these questions, it was assumed that they were late-comers and that the original nation of monument-builders had vanished with their entire civilisation. Archaeological and anthropological research eventually solved the riddle: the early settlers had reached the island by accident; at first they maintained their culture and technology, but then, marooned for centuries in complete isolation, deprived of outside contacts, challenges and stimulations, their descendants progressively could no longer muster the energy to cultivate their burdensome heritage; eventually they ceased to understand it, and in the end its very memory was lost. In its lonely and perfectly sterile purity, Easter Island is the ultimate paradigm of a “national culture.”

  CIGARETTES ARE SUBLIME

  After a long wait, I finally obtained a copy of Richard Klein’s book in praise of smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime—but I put it on a shelf and have not opened it yet. Why? I suspect that I may unconsciously fear that this book achieves something I have vaguely dreamed of doing myself. (Whenever you have a good idea, do not put it into practice, there is no need for that—sooner or later, someone else is bound to hit upon the same concept, and will do a better job of it.)

  What I had in mind actually was a sort of anthology—pictorial and literary—celebrating tobacco. For the pictures, I would have started with seventeenth-century Tabagies by the old masters from the Low Countries—Brouwer, Van Ostade, Teniers, etc. Then, for the modern times, there would have been Baudelaire with his pipe, as seen by Courbet; Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé, showing the poet wrapped in the blue smoke of his cigar; Van Gogh’s Pipe on a Chair, Cézanne and Degas’s various portraits of smokers. Even musicians could have been mobilised for my purpose: Bach, for instance, once professed in the same breath his serene faith in God and the trust he put in his pipe—the only pity is that, having already made a cantata praising coffee, he did not go one step further and compose a Tobacco Cantata.* What a magnificent anthem this would have constituted for today’s embattled smokers!

  On the literary side, my anthology would have been faced with an embarrassment of riches. Balzac could have contributed many quotable passages on cigars. (For instance, there is a memorable episode in La Fille aux yeux d’or, after young de Marsay finally succeeds in winning the favours of the mysterious and elusive Girl With the Golden Eyes and spends a wild night of passion with her. As he walks out of her house in the early dawn, he lights up a cigar and, drawing a long puff, says to himself: “This at least is something no man will ever tire of!”) Yet the opening quote should naturally belong to Samuel Johnson; it is no surprise that this inexhaustible font of wisdom on all sublunary topics should have repeatedly celebrated the virtues of tobacco; for example, he attributed the admirable placidity of the Dutch to their habit of smoking (and of playing draughts). For Johnson, who was haunted by a neurotic fear of madness, tobacco appeared as a powerfully soothing influence, and Hawkins heard him say: “As smoking is going out of fashion, insanity is growing more frequent.” Today, the manic fanaticism of the anti-smoking lobby eloquently confirms the accuracy of this observation.

  Actually, the current antics of the anti-tobacco activists would have provided rich material for an entire section of my anthology. Some time ago, it was reported in an English magazine that in a fairly crowded railway compartment, a couple who had been engaged in passionate kissing for some time eventually came to perform full sexual intercourse under the impassive eyes of the other passengers; it was only when, post coitum, the lovers attempted to light a cigarette that their co-travellers abandoned their reserve and reminded them indignantly that it was most improper to smoke in a public place.

  This revealing anecdote finds an odd corollary in another railway episode, which the father of C.S. Lewis was fond of recounting; A.N. Wilson reproduced this story in his biography of Lewis. The scene is in Ulster at the beginning of the century; Albert Lewis (the father of C.S.) “was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which has no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other characte
r, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit, whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor and defecated. When this operation was completed, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point, the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window, which read NO SMOKING. For C.S. Lewis, this anecdote of his father’s always enshrined in some insane way a truth about Northern Ireland and what it was like to live there.”

  There is no doubt that, if the Anti-Smoking Brigade had its way, the whole world would soon be turned into one grim and lunatic Ulster. This, I think, must be the reason why, even though I hardly smoke anymore, whenever I am offered the choice I always instinctively opt for the smoking section in coffee shops, waiting rooms, restaurants and other public places: the company is better. In one respect, smokers do enjoy a spiritual superiority over non-smokers—or, at least, they possess one significant advantage: they are more immediately aware of our common mortality. On this particular point, they certainly owe the anti-smoking lobby a debt of gratitude. The warnings that, by law, must now be printed on all tobacco products unwittingly echo a beautiful ancient ritual of the Catholic Church: on Ash Wednesday, as every faithful is marked on the forehead with the blessed ashes, the priest reminds him, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Most of the time, modern life endeavours to blunt or to obliterate this awareness of mortality. It should not be confused with a morbid cult of death—which is abhorrent to Christian humanism. (¡Viva la muerte! was an obscene fascist slogan: when one of Franco’s generals launched it at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Unamuno—who was then at the end of his life—denounced it in a speech of sublime passion); on the contrary, this awareness is a celebration of life. Mozart confessed in a letter that the thought of death accompanied him every day, and that it was the deep source from which all his creation sprang. It certainly explains the inexhaustible joy of his music.

  I do not mean that the inspiration which can be drawn from the ominous warnings issued by the official Health and Correct Thinking agencies will turn all smokers into new Mozarts, but they will certainly endow smoking with a new seduction—if not with metaphysical meaning. I confess when I look at them, I am seriously tempted to buy cigarettes again.

  *Actually, it seems he did.

  TELL THEM I SAID SOMETHING

  SOME TIME ago, newspapers reported the results of an inquiry conducted among the general public to determine “the hundred most beautiful words in the English language.” Predictably enough, motherhood, peace, love, liberty, spring, etc. duly appeared on the list. Yet from the outset this rather silly exercise was doomed to insignificance, for the simple reason that it was predicated upon the illusory notion that words can have a value by themselves. Actually, words are to some extent like colours, of which Delacroix could say, “Give me mud, I shall turn it into the most luminous female flesh—as long as I am free to choose which colours to put by its side.”

  By their very nature, words are neutral and indifferent. It is only from their context that they draw their most pungent emotional charge. Racism and sexism are a form of leprosy of the mind and should be mercilessly fought; yet for the most part the fight against racist and sexist language aims at the wrong target. I know of a righteous American journal that censored a contributor who referred to The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” And some equally righteous French publications endeavour to feminise words such as auteur (author) and écrivain (writer) into the hideous monsters auteure and écrivaine . . . Yet words are innocent. No perversions are to be found in dictionaries; they lie solely in people’s minds—and that’s the battlefield where the good fight ought to be fought.

  It is not the words themselves, but the circumstance and manner in which they are uttered that give them meaning and impact. Stendhal (who served in Napoleon’s army) liked to recall that when General Murat was charging the enemy at the head of his cavalry, he used to stir the spirits of his horsemen by shouting to them: ‘My bum is round, round as a plum.’ Under enemy fire, in the heat of battle, these idiotic words became simply sublime—and the men were all willing to get themselves killed, just for the privilege of following such a hero.

  In his first theatrical triumph, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), Ionesco exploited with great originality—and to splendid effect—the dichotomy that can exist between, on the one hand, the original meaning of words and, on the other, the meanings suggested by the tone, intention and gestures of the speaker. A good half a century earlier, Anatole France made use of the same conceit. In Le Livre de mon ami, the narrator recalls an episode from his adolescence: he had developed a passionate admiration for a beautiful female pianist who gave private recitals in his parents’ house. One night, at the end of a piece, the pianist suddenly turned towards her young admirer and asked him: “Did you like that?” “Oh yes, sir!” the hapless boy stuttered, overcome with emotion. His blunder plunged him into such a distress that he swore never to appear again in the beautiful musician’s presence. Forty years later, however, he met her perchance at a social gathering. Chatting about the successes of her long and brilliant career, the pianist confessed that eventually one became blasé about applause; yet once, in her earlier days, she received a compliment that she never forgot: a young man was so moved by her music, he called her “sir.”

  The circumstance that lends words their greatest weight is the proximity of death. The “swan song” image does not pertain to the Western tradition alone. It is there already in The Analects of Confucius: “When a bird is about to die, his song is sad; when a man is about to die, his words are true.” Shakespeare seems to echo it: “The tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony.” Besides, in Anglo-Saxon common law a statement made by a dying man possesses a special evidentiary status, since “a dying man is presumed not to lie.”

  No wonder the last words of the great are piously collected. The famous “Mehr Licht” (“More light”) of Goethe—assuming that he actually said it, and that he did not merely mean to ask that the shutters be opened—seems to suggest a lofty aspiration towards enlightenment and wisdom. By comparison, Thomas Mann’s ultimate query, “Where are my glasses?” sounds rather flat. At the moment of giving up the ghost on a hospital bed, the colourful Irish playwright Brendan Behan still had the wit to thank the nun who was wiping his brow: “Thank you, Sister! May all your sons become bishops.”

  I am especially moved by the way old Countess de Vercellis died. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who witnessed it, describes the episode in his Confessions: “With her serene mind and pleasant mood, she made the Catholic religion attractive to me. In the very end, she stopped chatting with us; but as she entered the final struggles of agony, she let off a big fart. ‘Well,’ she said, turning over in her bed, ‘a woman that farts is not dead.’ These were her last words.”

  The most heartbreaking last words are those of Pancho Villa. As the Mexican revolutionary was about to be shot, he found himself suddenly lost for words. He begged some journalists who stood nearby: “Don’t let it end like this! Tell them I said something.” Yet this time the journalists, instead of making something up, as is their usual practice, soberly reported the failure of inspiration in all its naked truth. Trust journalists!

  DETOURS

  A direct path merely takes you to your destination.

  —ANDRÉ GIDE

  SIDEWAYS

  ALAN BENNETT describes in one of his journals how, during a visit to Egypt, he found himself trapped among cohorts of tourists trudging wearily through dusty wastes of sand and rocks under
a merciless sun: the famous site he had come to admire looked merely like a stone quarry full of sweaty crowds. He wondered if tourism was not like pornography: a desperate search for lost sensation. The fact is, the only impressions that truly register on our sensibilities are accidental—we did not seek them out (let alone book an organised tour!).

  As E.M. Forster observed, “Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.” There are also Egypts of the mind; in the end, it is perhaps chance encounters with books and random jottings, however shallow, that can best escape dreariness.

  CREATIVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS

  In the arts, there are works that benefit from being misunderstood. Many years ago, a journalist who was interviewing Julien Green discovered to his surprise that this austere writer was a great fan of the James Bond movies. But according to a friend who often accompanied the old man to the cinema, it appeared that he was always getting the plot-lines hopelessly mixed up.

  This of course explains everything: the silliest scenario must acquire a disturbing depth after it has percolated through the filters and alembics of the author of a novel such as Moira.

  On the subject of these creative misunderstandings, I still recall some African audiences with imaginations that bordered on sheer genius. In my youth, I once had the chance to make a fairly long journey on foot through the country of the Bayakas in a poor and remote corner of the Kwango region in the Congo. There, in the villages of the bush, an enterprising Greek merchant, who had a four-wheel-drive jeep and an electric generator, would come from time to time and organise a film session. (I am of course referring to the time before independence; for today, even if there should still be any enterprising Greek merchants around, I doubt very much that they would find passable tracks to reach these distant hamlets.)