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

by Leys, Simon

  If the story seems mysterious, it is because the simplicity of the soul is the greatest mystery under heaven. Otherwise, it presents only one genuine enigma: Chekhov, who was a confirmed agnostic, displays here an intuitive grasp of the religious experience, reaching to its very essence—which usually escapes the learned speculations of theologians. We may naturally assume that the student in the story was pious and learned; he sincerely believed that the events surrounding Peter’s denial took place 1,900 years ago in the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace; his faith had already taught him that the Gospel narrative is true; then, suddenly, the tears of the women showed him that this story is real: it is happening to all of us, now. The tears of the women enable the young theologian to effect a giant leap: from abstract knowledge to actual experience, from truth to reality—which is the ground of all truths. (As C.S. Lewis put it: “Truth is always about something, but reality is what truth is about.”) Instead of pondering dogmas and doctrines, the student suddenly faced evidence. Hence his joy, which was overwhelming and mysterious indeed, but which presented nothing “irrational” (contrary to Bloom’s strange assessment).

  Yet Chekhov—with his scrupulous intellectual honesty—did not altogether discount other elements in the student’s ecstatic happiness: “youth, health, strength”—for, after all, “he was only twenty-two years old.”

  URINALS AND EDITORIAL PRACTICES

  At the end of the nineteenth century, as France was swept by a wave of fanatical anticlericalism, many town councils and municipalities adopted the policy of erecting urinoirs along the walls of local cathedrals and churches; under the pretext of ensuring hygiene and public decency, the brilliant idea was to have the entire male population of the town pissing day and night against the most venerable monuments that the religious had built.

  It seems to me that many modern editors of classic works of literature—and also many film-makers adapting literary masterpieces to the screen—are impelled by a somewhat similar desire for desecration. They append impertinent and preposterous introductions, they impose cover designs and presentations in complete contradiction with the expressed intention of the authors, they write film scripts that negate the meaning of the book they are supposed to adapt, they coolly chop off the epigraphs that the authors had lovingly selected—they generally display patronising arrogance and crass ignorance; they behave as if they were the proprietors of the works they should serve and preserve. Here are some examples (in no particular order). In the cinema, we recently saw what became of Graham Greene’s masterpiece The End of the Affair—no need here for further comment. With books, it is in the paperback reprints of classics that most sins are committed. Just a glance at my humble shelves brings at random Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with a lurid cover on which is printed in characters larger than the title, “Now a sensuous film starring Sylvia Kristel.” Poor Lawrence; you really did not deserve such an indignity. A new reprint of Lolita carries on its cover a reproduction of one of Balthus’s most patently paedophiliac paintings: a little girl caressing herself with an ambiguous smile—yet Nabokov, in his correspondence with his publishers, had taken pains to discuss at great length the question of the dust-jacket of this book, and he stipulated with utter firmness and clarity: “There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl” (letter, 1 March 1958).

  As if later editors would bother to follow authors’ instructions—they do not even read their writing. Conrad is particularly ill-treated, it seems; without any warning or justification, in a Penguin reprint of Almayer’s Folly, the editor took the liberty of simply dropping the famous epigraph that Conrad had borrowed from Henri-Frédéric Amiel: Qui de nous n’a eu sa Terre promise, son jour d’extase et sa fin en exil? (Who among us did not have his Promised Land, his day of ecstasy and his end in exile?) Not only is the sentence magnificent and provides the key to the entire novel, but it also supplies an important biographical clue to Conrad’s literary creation (Amiel, whose diaries Conrad first read during an early stay in Geneva, reappears, in a metamorphosed shape, as the placid Swiss narrator who witnessed the ravings of Slavic terrorists in Under Western Eyes). The paperback reprint of Heart of Darkness (Oxford Classics) carries a scholarly introduction that is grotesque and delirious: it proposes an elaborate phallic reading of the novel. I paraphrase: “Look at the Congo River on the map; don’t you see? It is obviously a huge, creeping phallus!” and so on. Literary scholars are particularly adept at cultivating this sort of nonsense: they seem permanently drunk on the psychedelic milk they keep sucking from the twin mammelles of Freud and Marx. Amazing examples of this merry art are too numerous to be quoted here.

  The resolute and invincible blindness of some editors can also be quite impressive. Stendhal’s treatise On Love (De l’Amour, 1822) is invariably presented under this title; yet, when Stendhal published La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), he printed at the beginning of his novel a list of his other works in which he indicated the full and final title under which he intended his essay on love to be known thereafter: De l’Amour et des diverses phases de cette maladie. It was studiously ignored by all subsequent editors—though it should certainly not be irrelevant for us to know that Stendhal viewed love as a sort of illness.

  THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE POET

  Sometimes it takes a poet to deflate effectively the windy pronouncements of a philosopher. To Theodor Adorno, who declared that, after Auschwitz, no art was possible, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Indeed, not only art, but breakfast as well.”

  OLYMPICS

  I recently had a chance to see again the notorious (yet remarkable) documentary film that Leni Riefenstahl made of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. I was struck by one tiny detail, which certainly was not deliberate and could not have attracted anyone’s attention at the time. In a passage devoted to the sailing competition, the camera caught for an instant the face of a crew member on a boat, at the height of a race. He was hauling in the jib sheet with all his might, and a cigarette was dangling from his lips.

  This image lasted for little more than two seconds, but for us it is stunning. At the time, it was so spontaneous, familiar and natural; today, it seems to come from another era.

  In the Olympic Games nowadays, it is commonly accepted that many competitors show up stuffed to the gills with all sorts of drugs (which the relevant authorities are careful not to control, unless it is by methods whose ineffectualness has been duly guaranteed beforehand). Yet should any sportsman enter the stadium with a cigarette or a pipe in his mouth, one dares not contemplate the fate that would befall him.

  Surely, at the least he would be locked in a madhouse, if not stoned to death on the spot by righteously angry crowds.

  But why does this simple image from an old documentary fill us with so much nostalgia? Is it not because it suddenly brings back memories from a bygone age, when it was still possible to engage in a sporting competition just for the sheer fun of it?

  AUTOCRATS

  One characteristic of autocrats which is inimitable is their naïveté. After all, despots are perhaps less cynical than credulous. An example is the anecdote told by Shostakovich in his memoirs: a general of Tsar Nicholas I had a daughter who married a Hussar against her father’s will. The father begged the tsar to intervene, and Nicholas immediately issued two edicts: the first one, to cancel the marriage; the second, to restore the daughter’s virginity.

  BUSHFIRE

  By mid-afternoon, our entire street—a dead end, climbing halfway up a wooded hill—is shrouded in acrid smoke, as opaque as a thick fog, creating an eerie twilight. By five o’clock, this grey fog turns red—a diffuse colour of fire, though no flames are visible yet. Electricity and telephone have been cut. We load the car with some essential belongings; documents and papers fill our suitcase; in my briefcase, stacked with letters and manuscripts, there is room left for only one book. There are some ten thousand books in the house—old and new, read or unread, all equally loved, need
ed, irreplaceable; which one should I save? There is no time now to ponder this question; in a hurry, I grab a thick volume (1,000 pages)—recently arrived, as yet unread: Cioran’s Cahiers 1957–1972 (his posthumous masterpiece, as it turns out) . . .

  Unlike the neighbouring suburb, our area was ultimately spared. The next day we unloaded the car, unpacking at leisure our emergency luggage. As I was going to put the Cioran volume back in its original place on the shelf, propelled by a sudden impulse I opened it at random and came across the following entry (p. 410, top of the page):

  Henri Thomas told me, a long time ago, that he saw in a cemetery in Normandy a grave bearing this inscription: X***, born on ——, deceased on —— and underneath: MAN OF PROPERTY.

  I burst out laughing. In my haste, I had picked up exactly the right book. I don’t remember who said this, but it is absolutely true: “Past a certain age, we read nothing perchance.”

  MEMENTO MORI

  DO YOU grieve at the thought that your life must come to an end? The alternative could be worse—Swift showed it convincingly in Gulliver’s Travels. Arriving in Luggnagg, Gulliver heard of the existence of “Immortals” among the local population. From time to time a child is born with a large round mark on his forehead, a sure sign that he is a “Struldbrugg”: he will never die. This phenomenon is not hereditary; it is purely accidental—and extremely rare. Gulliver is transported with wonderment: so, there are some humans that are spared the anguish normally attached to our condition. These Struldbruggs must be able to store a prodigious wealth of moral and material resources through the ages—a treasure of knowledge, experience and wisdom!

  In the face of Gulliver’s enthusiasm, his hosts can scarcely hide their smiles. Though the Struldbruggs are indeed immortal, they do age: after a few centuries they have lost their teeth, their hair, their memory; they can barely move; they are deaf and blind; they are hideously shrunken with age (the appearance of women is especially ghastly). The natural transformation of language deprives them of all means of communication with the new generations; they become strangers in their own society; burdened with all the miseries of old age, they survive endlessly in a state of desolate stupor. The progress of medicine provides us today with good illustrations of Swift’s vision.

  Recently, browsing again through Albert Speer’s Spandau Diaries, I came across an intriguing passage. In the seventeenth year of his imprisonment, Speer noted: “Today I read in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons a sentence that strangely paraphrases my recent bout of calculations [to fight his crushing boredom, Speer devised elaborate mathematical variations on the remaining time of his sentence]: ‘In prison, time is said to flow even more quickly than in Russia.’ How time must have slowed down in Russia these days!”

  Perchance, I had just been re-reading Fathers and Sons, and the passage in question actually says the exact opposite. Turgenev describes a middle-aged man who was abandoned by his mistress; broken-hearted, he returned to Russia, where “he no longer expected anything much of himself or of others, and he undertook nothing new”; he aged in loneliness, boredom and bitterness. “Ten years passed in this way—drab, fruitless years, but they sped by terribly quickly. Nowhere does time fly as it does in Russia; in prison, they say, it flies even faster.” Turgenev states clearly that, in the emptiness of the days, time passes at lightning speed. For Speer, however, who was still young and possessed of a fierce vitality, the enforced inaction of prison life was a torture; instinctively he misread Turgenev’s statement as an ironic way of saying: time passes slowly in Russia, nearly as slowly as it does in jail.

  Alexis Carrel, in his classic L’Homme, cet inconnu (Man the Unknown), analysed the difference between chronological time (the solar time measured by chronometers and calendars), which is immutable and exterior to man, and interior time, which differs with each individual, and within every individual from one age to the other. For instance, in early childhood a year is of seemingly endless duration, for it overflows with physiological events (growth) and psychological events (the uninterrupted absorption of new information and impressions). As one grows older these stimulations become fewer—Evelyn Waugh, lamenting the increasing difficulty of inventing new plots for novels, noted, “Nothing that happens to one after the age of forty makes any impression”—and it results in an acceleration of time, which rushes through this yawning emptiness.

  At the age of seventy-nine, Tolstoy observed in his diary that only children and old people live the true life, as the former are not yet subject to the illusion of time and the latter are finally freeing themselves from it. Indeed, at the end of our lives we are like the window-cleaner who falls from the hundredth floor of a skyscraper: the speed of his fall accelerates wildly; yet, until he hits the pavement, he remains suspended in a timeless void.

  We never cease to be astonished at the passing of time: “Look at him! Only yesterday, it seems, he was still a tiny kid, and now he is bald, with a big moustache; a married man and a father!” This shows clearly that time is not our natural element: would a fish ever be surprised by the wetness of water? For our true motherland is eternity; we are the mere passing guests of time. Nevertheless, it is within the bonds of time that man builds the cathedral of Chartres, paints the Sistine Chapel and plays the seven-string zither—which inspired William Blake’s luminous intuition: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  Putting together the disparate essays of this book entailed some delicate editing, which Chris Feik effected (once again!) with tact and skill. All my gratitude goes to him.

  S.L.

  PUBLICATION DETAILS

  QUIXOTISM

  “The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote” first appeared in The New York Review of Books (11 June 1998); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “An Empire of Ugliness” first appeared in the Australian Review of Books (March 1997); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “Lies That Tell the Truth” was published in the Monthly (November 2007).

  LITERATURE

  “The Prince de Ligne, or the Eighteenth Century Incarnate” first appeared as the preface to Sophie Deroisin, Le Prince de Ligne (Brussels: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Française de Belgique/Le Cri, 2006); it has been translated from the French for the present volume by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

  “Balzac” first appeared in the New York Review of Books (12 January 1995); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “Victor Hugo” first appeared in the New York Review of Books (17 December 1998); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “Victor Segalen Revisited Through His Complete Correspondence” was originally published as “Victor Segalen revu à travers sa correspondance complète” in Le Figaro littéraire (3 February 2005); it has been translated from the French for the present volume by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

  “Chesterton: The Poet Who Dances with a Hundred Legs” is the text of a lecture delivered to the Chesterton Society of Western Australia, Perth, September 1997.

  An abridged version of “Portrait of Proteus: A Little ABC of André Gide” was published in Best Australian Essays 2000 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000).

  “Malraux” first appeared in the New York Review of Books (29 May 1997); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “The Intimate Orwell” first appeared in the New York Review of Books (26 May 2011).

  “Terror of Babel: Evelyn Waugh” first appeared in the Independent Monthly (March 1993); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “The Truth of Simenon” is the text of a speech delivered to Académie Royale de Littérature Française of Belgium on the occasion of Leys’s election to the Chair of Georges Simenon (1992); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney
: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “The Belgianness of Henri Michaux” first appeared as “Belgitude de Michaux” in Le Magazine littéraire (January 2007); it has been translated from the French for the present volume by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

  “The Sins of the Son” first appeared in the Monthly (February 2010).

  “Cunning Like a Hedgehog” first appeared in the Australian Literary Review (1 August 2007).

  “The Experience of Literary Translation” has been adapted by the author from “L’Expérience de la traduction litteraire,” published in L’Ange et le cachalot (Editions du Seuil, 1998), translated by Dan Gunn. It was published in Notes from the Hall of Uselessness (Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2008) and in Best Australian Essays 2009 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009).

  “On Readers’ Rewards and Writers’ Awards” is the text of an address to the 2002 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

  “Writers and Money” first appeared in the Bulletin (17 December–24 January 2003).

  “Overtures” first appeared in the Australian Review of Books (May 1999).

  CHINA

  “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past” is the text of the Morrison Lecture at the Australian National University (1986); it was first published in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “One More Art: Chinese Calligraphy” first appeared in the New York Review of Books (18 April 1996); it was reprinted in The Angel & the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

  “An Introduction to Confucius” first appeared in Simon Leys’s translation of The Analects of Confucius (New York: Norton, 1997).