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

by Leys, Simon

His own name was an inspiring leitmotif for Hugo not only in his writings but, more especially, in his paintings.

  14. “I consider Baudelaire as the greatest poet of the nineteenth century . . . But I do not mean that, if one had to choose the most beautiful poem of the nineteenth century, one should look for it in Baudelaire. I do not believe that among all the Fleurs du mal . . . one could find one poem that equals ‘Booz endormi.’” He follows with two pages of subtle and perceptive analysis of the poem. See “À Propos de Baudelaire,” in Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Pastiches et mélanges, essais et articles (Paris: Pléiade/Gallimard, 1971), pp. 618–20.

  15. “Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth” (All were asleep in Ur and in Jerimadeth). Jerimadeth (the word rhymes with demandait, three lines down) sounds like the biblical name of a place, but in fact there is no such place—it is a phonetic equivalent of “J’ai rime à dait” (I’ve got a rhyme for dait).

  16. In this perspective, one can better appreciate why the Surrealist movement and the practitioners of écriture automatique recognised Hugo as their ancestor. André Breton himself—the Pope of Surrealism—acknowledged it (such generosity was not usual for him): “Hugo is a Surrealist when he isn’t stupid.”

  17. Quoted in Claude Roy, Victor Hugo témoin de son siècle (Paris: Editions J’ai Lu, 1962), pp. 13, 14.

  18. Quoted in Jean-Marc Hovasse, Victor Hugo chez les Belges (Brussels: Le Cri, 1994), p. 27.

  19. Océan, pp. 273, 276, 286.

  20. Adèle Foucher (1803–1868) and Victor Hugo were teenage sweethearts; when they married, he was only twenty and she nineteen; both were virgins and passionately in love. Soon, however, their union did cool down. Adèle had no great interest in poetry and was quite bewildered by the frightful physical frenzy of Victor’s passion. Marriage gave the latter a first revelation of the ecstasies of the flesh, which from then on he was to explore relentlessly with other, more responsive partners. Nevertheless, Adèle dutifully bore him five children; after one early lapse, for the rest of her life she discharged with dignity her role of wife and mother; she became the loyal servant of Hugo’s glory, and until her own death gave him her unstinting support.

  21. Just a few months ago, I was struck to find in an influential Chinese magazine (published in Hong Kong) a dialogue between Jin Yong and Ikeda Daisaku on the subject of Victor Hugo. (Jin Yong—pen name of Cha Liang-yong [Louis Cha]—is a prolific, talented and hugely successful author of historical novels, who has rightly been called “the Chinese Alexandre Dumas.” The first volume of his most famous series, The Deer and the Cauldron, masterfully translated into English by John Minford, was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press. Ikeda is a religious leader, former president of Soka Gakkai.) Both read Les Misérables when they were adolescents, and they comment on the indelible impression this left upon them. The remarkable impact of Hugo on at least two successive generations of intellectuals and writers in China and Japan is a topic that deserves a special study. (See Jin Yong and Ikeda Daisaku: “Da wenhao Yuguo: yi renxing zhi guang zhaohui shijie,” in Ming Bao monthly, January 1998, pp. 82–8.)

  22. In Brussels alone, within two weeks of the first printing of Volume One, eleven pirated editions came out. See Hovasse, op. cit., p. 98.

  23. Tolstoy worked on War and Peace from 1863 till 1868. Les Misérables, which he read in February 1863 as he was in the decisive gestation stage of his most ambitious project, revealed to him what could be achieved by combining the epic sweep of history with the particular incidents of individual destinies—by mixing fictional characters and historic figures. See Tolstoy’s Diaries, edited and translated by R.F. Christian (London: Flamingo, 1994), pp. 154, 158 and 508.

  24. Hugo’s involvement with China had two aspects: in public affairs, he showed active human concern and denounced vigorously Western imperialist aggressions in China. (To this day, the Chinese remember his generous interventions.) On the cultural side, however, his awareness of China never went beyond the superficial chinoiserie that was in fashion at the time. One can freely speculate on what his response would have been had he ever seen real Chinese paintings—especially the wild splashed-ink improvisations of the monk-painters of the Song, or the works of the great eccentric scholarly painters of the Ming and the Qing—but the fact is that he had no inkling of their existence. Hugo’s chinoiseries, however, have a grotesque exuberance that is mesmerising, humorous and delightfully crazy; during his exile, he designed an entire salon chinois for his mistress—complete with carved wood panelling, carved and painted screens and furniture. This amazing ensemble has been moved to Paris and reconstructed in the Maison de Victor Hugo in the Place des Vosges.

  25. See Journal de Eugène Delacroix, A. Joubin ed. (Paris: Plon, 1950), Vol. 2, p. 88.

  26. See André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), pp. 416–18.

  27. Pushkin was commenting in a letter on the indecent curiosity with which people were trying to obtain information about the private life of Byron. (Quoted in S. Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, op. cit., p. 141.)

  VICTOR SEGALEN REVISITED

  1. English translations are, respectively: A Lapse of Memory, tr. Rosemary Arnoux (Mount Nebo, Queensland: Boombana, 1995); Steles, tr. Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2007); and Paintings, tr. Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson (London: Quartet, 1991).

  2. Les Habits neufs du président Mao: Chronique de la “Révolution culturelle” (Paris: Éditions Champ Libre, Collection Bibliothéque Asia-tique, 1971). English-language translation by Carol Appleyard and Patrick Goode: The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Allison and Busby, 1977, revised 1981).

  3. Victor Segalen, Correspondance, presented by Henri Bouillier, edited by Annie Joly-Segalen, Dominique Lelong and Philippe Postel. 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 2004).

  4. At this university, if we are to believe Marianne Bourgeois’s congenial Monsieur Sié (Paris: La Différence, 2003), the poet’s name continues to be pronounced, Paris-fashion, as “Segalein,” although he himself always insisted on the Breton “Segalène” (see Correspondance 1, p. 1,273).

  5. It was at this time that Segalen paid a visit to Jules Renard, then recently elected to membership of the Académie Goncourt. In a letter to his wife, Segalen announced that he was going to see Renard, but thereafter he made no further mention of it. Renard, for his part, devoted a few lines in his Journal (14 November 1907) to the occasion: “Had a visit from [Segalen], author of Les Immémoriaux. Under thirty, I think. Navy doctor. Has already made his trip around the world. Seems young, sickly, pale, ravaged, too curly-haired, a mouth full of gold presumably brought back from over there along with tuberculosis. Situation middling but adequate. Would like the Prix Goncourt not for the money but in order to write another book.” And that was that. In all likelihood neither ever read a word the other wrote. Indeed it would be hard to picture two writers, two men even, more profoundly dissimilar: life experience, interests, style, aesthetic—not one thing in common. This was a non-meeting of two asteroids each whirling around on its own orbit. Ultimately the only real meeting point would be in the mind of any reader who happened to nourish a like passion for the work of each writer.

  6. Morrison was the London Times’s correspondent in Peking from 1895 to 1912, then an adviser to the President of the Chinese Republic until his death. An éminence grise of the British government’s foreign policy, then of the Chinese government’s foreign policy, he exercised an exceptionally acute and superbly well-informed judgement on Far Eastern matters. (Until the advent of the Communist regime, the main artery of Peking, Wangfujing Street, was known to the foreign community as Morrison Street.)

  7. Its title notwithstanding, the small work Peintures has nothing to do with Chinese painting.

  8. The best French editions are those produced by Sophie Labatut (Paris: Châtelain-Julien, 1999; Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 2000). English-language translation by J.A. U
nderwood: René Leys (Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1988; New York: NYRB, 2003).

  9. He had just given up opium, which he had smoked for twenty-odd years. Although he denied the impact of this, the absence of the drug must surely have worsened his state.

  CHESTERTON

  1. If the Chesterbelloc was in half part a French animal, the French half—paradoxically enough—was not on the Belloc side. Chesterton’s sensibility may have been quintessentially English, but his intellectual attitude was oddly continental (and this in turn may account for the fact that he found some of his most perceptive readers outside the English-speaking world). Contrary to the pragmatic approach which is so characteristic of the English, Chesterton always held that no fruitful practical initiative can ever be taken without first being set within a clear conceptual framework.

  He illustrated this point in a remarkable parable: “Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, ‘Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of light. If the light be in itself good . . .’ At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily.

  “Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and all depends on what is the philosophy of light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.”

  PORTRAIT OF PROTEUS

  1. Charles Du Bos used this passage from Gide’s most ambitious novel as an epigraph to his Dialogue with André Gide (1928), a critical essay which considerably strained the relationship between the two old friends.

  2. Letter of 17 March 1956 to Shirley Abbott.

  3. I found very few errors. Page 235, Maria Van Rysselberghe’s love for Émile Verhaeren was not “unreciprocated” (far from it!) but unconsummated (as Sheridan himself qualifies it accurately further down the same page). Page 574, the name of the film director who adapted La Symphonie pastorale to the screen is not “Jean Delaunay” but Jean Delannoy. Page 619, Roger Martin du Gard did not die “aged sixty-seven” but seventy-seven. Page 432, it is not altogether accurate to state that Martin du Gard’s apprehensions regarding his daughter’s marriage with Marcel de Coppet were unfounded; though, indeed, the couple did produce healthy children and (alcoholism and tuberculosis notwithstanding) Coppet lived a long life, the marriage itself did not last and collapsed in great bitterness. In the index, the names of the Marx Brothers and of Stalin are missing. (In the text, mention of a pleasant evening at the movies, watching A Night at the Opera, could convey the misleading impression that Gide appreciated the genius of the Marx Brothers. This was unfortunately not the case, as is evidenced in other passages of the Cahiers de la petite dame.) Larbaud’s Christian name is not “Valéry” but Valery. Page 20, “classe de premier” should read class de première; page 229, “désbabille” should be déshabillé; page 578, “problèmes actuelles” is a mistake for problèmes actuels; page 663, “André Suarez” is a misspelling of André Suarès. But I am nitpicking here. These errors are all minor, and the very fact that so few of them are to be found in a work of such magnitude gives a measure of Sheridan’s care and reliability.

  4. Gide’s Journal (two volumes) was issued in Pléiade, in two different editions. When I quote from Vol. 1, I refer to the earlier (1949) edition, whereas Vol. 2 refers to the latest (1997) edition. (The two editions do not share the same pagination.)

  5. Sheridan’s bibliography is remarkably comprehensive. Yet a few interesting books have come out since the publication of his work: Jean Schlumberger, Notes sur la vie littéraire, 1902–1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999, abridged hereafter as Schlum.), and also Béatrix Beck, Confidences de Gargouille (Paris: Grasset, 1998), in which one chapter deals with the author’s experiences as Gide’s last secretary (hereafter abbreviated as Beck). Besides, I must also mention the first volume of an important biography, Claude Martin, André Gide, ou La Vocation du bonheur, 1869–1911 (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Vol. 2, 1911–1951, is being prepared. Finally, another Pléiade volume, André Gide, Essais critiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1999); this monumental collection encompasses the near-totality of Gide’s critical endeavour—which may well prove to be his most lasting achievement.

  6. Besides these individual correspondences, there is also a general correspondence, the inventory of which was established by Claude Martin—25,000 letters!

  7. Journal 1, pp. 396–8, entry of 24 January 1914.

  8. Proust’s mother was Jewish—like Montaigne’s. Without mentioning this particular fact, Gide made a perceptive comparison of the two writers in the fine essay he wrote on Proust (originally collected in Incidences, now reproduced in Essais critiques, op. cit., pp. 289–93.)

  9. Maria Van Rysselberghe: Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), hereafter abridged as PD, Vol. 1, p. 99.

  10. PD 2, p. 22.

  11. PD 2, p. 30.

  12. PD 2, p. 146.

  13. PD 2, p. 439.

  14. Beck, p. 91.

  15. PD 3, p. 303. See also art. Devil and note 79, infra.

  16. Pierre Herbart: À la Recherché d’André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), hereafter abridged as Herbart, p. 36.

  17. Blum wrote to Gide in January 1948, expressing his deep friendship, but he confessed that these passages from the Journal did hurt him. (See Journal 2, pp. 1,054, 1,502, note 4.) After Blum’s death in 1950, his widow came to see Gide and told him: “He loved you more than you loved him. Not only were you his best friend, but you were his only friend.” Gide was touched—and somewhat puzzled. (See Schlum., p. 330.)

  18. Sheridan, p. 127.

  19. Journal 1, p. 787 (24 June 1924).

  20. Jean Prévost, Caractères, quoted in PD 4, p. 121.

  21. Quoted by R. Martin du Gard, Notes sur André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), abridged hereafter as Martin, p. 90.

  22. Francois Mauriac, Bloc-notes (Paris: Seuil, 1993), Vol. 3, p. 449, entry of 28 February 1964.

  23. Sheridan, p. 510.

  24. Sheridan, p. 593.

  25. Gide grieved at the death of his wife Madeleine. The Tiny Lady commented: “When Gide says that he never loved anybody more than his wife, I believe him and I am sure that he is telling the truth. But when he pretends that he loved her more than himself, he is wrong—he lies. He was incapable of that—he loved nothing more than himself.” See Schlum., p. 346. On Gide’s selfishness—shocking, spontaneous, absolute—see also Herbart, pp. 49–55.

  26. In old age (he was seventy-three at the time), he once confided to the Tiny Lady that “anger had always been a very rare experience for him—but he found it to be a delightful feeling: a sort of release.” (PD 3, p. 293.)

  27. His oldest and best friend, Roger Martin du Gard, eventually took a dimmer view of the ethical cost of the Gidean attitude. In a letter to his daughter (20 April 1936), Martin issued this earnest warning: “Gide’s example is baneful. His happiness is built upon ruins. His joy is made of other people’s sufferings. I do not condemn him. Yet, though I sometimes envy his happiness, his joy, his freedom, my envy is only superficial; it hits me accidentally, in the weak spot of my own selfishness; at the very bottom, however, I would not wish to be happy in such a way—by trampling upon other people. Gide never felt genuinely
involved with anything; he never committed himself to any form of action; all that counts for him is a temporary mood, the seductiveness of the moment. It is a way of life—it can never be mine. I am not fooled by the false boldness of those who ‘break free.’ It is only a form of attractive sophistry. The limits of freedom are marked by our neighbour’s presence. To breach these boundaries is only a gesture of phoney courage. I have other rules of life—rightly or wrongly—and I am too far into my own journey to change them.” (R. Martin du Gard, Journal [Paris: Gallimard, 1993], Vol. 2, p. 1,177.)

  28. PD 1, p. 31. He said this in 1919—scarcely a year after having experienced the only tragedy of his life. Again, in 1934: “The effort it takes to put myself in a bad mood is quite extraordinary. When I am in front of some serious trouble, sometimes I try very hard to be gloomy but I never succeed.” (PD 2, p. 416.) And finally, in 1949—two years before the end of his long life: “Even though the future inspires me a black and opaque pessimism, which I do not wish to acknowledge, and even though I am now physically diminished, I still find myself incapable of being unhappy.” (PD 4, p. 146.) Even domestic catastrophes could not distress him—for instance, as his rich library was being ruined by a leaking roof during a violent rainstorm (lying sick in bed, he directed the rescue operations, shouting instructions from a distance: “Leave Meredith, save Conrad!”), he pretended to be upset, but could hardly hide his excitement at the event. He said the next day to the Tiny Lady: “Shall I tell you the main result of yesterday’s disaster? I have never worked better.” (PD 3, p. 124; 4, p. 54.)

  29. PD 2, p. 417.

  30. Sheridan, p. 196.

  31. Herbart, p. 54.

  32. Beck, p. 152.

  33. PD 2, p. 40.

  34. Sheridan, p. 587.

  35. Martin, p. 94.

  36. His inability to recognise people’s faces was notorious and often gave rise to embarrassing or ludicrous incidents. See for instance PD 1, p. 196.