The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters—a genius of immense authority—had invited Waugh...

 In everyday life, Waugh was constantly casting acquaintances and friends into fantastic roles, and generally turning the people he met into characters in a private charade; often he would use this myth-making talent to hilarious effect. A good illustration is provided, for instance, by his visit to the great poet Paul Claudel. The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters—a genius of immense authority—had invited Waugh and Christopher Sykes to have lunch in his Paris apartment. This is how Waugh related the meeting in his diary:

The old man was deaf and dumb. All his family—wife, sons and daughters-in-law—sat round the table. He greeted me by putting into my hands a newly printed édition de luxe of some   verses of his. A present? I began to thank him. He took it away and put it on a table. I had the impression it was to be my prize if I behaved well. Lively conversation mostly in English. Every now and then the old man’s lips were seen to move and there would be a cry: “Papa is speaking!” and a hush broken only by unintelligible animal noises. Some of these were addressed to me, and I thought he said: “How would you put into English potage de midi?” I replied: “Soup at luncheon.” It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi. His tortoise eyes glistened with hostility. After luncheon there was a great deal of fuss among the womenfolk as to whether or not Papa was to have cognac. He got it, brightened a little, called for an album and made me sit by him, as his arthritic fingers turned the pages . . . Anything that caught his fancy had been pasted [in the album]. Some were humorous, some not. There was a group of the Goebbels family. “That’s funny,” I said, feeling on safe ground. “I think it very sad,” he mumbled . . . When we left, he came to the drawing room door and laid his hand on the édition de luxe, gave me another look of reptilian hate, and left it on its table. Next day, he told a daughter-in-law that both Christopher [Sykes] and I were “très gentlemen.”

Christopher Sykes, however, gave a completely different account. Not only had Claudel been perfectly hospitable, genial and lively, but virtually none of the grotesque incidents mentioned in Waugh’s narrative did actually take place. In particular, Waugh’s horrible gaffe was pure fiction. One would have guessed as much: it is very difficult to believe that Waugh, who admired Claudel, would not have known even the title of one of his masterpieces: “It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi . . .” It transpired indeed! (One is reminded of Philip Larkin’s tranquil impudence: “Deep down, I think foreign languages irrelevant.”) Shortly after the encounter with Claudel, Sykes was astonished to hear Waugh describing for the first time this fictitious incident to a common friend; he stuck to his invention after that, as he obviously had come to believe it sincerely. Perhaps it was not simply one more instance of the novelist’s instinct   at work; more exactly, “the novelist’s instinct” was itself an expression of a deeper defence against the threats which reality was directing at his self-esteem: from Sykes’ testimony, we know that, immediately before the visit, Waugh was virtually paralysed with nervousness—a most uncharacteristic and humiliating condition for a man whose powerful personality usually inspired fear in all those who approached him. (On their way to Claudel’s apartment, Waugh insisted that they first stop in a church to pray for success; and then during the entire visit, he feigned total ignorance of the French language, for fear of making mistakes and bringing ridicule upon himself.) Obviously, meeting Claudel had momentous meaning for him, and he was desperately eager to make a favourable impression on the grand old man. Yet, things did not work out the way he would have wished; as Sykes observed, “he somehow detected that Claudel, for all his geniality, did not like him.” In Waugh’s version, however, the mot de la fin was provided by Claudel commenting the next day to his daughter-in-law: “Waugh is très gentleman.” Actually this is probably a clue for the deep wound which may have triggered the entire fiction: according to Sykes, Claudel’s impression was precisely the opposite: “Later, Claudel told a friend of mine that he had been very interested to meet Evelyn Waugh, ‘Mais,’ he added, ‘il lui manque l’allure du vrai gentleman’ (‘he does not look like a real gentleman’)!”

Similar examples of bizarre incidents abound in Waugh’s life and make his biography remarkably colourful. (Stannard’s work, which is masterful and seems definitive, should not make us neglect the earlier study by Sykes, with its wealth of anecdotes; and more recently, in his autobiography, Auberon Waugh has produced a portrait of his father which, in its utterly unsentimental truthfulness, is deeply affecting.[  1]) There was, however, a dark side to his imaginative power: he had suffered from recurrent bouts of persecution mania since his early twenties, and after his first wife’s traumatic desertion he exhibited symptoms of schizophrenia. In late middle age, his most frightening slide into hallucinations and lunacy was faithfully chronicled in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Eventually this latter breakdown was diagnosed as having resulted from a progressive poisoning induced by his protracted abuse of strong sleeping drugs; yet it is interesting to note that at first he consulted a priest, as he wondered if he was not possessed by the Devil. (Some twenty-five years earlier, when Belloc first met the brilliant young novelist, Waugh’s future mother-in-law asked the old sage’s opinion of Waugh, and Belloc made the startling reply: “He has a devil in him.”)

While in the army during the war he had been forced to submit to a psychological examination, because of his erratic and impossible behaviour: “The doctor appears to have been told that Waugh was a drunkard and tried to impute to him (with some good reason) unhappiness and frustration through adolescence. Waugh suffered ninety minutes of this and managed at last to turn the tables: ‘You have been asking me a great many questions. Do you mind if I now ask you one?’ The psychiatrist offered no objection. ‘Why then,’ Waugh asked, ‘have you not questioned me about the most important thing in a man’s life—his religion?’”

There is no doubt that religion was indeed the most important thing in Waugh’s life. Any biographer who failed to recognise this would be wasting their time—and ours. Such a reproach was directed at Stannard by one critic, but seems to me unwarranted. Stannard not only provides a wealth of inspiring quotes from Waugh’s writings, but has also unearthed impressive evidence of charitable deeds which Waugh secretly performed as a form of spiritual cultivation, and which bear eloquent testimony to the absolute seriousness of his commitment. If he sometimes brought to the everyday practice of his Catholic faith some of the eccentricity which also characterised most other aspects of his life (for instance, as an acquaintance recalled, during Lent, when having lunch in a restaurant, he would produce miniature scales at the table to weigh out precisely the quantities of allowable food!), his faith was not a matter for posturing; it cost him too dearly, in every respect, for its sincerity to be questioned. In his remarkable correspondence, whenever the subject of religion is being discussed, he relinquishes his usual whimsicality and writes with simplicity, depth, gravity and a most touching sense of urgency. For all his gluttony and drunkenness, his passionate attachment to all things of beauty, his selfishness, his impatience, his unkindness and anger (a close friend once asked how he could reconcile his generally beastly behaviour and his Christianity; Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being”), what he derived from his Catholicism was a fundamental ability not to take this world too seriously. Stannard shows a sound grasp of this central issue in his choice of a subtitle for the second and final volume of his biographical study, No Abiding City—a reference to St. Paul (Hebrews XIII, 14): non enim habemus hic manentem civitatem, sed futuram inquirimus (“For we have here no abiding city, but we seek one that is to come”), which Waugh was particularly fond of quoting. Chesterton had already observed: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time,” but for Waugh, the Church not only secured liberation from the world, it also provided a force and an inspiration to go against the world—contra mundum.

From THE HALL OF USELESSNESS

Simon Leys

Man’s estrangement from the mythical realm and the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual—that is the major cause of mental illness

he was interviewed by an American journalist, who asked him a very American question: “Are you receiving any therapy or counselling?” Grant replied, “No. In England, we read novels.”

Half a century earlier, the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung developed the other side of this same observation. He phrased it in more technical terms: “Man’s estrangement from the mythical realm and the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual—that is the major cause of mental illness.” In other words, people who do not read fiction or poetry are in permanent danger of crashing against facts and being crushed by reality. And then, in turn, it is left to Dr. Jung and his colleagues to rush to the rescue and attempt to mend the broken pieces.

Do psychotherapists multiply when novelists and poets become scarce? There may well be a connection between the development of clinical psychology on the one hand and the withering of the inspired imagination on the other—at least, this was the belief of some eminent practitioners. Rainer Maria Rilke once begged Lou Andreas-Salomé to psychoanalyse him. She refused; she explained to him, “If the analysis is successful, you may never write poetry again.” (And just imagine: had a skilful shrink cured Kafka of his existential anxieties, our age—and modern man’s condition—could have been deprived of its most perceptive interpreter.)

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

Leys - Translations which are superior to their originals

I believe it was Gide who remarked of a writer he did not care for, “He is much improved by translation.” This happy gibe raises the curious issue of translators who improve on their originals. Examples abound here. Gabriel García Márquez has said that Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is much superior to its original Spanish version. I have spoken above of Lin Shu; not only does La Dame aux camélias gain from being read in Chinese, but—if Arthur Waley is to be believed—the same might be said of Dickens’s novels. But the most noteworthy case is probably that of Baudelaire as translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Anglo-Saxon connoisseurs who read French are practically unanimous in preferring Baudelaire’s translations to Poe’s originals, generally judging Poe to be “boring, vulgar and lacking a good ear”; while the way in which, following Baudelaire, great French poets such as Mallarmé, Claudel and Valéry could worship him and take seriously his indigestible mishmash of pseudoscience and metaphysical fantasy remains for English and American critics a source of infinite perplexity. The fact is that it is often mediocre writers who lend themselves best to the glorious misunderstandings of translation and exportation, whereas writers of genius resist the efforts of translators. Du Fu, the greatest and most perfect of all the Chinese classic poets, becomes grey and arid in translation, whereas his contemporary Hanshan, whose work is flat and vulgar and was, quite rightly, largely ignored in China, enjoyed a huge success in colourful poetic reincarnations in Japan, in America and in France . . . Translation may serve as a perverse screen serving to occlude instances of true beauty, while conferring a sudden freshness upon worn-out clichés. The poetry of Mao Zedong, for example, owed its fortune not only to the pounding of propaganda and the political myths of a certain era, but also to the fact that it clearly belongs to that category of works which are “improved by translation,” the translation succeeding in concealing their original vulgarity. In that ferociously funny novel Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell says of one of his characters: “He would not like German half so well if he should learn it. There is no such happiness as not to know an idiom from a masterstroke.”

And in The Catcher in the Rye the young hero completely muddles up the meaning of a line of Robert Burns (which gives Salinger the title of his novel): this marvellous mistake becoming the source for him of a much purer and deeper poetic delight than would have been drawn from a correct reading of the poem in question . . . A “homage to the mistake” remains to be written.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

Simenon

At the peak of his career, Simenon was living in a pseudo-castle which he designed himself—a mixture of palace, factory, health resort and fortress where he was waited on by an army of secretaries, butlers, chauffeurs, cooks and gardeners. Whereas Simenon’s novels resemble life, his life increasingly resembled a novel—one of those cheap romances which, in his early years, he would sign with phony aristocratic pseudonyms such as Jean du Perry or Germain d’Antibes, and entitle suggestively Voluptuous Embraces, Frivolous Perversities or Alone Among Gorillas.
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The strength of Simenon is to achieve unforgettable effects by ordinary means. His language is poor and bare (like the language of the unconscious), making him the most translatable of all writers: his writing loses nothing by being turned into Eskimo or Japanese. It would be difficult to make an anthology of his best pages: he does not have best pages, he only has better novels, in which everything hangs together without a single seam.

“One always writes too much,” Chardonne used to say. Had he published ten times less, Simenon would have enjoyed a literary position a hundred times more important. Detective stories (an utterly boring genre, by its very definition)—which, actually, he himself did not take very seriously and produced industrially as a form of relaxation from his authentic literary creation—ensured his wealth and popularity; yet, at the same time for millions of readers they obscured his true genius, which he invested nearly exclusively in what he called his “tough novels” (romans durs). The latter exacted from him such an intense, nervous effort that sometimes, before starting to write, he would suffer fits of vomiting. Each time, he had to assume imaginatively the persona of his main protagonist—to become him—and then to see with the mind’s eye the world his pen was conjuring as it followed an inner dictation. This psychic metamorphosis is common to all “visionary” writers—Julien Green (once more!) described it well in various passages of his Journal. This phenomenon reached such an intensity that there were times when it scared Simenon, times when he felt drawn towards an uncertain border where his very sanity might founder.

The mental tension required by this type of writing cannot be sustained long, as it tolerated no interruption and no relaxation; the first draft of Simenon’s novels was generally completed in eight or ten days. His masterpieces are therefore always brief: written in one breath, and designed to be read at one sitting.

The first draft was nearly a definitive version—subsequent corrections concerned only details. Simenon’s original manuscripts are amazingly neat; in their swift tidiness they remind us of Mozart’s autographic musical scores. To bring these two names together here may appear incongruous—and it is, in every respect, except one which is essential: the workings of the creative mind. For both artists, the starting point was of crucial importance: a musical phrase, an initial vision, was given them; this first phrase once being set, the rest followed quickly, in one impetus, without hesitation, in a continuous flow—what Mozart called il filo. The speed of this process, its triumphant decisiveness, self-confidence and certainty can make shallow observers speak of “facility”; this is a very misleading impression, as, in order to sustain the rhythm of the inner dictation without breaking its thread, the artist must mobilise powers of concentration that are nearly superhuman.

This type of creation, however, confronts us with an enigma (which Shaffer grasped well in his Amadeus—musicologists and historians who criticised him missed the point): the created work possesses a splendour and a depth that far exceed the calibre of its creator. The work is not only greater than its author, it is different in nature: it comes from somewhere else. The author shocks those who admire his work; in contrast with it, he seems vacuous. And yet—was it not precisely this very emptiness that enabled him to provide a free channel for his works to be born?
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Why should anyone work so hard to portray a Simenon who, in the end, looks like anybody else? The only Simenon who interests us resembles nobody, and this is what enabled him to write Letter to My Judge, Widow Couderc, The Escapee, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, and so many other novels where, strangely, again and again, we return to draw the courage to contemplate our own misery without flinching. The truth that inhabited Simenon lies in his works, and there only. Whoever still insists to look elsewhere for it ought to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s lines:

By this, and only this, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries,
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider,
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

This divorce between the writer and his writing

Samuel Johnson said: “Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” I am not sure if this sort of experience would have been of much use to Simenon’s biographer—or to any other great writer’s, for that matter. Isaac Bashevis Singer once observed (forgive this abundance of quotations, it is not pedantry—simply, the fact is that, for the last fifteen years, I have been frequenting books more than people; furthermore, why should we attempt clumsily to reinvent what good writers have better said before us?) that, even if Tolstoy were living next door, instead of paying him a visit, he would rather stay home and read Anna Karenina again. This is elementary wisdom. The encounter of geniuses is not always an occasion for sublime exchanges. The only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust is a good example: these two giants of modern literature once shared a taxi, but they spent the entire time arguing whether to open or shut the window. (This anecdote must be true, since it was invented by Nabokov.)

People are often surprised when they realise that, in life, great writers do not bear much resemblance to the image they had formed of them while reading their works. For instance, with naïve astonishment they may discover that a fierce polemicist, whose fire and violence had filled them with awe, actually is a quiet, shy and retiring man; or again, the orgiastic prophet of burning passion, who had stirred their sensual imagination, proves in fact to be a eunuch; or the famous adventurer, who set their minds dreaming of exotic horizons, wears slippers and never leaves his cosy fireside; or the aesthete from whose exquisite visions they drew so much inspiration eats from plastic plates and wears hideous neckties. They should have known better. Quite frequently, an artist creates in order to compensate for a deficiency; his creation is not the joyous and exuberant outpouring of an overflow—it is more often a pathetic attempt to answer a want, to bridge a gap, to hide a wound.

Hilaire Belloc admirably described this divorce between the writer and his writing:

I never knew a man yet who was consonant to his work. Either he was clearly much greater and better than his work, or clearly much less and worse . . . In point of fact it is not the mere man who does the thing: it is the man inspired. And the reason we are shocked by the vanity of artists is that, more or less consciously, we consider the contrast between what God has done through them, and their own disgusting selves.  Whe the work is of genius, he is far below it: he is on a different plane. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent him from outside.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

Balzac

The brutalities of boarding school can routinely maim sensitive children for life; occasionally they may also breed a genius. Numbed by sorrow and fear, the child Balzac fell into a stupor; his teachers, unable to draw any intelligent response out of their lethargic pupil, bombarded him with punishments. Detention meant being locked for hours or even days on end in a tiny cell, and the little boy ended up spending up to four days a week in the solitary gloom of the school prison. To escape from this desolation, mere dreaming was not enough: he had to invent for himself another world, more real than this unbearable environment. Relying on his memory, he began to recreate in his mind scenes he had read about in books; he developed a visionary imagination that enabled him to conjure entire worlds, with near-hallucinatory power.

Later in life, he explained: “Whenever I like, I draw a veil over my eyes. Suddenly I go back into myself, and there I find a dark room in which all the accidents of Nature reproduce themselves in a form far purer than the form in which they appeared to my outer senses.” He had learned to cultivate visions which fed not on fantasy but on truth, the truth of his own memory and observation, which he could summon up and modify at will. Balzac would constantly resort to these “wilful hallucinations,” not only to find material for his books but also as a refuge against unhappiness, or as an emergency escape whenever he found himself cornered by reality.

Of course, when the frontier between the mind’s vision and reality becomes blurred, one may reach the edge of madness, but Balzac believed that this danger could be overcome if the vision was transformed into knowledge through the mediation of writing. His faith in the power of the written word to become objective truth was repeatedly confirmed by eerie experiences: his fiction contained startling premonitions. At times, events unfolded in his life as if they had already been mapped out in his writing; the printed word was producing reality instead of reflecting it. In his case, as Robb puts it, “The experience came after the writing.”

There was a complete inversion of roles between invention and reality, which culminated on his deathbed when he deliriously called for Dr. Bianchon, the fictional doctor of La Comédie humaine, who alone, he believed, would be able to save him. (The anecdote may be mythical but myths can hint at a deeper truth.)
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As Baudelaire described it:

Nobody could ever possibly imagine how clumsy, silly and STUPID that great man was in his youth. And yet he managed to acquire, to get for himself so to speak, not only grandiose ideas but also a vast amount of wit. But then he NEVER stopped working.

Finally, when he was thirty-one, he had a breakthrough with his first accomplished work, La Peau de chagrin, which was also an immediate commercial success. For the next twenty years—until he died, in fact—his great creations were to follow at a breathtaking pace (though even in his purest masterpieces, he never entirely succeeded in pruning his style of its original clumsiness). Literary success, however, proved to be a curse: in order to create, he virtually renounced living—it was as if, to inject life into La Comédie humaine, he had to die. Quite literally, his writing killed him.

At first, writing was for him a sort of asceticism. A passage in La Muse du département could be read as a manifesto for his method:

There is no great talent without great willpower. These twin forces are needed to build the huge monument of an individual glory. Superior men keep their brains in a productive state, just as the knights of old kept their weapons in perfect condition. They conquer laziness, they deny themselves all debilitating pleasures . . . Willpower can and should be a just cause for pride, much more than talent. Whereas talent develops from the cultivation of a gift, willpower is a victory constantly won again over instincts, over inclinations that must be disciplined and repressed, over whims and all kinds of obstacles, over difficulties heroically surmounted.

Soon, however, the discipline turned into an all-consuming obsession. Although he wore a monk’s robe when writing, his frantic work had little in common with the quiet and regular pace of cloister life: it became an addiction, an orgy in reverse. At times he only slept two hours a night. He ate no solid food, fearing that digestion might slow down his mind, and sustained himself only with gallons of strong coffee. On finishing a novel, he would collapse, sleep continuously for some twenty hours, and then gorge himself like a camel arriving at an oasis. He had originally a powerful constitution, but with such a regimen he already began to have alarming symptoms of physical decay in his late thirties; since he never eased the pace of his demented activity his health continued to deteriorate. He turned into a premature invalid, and died at fifty-one.
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Balzac was widely thought to be afflicted with acute financial ineptitude, but Robb shows that the reality was much more complex: “The schemes he came up with can be divided into two categories: practical ideas, which he never seriously thought of putting into practice, and impractical ones, which he did.” In pursuing the impractical schemes he ensured his own ruin; but he allotted the practical ones to some of his characters, thus making plausible their fabulous fortunes. Robb writes:

Certainly a contemporary reader using La Comédie humaine as an investment guide would probably have made a handsome profit . . . Balzac steered his banker, Baron Nucingen, and the money-lender Magus to undreamt-of wealth by having them invest, for example, in the Orléans Railway, while he lost his own money on the Northern Railway.

There is no escaping the radical difference between the capacity for conception and that for execution: imagination and action are often at opposite poles. That is why novelists usually do not become millionaires, whereas millionaires do not even read novels. Serious people involved in weighty affairs have no time for the puerile games of artistic creation. A man who is entirely “adult” and totally healthy (the latter state, as Sterne warned us, is a most abnormal condition, one that should warrant constant caution) would certainly never contemplate playing the flute all day long, or telling idle tales, or acting and singing on a stage, or playing with clay, paints and brushes. “Genius,” Baudelaire said, “is childhood recalled at will.”
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Balzac presents one of the purest examples of the creative genius: “pure” in the sense that he was largely free of extraneous virtues. What enables great artists and writers to create is not intelligence (theirs can sometimes be average, or even mediocre: Balzac, for instance, often had ideas of startling absurdity; not only was he lacking in elementary common sense, but at times he verged on insanity). It is not sensitivity (many people can “feel” with utter intensity without being necessarily able to express themselves). It is not a matter of education and taste (in the decor of his lodgings, Balzac displayed the aesthetic sense of a prosperous Caribbean pimp). The real source of all creation (as Baudelaire again pointed out) is imagination. Balzac’s fiction originally sprang from an intuition he first discovered as a wretched little schoolboy locked in a dark closet at his boarding school—an intuition to which he remained faithful until death, and which enabled him to enlarge immeasurably the world of countless readers: life is a prison, and only imagination can open its windows.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows

Arthur Waley said that he preferred to read Dickens in Chinese translation (Dickens’s first Chinese translator was indeed an exquisite writer). I wonder if Balzac does not also belong to the category of writers who actually benefit from being translated. I suspect that his visionary imagination would remain unaffected by the transposition into another language, whereas it would be relatively easy for tactful translators to soften the jarring notes and straighten the blunders that, in the original, frequently jolt the reader or threaten, at the most dramatic moments, to set off anticlimactic laughter.
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In our own time, two comments that summarise, with cruel wit, the critical ambivalence that still persists towards Hugo would fit Balzac much better. On being asked who was the greatest French poet, André Gide replied: “Victor Hugo—alas!” And Jean Cocteau added: “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo.” Both in greatness and in lunacy, Balzac certainly scaled heights that were at least as spectacular.
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In Balzac’s novels, Baudelaire observed, even doorkeepers have genius, and Oscar Wilde added:

A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent, fiery coloured existence. They dominate us and defy scepticism . . . Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.
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In his hugely entertaining new biography of Balzac (certainly the best of all those I have read), Graham Robb does not directly address the central paradox of Balzac’s prodigious achievement: How was it possible that the greatest monument of European fiction was built by a man singularly devoid of literary taste?
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Balzac’s first mistress, who considerably contributed to the refinement of his sensibility, was a few years older than his mother, and subsequently all the women who mattered in his life were, to some extent, substitute mothers. In an early letter, he wrote: “I have only two passions: love and glory”—and the purpose of the latter was to secure the former. He confessed that the primary motivation of his writing was to win the love of women, and in this he succeeded remarkably well: after his death, more than 10,000 letters from female admirers were found among his papers.

Countess Hanska was to become his last and greatest love—greatest, because it was essentially imaginary and literary, and was conducted for sixteen years mostly by correspondence. When they finally succeeded in getting back together and marrying, Balzac was a dying man. She had first entered Balzac’s life as an anonymous correspondent; her passion was originally aroused simply by reading his novels in the backwoods of the Ukraine.

The seduction exerted by the great novelist’s prose was so powerful that it could work even by proxy: it was once rumoured that “several men had obtained the favours of respectable women at the Opera ball by pretending to be Balzac.” This might have seemed fairly easy, since he was short and fat, with common and vulgar looks, like a Daumier shopkeeper or butcher. But it would also have been difficult: his enormous head, beautiful and blazing eyes, generous laughter and boisterous spirits set him apart from the crowd. Perhaps Rodin caught best his paradoxical appearance: a sort of gigantic dwarf, a coiled-up spring of pure energy. By a cruel contradiction, however, if he wrote novels to win women, he also had to forsake women in order to write novels: he firmly believed that every man had at birth a finite store of vital fluid and that the secret of creative life was to hoard one’s energy. Sperm was for him an emission of pure cerebral substance—once, having spent the night with an enchanting creature, he turned up at the house of a friend, crying: “I just lost a book!”

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge

The radio that had been blaring in a corner all morning could not bother me either: pop songs, stockmarket figures, muzak, horseracing reports, more pop songs, a lecture on foot-and-mouth disease in cows—whatever: this audio-pap kept dripping like lukewarm water from a leaky faucet and nobody was listening anyway.

Suddenly a miracle occurred. For a reason that will forever remain mysterious, this vulgar broadcasting routine gave way without transition (or, if there had been one, it escaped my attention) to the most sublime music: the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet began to flow and with serene authority filled the entire space of the café, turning it at once into an antechamber of Paradise. But the other patrons who had been chatting, drinking, playing cards or reading newspapers were not deaf after all: this magical irruption of a voice from heaven provoked a general start among them—all faces turned round, frowning with puzzled concern. Yet, in a matter of seconds, to the huge relief of all, one customer resolutely stood up, walked straight to the radio, turned the tuning knob and cut off this disquieting intermède, switched to another station and restored at once the more congenial noises, which everyone could again comfortably ignore.

At that moment the realisation hit me—and has never left me since: true Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness.

Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule. In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity. If this is true in the realm of aesthetics, it is even more true in the world of ethics. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

Our culture has drifted away from its spiritual roots

The word “quixotic”—as I indicated at the very beginning—has entered the common language, with the meaning “hopelessly naïve and idealistic,” “ridiculously impractical,” “doomed to fail.” That this epithet can be used now in an exclusively pejorative sense not only shows that we have ceased to read Cervantes and to understand his character, but more fundamentally it reveals that our culture has drifted away from its spiritual roots.
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In this very connection, Unamuno remarked that John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola did not reject rationality, nor did they distrust scientific knowledge; what led them to their mysticism was simply the perception of “an intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality.”

In his quest for immortal fame, Don Quixote suffered repeated defeats. Because he obstinately refused to adjust “the hugeness of his desire” to “the smallness of reality,” he was doomed to perpetual failure. Only a culture based upon “a religion of losers” could produce such a hero.

What we should remember, however, is this (if I may thus paraphrase Bernard Shaw): The successful man adapts himself to the world. The loser persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the loser.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

To match the image created by the expectations

The occupation Don Quixote chooses for himself is that of knight errant. He is not under the delusion that he is a knight errant—no, he sets his mind on becoming one. He does not play at being someone else, as children do in their games; he is not pretending to be someone else, like an impostor, or impersonating a character, like an actor on stage. And he adopts the profession of knight after due reflection: it is the result of a deliberate choice. After having considered other options, he finally decides that the career of a knight errant would be the most rewarding, intellectually and morally.

But “How does one become a knight?” Van Doren asks. By acting like a knight—which is the very opposite of pretence, of make-believe. And to act the way Don Quixote does is more than to ape. To imitate as he does is a profound apprenticeship—the true way of learning and the key to understanding. “What is the difference between acting like a great man and being one? To act like a poet is to write poems; to act like a statesman is to ponder the nature of goodness and justice; to act like a student is to study; to act like a knight is to think and feel like one.”

Had Don Quixote been simply and plainly mad, or had he indulged in a protracted game of self-deception and play-acting, we should not be talking of him now, Van Doren observes—“We are talking of him because we suspect that, in the end, he did become a knight.”

“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.” Iris Murdoch made this observation in a different context, but it accurately identifies a defining feature of human nature. It was most memorably exemplified by Don Quixote—which gave Cervantes’s novel its universal relevance.

Unlike Don Quixote, however, most of us do not have the chance to select and decide for ourselves which characters we should apply ourselves to becoming.
Circumstances of life do the casting; our roles are being imposed on us, other people dictate to us our lines and prompt our acting. A haunting illustration of this was provided in one of Rossellini’s last films, General della Rovere (1959). A petty crook in Italy at the end of World War II is arrested by the Gestapo and forced by them to impersonate a prestigious figure of the Resistance, General della Rovere, so that they can extract information from political prisoners. But the con man performs his role so convincingly that the other prisoners come to worship him as their moral leader; thus he is progressively compelled to live above himself and to match the image created by their expectations. In the end, he refuses to betray their trust, he is put in front of a firing squad and dies the death of a hero. He has truly become General della Rovere.

*
To man’s basic interrogation—Why is it that God never speaks to us openly or answers us directly with a clear voice? Why are we never allowed to see his face?—C.S. Lewis gave a striking answer: How can God meet us face to face, till we have faces?

When we first enter upon the stage of life, it is as if we were only given masks that correspond to our respective roles. If we act our part well enough, the mask eventually turns into our true face. Thus Don Quixote becomes a knight, Rossellini’s petty crook becomes General della Rovere—and each of us, we can become at last who we were originally meant to be.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

He created everything and yet is nowhere to be seen

Montherlant, one of the most remarkable French writers of our century (a novelist, playwright and essayist), was deeply imbued with Spanish culture. He spent much time in Spain (he even learned and practised bullfighting); his fluent knowledge of Spanish enabled him to read Don Quixote in the original text.

He re-read the book four times during his life, and he too experienced an increasing irritation at Cervantes’s coarse treatment of a sublime character. Besides, he felt that the book was much too long and that it contained too many tasteless and cruel jokes. But this objection could be turned against itself—is this not precisely a perfect definition of life itself? Come to think of it: a story that drags on much too long and is full of tasteless and cruel jokes . . . Note that the worst accusations that can be directed against Cervantes always point in the end to the unique and disquieting power of his book to conjure reality.

Finally, what irked Montherlant most—what he could not forgive Cervantes for—was that, through the entire book, not once does the author express one word of compassion for his hero, or one word of blame for the vulgar bullies who relentlessly mock and persecute him. This reaction—very similar to that of Nabokov—once again reflects a paradox, now familiar to us. What infuriates the critics of Cervantes is precisely the main strength of his art: the secret of its lifelikeness. Flaubert (who, by the way, worshipped Don Quixote) said that a great writer should stand in his novel like God in his creation. He created everything and yet is nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard. He is everywhere and yet invisible, silent, seemingly absent and indifferent. We curse him for his silence and his indifference, which we take as evidence of his cruelty.

But if the author were to intervene in his narratives—if, instead of letting facts and actions speak for themselves, he were to speak in his own voice—the spell would be broken at once, we would be suddenly reminded that this is not life, this is not reality—it is merely a tale. When we reproach Cervantes for his lack of compassion, his indifference, his cruelty, for the brutality of his jokes, we forget that the more we hate the author, the more we believe in the reality of his world and his creatures.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

There are no messages in my novels. When I want to send a message, I go to the post office

But this, in turn, raises an interesting question. A little while ago, out of the blue, I inadvertently caught some critical flak for venturing to suggest in a nationally broadcast lecture (among a few other heresies) the notion (quite banal in fact) that creative literature, inasmuch as it is artistically valid, can carry no message. This view is not new, by the way, and should be self-evident. Hemingway, whom I quoted, had expressed it best to a journalist who was questioning him on “the messages” of his novels. He very sensibly replied: “There are no messages in my novels. When I want to send a message, I go to the post office.”

Some critics reacted indignantly to my statement: “What? No messages in the masterpieces of world literature? And what about Dante’s Divine Comedy? What about Milton’s Paradise Lost?” Even more to the point, they could have added: “And what about Cervantes’s Don Quixote?”

Of course, many poets and novelists think that they have messages to communicate, and most of the time they passionately believe in the momentous significance of their messages. But quite frequently these messages are far less important than their authors originally assumed. Sometimes they prove to be actually mistaken, or downright silly or even obnoxious. And often, after a while, they become simply irrelevant, whereas the works themselves, if they have genuine literary merit, acquire a life of their own, revealing their true, long-lasting meaning to later generations; but of this deeper meaning, the author himself was hardly aware. Most of Dante’s most fervent readers today care very little for medieval theology; and virtually none of Don Quixote’s modern admirers have ever read—let alone heard the names of—most of the books of chivalry that Cervantes attacked with such fierce passion.

In fact, it is in this gap between the author’s conscious intention (which may be merely incidental) and the deeper meaning of his work that the critic can find the only legitimate ground on which to exert his craft. Chesterton put it well, in one of the introductions he wrote to Dickens’s novels:

The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function—that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author’s mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author’s mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

The closer a book comes to being a genuine work of art, a true creation with a life of its own, the less likely it is that the author had full control over and a clear understanding of what he wrote. D.H. Lawrence, who was an exceptionally perceptive critic, summed this up in a statement I have already quoted many times but which one should never tire of invoking: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

This urge “to save the tale from the artist who created it” has proved particularly strong with the critics of Don Quixote. In fact, some of these critics have developed a most peculiar attitude: it is as if the more they come to love Don Quixote, the more they come to resent Cervantes. At first this paradox may seem far-fetched, but there is a logic to it.

Last century, when theatrical troupes went on tour in the country, performing romantic melodramas for unsophisticated village audiences, it often happened that the actor who had impersonated the villain of the play had to be protected after the show, since the local toughs would be waiting for him in order to beat him up, in punishment for all the evil deeds he had just committed so convincingly on stage. Similarly, it is because Don Quixote has become so intensely alive and real for them that some readers cannot forgive Cervantes for subjecting their hero to such a foul and savage treatment.

Or again, you can find another instance of this same phenomenon illustrated in a popular contemporary thriller. In Stephen King’s Misery (I have not read the book; I only saw the film, which is horribly funny), a best-selling author is being held captive by a female fan; distressed and angered by the fictional death of her favourite heroine, this psychopathic reader tortures the hapless author and forces him to rewrite the ending of his novel.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

The Idea of a University

The best description of this sort of experience was given by John Henry Newman. In his classic The Idea of a University, he made an amazingly bold statement: he said that if he had to choose between two types of universities, one in which eminent professors teach students who come to the university only to attend lectures and sit for examinations, and the other where there are no professors, no lectures, no examinations and no degrees, but where the students live together for two or three years, he would choose the second type. He concluded, “How is this to be explained? When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic and observant as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn from one another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought and distinct principles for judging and acting day by day.”

Simon Leys

In springtime the dragon is useless

Traditionally, Chinese scholars, men of letters, artists would give an inspiring name to their residences, hermitages, libraries and studios. Sometimes they did not actually possess residences, hermitages, libraries or studios—not even a roof over their heads—but the existence or non-existence of a material support for a Name never appeared to them a very relevant issue. And I wonder if one of the deepest seductions of Chinese culture is not related to this conjuring power with which it vests the Written Word.
*
For two years I enjoyed there the fraternal hospitality of a former schoolmate, whom I knew from Taiwan—he was an artist (calligrapher and seal-carver) sharing a place with two postgraduate students, a philologist and a historian. We slept on bunks in a single common room. This room was naturally a complete mess—anywhere else it would have resembled a dismal slum, but here all was redeemed by the work of my friend: one superb calligraphy (in seal-script style) hanging on the wall—Wu Yong Tang, “The Hall of Uselessness.” If taken at face value, it had a touch of tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation; in fact, it contained a very cheeky double-meaning. The words (chosen by our philologist companion, who was a fine scholar) alluded to a passage from The Book of Changes, the most ancient, most holy (and most obscure) of all the Chinese classics, which said that “in springtime the dragon is useless.” This, in turn, according to commentaries, meant that in their youth the talents of superior men (promised to a great future) must remain hidden.

Simon Leys

The cardinal problems of biography: to what extent can or should one tell the truth

When I began to write again, I thought that I had better start by trying my hand at biography. I knew that I had neither the creative imagination nor the sharp ear for dialogue which produces good novels; I had long ago given up the hope of becoming a poet. I lacked the historian’s training which I might have obtained if—as I had wished at eighteen—my mother had allowed me to go to Oxford, instead of ‘coming out’. But for many years I had preferred memoirs and letters to any other form of reading, and I hoped that I might perhaps have a certain aptitude for observing and assembling the different parts of a character and a life until they came together into a pattern, giving a man what Virginia Woolf called ‘a kind of shape after his death’.

My first subject I found made to my hand: a life of Leopardi, about whom at that time no study existed in English, except an interesting essay by James Thomson and the scholarly Introduction to the translation of his works by G. L. Bickersteth. Leopardi— apart from being one of the greatest Italian poets—was an almost ideal subject for a biography in the thirties, especially for a generation whose taste had been formed by Strachey and Maurois, by Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf. He was young, deformed, lonely, ambitious and embittered; he lived in an old-fashioned, pious family of the noblesse de province in a little town of the Marches, and violently rebelled both against the rule of his parents and the restrictions of his environment; he was extremely articulate, setting down his loneliness, his grief, his contempt for his fellow citizens, his longings for friendship and love and his literary aspirations, in what eventually turned into five volumes of letters, as well as in the seven volumes of his daybook, Lo Zibaldone. ‘In depicting his despair and total disenchantment’—the phrase is his own—‘he drew the colours from his own heart.’

Moreover he belonged to a closed society into which English travellers have seldom penetrated (his contemporary, Byron, was perhaps the first to do so, but that was through his mistress) and about which they have consequently felt very curious. ‘You must have wondered’, wrote Basil de Selincourt in one of the first reviews of my book, ‘what went on in the huge rooms of the seemingly unoccupied palazzi . . . Here is a book that will put the key of the mystery into your hands.’

It is to these circumstances that I attribute the considerable success—perhaps greater than it deserved—of my first book. Its chief merit, it now seems to me, was the fullness with which I quoted from my subject’s letters and notebooks. For while I read those letters myself—sometimes long-winded and self-pitying, but often unendurably poignant—a man had indeed taken shape for me, whom I came to know better than most of my friends and to whom I wished to offer the only tribute that a biographer can pay to his subject—to tell (in so far as is possible) the truth about him.

This has always been one of the cardinal problems of biography: to what extent can or should one tell the truth—and what, indeed, is the truth about any of us? The second question is the more difficult one to answer. ‘The world will never know my life’, said Carlyle (and the words stand on the first page of his Life by his closest friend, Froude) ‘even if it should write and read a hundred biographies of me. The main facts of it are known, and are likely to be known, to myself alone, of all created men.’ Not only are there facts that we do not tell, but some that we ourselves do not know; at best, some small facet of the truth occasionally catches the light, and it is that which the biographer must try to seize. ‘For there is’, as Virginia Woolf remarked, ‘a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.’1

1.Granite and Rainbow, p. 149: ‘The New Biography’.

Iris Origo
Images and Shadows

On Orwell:

Some years earlier he had made an unfortunate and unwelcome pass at another woman. This episode is documented by the editor with embarrassing precision—at which point readers might remember Orwell’s hostility to the very concept of biography (“every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats too humiliating and disgraceful to contemplate”). Do biographers, however serious and scrupulous, really need or have the right to explore and disclose such intimate details? Yet we still read them. Is it right for us to do so? These questions are not rhetorical: I honestly do not know the answer.

Simon Leys

Let us admit it, to irritate idiots actually is enjoyable

Waugh exemplifies the primordial importance of style. He infuriated a great many fools in his time, not only because he took a mischievous pleasure in taunting them (let us admit it, to irritate idiots actually is enjoyable), but, more essentially, because he stubbornly held onto a timeless (and therefore untimely) truth. The arbiters of public opinion do not forgive those who openly mock intellectual fashions or transgress political and aesthetic taboos. Social conformity has its dungeons where the irreverent are to be confined behind thick walls of silence until complete oblivion. With Waugh, however, the trouble was that, while alive, his flamboyant and formidable personality could not easily be ignored or dismissed. On his death, the intelligentsia at last breathed a sigh of relief, and, from the grudging homages that were paid to the deceased, one could see that the dour undertakers of the literary establishment had firmly set their minds on burying him for good. Actually, this task proved quite impracticable and Waugh’s wit continued to shine more brightly than ever, however much the stern guardians of political correctness would have wished to turn it off. The fact is, in order to get rid of Waugh, one would probably first have to get rid of the English language.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

Thinking requires space in which to forget, to select, to delate

Memory by itself can only accumulate data, pointlessly and meaninglessly. Remember Jorge Luis Borges’s philosophical parable “Funes the Memorious.” Funes is a young man who, falling on his head from a horse, becomes strangely crippled: his memory hyper-develops, he is deprived of any ability to forget, he remembers everything; his mind becomes a monstrous garbage dump cluttered and clogged with irrelevant data, a gigantic heap of unrelated images and disconnected instants; he cannot evacuate any fragment of past experiences, however trifling. This relentless capacity for absolute and continuous recollection is a curse; it excludes all possibility of thought. For thinking requires space in which to forget, to select, to delete and to isolate what is significant. If you cannot discard any item from the memory store, you cannot abstract and generalise. But without abstraction and generalisation, there can be no thought.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness

How do our minds reach truth

At roughly the same time as Plato in the West, ancient Daoist thinkers in China also expressed their ideas in imaginative form. On the subject that occupies us here—how do our minds reach truth—there is one tale in Lie Zi that seems illuminating and fundamental.

In the time of the Warring States, horses were very important for military reasons. The feudal lords employed the services of experts to find good ones. Best of all was the super-horse (qian-li ma), an animal which could run a thousand miles a day without leaving tracks and without raising dust. Super-horses were most sought after, but they were also very rare and hard to detect. Hence the need for highly specialised experts; most famous among these was a man called Bole. Eventually Bole became too old to pursue his field trips prospecting for super-horses. Thus his employer, the Duke of Qin, asked him if he could recommend another expert to carry on with this task. “Yes,” said Bole, “I have a friend, a pedlar of firewood in the market, who is quite a connoisseur of horses.” Following Bole’s advice, the duke dispatched this man on a mission to find a super-horse. Three months later, the man returned and reported to the duke: “I have found one; it is in such-and-such a place; it’s a brown mare.” The duke sent his people to fetch the animal, which proved to be a black stallion. The duke was not happy and summoned Bole: “That friend of yours—he does not seem to be much of an expert: he could not even get the animal’s sex and colour right!” On hearing this, Bole was amazed:

Fantastic! He is even better than myself, a hundred, a thousand times better than myself! What he perceives is the innermost nature of the animal. He looks for and sees what he needs to see. He ignores what he does not need to see. Not distracted by external appearances, he goes straight to the inner essence. The way he judges horses shows that he should be judge of more important things than horses.

And, needless to say, this particular animal proved to be a super-horse indeed, a horse that could run a thousand miles a day without leaving tracks and without raising dust.

Simon Leys
The Hall  of Uselessness