Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

In the middle of his journey, Dana went through a crisis of which he gives us only a truncated picture. In California, just before starting the return journey, the captain ordered Dana to move to another ship, one that would remain there for another two years. This instruction plunged Dana into panic and in his desperation he went to extraordinary lengths to secure his early return home. The methods he adopted then did, in fact, alienate him from the other sailors. They were suddenly reminded of what Dana had tried so hard to make them forget: he was not one of them, he belonged to the privileged class.

But why did the prospect of another two years in California provoke such terror in Dana’s mind? The explanations he provided are not very convincing. Such a delay, he said, would virtually have prevented him from resuming his studies at Harvard and therefore would have condemned him to remain a sailor for the rest of his life. This argument does not hold water.

From the testimony of one of his seafaring companions, another young bourgeois from Boston who had enrolled on the same ship, we learn something of Dana’s life ashore. He was sharing a hut with a friendly young Indian woman. It seems our Puritan did enjoy for quite a while the brutish bliss of being simply young, carefree and healthy on a sunny Californian beach: he had discovered the animal innocence of life before the Fall.

However, as soon as the captain’s new instructions managed to turn this happy interlude into a more permanent way of life, Dana became terrified. As in R.L. Stevenson’s disturbing tale, where past a certain point Mr. Hyde can no longer revert to his Dr. Jekyll identity — since the chemistry of his organism had been irretrievably altered — Dana realised that should he pursue his Californian life any longer, he would reach a point of no return. This would indeed condemn him to remain a sailor for the rest of his life; there would be no more possibility to reintegrate his original self.

In a short and illuminating autobiographical sketch he wrote for himself in 1842 (this remarkable page was discovered and published more than a century later), Dana described how, after his return to Boston, he went through a dramatic mystical crisis, at the end of which he received confirmation within the Episcopalian Church. Regarding his Californian experience, he summed it up in only one phrase: “Not a man in my ship was more guilty in God’s sight than myself.”

During the remaining years of his life he numbed himself with a constant overload of work, plunging himself into frenzied activity close to neurosis and repeatedly provoking severe depression, which in turn required prolonged rest. At times, also, he suffered bouts of his old illness: migraines, failing eyesight, fainting fits.

At other times he retained a furious lust for adventure and physical effort in open air; he would go hunting and camping with trappers, whose simple and primitive way of life delighted him, and he amazed them with his exceptional physical resilience.

His need for escape sometimes took other forms: far from Boston, he would take advantage of his travels to explore the lower depths of big cities such as New York and London. In a way somehow similar to George Orwell’s exploration in the next century of the marginal worlds of tramps and hoboes, he would disguise himself in sailor’s clothing and descend into “dark, filthy, violent and degrading regions of saloons and brothels in the harbour districts” or he would spend an evening there chatting with prostitutes.

We know of these episodes only because he wrote them down in private diaries not meant for publication. He was never discovered or identified during these dangerous dives — imagine the scandal that would have resulted — but one wonders to what extent he was not unconsciously looking for such a liberating accident.

Meanwhile, he applied all his energy to discharge with stoic nobility the obligations of a model husband, model father, model parishioner and model citizen. It seems as if the institutions of marriage, family, church and law, as well as his dedication to serving the common good, were so many defences against the “madness of art” that was so obviously his original calling. As for literature, he never wrote anything again.

* See above, p. 141.

*

THE TITLE of my little talk is An Idea of the University . This is, of course, a humble homage to Cardinal Newman’s great book The Idea of a University —a classic work published a little more than 150 years ago, which has lost nothing of its relevance for us today and should remain the basic reference for any reflection on the problems of the university.

This topic is huge — but I shall not be long, for I shall approach it only from the very limited perspective of my own modest personal experience. In doing this, I may repeat things which I have already said or published before. I apologise for this repetitiveness — it cannot be helped, I am afraid: a simple desire to remain truthful to one’s experiences and beliefs is often the enemy of eloquence and novelty.

I have spent all my active life in universities: first, as a student, of course (but, in a sense, every academic always remains a student till his death). For nearly forty years, I have pursued research and carried on teaching in various universities, first in the Far East, then mostly in Australia, with some periods in Europe and in the United States. My career was happy; I have been lucky: all my life, I had the rare opportunity to do work which I loved in congenial and stimulating environments. Only, near the end, deep modifications began to affect the university — I am not talking here of any specifically Australian problems, but of a much more broad and universal malaise. As these transformations were progressively taking the university further away from the model to which I had originally devoted my life, I finally decided to quit — six years before reaching retirement age. Considering the way things have evolved since then, it is a decision that I have never regretted. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I was a deserter. I am not proud of that. Yet today my heart is with the brave people who are starting Campion College and will continue to fight the good fight — and it is to show them my support that I have come here tonight.

Near the end of his life, Gustave Flaubert wrote in one of his remarkable letters to his dear friend Ivan Turgenev a little phrase that could beautifully summarise my topic: “I have always tried to live in an ivory tower; but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.” These are indeed the two poles of our predicament: on one side, the need for an “ivory tower,” and on the other side, the threat of the “tide of shit.”

Let us consider first the ivory tower. C.S. Lewis observed that, to assess the value of anything — be it a cathedral or a corkscrew — one should first know its purpose. Intellectual impostures always require convoluted jargon, whereas fundamental values can normally be defined in clear and simple language. Thus, the commonly accepted definition of the university is fairly straightforward: a university is a place where scholars seek truth, pursue and transmit knowledge for knowledge’s sake — irrespective of the consequences, implications and utility of the endeavour .

In order to function, a university requires basically four things — two of these are absolutely essential and necessary; the other two are important, but not always indispensable.

First, a community of scholars. Sir Zelman Cowen told this anecdote: some years ago in England, a bright and smart politician gave a speech to the dons at Oxford. He addressed them as “employees of the university.” One don immediately stood up and corrected him: “We are not employees of the university, we are the university .” And one could not have put it better: the only employees of the university are the professional managers and administrators — and they do not direct or control the scholars, they are at the service of the scholars.