Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Actually, when he heard the story, the wise and prudent Professor Krokodil felt utterly indignant: Hutudan was really reacting in a most irresponsible manner — even if his complaint was groundless, it could potentially damage the reputation of the university; but if it proved to be true , then the consequences would naturally be far worse. This could obviously not be tolerated. He immediately instructed his most trusted assistant, the dean (whose name I forget), to launch an inquiry into the matter. The dean was a very insignificant man; so insignificant, in fact, that everyone constantly forgot his name — he had to carry it written on a filing card which was attached to the lapel of his coat with a clothes-peg.

As soon as he received his brief, the dean set to work. First, he conducted a long interview with the tea-lady of the faculty, during which they discussed the weather. He faithfully recorded these meteorological considerations. Then, he tore some twenty pages from an outdated telephone directory. Finally, he picked up an old issue of The Timbuctoo Times , destined for use as wrapping paper in a nearby fish-and-chip shop. Back in his office, he stapled together the minutes of his conversation with the tea-lady, the pages torn from the telephone directory, and the fish-and-chip wrapping. He put everything in a folder; with the colour pencils that Santa Claus had given him at Christmas, he wrote on the cover: REPORT PRESENTED TO THE VICE-CHANCELLOR ON THE TEACHING OF PATAPHYSICS AND OTHER MATTERS RELATED AND UNRELATED.

The vice-chancellor devoured the report from cover to cover, and felt immensely relieved. He immediately wrote to Hutudan: “As promised, I consulted with the dean on the matter you raised. You will be pleased to learn that the dean’s report does not contain the slightest shred of evidence supporting the misgivings and fears you voiced.” Upon reading this, Hutudan was greatly relieved too; he went back to scrubbing the departmental toilets with a lighter heart.

From time to time, Hutudan still experiences brief pangs of nostalgia; he misses the autumn mornings in the meadows with their smell of mist and mushroom, when he would guide eager young pataphysicians in their first attempts at observing cows swinging their tails — but then he remembers what Professor Krokodil told him: to employ a world-famous pataphysician to clean the toilets is to adopt a “multi-disciplinary approach”—that is what they do in all modern universities nowadays.

Galosh is still blind as a bat, but it does not matter really; he received a diploma of clear-sightedness honoris causa and was recently made pataphysician extraordinary. It is rumoured that even greater things are in store for him — but this I cannot ascertain, for I do not live in Timbuctoo.

SOME PEOPLE seem to know everything and understand nothing: usually this is a reproach one would be tempted to throw at academic critics, but it came irrepressibly to mind as I was reading the last volume (posthumously published) of Edmund Wilson’s notebooks, The Sixties . Actually, long ago, oblique hints in Anaïs Nin’s diaries, as well as the fascinating Wilson — Nabokov correspondence (I hope to come back to it on a later occasion) should have warned us of a central hollowness inside the old giant of American letters.

For the most part, The Sixties is made up of endless name-dropping and a dreary record of attendance at social and literary functions — the climax being an official dinner at the Kennedy White House. The book is not altogether uninteresting, though; there are occasional flashes of sharp perception (for instance, Cartier-Bresson “is so little provincial that one should not take him for a modern Frenchman”); there are also provocative observations from illustrious interlocutors — for example, Malraux told him that the New York Metropolitan Museum was “ un musée de province ,” whereas the National Gallery in Washington should be considered the real thing (this judgement may seem unfair at first, and yet when you think of it, it has an intriguing pertinence).

There are also distasteful and grossly indiscreet passages. Could any form of sexual exhibitionism ever be redeemed by youth and beauty? I very much doubt it, but what is sure is that old people who expose themselves are always painfully obscene. Wilson records love-making sessions with his wife in the same way as a zoologist would describe the laborious coition of elephants; one episode appears at the end of a paragraph that had started with the mention of an appointment at the dentist — the unconscious association seems lugubriously appropriate.

Still, these are mere trifles. What dumbfounded me is the following confession: “(I had dinner with Mike Nichols); he had just read Tolstoy’s Death Of Ivan Ilyich , which had made a great impression on him. I do not care for this story as much as many people do. I do not believe that a man like Ivan Ilyich could ever look back on his life and find it so empty and futile ; I don’t believe that Tolstoy, in the period where he was writing his great novels would ever have invented such a character.”

Gore Vidal, in a review of The Sixties , specially extolled this very passage: “This is simply true. Ivan Ilyich would not have regarded his past life as empty and futile any more than Edmund Wilson could ever have found his life anything but fascinating and full.” In this extraordinary comment, Vidal unwittingly hit the nail on the head: the corollary of his observation is indeed that, if an eminent and influential Supreme Court magistrate such as Ivan Ilyich can, in the light of his approaching death, suddenly discover that his apparently successful life was in fact dreadfully wanting in some essential human aspects, this would also mean that eminent and influential men of letters such as Wilson and Vidal ought perhaps to re-examine whether their sense of importance and achievement was warranted. But this is probably an exercise which no successful man would willingly contemplate. Yet whoever feels in the end that he had a successful life must not have been aiming very high in the first instance.

Late last year, Cynthia Blanche concluded her review of Dorothy Hewett’s The Toucher : “Surely age without wisdom must be the worst fate to befall anyone: the sure sign of an empty life.” In a lifetime, Wilson and Vidal devoured entire libraries; that, in the end, so much reading seems to have generated so little understanding is sad and puzzling.

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And yet, are books really so useless? I still believe that at least political leaders and statesmen should try to read more literature. This might enable them to acquire an elementary self-knowledge that, in turn, could prevent them from making disgraceful fools of themselves when they are forced into retirement. This thought occurred to me as I came across a comment by Orson Welles on King Lear : “Lear becomes senile by giving power away. The thing that keeps people alive in their old age is power.. . But take power away from any of these old men who run the world — in this world that belongs only to young people — and you’ll see a ‘babbling, slippered pantaloon.’”

Talking of Orson Welles, I wonder if many people still remember how, soon after the Second World War, his artistic reputation in Europe was nearly wrecked for a while by a blistering attack which Sartre launched against Citizen Kane . The profound silliness of this diatribe is startling half a century later: