Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

It is not the words themselves, but the circumstance and manner in which they are uttered that give them meaning and impact. Stendhal (who served in Napoleon’s army) liked to recall that when General Murat was charging the enemy at the head of his cavalry, he used to stir the spirits of his horsemen by shouting to them: ‘My bum is round, round as a plum.’ Under enemy fire, in the heat of battle, these idiotic words became simply sublime — and the men were all willing to get themselves killed, just for the privilege of following such a hero.

In his first theatrical triumph, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), Ionesco exploited with great originality — and to splendid effect — the dichotomy that can exist between, on the one hand, the original meaning of words and, on the other, the meanings suggested by the tone, intention and gestures of the speaker. A good half a century earlier, Anatole France made use of the same conceit. In Le Livre de mon ami , the narrator recalls an episode from his adolescence: he had developed a passionate admiration for a beautiful female pianist who gave private recitals in his parents’ house. One night, at the end of a piece, the pianist suddenly turned towards her young admirer and asked him: “Did you like that?” “Oh yes, sir !” the hapless boy stuttered, overcome with emotion. His blunder plunged him into such a distress that he swore never to appear again in the beautiful musician’s presence. Forty years later, however, he met her perchance at a social gathering. Chatting about the successes of her long and brilliant career, the pianist confessed that eventually one became blasé about applause; yet once, in her earlier days, she received a compliment that she never forgot: a young man was so moved by her music, he called her “sir.”

The circumstance that lends words their greatest weight is the proximity of death. The “swan song” image does not pertain to the Western tradition alone. It is there already in The Analects of Confucius : “When a bird is about to die, his song is sad; when a man is about to die, his words are true.” Shakespeare seems to echo it: “The tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony.” Besides, in Anglo-Saxon common law a statement made by a dying man possesses a special evidentiary status, since “a dying man is presumed not to lie.”

No wonder the last words of the great are piously collected. The famous “ Mehr Licht ” (“More light”) of Goethe — assuming that he actually said it, and that he did not merely mean to ask that the shutters be opened — seems to suggest a lofty aspiration towards enlightenment and wisdom. By comparison, Thomas Mann’s ultimate query, “Where are my glasses?” sounds rather flat. At the moment of giving up the ghost on a hospital bed, the colourful Irish playwright Brendan Behan still had the wit to thank the nun who was wiping his brow: “Thank you, Sister! May all your sons become bishops.”

I am especially moved by the way old Countess de Vercellis died. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who witnessed it, describes the episode in his Confessions : “With her serene mind and pleasant mood, she made the Catholic religion attractive to me. In the very end, she stopped chatting with us; but as she entered the final struggles of agony, she let off a big fart. ‘Well,’ she said, turning over in her bed, ‘a woman that farts is not dead.’ These were her last words.”

The most heartbreaking last words are those of Pancho Villa. As the Mexican revolutionary was about to be shot, he found himself suddenly lost for words. He begged some journalists who stood nearby: “Don’t let it end like this! Tell them I said something .” Yet this time the journalists, instead of making something up, as is their usual practice, soberly reported the failure of inspiration in all its naked truth. Trust journalists!

SIDEWAYS

ALAN BENNETT describes in one of his journals how, during a visit to Egypt, he found himself trapped among cohorts of tourists trudging wearily through dusty wastes of sand and rocks under a merciless sun: the famous site he had come to admire looked merely like a stone quarry full of sweaty crowds. He wondered if tourism was not like pornography: a desperate search for lost sensation. The fact is, the only impressions that truly register on our sensibilities are accidental — we did not seek them out (let alone book an organised tour!).

As E.M. Forster observed, “Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.” There are also Egypts of the mind; in the end, it is perhaps chance encounters with books and random jottings, however shallow, that can best escape dreariness.

CREATIVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS

In the arts, there are works that benefit from being misunderstood. Many years ago, a journalist who was interviewing Julien Green discovered to his surprise that this austere writer was a great fan of the James Bond movies. But according to a friend who often accompanied the old man to the cinema, it appeared that he was always getting the plot-lines hopelessly mixed up.

This of course explains everything: the silliest scenario must acquire a disturbing depth after it has percolated through the filters and alembics of the author of a novel such as Moira .

On the subject of these creative misunderstandings, I still recall some African audiences with imaginations that bordered on sheer genius. In my youth, I once had the chance to make a fairly long journey on foot through the country of the Bayakas in a poor and remote corner of the Kwango region in the Congo. There, in the villages of the bush, an enterprising Greek merchant, who had a four-wheel-drive jeep and an electric generator, would come from time to time and organise a film session. (I am of course referring to the time before independence; for today, even if there should still be any enterprising Greek merchants around, I doubt very much that they would find passable tracks to reach these distant hamlets.)

The films that were shown on these rare and festive occasions were old Hollywood productions from the ’30s and ’40s — with femmes fatales holding white telephones and cigar-chomping gangsters in pinstripe suits. Did they come with a soundtrack? I do not remember now, but in any case it would have been of limited use, since the spectators understood only Kiyaka. Nevertheless they managed to invent for themselves, on the sole basis of these bleary black-and-white images flickering on a makeshift screen under the stars, in the warm night full of screeching insects, prodigious stories that no screenwriter could have conceived, even had he let his imagination run wild.

In these ancient American productions, black actors were rare and they were invariably confined to minor parts: doormen, shoe-shiners, cooks, railway porters. Yet it was on them that the passionate interest of the public entirely focused. To their eyes, these fleeting walk-ons were the true protagonists of the film. The very scarcity of their visible interventions would only confirm the occult and central importance of the roles that the collective inspiration of the audience was bestowing on them. Whenever they unexpectedly reappeared on screen for a few seconds, a roar of enthusiasm greeted their return, which had been awaited with intense expectation. Sometimes the black supernumerary would make only one appearance, and never come back. But it did not matter: he became all the more free to pursue his adventures in that other film, invisible and fabulous, of which the screen could only show the feeble negative image.

HAWAII STOPOVER

The most depressing thing is to watch these crowds of tourists, who paid a not inconsiderable amount to come here and secure for themselves eight days of happiness. In the motley uniforms of holiday convicts, they patrol lugubriously this huge Luna Park while trying hard to persuade themselves that they are getting their money’s worth of fun.