Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Chekhov wrote some 250 short stories; among all of them, he singled out “The Student” as his favourite. Harold Bloom finds his choice surprising: “Why did Chekhov prefer this story to scores of what seem to many of his admirers far more consequential and vital tales? I have no clear answer… Nothing in ‘The Student,’ except what happens in the protagonist’s mind, is anything but dreadfully dismal. It is the irrational rise of impersonal joy and personal hope out of cold and misery, and the tears of betrayal, that appear to have moved Chekhov himself…” Yet Bloom remains puzzled: “The rejoicing has no trace of authentic piety or of salvation.”

If the story seems mysterious, it is because the simplicity of the soul is the greatest mystery under heaven. Otherwise, it presents only one genuine enigma: Chekhov, who was a confirmed agnostic, displays here an intuitive grasp of the religious experience, reaching to its very essence — which usually escapes the learned speculations of theologians. We may naturally assume that the student in the story was pious and learned; he sincerely believed that the events surrounding Peter’s denial took place 1,900 years ago in the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace; his faith had already taught him that the Gospel narrative is true ; then, suddenly, the tears of the women showed him that this story is real : it is happening to all of us, now. The tears of the women enable the young theologian to effect a giant leap: from abstract knowledge to actual experience, from truth to reality — which is the ground of all truths. (As C.S. Lewis put it: “Truth is always about something, but reality is what truth is about.”) Instead of pondering dogmas and doctrines, the student suddenly faced evidence. Hence his joy, which was overwhelming and mysterious indeed, but which presented nothing “irrational” (contrary to Bloom’s strange assessment).

Yet Chekhov — with his scrupulous intellectual honesty — did not altogether discount other elements in the student’s ecstatic happiness: “youth, health, strength”—for, after all, “he was only twenty-two years old.”

URINALS AND EDITORIAL PRACTICES

At the end of the nineteenth century, as France was swept by a wave of fanatical anticlericalism, many town councils and municipalities adopted the policy of erecting urinoirs along the walls of local cathedrals and churches; under the pretext of ensuring hygiene and public decency, the brilliant idea was to have the entire male population of the town pissing day and night against the most venerable monuments that the religious had built.

It seems to me that many modern editors of classic works of literature — and also many film-makers adapting literary masterpieces to the screen — are impelled by a somewhat similar desire for desecration. They append impertinent and preposterous introductions, they impose cover designs and presentations in complete contradiction with the expressed intention of the authors, they write film scripts that negate the meaning of the book they are supposed to adapt, they coolly chop off the epigraphs that the authors had lovingly selected — they generally display patronising arrogance and crass ignorance; they behave as if they were the proprietors of the works they should serve and preserve. Here are some examples (in no particular order). In the cinema, we recently saw what became of Graham Greene’s masterpiece The End of the Affair —no need here for further comment. With books, it is in the paperback reprints of classics that most sins are committed. Just a glance at my humble shelves brings at random Lady Chatterley’s Lover , with a lurid cover on which is printed in characters larger than the title, “Now a sensuous film starring Sylvia Kristel.” Poor Lawrence; you really did not deserve such an indignity. A new reprint of Lolita carries on its cover a reproduction of one of Balthus’s most patently paedophiliac paintings: a little girl caressing herself with an ambiguous smile — yet Nabokov, in his correspondence with his publishers, had taken pains to discuss at great length the question of the dust-jacket of this book, and he stipulated with utter firmness and clarity: “There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl” (letter, 1 March 1958).

As if later editors would bother to follow authors’ instructions — they do not even read their writing. Conrad is particularly ill-treated, it seems; without any warning or justification, in a Penguin reprint of Almayer’s Folly , the editor took the liberty of simply dropping the famous epigraph that Conrad had borrowed from Henri-Frédéric Amiel: Qui de nous n’a eu sa Terre promise, son jour d’extase et sa fin en exil? (Who among us did not have his Promised Land, his day of ecstasy and his end in exile?) Not only is the sentence magnificent and provides the key to the entire novel, but it also supplies an important biographical clue to Conrad’s literary creation (Amiel, whose diaries Conrad first read during an early stay in Geneva, reappears, in a metamorphosed shape, as the placid Swiss narrator who witnessed the ravings of Slavic terrorists in Under Western Eyes ). The paperback reprint of Heart of Darkness (Oxford Classics) carries a scholarly introduction that is grotesque and delirious: it proposes an elaborate phallic reading of the novel. I paraphrase: “Look at the Congo River on the map; don’t you see? It is obviously a huge, creeping phallus!” and so on. Literary scholars are particularly adept at cultivating this sort of nonsense: they seem permanently drunk on the psychedelic milk they keep sucking from the twin mammelles of Freud and Marx. Amazing examples of this merry art are too numerous to be quoted here.

The resolute and invincible blindness of some editors can also be quite impressive. Stendhal’s treatise On Love (De l’Amour , 1822) is invariably presented under this title; yet, when Stendhal published La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), he printed at the beginning of his novel a list of his other works in which he indicated the full and final title under which he intended his essay on love to be known thereafter: De l’Amour et des diverses phases de cette maladie . It was studiously ignored by all subsequent editors — though it should certainly not be irrelevant for us to know that Stendhal viewed love as a sort of illness.

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE POET

Sometimes it takes a poet to deflate effectively the windy pronouncements of a philosopher. To Theodor Adorno, who declared that, after Auschwitz, no art was possible, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Indeed, not only art, but breakfast as well.”

OLYMPICS

I recently had a chance to see again the notorious (yet remarkable) documentary film that Leni Riefenstahl made of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. I was struck by one tiny detail, which certainly was not deliberate and could not have attracted anyone’s attention at the time. In a passage devoted to the sailing competition, the camera caught for an instant the face of a crew member on a boat, at the height of a race. He was hauling in the jib sheet with all his might, and a cigarette was dangling from his lips.

This image lasted for little more than two seconds, but for us it is stunning. At the time, it was so spontaneous, familiar and natural; today, it seems to come from another era.

In the Olympic Games nowadays, it is commonly accepted that many competitors show up stuffed to the gills with all sorts of drugs (which the relevant authorities are careful not to control, unless it is by methods whose ineffectualness has been duly guaranteed beforehand). Yet should any sportsman enter the stadium with a cigarette or a pipe in his mouth, one dares not contemplate the fate that would befall him.