Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

2. Random observations on Cervantes and Don Quixote are scattered through several volumes of Montherlant’s notebooks. He also wrote an introduction to a paperback reprint of Don Quichotte (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1961), which in turn was reproduced in the posthumous collection of his critical essays ( Essais critiques , Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

3. La Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho was first published in 1905. An English translation was issued by Princeton University Press as Vol. 3 of Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno (Bollingen Series, 1967). Here, I have used the French translation by J. Babelon, La Vie de Don Quichotte et de Sancho Pança (Paris: Albin Michel, 1959).

4 . .. Sufro yo a tu costa,

Dios no existente, pues si Tú existieras

Existiría yo también de veras.

(from Rosario de sonetos líricos )

5. Don Quixote’s Profession , originally a series of three lectures, was first published as a monograph by Columbia University Press in 1958. It was subsequently reproduced in a collection of Van Doren’s essays, The Happy Critic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961). This volume, like most of Van Doren’s other writings, has now become extremely rare.

THE PRINCE DE LIGNE

1. The letter is a very fine one. The Prince is tactful enough to cloak his generosity with a jocular tone. Since Sophie Deroisin quotes only one sentence of it, let me give the text in its entirety:

I am, Sir, the person who came to see you the other day. I shall not return, though I am longing to do so; but you dislike both devotees and their devotion.

Consider my proposals. No one reads in my country; you will be neither admired nor persecuted. You will have the key to my library and gardens; you will see me there or not, as you please. You will have a little country-house a quarter of a league from mine. You can plant, sow, do what you like.

Jean-Baptiste [Rousseau] and his wit came to die in Flanders, but he was merely a writer of verse; let Jean-Jacques and his genius come and live there. Let it be in my house, or as it were in his, that you continue to live vitam impendere vero . If you want still greater freedom, I have a tiny plot of detached land, where the air is good, the sky fair; and it is only eighty leagues from here, I have neither archbishop nor Parliament, but the finest sheep in the world.

There are honey-bees at the other house I offer you. If you like them, I will leave them; if you do not, I will remove them elsewhere: their republic will treat you better than that of Geneva, which you have honoured so greatly and to which you will have done so much good.

Like you, I hate thrones and dominations; you will reign over no one, but no one will reign over you. If you accept my offer, I will come to fetch you and will conduct you myself to the Temple of Virtue, which will be the name of your abode. But we shall not call it by that name; I will spare your modesty all the triumphs you deserve.

If all this displeases you, Monsieur, consider that it has never been suggested. I shall not see you again, but I shall continue to read you and to admire you, though I shall not tell you so.

(translation by Sir Leigh Ashton, modified)

2. Let it be said en passant that this observation actually reveals what is wrong with Wagner himself.

3. It is worth noting that Ligne himself, though he considered Mozart “an excellent and charming composer,” gave higher marks to Gluck.

4. In a recent work, Het Belgisch Laberint (Utrecht: De Arbeiderspers, 1989), Geert van Istendael has drawn the interesting corollary that “Europe will be Belgian or will not exist.”

5. In Belgium, up until the end of the eighteenth century, the aristocracy and the various elites (e.g., painters) were conventionally looked upon as “Flemings.” Soldiers and multifarious other down-and-outs were deemed “Walloons.”

6. Ligne would write to Casanova:

I used to believe like you that the sum of the good was greater than the sum of the bad.

But two years ago today, on the unhappiest day of my own life, I learnt that my poor Charles had lost his, and since then I feel that all my blessings combined (and I have received a prodigious quantity of them) have not brought me, either in general or in particular, one thousandth part in pleasure of all the pain with which this frightful loss afflicted, and will continue to afflict me…. Can I even compare the life of my poor Charles with his death? I adored him for his valour, his character, his simple, jesting and sociable gaiety; but he never gave me as much pleasure alive as he hurt me in ceasing to live….

BALZAC

1. Quoted by Haydn Mason, “Voltaire et Shakespeare,” in Visages de Voltaire (Brussels: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Françaises, 1994), p. 23.

2. José Cabanis gathered a collection of these purple patches in his succulent Plaisir et lectures (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), Vols. 1 and 2.

3. This “Portrait de Balzac” was made for French radio and was broadcast in 1960. It is reproduced in Alain Bertrand, Georges Simenon (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988), pp. 215–40.

4. These views may appear odd to Western minds, but they were commonly held in China, where they received special development in Daoist sexual theory and practice — and I wonder if Balzac did not draw from that very source. Robb points out that, in his youth, Balzac “profited from his father’s multifarious interests, which, at a time, included all things Chinese.” Balzac himself declared: “At the age of fifteen, I knew everything it was possible to know about China.”

5. This is exactly the definition of what psychologists call “eidetic memory.” Eidetic memory is similar in some of its effects to hallucination, but, unlike hallucination, it is not a morbid phenomenon. Many children are naturally endowed with this ability to store and recall at will accurate and vivid images from the past, but they lose it as they grow up. Some novelists and some painters maintain and develop this gift through the very practice of their craft. It was systematically cultivated by Chinese painters (the prevalence of eidetic memory among the Chinese may have resulted from their early learning, and constant use, of an ideographic script).

Sartre (in his treatise L’Imaginaire ) took for granted the validity of Alain’s view that there is an essential difference between what is perceived and what is imagined; Alain used to illustrate the distinction by putting the question: If you pretend that you can see the Pantheon without standing in front of it, then please tell us how many columns you see on its façade. Yet a well-trained Chinese painter — or, in Europe, Leonardo da Vinci or Daumier — would have been able to meet that very challenge and, shutting his eyes, could have counted the columns from the image in his mind.

6. Following this, Balzac then singled out the two most pernicious practices that can sap the willpower of a writer: an excessive consommation of cigars and the frequent writing of book reviews. (For Balzac, the proper approach to literary journalism consisted simply in writing under a pen-name effusive praise of his own novels.)

VICTOR HUGO

1. Oeuvres complètes de Victor Hugo (Paris: Bouquins Laffont, 1989), Océan , p. 290. This detached fragment from the huge mass of Hugo’s posthumously published papers bears a small heading: “The Revilers.” What Hugo had in mind therefore was not the flaws of the great but the fact that greatness, by its very nature, presents an open field for base vermin. Taken in the first meaning, however, this observation could also be applied to Hugo, even in the most literal sense: the heroic Juliette Drouet — his loving, long-suffering mistress — noted that the great poet had filthy underwear, his personal hygiene was deplorable (he kept using her toothbrush) and, on occasion, he even gave her fleas.