Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

9. B. Souvarine, Staline (Paris: Champ Libre, 1977), pp. 11–12.

10. R. Stéphane, André Malraux: entretiens et précisions (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 91.

11. C. Cate, André Malraux: A Biography (New York: Fromm, 1997).

THE INTIMATE ORWELL

1. On this subject, Orwell’s wife, writing to his sister (from Marrakech in 1938) observed with wry amusement: “He did construct one dugout in Spain [during the Civil War] and it fell down on him and his companions’ heads two days later, not under any kind of bombardment, but just from the force of gravity. But the dugout has generally been by way of light relief; his specialities are concentration camps and famine. He buried some potatoes against the famine, and they might have been very useful if they hadn’t gone mouldy at once. To my surprise he does intend to stay here [in Marrakech] whatever happens. In theory this seems too reasonable and even comfortable to be in character.”

2. Orwell and Spender became friends — but on the subject of Spender’s poetry, Orwell’s literary judgement never wavered; he simply chose not to comment.

3. This reminds me of Georges Bernanos (the two writers have much in common besides their fight against Franco). The great French novelist and pamphleteer exiled himself to Brazil shortly before the Second World War — he was disgusted by France’s political and moral decline. He sank all his meagre savings in the purchase of a cattle farm (which was soon to go bankrupt) and at the time wrote to a friend: “I have just bought 200 cows and thus acquired the right to call myself no longer ‘man of letters’ but cattleman, which I much prefer. As a cattleman I shall be able to write what I think.”

4. A young and beautiful woman — though somewhat hare-brained, she managed to edit (with the collaboration of I. Angus) the excellent Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969). These four volumes remain invaluable; not every reader can afford the twenty volumes of Davison’s editions of the Complete Works .

TERROR OF BABEL: EVELYN WAUGH

1. Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Collins, 1975); Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (London: Arrow, 1991). Postscript of 1998: one more title should be added now to this small bibliography — Selena Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994).

2. Once more, one is reminded of Belloc and of the remarkable letter he wrote to Chesterton on the occasion of the latter’s conversion to Catholicism: “The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality . It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is which the will deliberately confirms… I am by all my nature of mind sceptical… And as to the doubt of the soul, I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion… To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It lacks meat. It is my misfortune. In my youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man; or as a wounded dog, not able to walk, yet knows the way home.”

THE BELGIANNESS OF HENRI MICHAUX

1. As a matter of fact Michaux was born not in Brussels but in Namur (which only reinforces the point).

2. In the light of his own experience, Cioran, who was profoundly sympathetic to both Michaux and Borges, has this to say about the latter: “By the time I reached twenty, things Balkan had nothing further to offer me. Such is the tragedy — and also the benefit — of being born in a minor or indifferent cultural environment. I worshipped what was foreign. Whence my hunger to venture abroad into literature and philosophy, falling upon them with an unhealthy passion. What happens in Eastern Europe must necessarily occur too in the Latin American countries, and I have noticed that their representatives are infinitely better informed and more cultured than Westerners, who are incurably provincial. Neither in France nor in England have I encountered anyone with a curiosity to rival that of Borges, which is almost maniacal, almost a vice — and I say “vice” advisedly, for when it comes to art and thought anything that does not tend towards a slightly perverse fervour is superficial, and therefore illusory…. Borges was condemned to universality, forced into it, obliged to direct his mind in every direction if only to escape the asphyxiating atmosphere of Argentina. It is the South American void that makes the writers of the whole continent more lively and varied than West Europeans paralysed by tradition and incapable of breaking out of their prestigious atrophy.”

3. When Jacques Brosse told him how he had written an account of a psychological experience with the greatest of ease, Michaux responded enviously: “Ah, but it’s obviously not the same for you: you write in your mother tongue!”

“Surely,” Brosse replied, “you’re not telling me that they don’t speak French in Namur?”

“It’s not French they speak — it’s Walloon!”

Michaux added that, at the boarding school where he was locked up at the age of seven, “surrounded by stinking little peasants” who were brutal and spoke only in their own dialect, “Flemish became my second language, which I spoke as well, if not better, than French.” “Did you know,” the poet once asked an interviewer, “that as an adolescent I briefly contemplated writing in Flemish?” His very first revelation of poetry came from reading Guido Gezelle: “Gezelle was the great man. But I quickly realised that I could never equal him.” It must indeed be said that this West-Flemish priest-poet succeeded in making sublime verbal music in his obscure patois; his verses are forever engraved in the memory of anyone exposed to them on a school bench.

4. It is a strange French and English hybrid. The French equivalent of “schooner” is goélette. Michaux’s term might refer either to a cinq-mâts goélette or a goélette à cinq mâts . The difference between the two types of rigging is substantial: the first carries square sails on the foremast, whereas the five masts of the second are all fore-and-aft rigged. Late in his life, probably embarrassed by the juvenile bragging and exaggerations of his letters to Closson, Michaux prevailed upon his correspondent to return them to him, and no sooner did he get them back than he destroyed them — to the consternation of his old friend. But even though the originals thus perished, the content of the letters survived, unbeknownst to the two correspondents, in the shape of photocopies made fifteen years earlier by a third party who had access to Closson’s papers. This eventually made posthumous publication possible — something which Michaux would doubtless have opposed. One might well wonder, moreover, what caused the vehemence with which he sought to erase all traces of this unique phase of his life.

5. And let it not be objected that the original versions and variants are supplied in the endnotes! In the first place, only some of them are; but the most important thing is that average readers can hardly be expected to enjoy reading a text when, for every page, they have to flip back a dozen times to notes in microscopic print a thousand pages further on. The dismal truth is that Michaux’s greatest writings are now unavailable in their incomparable original versions. We can but dream of a sort of anti-Pléiade edition that brought them together in a single volume.