Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Yet, when you call a man a fool, the epithet acquires a very special dimension if you also happen to be his son and heir. Whereas the Jamesian irony on the same subject sounds merely flippant — and ultimately irrelevant — Baudelaire’s private outbursts have a sacrilegious quality and should illuminate rather than obscure the close filiation that links his poetry to that of Hugo. He himself knew all too well that, without the triumphant breakthrough of Hugo’s poetic revolution which opened the way and cleared the field, his own Fleurs du mal could not have found ground on which to blossom. It is true that today, the acute modernity of Baudelaire’s voice still vibrates in our lives, whereas the passing of time has cruelly battered the great monuments which Hugo built in verse, and few visitors still care to wander amid these ruins. It is the distance between the two poets that strikes us now; but if one is within the same tradition, one tends to be more aware of the differences; in this respect, the perspective of a sensitive outsider may sometimes be more penetrating. Thus, for instance, Joseph Brodsky, commenting on “the gaudiness and eloquence” of the two writers within the French poetical “tradition of pathos and urgent statement,” was right in his boldness: “Hugo, Baudelaire — for me these are the same poet with two different names.”[6] Some truths are simply better perceived from a distance.

What has contributed to obscure Hugo’s role as the decisive pioneer of modern French poetry — down to its most elitist and hermetic twentieth-century expressions — is the vulgar institutionalisation of his colossal fame that took place at the end of his life. In old age, he literally became the object of a popular cult. His white beard, his huge forehead pregnant with unfathomable visions, easily lent themselves to use as some kind of substitute image of God the Father — a god for the new secularised masses to which he preached the universal brotherhood of mankind and the forthcoming advent of a World Republic. (Meanwhile we have seen famous writers serving worse causes.)

When he died, the funeral procession that carried his remains into the Pantheon — thus completing the deification process — was followed by a million mourners. The flamboyant bad taste of the ceremony presented a farcical mixture of melodrama and carnival — well summarised by the poisonous pen of Edmond de Goncourt, who noted in his diary entry for 2 June 1885:

The night before Hugo’s funeral — this night of desolate wake of the entire nation — was celebrated with a gigantic copulation: brothels having closed for the circumstance, their women went to participate in a huge priapic orgy on the lawns of the Champs-Elysées — and our good policemen refrained from disturbing these republican unions…. Another detail regarding the “f — ing” funeral of our great man — this information comes from police sources — for the last week, all the prostitutes have been performing their services with a black crêpe draped round their private parts— c — ts in mourning![7]

But the price of this popularity was a certain alienation from the intellectual and artistic elite. The intelligentsia usually leaves the frequenting of the National Monuments to country bumpkins, foreigners and tourists. Retired schoolteachers in the provinces may perhaps still be able to recite Hugo’s verses, but the arbiters of literary elegance frown when hearing his name. Gide’s notorious bon mot has remained memorable (I do not apologise for quoting it here once more; better than a long essay, it sums up the ambivalence of the critical Establishment on his subject). On being asked who was the greatest French poet, Gide replied: “Hugo, alas.”

Indeed, for the sophisticated connoisseur, the greatness of Hugo is a bitter paradox: France’s most famous writer is also the one who is most offensive to French taste. The French genius cultivates measure, lucidity and perfection — and Hugo is excessive, mad and flawed. In a tradition that values order, harmony and a sense of proportion, Hugo came to pitch the gaudy tent of his freak show: a nightmarish circus full of hunchbacks and dwarves and monsters, and fights to the death with crocodiles and giant octopuses, against a backdrop of dark sewers, Gothic ruins, stormy nights, fires, floods and shipwrecks… And the madness that accompanied him in life (both his brother and his daughter had to be confined till death in a lunatic asylum) constantly lurks in his works. As Graham Robb points out perceptively, there is evidence that, at times, Hugo was afraid of the outpourings from his own imagination, and would append reassuring conclusions to his most frightening poems: “Everyone is a lunatic in the privacy of their own mind, and considering the treasures in Hugo’s unconscious, his apparent sanity is a far more remarkable phenomenon.” Only in his paintings — most of which were not meant to be shown to the public — did Hugo (who was one of the most original graphic artists of his century, and of ours as well) dare fully to pursue some of his most disturbing visions.

At the end of the Hugolian century, the painter Degas once confessed his frustration to Mallarmé: “I have so many ideas for poems — if only I could write them down!” “My dear Degas,” Mallarmé replied, “poems are not written with ideas, they are written with words .”[8]

Inasmuch as modern poetry can be characterised by this awareness that poems are generated by words rather than by ideas — that it is the “linguistic impulse” that drives the poet — it reflects an attitude that can be traced back directly to Hugo. “Any more or less serious poet knows that he is writing because language is dictating to him.” This statement is actually by Brodsky, but it could as aptly describe Hugo’s revolution.[9]

With Hugo, for the first time, language is consciously put in command. He said, “Words are The Word, and The Word is God.” He deliberately allowed himself to be led by words, for “words are the mysterious passers-by of the soul.”[10] Being the guardian of words, the poet is vested with prophetic powers: he is the guide who will take mankind to the Truth.

Hugo’s religion of language was built upon solid foundations; his mastery of words was unparalleled. This was a reflection of his innate talents much more than a result of his education. Son of a plebeian father who was a revolutionary soldier and became a general of Napoleon, and of a mother with vaguely aristocratic forebears, Hugo received a traditional yet rather basic schooling; with the exception of two memorable years spent in Italy and Spain (where General Count Hugo was sent on imperial missions), Victor grew up in Paris. By the age of fifteen, the stupendous precocity of his poetic genius was already showing — it received the official consecration of prestigious literary prizes, and under the Restoration, the young prodigy was soon rewarded with royal patronage.

A friend of the family recalled the claim he once heard him making: “There is only one classical writer in the century — only one, do you hear? Me. I know the French language better than anyone else alive! ”[11]

This was no hollow boast: with the richest vocabulary since Rabelais, his linguistic keyboard presents the bewildering range of a grand organ — by turns solemn, familiar, thundering, whispering, screeching, bellowing, murmuring, roaring. He could improvise effortlessly in all forms of regular poetry; impeccable alexandrine meter was for him a native language. He was a fluent Latinist and had a good knowledge of Spanish; and though his English remained quite atrocious (even after twenty years of exile spent in the largely English-speaking Channel Islands), he constantly toyed with it (foreign idioms are magic when you do not really understand the language). Technical terms from all sorts of trades and crafts stirred his imagination; he explored in depth the slang of the underworld, the jargon of criminals and of jails; his mastery of the technical language of the sea (navigation, naval architecture, ships, riggings and sails, manoeuvre and seamanship) is exhaustive and astonishing — and professionally accurate.[12] During his travels, he collected in his notebooks all the strange words and bizarre or ridiculous names that caught his attention in the streets, on posters, public notices or on shop signs. Puns, in particular, fascinated him no end. (“A pun is the bird-dropping of a soaring spirit,” says a character in Les Misérables .) Starting with multilingual variations on his own name (“Ego Hugo,” “Hu(e)! Go!”[13]), he displayed in his diaries a manic compulsion for playing with words. But he went further; far from confining this activity to his private notebooks, he sometimes extended this sort of exercise to his most solemn and formal poetic creations. In his justly famous “Booz endormi” (Proust, and he is not alone in this opinion, considered it the greatest poem in the French language, placing it even above the works of his beloved Baudelaire[14]), Hugo, at a loss to find a rhyme to complete the poem, simply made it up with an impudent pun. This could easily appear as a crude schoolboyish prank, and in the majestic context of the poem, the effect of such an intrusion should be grotesque — but it is sublime.[15]