Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

At such a point, the servant of the word has truly become its creator and master. Someone once reproached him (in another context) for having fabricated a word that did not exist in the dictionary: “This is not French!”

“Now it is,” Hugo replied.[16]

* * *

Half of the misery in this world is caused by people whose only talent is to worm their way into positions for which they otherwise have no competence. Conversely, how many talented individuals remain forever in obscurity for the lack of one ability: self-promotion? Hugo presents the rare example of a prodigiously gifted man who was also the shrewd impresario of his own talent. From a very early age, he learned how to please influential people, and he also knew when, and how far, he could judiciously offend them. At the age of twenty, he was granted a pension from King Louis XVIII (in reward for a sycophantic poem), but seven years later, he cleverly declined another pension from Louis’s successor, the most unpopular Charles X. During the 1840s, he cultivated fairly close and cordial relations with King Louis-Philippe, without ever compromising his independence or becoming a mere courtier. Thus, with a cunning mixture of respect and iconoclasm, he succeeded in securing the favours of the Establishment without alienating the enthusiastic devotion of his own young followers; he was simultaneously rewarded by the political and literary authorities, and idolised by poets with dishevelled hair and crimson waistcoats. He was made a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur at twenty-three — an exceptionally young age for such an honour. (Shortly after, on a journey, wearing the ribbon of this much coveted distinction, he was arrested by a gendarme who suspected him of impersonation!)

The tumultuous staging of his drama Hernani in 1830 consecrated his position as the guiding star of the Romantic movement — he was then twenty-eight. But being universally acknowledged as the leader of the literary revolution did not prevent him entering a few years later the prestigious fortress of literary conservatism, the French Academy. Neither did the political right penalise him for his fashionable anti-conformism: he was made a pair de France (more or less the equivalent of a life-peer in the British House of Lords). Thus, before reaching the middle of life, he had achieved all the goals and reaped all the honours which ambitious writers and politicians would normally take twice the time to obtain.

Trollope famously observed that “success is a necessary misfortune of human life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.” This is true, but only for most of us who make up the plodding majority. For a man like Hugo, who was truly ambitious (I mean, who desired genuine greatness), early success was a blessing: he got success out of his system — it freed his mind for better things. The frantic race for the wretched baubles that keeps us running on the social treadmill until we collapse of old age was already over for him while still young. Ribbons, honours, titles, prizes, medals — the paltry rewards, the laughable carrots which we docilely pursue on a lifelong chase — he won them all in the first part of his career; what would have been the point of slaving for another fifty years, merely to add a few more knick-knacks to his dusty collection?

Halfway through life, he found himself free — free to risk everything, free to become himself, to be idealistic, brave, generous, reckless and noble, free to take once and for all the side of Justice — this permanent “fugitive from the side of victory.” In 1851, when Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon’s nephew, “who stuffed the Eagle” with his “cadaverous face of a card sharp”) staged his coup against the Republic and restored the Empire, turning himself into “Napoléon-le-Petit”—as Hugo was to call him, with lethal wit — the poet stood up against the despot (though he knew his cause was desperate) and lent his voice to the victims, the losers, the downtrodden, the misérables . He made a vain attempt to organise popular resistance against the usurper, but the secret police of Louis Bonaparte already had the situation under control. Overnight, Hugo had to forsake everything: his position, his public audience, his home, his country; he had to hide and to flee, he was a fugitive with a reward on his head — he was forced into permanent exile.

He escaped to Brussels, and from there went to the Channel Islands, first taking refuge in Jersey, then finally settling in Guernsey. His exile was to last nearly twenty years. Now he could say at last: “The literary revolution and the political revolution have effected their junction in me.” What a liberation! Youth had suddenly burst into his life: “Those who become young late in life, stay young longer.”[17] He was to stay young till his death in 1885, at age eighty-three.

Hugo’s writings are full of prophetic insights on his own destiny. Some twenty years earlier, commenting on the life of Rubens during a first visit to Belgium, he observed: “A great man is born twice. The first time as a man, the second as a genius.”[18] Exile was to be Hugo’s second birth — the chance of his life. And he had the wisdom to see this. Three years into his new life, he noted:

I find increasingly that exile is good.

It is as if, without their knowing it, the exiles were near some sort of sun: they mature quickly.

These last three years, I feel that I am on the true peak of life; I can distinguish the real lineaments of all that people call facts, history, events, successes, catastrophes — the huge machinery of Providence.

At least, for this reason alone, I should thank Mr. Bonaparte who exiled me, and God who chose me.

Maybe I shall die in this exile, but I shall die a better man. All is well.

Five years later:

What a pity I was not exiled earlier! I could have achieved so many things which I fear I shall not have the time to complete.

Eight years later:

In exile, I said the word that explains my entire life: I grew.[19]

In his dashing early days in Paris, he had been the centre of an ebullient court of admirers, fellow writers, followers, idlers and parasites. His house was invaded by endless cohorts of visitors, he did not even have the time to answer his mail, and from dawn till night his door was simply left open. Now, however, not many of his fair-weather acquaintances would still find the courage to brave the mists and storms of the Channel to make a pilgrimage to the exile’s rock, or be bold enough to run the gauntlet of the spies and secret police who kept Hugo’s outside contacts under close surveillance. As a result, the poet found himself left with only two interlocutors — but with these at least, he felt on the same footing: God and the ocean.

No wonder these years of solitude and contemplation were the most productive of his life. They were also happy years — for himself at least, if not for his family. (His daughter Adèle went insane; his wife[20] and grown-up sons could not bear the loneliness and eventually moved back to Brussels, where Hugo would from time to time pay them a visit, on the way to one of his occasional continental jaunts.)

Most of his masterpieces date from this period, climaxing in 1862 with his monumental novel, Les Misérables —less a novel than an immense prose poem, perhaps the last and only genuine epic of modern times. Hugo’s passion for language found here its hugest and wildest outlet. The book is like a foaming and thundering Niagara of words; it is also a dumbfounding patchwork in which philosophico-socio-political dissertations constantly interrupt the narrative. There are passages of comedy, of drama, of satire, of breathtaking action; there are tender elegies, realistic sketches, huge historic frescoes; there are essays on the most disparate topics, such as the linguistic structure of slang, the economics of sewage recycling — a prodigious display of encyclopaedic interests (which influenced Jules Verne) — and yet these heteroclite fragments are all swept together and eventually merge in one powerful poetic stream.