Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

In this connection I must ask the reader’s forbearance if I now insert a personal parenthesis (rest assured, it will be the last). In 1971, when I published The Chairman’s New Clothes ,[2] I needed, at short notice and for trivial bureaucratic reasons, to sign the book with a pseudonym. If I was bold enough to borrow my false surname from Segalen’s masterpiece, it was solely because at that time René Leys was completely out of print and had been impossible to find for over twenty years, so that the name had no resonance save in the memories of a handful of faithful admirers of Segalen, lovers of literature and somewhat smitten by things Chinese. It was to this happy few — my like, my brothers — that I was directing an innocent wink. Had I had the slightest notion at that time of how Segalen’s work was to become the object of an extraordinary renewal of interest, I would have modestly chosen some other banal Flemish patronymic — Beulemans, say, or Coppenolle — but now it is rather too late for that.

As a matter of fact Segalen’s triumphant return had been foreshadowed by Professor Henri Bouillier’s magisterial biography Victor Segalen (Paris: Mercure de France, 1961). The same Henri Bouillier has now given us the poet’s correspondence.[3] Thirty years after Bouillier’s biography, Gilles Manceron’s Segalen appeared (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1991); so far from duplicating the earlier biography, it rounded it out admirably.

In the interim, thanks above all to the devoted efforts of Victor’s daughter Annie Joly-Segalen (1912–1998), the issuing of unpublished manuscripts and posthumous fragments, reprints, selected works, popular editions, scholarly editions, collector’s editions, commemorative exhibitions and international conferences all proliferated. Segalen became the subject of a steady flow of books, essays, studies and articles; as far away as the Antipodes, doctoral theses focused on him, while in Brest a university has now been named after him.[4]

As to the indefatigable activity of Madame Joly-Segalen, Bouillier is hardly exaggerating when he speaks of a “prodigious filial love from beyond the grave” and “the miraculous resurrection of a father by his daughter.” But he is, I feel, on much less certain ground when he adds that “it was thanks to her” that “Segalen has become one of the century’s greatest poets.” In the previous century Rimbaud had only a sister (a blundering busybody to boot), while Laforgue had no one, and surely both these poets have endured solely by virtue of their poetry?

The three high points of Segalen’s existence — the two years in Polynesia (1903–1905), his first great Chinese adventure (1909), and finally his anguished quest on the threshold of the beyond, in the last twelve months of his life — provide the finest and most intense pages of this enormous correspondence. The remainder (and the two volumes of letters, along with the supplemental Repères [Reference Guide] comprise 2,850 pages), though perhaps not always of burning interest, nevertheless serve to confirm John Henry Newman’s dictum that “the true life of a man is in his letters.”

Segalen’s prime correspondents, from his adolescence up until his return from Polynesia and marriage, were his parents, especially his mother. Thereafter his wife became the soul mate to whom he wrote almost daily during his frequent and prolonged absences; his last letter to her was written on the eve of his death. His close friends — and Segalen attached great importance to friendship — included his fellow naval officers (Henry Manceron, Jean Lartigue) but also admired elders, intellectuals and artists (Daniel de Monfreid, Debussy, Jules de Gaultier, Claudel, etc.).

Segalen was born in Brest into a modest middle-class family with deep Breton and Catholic roots. His father was a gentle and self-effacing civil servant and an amateur painter. His mother, somewhat musical — she played the church organ and the piano — was a formidable and frighteningly possessive person, and she long wielded tight control over her son (who as a twenty-one-year-old medical student was still obliged to write her, not only to justify his smallest expenditures but even to explain on one occasion what had prevented him from receiving Holy Communion at Mass, a tale-bearing chaplain having duly reported this misdemeanour to Madame Segalen).

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Segalen’s background was certainly narrow and smothering in many respects, but it is worth bearing in mind that this provincial bourgeoisie did know how to sacrifice for the education of its offspring. Thus Victor received a solid literary, classical and scientific education; he was also introduced in childhood to music and painting, which remained passions of his throughout his life. Nor must we overlook the essential: he benefited from what only the warm affection of a united family can supply, a happy childhood, which arms one to face life and, once adult, to eliminate the risk of losing time in some fatuous and vain quest for happiness.

But Segalen had a frail and nervous disposition, and he was prone all his life long to bouts of melancholy. At boarding school, far from home, he was laid low by depression. While he was a student at the Bordeaux School of Naval Medicine, his sister and mother had to come and support him during another attack. He needed his family, yet at the same time he longed to take wing. This desire for emancipation manifested itself in various ways — in his rejection of the organized Church as in his liaisons with young women (liaisons which he had to conceal from his mother — another source of anxiety).

True freedom from the family’s grip came only, in the nature of things, with his great departure for Polynesia, his first overseas posting. But loving ties with his parents were maintained by letter well beyond that moment, and right up until his marriage. Thereafter, however, though still respectful and courteous, his communications became rare and more distanced. Five years before his death, Segalen confided to a very dear friend that “Nothing at all has been a disappointment to me except my mother (the reluctant affection I once felt for her perished long ago).” Two years before his death, in a letter to his wife concerning the education of their older son, in whom he wished to instil high standards, he remarked that “I feel that my parents were satisfied with mediocrity, and for that I shall never forgive them.”

Segalen became a Navy doctor for simple practical reasons: his family could not have afforded extended study for him. In point of fact he liked neither the sea nor medicine. He suffered from seasickness, and he cursed the time-consuming demands of a profession that distracted him from his true passions. On both matters his correspondence is explicit.

The sea: “I find the open sea boring, nauseating and stupid.” “My Pacific crossing was bleak, banal, and long.” “Fifteen stupid days on this stupid sea. How horribly monotonous the South Pacific is as a mass of water!” “I shall relish with ever-renewed joy the charm of a night on land, cool and with no rolling.” “Ah! How good the solid, fragrant earth is after five days on the high seas! Decidedly, the sea is beautiful only as seen from the coast, or framed by shores, beaches, and rocks. The open sea is paltry and odourless…. And the vast horizon shrinks and squeezes you like an iron ring.” “Life at sea gives me the slightly stale feeling of a pious old maid in religious retreat. .. The open sea is really and truly imbecilic. Its only virtue is that it conveys you ‘elsewhere.’”

As for medicine, Segalen hardly ever speaks of it in any but exasperated terms: “For me medicine means oppressive and monotonous boredom.” At one point he complains of “the vile butchery of medical practice” that prevents him from playing his piano; at another, he fancies that “Sinology, an exact science” might “save him once and for all from the vileness of medicine.” It should be noted, nevertheless, that Segalen was a good doctor who combined competence with compassion. During the struggle against an outbreak of plague in northeast China he distinguished himself by his courage, devotion and organizational skill.