Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

What is even more bewildering is that this passionate music lover was ignorant of the very existence of classical Chinese music — the music of scholars, a music of the soul and of silence, as played on a seven-string zither, the guqin . And he dared complain of living in “a country without musicality” which knew nothing but noise! He never sought to meet Chinese masters who could have initiated him into the varied disciplines of their culture; he had no social contact with either scholars or artists; indeed he seems never to have had a single conversation with any educated Chinese person.

So it was not China that was finished—“over, sucked dry”—for him, a China that he had never bitten into, but solely his “vision.” And what was that vision? He described it in what he conceived as his magnum opus, Le Fils du Ciel (The Son of Heaven). Unfortunately, Segalen’s Son of Heaven resembles the Emperor of China much as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado resembles the Emperor of Japan — except for the fact that the former is not very amusing.

Yet, for all that, Victor Segalen left us the miraculous accident of his René Leys ,[8] a novel of failure and derision — and one faithful, this time, to the author’s actual experience: the narrator, striving desperately to penetrate an impenetrable China, eventually succeeds only in getting himself led down the garden path by a seductive if pathetic trickster. This masterpiece escaped Segalen almost involuntarily, and in retrospect left him perplexed: a month before his death, after having his great friend Hélène Hilpert read the manuscript, he wrote her: “I find it amusing that René Leys amused you a little. But how far away it seems, how youthful…”

As a rule, conventional critics and commentators do not linger long over this book, for it makes them a little uneasy. After all, it’s a kind of joke, surely? And yet it is by virtue of this “joke” that Segalen is guaranteed a passage to posterity. It is not I who make this claim, but Claudel and Rilke — hardly casual readers.

Back in France, exhausted by his prodigious efforts as physician, traveller, Sinologist, archaeologist and writer, Segalen fell into a profound depression exacerbated by a condition that medicine could not diagnose.[9] He simply felt life slipping away from him. At this juncture his wife Yvonne, frightened by the gravity of his affliction, had to call for support upon Hélène Hilpert, a very old and intimate childhood friend. Hilpert herself was in a tragic situation: she had four little children, but her husband had gone missing at the front a year earlier and she did not know whether he was dead or a prisoner. (As it turned out, his remains were found only ten years later.)

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Right away, Segalen in his state of nervous collapse recognized another soul mate in the person of Hélène. The last year of his correspondence — from May 1918 until May 1919, just before his death — consists mostly of the eighty-nine letters that he wrote her, and as a matter of fact they constitute the most touching portion of the whole collection. These letters have nothing clandestine about them: Yvonne frequently added a personal note at the bottom of the pages written by her husband; but it pained her to see Victor, with whom she had hitherto shared everything, pursuing a dialogue with Hélène on a level to which she herself had no access.

When Yvonne had married Segalen, she had also espoused his agnosticism — and this in a quite comfortable and untroubled way. Segalen, on the other hand, was by nature a mystical soul who in a muddled way had never really come to terms with the fact of having lost his faith. Hélène was a fervent Catholic; she was also an intelligent and highly sensitive woman; she perceived Segalen’s distress, and realized how very ill he was; she possessed, perhaps, ways of helping him in his present state, but she could not allow herself, or allow him, to put a foot wrong.

In a moment of particularly acute distress, Segalen exposed his difficulties to Claudel, who, with more generosity than tact, seeing the breach that was opening up in his correspondent’s unbelief, charged through it like a rhinoceros, offering to come over post haste, take Segalen by the scruff of the neck and drag him into a confessional box. Segalen was touched by this heartfelt enthusiasm but chose to evade it, preferring to confide instead in his sweet friend. Who among us would not prefer to enter paradise led by the hand of a Beatrice rather than rushed there on the back of a galloping pachyderm?

How much longer would Segalen have managed to confine his tumultuous feelings to the exclusively amicable channel dictated by Hélène? We shall never know. In the spring of 1919 Segalen spent a few days of solitary rest at an inn on the edge of the legendary Huelgoat forest. The last two letters he wrote were addressed the one to Hélène and the other to his wife. They glow with a like tender feeling for his friend and for Yvonne. The next day he went walking in the forest, but did not return. Two days later his body was discovered stretched out beneath a tree. He had a wound at the ankle and had died from the resulting haemorrhage, which he had vainly sought to stanch by means of an improvised tourniquet. Those who knew Segalen called it suicide. Those who loved him called it an accident.

Today Segalen’s biographers incline to the latter view, pointing out that a doctor intending to commit suicide might be expected to have less primitive means at his disposal. But what of a doctor wishing to spare his nearest and dearest the cruel discovery that he has deliberately abandoned them? His last two letters are by no means letters of farewell — and yet, ten years earlier, he had already confessed to his wife that “Truly intimate matters are never written of.”

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The Poet Who Dances with a Hundred Legs

IDEALLY, the title of a public lecture or a book should define or sum up the topic that is going to be treated. Therefore, allow me to explain briefly the choice of this peculiar title.

First, Chesterton the poet. Chesterton once said that he suspected Bernard Shaw of being the only man who had never written any poetry. We may well suspect that Chesterton never wrote anything else.

But what is poetry? It is not merely a literary form made of rhythmic and rhyming lines — though Chesterton also wrote (and wrote memorably) a lot of these. Poetry is something much more essential. Poetry is grasping reality, making an inventory of the visible world, giving names to all creatures, naming what is . Thus, for Chesterton, one of the greatest poems ever written was, in Robinson Crusoe , simply the list of things that Robinson salvaged from the wreck of his ship: two guns, one axe, three cutlasses, one saw, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat flesh… Poetry is our vital link with the outside world — the lifeline on which our very survival depends — and therefore also, in some circumstances, it can become the ultimate safeguard of our mental sanity.

One of the many misunderstandings we often entertain on the subject of Chesterton is to picture him as a big, benign, jolly fellow, inexhaustibly possessed by innocent laughter; a man who seems to have spent all his life blissfully unaware of the nocturnal side of the human condition; a man securely and serenely anchored in sunny certainties; a man who seemingly was spared our common anguishes, and doubts and fears; a man from another age perhaps, and who could hardly have had an inkling of the terrors and horrors that were to characterise our time. At the end of this hideous twentieth century — arguably the most savage and inhumane period in all history — we may well wonder: with his permanent and unflappable good cheer, isn’t Chesterton some sort of monument from another era — if not from another civilisation? Shouldn’t he appear to the modern reader as an endearing but irrelevant anachronism? For, after all, we are the children of Kafka: how could Chesterton address our anxiety?