Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

My critics think that I am not serious but only funny, because they think that “funny” is the opposite of “serious.” But “funny” is the opposite of “not funny” and of nothing else. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German. The two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other… If you say that two sheep added to two sheep make four sheep, your audience will accept it patiently — like sheep. But if you say it of two monkeys, or two kangaroos, or two sea-green griffins, people will refuse to believe that two and two make four. They seem to believe that you must have made up the arithmetic, just as you have made up the illustration of the arithmetic. They cannot believe that anything decorated with an incidental joke can be sensible. Perhaps it explains why so many successful men are so dull — or why so many dull men are successful.

* * *

I have talked for much too long already, and yet I have barely skimmed the surface of this huge topic. But I now realise that I could have given it another title: Chesterton: The Man Who Was In Love With Daylight. He said, “If there is one thing of which I have always been certain since my boyhood and grow more certain as I advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical, if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us, if the normal man does not amaze.”

Most people tend to think of Chesterton as a “Catholic writer,” but they do not seem to realise that his conversion occurred fairly late in life (in 1922—only fourteen years before his death; a number of his major works were written long before he actually joined the Church). But when he finally made the move, he said that he became a Catholic in order to get rid of his sins.

But there was, I think, another motivation, equally powerful: gratitude. He once said that if he were to go to hell upon his death, he would still thank God for this life on earth. From the very beginning, the urge to thank his creator is what impelled him to write.

In Chesterton’s experience, the mere fact of being is so miraculous in itself that no subsequent misfortune could ever exempt a man from feeling a sort of cosmic thankfulness. I wish to end here with a short prose poem which he jotted down in a notebook of his agnostic youth; it shows that this overwhelming sense of wonder and gratitude actually predated by many years his religious conversion:

EVENING

Here dies another day

During which I have had eyes, ears, hands

And the great world round me;

And with tomorrow begins another.

Why am I allowed two?

* Lecture to the Chesterton Society of Western Australia, Perth, September 1997.

A Little ABC of André Gide

To tell the truth, I don’t know what I think of him. He is never the same for long. He never gets engaged in anything, yet nothing is more engaging than his permanent evasions. You cannot judge him, for you haven’t known him long enough. His very self is in a constant process of undoing and remaking. You think you have pinned him down, but he is Proteus:* he adopts the shape of whatever he happens to love. And you cannot understand him unless you love him.

— ANDRÉ GIDE, Les Faux-monnayeurs [1]

Gide is one of the few writers who really nauseates me, so I am naturally not an authority on him.

— FLANNERY O’CONNOR, The Habit of Being [2]

THE STARTING point of this (rather whimsical) little glossary of the Gidean enigma was provided to me by Alan Sheridan’s work André Gide: A Life in the Present (Harvard University Press, 1999). Sheridan’s massive opus (700 pages) is a model of meticulous scholarship.[3] To appreciate the biographer’s achievement, one should consider how daunting was his task. Gide was a compulsive diarist; besides writing some sixty books (essays, fiction, theatre, travelogues, criticism, poetry, literary translations), he kept for more than fifty years a Journal [4] that fills thousands of pages. Members of his small circle of close friends were equally addicted to graphomania. First of all, Maria Van Rysselberghe — nicknamed la Petite Dame (“the Tiny Lady”*), who knew him for half a century and was his most intimate companion (or should we say accomplice?) during the last thirty years of his life (inasmuch as any sort of intimate companionship could be achieved with such a slippery eel) — kept an accurate and vivid record of his daily utterances and deeds, together with perceptive portraits of his literary friends and transcripts of their conversations (four volumes — nearly 2,000 pages — crammed with information). Gide’s best friends were also writers: Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Schlumberger, Pierre Herbart.* After his death, they all wrote memoirs of the Gide they knew. The figure of Gide also looms large in Martin du Gard’s monumental and fascinating Journal (three volumes—3,500 pages) as well as in Schlumberger’s diaries.[5] When they were away from Paris, in their respective country residences, the friends wrote to each other at great length: the correspondence Gide — Martin du Gard and Gide — Schlumberger fills three volumes (1,400 pages). Besides, Gide also corresponded regularly with a great number of literary acquaintances, editors, writers, artists, poets, critics — his position as the co-founder and main financial backer (with Schlumberger and Gallimard) of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française (literary journal cum publishing house) virtually established him as the éminence grise of twentieth-century French literature: his voluminous published correspondence with Valéry, Claudel, Jammes, Mauriac, Jouhandeau, Romains, Suarès, Rivière, Copeau, Du Bos, Cocteau, J.-E. Blanche, Arnold Bennett, Edmund Gosse, Rilke, Verhaeren, etc., etc., amounts to some 20,000 pages.[6]

Thus, the first and main problem of Gide’s biographer was not how to gather information, but how not to drown in it. Sheridan succeeded in bringing this literary flood under control, and in organising it into a lucid synthesis. Yet, just as the damming of a big river cannot be achieved without inflicting some damage on its wildlife, the discipline which Sheridan had to impose upon his rich material was perhaps not fully compatible with the lush ambiguities and contradictions of the subject. Now, in contrast with whatever certainties the reader may feel able to derive from Sheridan’s authoritative study, the only purpose of my disjointed notes is to warn him against the temptation to draw conclusions — for Gide must always present an irreducible elusiveness: he was truly the great master of intellectual escape — the Houdini of modern literature.

ANTI-SEMITISM

In 1914—he was then a middle-aged, well-established writer — after a lunch with his old friend and former schoolmate Léon Blum, Gide noted in his diary[7] how he respected Blum’s intelligence and culture, but resented his Jewishness. He expounded at some length on this theme:

There is no need to enlarge here on Jewish defects; the point is: the qualities of the Jewish race are not French qualities. Even when Frenchmen are less intelligent, less resilient, less worthy in every respect than the Jews, the fact remains that only they themselves can express what they have to say. The Jewish contribution to our literature… is not so much enriching us, as it constitutes an interruption in the slow effort of our race to express itself, and this represents a severe, an intolerable distortion of its meaning.

One must acknowledge that nowadays there is in France a Jewish literature that is not French literature… The Jews speak with greater ease than us, because they have fewer scruples. They speak louder than us, because they ignore the reasons that sometimes make us speak in a lower voice, the reasons that make us respect certain things.