Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Russian literature occupied an important place in his reading, Dostoevsky above all, and also Chekhov. He disliked Tolstoy and this was often a bone of contention with Martin du Gard, for whom Tolstoy was God. It is always interesting to explore the dislikes of an artist — sometimes they define his mind more sharply than his predilections would.[143] “I keep reading War and Peace , and the further I go, the more I dislike it. Of course, Tolstoy’s direct observation of life is prodigious. In contrast, whenever Dostoevsky reports a conversation, one always feels that no one, anywhere, ever spoke in such a manner — whereas with Tolstoy, one’s reaction is always to say: How true! But Tolstoy’s dialogue, however lifelike, is nearly always devoid of interest. It is full of absurd platitudes… For me, everything in Tolstoy is uncongenial, down to the even light that bathes with the same indifference a Napoleonic battle and Natasha’s needlework.”[144] “In Tolstoy, the light is implacably even, there are no shades. Compared with Dostoevsky, it is as if you were to put a painting by Detaille next to a Rembrandt.”[145] (Talking to Martin du Gard:) “You are on the side of Tolstoy. As for me, I am — or at least I wish to be — on the side of Dostoevsky… Tolstoy is a wonderful witness, but for me, this is not enough. His scrutiny always bears upon the more general aspects of man — I may say, what constitutes common humanity, what is in all of us, what we share with all other people. He shows me what I already know — more or less — what I could have found by myself with a little attention. He never offers any surprise… Whereas Dostoevsky, ah! He always amazes me. He always reveals new things, things I had never suspected to exist: the unseen…”[146]

He also followed, to some extent, contemporary developments in German literature. He professed public admiration for Thomas Mann, but confessed private boredom: “ Zauberberg is an important book, quite masterly, but German novels are always such a vide-poches : they really pour everything into it.”[147] (Here, Gide seems to be unwittingly joining Claudel, who held that the key metaphor with which to interpret the diverse manifestations of German culture was the sausage .[148])

Gide followed closely the French literary life of his time. Usually, writers are notoriously mean to each other; rivalries, backstabbing, jealousy are all too common among them. Gide’s little circle, however, was remarkably free of these poisonous practices. The three friends — Schlumberger, Martin du Gard and Gide himself — always read out their new works to each other; they exchanged critical comments; the frankness of these could be blunt and ruthless at times, and yet they were invariably received in a spirit of unshakeable friendship.[149] And what is even more remarkable, they derived genuine delight from the successes of their friends.[150] Naturally enough, Gide did experience a mischievous pleasure when he saw his old antagonist Paul Claudel being humiliatingly rebuffed by the Académie Française (his candidacy had been defeated by a very mediocre competitor). Not without humour, he honestly acknowledged his private resentment of the overwhelming poet: “In front of Claudel, I am only aware of my own failings: he is awesome, he is overpowering, he has more breadth, more weight, more health, more money, more genius, more power, more children, more faith, etc., than I; I can only meekly listen to him.”[151] Gide had watched with glee what he deemed to have been a disastrous staging of Claudel’s theatrical masterpiece Le Soulier de satin —and yet, in the end, his own love of literature had the last word. The Tiny Lady described how, a year before his death, he came one night to the dinner table with a copy of Claudel’s play in his hand: “God knows how much I normally dislike this sort of stuff, but I just opened the book at random and came upon this passage — it is truly, absolutely admirable!” For him, the Tiny Lady concluded, the literary excellence of a work always swept away all other considerations: “How I love to see this aspect of his character; it reminds me of what Flaubert said: ‘Aesthetics is but a superior form of justice.’”[152]

All his life, he regretted having once — briefly, but glaringly — failed to uphold this “superior form of justice” when he overlooked Proust’s manuscript of the first part of À la recherche du temps perdu . Although he personally took the blame for this error — and never forgave himself — it seems in fact that the decision to reject Proust’s masterpiece was taken by Schlumberger (who remained largely unrepentant).[153] Eventually Gide made up for his earlier blunder by writing (in 1921) a sensitive and generous essay on Proust.[154] His private comments on Proust, as recorded over the years by the Tiny Lady, do nevertheless reflect curious contradictions — enthusiasm alternating with irritation.[155]

He paid much attention to younger writers. For instance, he felt genuine affection for Malraux; he admired his ebullient intelligence and his passion for heroic activism, but rightly judged that he was not a good writer. From the start, he perceived the exceptional brilliance of Sartre, whom he befriended — though he was disappointed (with good reason) by Sartre’s later novels. He extolled the merits of Simenon (“perhaps our greatest novelist”) at a time when the literati still affected to despise this all-too-successful and prolific author of commercial thrillers. More importantly, he discovered the poet Henri Michaux; he sought out both men personally and extended his friendship to them. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, one may feel that he overestimated the achievement of Simenon (in whom he appreciated all the things which he himself most cruelly lacked: a creative imagination, the sense of reality, experience of life[156]); and though he detected the deep originality of Michaux, he never really took the full measure of his genius. Nevertheless, in both cases he displayed qualities of perception and generosity that were truly admirable.

Gide believed that he and his great contemporaries, Valéry (his old friend) and Claudel (his intimate enemy) would eventually be recognised by posterity as having formed “a single team”—not simply because they belonged to the same era, but more deeply because “they had all shared the more or less secret influence of Mallarmé.”[157] In fact, the literary affinities of the members of “the team” are questionable, but what is certainly worth pondering is Gide’s acknowledgement of Mallarmé’s influence, which, in his own case at least, was profound and long-lasting. (Actually, instead of subtitling his biography of Gide A Life in the Present , Sheridan could have called it more appropriately The Last Writer of the Nineteenth Century .)

In Gide’s case, the Mallarmean inheritance found expression in the absolute primacy he gave to form and style over all other concerns. On this point, Gide’s literary aesthetics never wavered: as early as 1910, in an essay on Baudelaire, he stated: “In art, where expression alone matters, ideas appear young for only a day… Today, if Baudelaire still lives on, it is thanks to his formal perfection. No artist ever relied upon anything else to reach posterity.”[158] This notion acquired ever-greater importance for him with the passing of the years, and in old age, it reigned supreme in all his writings — sometimes to the dismay of his closest friends, who deplored the facility with which he would too often content himself with lieux communs , banal ideas, clichés and platitudes, so long as he could dress them up in exquisite Gidean garb.[159]

During his final illness, he cared little for communication; still he persisted, even on his deathbed, in correcting syntactical and grammatical improprieties in what was being said to him. The Tiny Lady observed: “He does not make allowance anymore for the slightest linguistic lapses, as if his entire capacity for attention was now exclusively focused on that single issue.”[160]