Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

In the end, the gift of writing novels is not unlike God’s grace: it is arbitrary, incomprehensible and sublimely unjust. It is not a scandal if novelists of genius prove to be wretched fellows; it is a comforting miracle that wretched fellows prove to be novelists of genius.

I have still not told you when Simenon was born, when he died, or how he lived. I have said nothing of the triumphs of his public life or of the dramas of his private life; I did not dwell on his parents, his origins, his career, his travels, his adventures, his pipes, his women, and all the Maigret folklore… And you begin to see — I trust — why I shall not raise these matters. They are all false tracks, red herrings, dead-ends; they lead nowhere. What a zealous researcher might finally catch in his net — after dragging bleak expanses of mud — would hardly repay his efforts. Every life leaves behind an accumulation of broken odds and ends — bizarre and sometimes smelly. Rummaging there, one can always unearth enough evidence to establish that the deceased was both monstrous and mediocre. Such a combination is quite common — whoever doubts it needs only look at himself in a mirror.

Why should anyone work so hard to portray a Simenon who, in the end, looks like anybody else? The only Simenon who interests us resembles nobody, and this is what enabled him to write Letter to My Judge, Widow Couderc, The Escapee, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By , and so many other novels where, strangely, again and again, we return to draw the courage to contemplate our own misery without flinching. The truth that inhabited Simenon lies in his works, and there only. Whoever still insists to look elsewhere for it ought to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s lines:

By this, and only this, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries,

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider,

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms.

*Speech to the Académie Royale de Littérature Française of Belgium on the occasion of my election to the Chair of Georges Simenon (1992).

IN BELGIUM

Je plie / Je coule / Je m’appuie sur les coups que l’on me porte /… / Et toi, qui en misère as abondance / Et toi, / Par ta soif, du moins tu es soleil / Épervier de la faiblesse, domine!

I fold / I sink / I lean into the blows I am dealt /… / And you, who find abundance in poverty / And you, / who by your thirst, at least, are sunshine / Hawk of your weakness, dominate!

— HENRI MICHAUX, Épreuves, Exorcismes

ARTISTS who are content merely to hone their gifts eventually come to little. The ones who truly leave their mark have the strength and the courage to explore and exploit their shortcomings. Michaux sensed this from the outset: “I was born with holes in me.” And he knew in an inspired way how to take advantage of it. “I have seven or eight senses. One of them is the sense of lack. .. There are sicknesses which leave nothing at all of a man who is cured of them.” Precautions were thus in order: “Always keep a reserve stock of maladaptation.” In this area, however, Michaux was well provisioned from birth.

For in the first place he was Belgian. And not just Belgian, but a native of Namur — the province of a province. (The French tell Belgian jokes; the Belgians tell Namur jokes.) Speaking of Michaux, Jorge Luis Borges — rather well placed to appreciate such things, since Buenos Aires is not exactly the centre of the earth — stressed how great an advantage might be drawn from culturally marginal origins: “A writer born in a great nation is in danger of assuming that the culture of his native country suffices. In this, paradoxically, he is the one who tends to be provincial.”[2]

At bottom, Belgianness is a diffuse awareness of a lack. The lack, first and foremost, of a language. In their use of French, Belgians are plagued by insecurities. Some stagger along in Walloon ruts; the rest flounder in a bog of Flemish expressions. Disturbed and anxious, they limp first on one leg and then on the other. For Michaux, however, the infirmity was even more radical: born in a Walloon town, then incarcerated while still a child in a strictly Flemish boarding school, he pulled off the remarkable feat of starting out in life hampered by both handicaps at once.[3]

Of course, Michaux soon sloughed off his “Walloon,” and completely forgot the Flemish of his childhood, but something remained, something essential that imparts a unique flavour to his voice: “I do not always think directly in French.” What is more, this circumstance made him especially sensitive to his compatriots’ mistrustful, clumsy and hesitant attitude to language. In one of his very earliest writings, he observed that in Belgium “the commonest of insults is stoeffer , which means a pretentious person, a poseur. Belgians are afraid of pretentiousness… especially the pretentiousness of the spoken or written word. Hence their accent — their notorious way of speaking French. The key here is this: Belgians believe that words are pretentious in themselves. They cloak and muffle them as much as they can, so much so that they become inoffensive and well-behaved. Speaking should be done, they think, rather as you might open your wallet, making sure to hide the large bills, or as if raising the alarm in the case of an accident — and even then gesturing broadly with the hands to help ease the word’s passage.”

After the lack of language comes a lack of space. “This sad, overpeopled land… muddy countryside squelching underfoot, terrain for frogs… no wildness. What is wild in this country? Wherever you thrust your hand you come upon beets or potatoes, or a turnip, or a rutabaga — stomach stuffing for the livestock as for this entire race of eaters of as much starch and stodge as possible. A few dirty, sluggish, devastated rivers with no place to go. Caskets, ho!… A landscape of little hills fit for motor-coach tourists; endless files go up, come down, looping, spiralling; ants, worker ants of a toiling country, toiling more that any other. ..”

Europe has a good many small countries, but this is the only one, seemingly, to take pride in its exiguity. It proclaims its smallness, boasts of it with satisfaction, basks in it, drapes itself in it like a flag. Have you ever heard the Dutch, the Danish, the Portuguese or the Swiss referring to themselves as “little Dutchmen,” “little Danes,” etc.? What is more, Belgium feels uncomfortable, uneasy, with its present form, and considers itself still too big ! It would like to become even smaller, and it will no doubt do so. New plans are afoot to fragment the country even further, to split it up into ever smaller sections that can wriggle in complete autonomy like a worm severed by a gardener’s spade.

* * *

But from the beginning the worst thing for Michaux was people: “The Belgians were the first human beings that I had the chance to be ashamed of.”

“A race of shiny noses! A disgusting race that dangles, loiters, trickles — such was the race in the midst of which he was born. Masses of poor people, or rather of petty-rich ones. Rich people. .. A people bloated, but bursting with inner strength, not noble, but proliferating.” This original sin was very intimate for Michaux: “Have always felt estranged from my family. .. The farther back I go into my childhood, the stronger my feeling of being a stranger in my parents’ house.”