Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

For someone guilty of being a stranger at home, it was absolutely essential to find an elsewhere to offset this alarming state of affairs. But where to run to? “That Flemish countryside! You cannot contemplate it without putting everything in doubt. Those low houses that have not dared to risk another story upward, then all of a sudden a tall church steeple shoots into the air, as if this was the only thing in man capable of ascending, the only thing with a chance in the heights.” Michaux too had sought that “chance in the heights”: his earliest wish was to become a saint. In time, alas, you abandon such a wish, but you never get over it, never find consolation for its loss: “My father refused to let me join the Benedictines. The dream of my adolescence had been sainthood. I fell from a great height — very disorientated — when I lost my faith around twenty years of age. .. I got into literature for lack of any better alternative. .. Too impressed by the saints to take other people and their writings seriously. .. What I am and what I do seemed to me then, and still seem to me — quite objectively, and by no means out of modesty — to be wretched. The achievements of almost all others seem likewise wretched, if not worse. The saints, even if their starting-point — at least as I see it — is mistaken… are a magnificent fullfillment of man.” (Much later on, moreover, during Michaux’s visit to India, this never-forgotten aspiration of his adolescence gave him a particularly acute insight into a certain kind of professional holiness: “Nothing is sadder than failure. Rarely do the religious Hindus bear the mark of divinity. They have it as the critic of the Times and professors of literature have the stamp of literary genius.”)

ELSEWHERE

The author has often lived elsewhere. .. He has found himself more at ease than in Europe. That is already something. At times he was very nearly domesticated. But not truly. One cannot be too wary about countries.

— HENRI MICHAUX, Preface to Ailleurs

From the start travel emerged as Michaux’s essential activity. It has been said that illnesses are the journeys of the poor; how much truer still to say that illnesses are the first and most prodigious journeys of children. Michaux had his full ration very early on, and throughout his life, and what is more he continually drew inspiration from those journeys. In parallel with this experience of sickness, he began botanical and entomological explorations in the family garden that foreshadowed the great expeditions of his youth and maturity. He observed the battles of ants and made friends with plants (“at the age of eight I was still dreaming of being classified as a plant”). Insects, mollusks and invertebrates never lost their fascination for him: “At the age of 34, and only then, I discovered cuttlefish. I adopted them, and came to believe, after hours and hours of watching them, that they likewise adopted me.”

The most fundamental form of respect for others is the attention one pays them. Michaux saw no good reason why such attention should be confined to human beings: “For animals we tend to apply crowd psychology. Sparrows. Mice. But this particular sparrow, this particular mouse, what are their names?” To his relationship to trees, Michaux brought all the psychological insight and courtesy that he showed to his own kind (though what was his own kind?): just re-read his account of his encounters with bamboo, banyan or baobab. In the most natural way, without strain or affectation, he could adopt the point of view of a sheep or a tiger — even get inside the skin of a flea: “There is no evidence to show that the flea living on a mouse fears the cat.” Michaux’s bestiary is not anthropomorphic — rather, it is his insects that offer us an entomology of man: “Civilised insects do not understand that man does not secrete his pants. The others find nothing extraordinary about that fact.” Ecuador (1929) — a work still experimental in some respects, but already masterly — provided a first demonstration of the poet’s method, as perfectly summed up in the book’s odd blurb: “The Author says not a word about the Panama Canal, but he does happen to speak about a fly.”

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Michaux’s Plume affords a revealing glimpse of his experience of travel. Plume travels incessantly, but he has no talent for this activity: he knows only its disappointments, forever running into frustrations, having accidents, and falling prey to misunderstandings, misadventures, humiliations and ordeals that are sometimes ridiculous and sometimes sinister. “Plume could not say that he was excessively well treated when traveling. Some people pushed past him without warning; others wiped their hands nonchalantly on his jacket. In the end he got used to this. He preferred to travel modestly. .. He said nothing, made no complaint. He thought of those unfortunates who could not travel at all, whereas for his part he could travel, and traveled all the time.”

Why did Michaux travel? It was an essentially painful experience for him, as suggested by the disturbing metaphor of his expedition to the centre of the “opaque and slow life” of an apple: “I placed an apple on my table. Then I put myself inside the apple. .. There was some groping about, various experiences. A whole long tale. .. Leaving was not at all easy, and nor is explaining it. But I can tell you in one word — and that word is suffering. When I arrived inside the apple, I was freezing.” As for Michaux’s expeditions to South America, to Asia, they tried him in ways that were by no means metaphorical. As he confessed to a confidant, “I treated myself brutally, I forced myself to walk, but my body responded badly to these adventures.” And elsewhere, in an interview: “I am not physically designed for adventure; my wounds do not heal; eight times they almost had to cut my leg off, and I have heart attacks.”

In a laconic but highly significant autobiographical sketch that Michaux wrote for one of his commentators, he explained (speaking of himself in the third person) what he expected from travel: “He travels against . To rid himself of his native land, his attachments of every kind and everything that clings to him, despite himself, of Greek or Roman or Germanic culture, or of Belgian habits. Voyages of expatriation.” He travels in a sense to purge himself: “Not to acquire anything. To impoverish yourself. That is what you need.”

Michaux was not at ease traveling, yet the journey brought him relief — for he was even less at ease at home. Disquiet, which is abnormal for the settled, is at least natural in the traveler: being abroad offers existential angst a reassuring justification. This puts one in mind of a poem by Philip Larkin, “The Importance of Elsewhere” (although Larkin, be it said, has absolutely nothing in common with Michaux except for poetic genius and the challenge of being): “Lonely in Ireland since it was not home / Strangeness made sense. .. / Living in England has no such excuse: / These are my customs and establishments / It would be much more serious to refuse. / Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.”

The reader who wishes to know more about Michaux’s travels may usefully consult Jean-Pierre Martin’s biographical study Henri Michaux (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Unfortunately, on a matter of particular interest to me, namely the maritime interlude in the poet’s life, this otherwise remarkable work failed to satisfy my curiosity. Granted, information is scant. But did the biographer follow up all possible avenues? And have the logical conclusions been fully drawn?

After completing his secondary education at a Jesuit school in Brussels, when Michaux was prevented by his father from becoming a monk, he eventually enrolled at the Université Libre de Bruxelles for first-year science in preparation for medicine. But he dropped out after a few months and resolved to go to sea. Breaking off with his parents, he left for France and for three months wandered from port to port (Dunkirk, Malo-les-Bains, Boulogne-sur-Mer) in a desperate search for a chance to put out to sea. His mood swung continually from extreme exaltation to deep depression. The mirage of embarkation formed again and again, only to dissipate each time. In late July 1920 he announced to Herman Closson, the close friend and former schoolmate with whom he had maintained a continuous correspondence since leaving Belgium, that “A week from today I shall certainly have left.” After which he sent no news. The following year he surfaced in Marseilles, returned to his parents’ house in Brussels, and then began his military service, from which he would be discharged a few months later on the grounds of a weak heart.