Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

The first time that Michaux ever evoked his seaman’s career was a quarter-century later, in 1946, in a letter-cum-memorandum to René Bertelé, who had asked him for biographical details: “I left Belgium at twenty-one and signed on as a seaman.” Later still, in 1957, in “Quelques renseignements sur cinquante-neuf années d’existence” (Some Particulars on Fifty-Nine Years of Existence), written at the request of another commentator and biographer, Robert Bréchon, he supplied a little more information about his seagoing ventures:

1920. Boulogne-sur-Mer. Took ship as a seaman on a five-mast schooner.

Rotterdam: second embarkation. Aboard Le Victorieux , ten thousand tons, a good-looking vessel which the Germans had just delivered to France. There were fourteen of us in cramped crew’s quarters in the bow. Remarkable, unexpected and invigorating camaraderie. Bremen, Savannah, Norfolk, Newport News, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires. Back in Rio, the crew, complaining of bad food, refused to go on and reported sick en bloc. In solidarity, he left the fine ship with them… thus avoiding the wreck of the vessel twenty days later south of New York.

1921. Marseilles. The worldwide laying-up of ships (former troop and supply transports) was at its height. No chance of signing on. The great window had closed. He had to turn his back on the sea.

Finally, at the age of eighty, in 1979, in answer to a query from an editor of the reference periodical Contemporary Authors , Michaux supplied the following additional information: “I never sailed under the Belgian flag. Twice I managed to sign on as a seaman on French ships, even though I had no qualifications at all. I was twenty-one.”

The oddly belated and fragmentary nature of these details puzzles me. The first boat on which Michaux was hired was a sailing ship. And a strange one indeed: a “ cinq-mâts schooner ,” he tells us. But the term does not exist.[4] Michaux was sailing on a French vessel; as occasional a sailor as he was, it is scarcely conceivable that after several months of life on board he had never learnt or retained the French name for the type of boat he was on. It is worth noting too that five-masted sailing vessels (rigged as schooners) were hardly to be found in Europe: they made their appearance early and soon disappeared, and were used for the most part in the United States, on both coasts, for transporting lumber or for offshore fishing. Such a boat, sailing under the French flag, would have been a rare bird indeed!

As for the second boat, Michaux did not trouble to say whether it was a sailing or a motor vessel; on the other hand, he gave its name, Le Victorieux , and its provenance as war reparation from Germany to France. On the basis of these two pieces of information it should be possible to trace this vessel in maritime archives, notably those of Lloyd’s. Furthermore, if Le Victorieux foundered in 1921 off New York, the press must have reported the event at the time. Most of the ships on which Joseph Conrad sailed, for example, have been quite precisely identified by his biographers (name of vessel, tonnage, rigging, crew lists, etc.). Michaux’s two boats would call for much less research, but it has not been done.

Another enigma too surrounds Michaux’s seafaring. During his feverish search for employment as a seaman, he sent an unending flow of letters, as we have seen, to Herman Closson, the only friend to whom he opened up, keeping him abreast of the ups and downs of his quest and confiding in him about his alternating hopes and disappointments. Sometimes, if we are to believe him — although it becomes harder and harder to do so — he was within a hair’s breadth of casting off. Finally (as mentioned above), Michaux bragged that “A week from today I shall certainly have left.” Michaux was without vanity, but he had a diabolical pride; after such a declaration there would have been no backing down. But then what happened next? He disappeared. Complete silence. If he really did go to sea, and put in at all those exotic ports, whose very names would have fired the imaginations of the two adolescents, why did he never send so much as a triumphant postcard to his old chum whom he so loved to impress (not to mention the fact that he was an inveterate sender of postcards his whole life long)? But this time there was no word, no card — NOTHING! The correspondence with Closson did not resume until the very end of 1921—by which time Michaux was just beginning his national service in a Belgian barracks.

Let me mention one last reason — but not the least — for us to be mystified. For any sensitive and imaginative young man, and a fortiori for a young poet of genius, the very first sea voyage aboard an oceangoing sailing ship must be a rough, overwhelming and unforgettable adventure. In Michaux’s case, however, the experience left strictly no trace in his poetic output with the exception of a couple of short sibylline sentences in a prose piece on a completely different subject: “Poor A., what are you doing aboard that boat? Months pass; suffering, suffering. Sailor, what are you doing? Months pass; suffering, suffering.” By contrast, when Michaux sailed to Ecuador some seven years later, the three-week crossing from Amsterdam to Guayaquil inspired the superb opening of his Ecuador— some twenty pages. In other words, his modest, indeed banal and routine experience as a simple passenger on a semi-cargo ship was enough to sharpen his capacity to observe and stir his imagination far more thoroughly than his supposed two years as a seaman!

In their chronology at the beginning of the first volume of the Pléiade edition of Michaux’s complete works, the editors Raymond Bellour and Ysé Tran conclude, apropos of the years 1919–1921, that “No document exists offering details of Michaux’s voyages as a sailor besides those particulars that he himself shared or made public.” And Jean-Pierre Martin confirms this: “Of these crossings there is no trace. All we have is Michaux’s own brief and retrospective testimony. Only a biographical note written by him over thirty years later.” Yet Martin draws no inference from this.

For my own part, so long as we have no proof of the reality of this maritime chapter, I shall continue to think that it belongs to the sphere of the imagination. Which is not by any means to call Michaux a liar. He is a poet. And I take the word in the first two meanings assigned it in Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary: “Poet: an inventor; an author of fiction.”

MICHAUX’S TOMB

I am afraid — afraid that, once dead, I shall have in some sense to live even longer.

— HENRI MICHAUX, “Note sur le suicide”

In these bibles [the Pléiade editions] errors become definitive.

— ARAGON, as reported by Matthieu Galey, Journal I

One day, a good twenty years ago, because in my writings on China I had several times expressed my admiration for Michaux, I received a letter from an unknown reader who wanted to know how it was possible for me to give so much consideration to an author who had so stupidly truckled to Maoism. When you publish books you are bound to receive a quantity of eccentric or bizarre letters, but this one seemed to break all bounds. The qualities that make Michaux especially dear to us are precisely his tonic disrespect, his honed intelligence and his absolute originality: all his ideas were arrived at independently, thanks to a sort of wild naïveté, and he never allowed himself to follow any kind of fashion. It should be added that when he was traveling in China (1932) the very name of Mao was still largely unknown. Clearly my correspondent must be a crazy compulsive letter-writer. I tossed the letter away, but the memory of it continued to nag vaguely at me, for, as absurd as its content had been, its form and style in no way suggested that the writer was a lunatic. But what could the letter possibly refer to?