Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

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Regarding The Original of Laura , however, Vera followed only half of Nabokov’s instructions. Love prevented her from destroying drafts handwritten by her husband; but taste and literary judgement prevented her from publishing them.

Eighteen years after his mother’s death, Dmitri finally decided to publish these posthumous fragments. It would be impertinent for us to speculate on his motivations. He was close to his parents; his affection and admiration for his father are evident, as is his devotion to his father’s works; he spent much time preparing editions and translations of Nabokov’s writings. Anyway, Dmitri’s love and dedication are not the issue here. The question is: what about his taste and judgement?

In this field, he once had a notorious lapse. At the time of the international triumph of Lolita —as a film adaptation was being prepared — young Dmitri (he was twenty-six at the time) had the idea to stage in Italy (where he was pursuing his opera-singing career) a fake casting contest for the part of Lolita. In Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years , Brian Boyd writes (drawing on Dmitri’s own words, as quoted in Vladimir’s selected letters and Dmitri’s published memoirs):

For two days his Milan apartment was invaded by “decidedly postpubescent aspiring nymphets, some with provincial mothers in tow.” When his father saw a magazine photograph of the “finalists” surrounding Dmitri on his oversized satin-covered bed, he cabled his son at once to stop “the Lolita publicity” immediately. And he sent a stern letter, warning Dmitri that such a puerile stunt could only harm his own career.

Of course, Dmitri was duly contrite afterwards. This youthful indiscretion took place nearly fifty years ago; it would be far-fetched to invoke it today against the old man who recently took the initiative to publish The Original of Laura. Still, one may regret that on this occasion, no stern fatherly cable could have come in time to put a quick stop to this enterprise.

G.K. CHESTERTON, whose formidable mind drew inspiration from a vast culture — literary, political, poetical, historical and philosophical — once received the naïve praise of a lady: “Oh, Mr. Chesterton, you know so many things!” He suavely replied: “Madam, I know nothing: I am a journalist.”

The many enemies of French philosopher Jean-François Revel often attempted to dismiss him as a mere journalist which, of course, he was among many other things, and very much in the Chestertonian fashion.

At first it may seem odd to associate these two names: what could there be in common between the great Christian apologist and the staunch atheist, between the mystical poet and the strict rationalist, between the huge, benevolent man-mountain and the short, fiery, nimble and pugnacious intellectual athlete (and, should we also add, between the devoted husband and the irrepressible ladies’ man)? One could multiply the contrasts, yet, on a deeper level, the essence of their genius was very much alike.

Revel was an extrovert who took daily delight in the company of his friends:

I am the most sociable creature; other people’s society is my joy. Though, for me, a happy day should have a part of solitude, it must also afford a few hours of the most intense of all the pleasures of the mind: conversation. Friendship has always occupied a central place in my life, as well as the keen desire to make new acquaintances, to hear them, to question them, to test their reactions to my own views.

Always sparring with his interlocutors, he was passionately committed to his ideas, but if he took his own beliefs with utter seriousness, he did not take his own person seriously. Again, one could apply to him what Chesterton’s brother said of his famous sibling: “He had a passionate need to express his opinions, but he would express them as readily and well to a man he met on a bus.”

Revel’s capacity for self-irony is the crowning grace of his memoirs, The Thief in an Empty House . Personal records can be a dangerous exercise, but in his case it eventuated in a triumphant masterpiece.

His humour enchanted his readers but kept disconcerting the more pompous pundits. The French greatly value wit, which they display in profusion, but humour often makes them uneasy, especially when it is applied to important subjects; they do not have a word for it, they do not know the thing.

Whereas wit is a form of duelling — it aims to wound or to kill — the essence of humour is self-deprecatory. Once again, a Chestertonian saying could be apposite:

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 nothing else. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German.

What compounded the dismay of Revel’s pretentious critics was his implacable clarity. One of his close friends and collaborators said he doubted if Revel, in his entire career, had written a single sentence that was obscure. In the Parisian intellectual world such a habit can easily ruin a writer’s credit, for simple souls and solemn mediocrities are impressed only by what is couched in opaque jargon. And, in their eyes, how could one possibly say something important if one is not self-important?

With the accuracy of his information and the sharpness of his irony, Revel deflated the huge balloons of cant that elevate the chattering classes. They felt utterly threatened, for he was exposing the puffery of the latest intellectual fashions upon which their livelihood depended. At times they could not hide their panic; for instance, the great guru of the intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan, during one of his psychoanalytical seminars at the Sorbonne, performed in front of his devotees a voodoo-like exorcism. He frantically trampled underfoot and destroyed a copy of Revel’s book Why Philosophers? , in which Lacan’s charlatanism was analysed.

Yet such outbursts were mere circus acts; far more vicious was the invisible conspiracy that surrounded Revel with a wall of silence, well documented in Pierre Boncenne’s Pour Jean-François Revel: Un esprit libre (Paris: Plon, 2006), a timely and perceptive book that takes the full measure of Revel’s intellectual, literary and human stature.

A paradoxical situation developed: Revel’s weekly newspaper columns were avidly read, nearly every one of his thirty-odd books was an instant bestseller, and yet the most influential “progressive” critics studiously ignored his existence. His books were not reviewed, his ideas were not discussed, if his name was mentioned at all it was with a patronising sneer, if not downright slander.

Revel was quintessentially French in his literary tastes and sensitivity (his pages on Michel de Montaigne, François Rabelais and Marcel Proust marry intelligence with love; his anthology of French poetry mirrors his original appreciation of the poetic language), in his art of living (his great book on gastronomy is truly “a feast in words”) and in his conviviality (he truly cared for his friends).

And yet what strikingly set him apart from most other intellectuals of his generation was his genuinely cosmopolitan outlook. He spent the best part of his formative and early creative years abroad, mostly in Mexico and Italy. In addition to English (spoken by few educated French of his time) he was fluent in Italian, Spanish and German; until the end of his life he retained the healthy habit of starting every day (he rose at 5 a.m.) by listening to the BBC news and reading six foreign newspapers.