Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

The impeccable wordsmith and original thinker Paul Valéry’s preamble for his philosophical essay “Monsieur Teste” stays etched in the mind when the essay itself is a blurry impression:

Stupidity is not my strong point. I have seen many people; I have visited a few countries; I have taken part in various undertakings without liking them; I have eaten nearly every day; I have caressed a few women. Today I can still recall a good hundred faces, two or three great shows, and perhaps the gist of some twenty books. What I remember is neither the best nor the worst of these things: simply what has managed to remain, remains. This arithmetic relieves me of any surprise that I am growing old.

But the hyper-rationality of Valéry’s intelligence produced in him a strong prejudice against the art of fiction. To his mind, a novelist’s invention was deplorably devoid of intellectual necessity. He toyed with the idea of compiling an anthology of first lines from famous novels, to demonstrate the asinine triviality of a literary genre in which a book may begin with a statement as vacuous as: “The marchioness went out at five o’clock,” a phrase that became a shorthand indictment for a certain type of fiction. The surrealist movement appropriated Valéry’s gibe in its ferocious literary crusade against all novels and novelists — but these inquisitorial outbursts had no noticeable impact upon the general health of European and American fiction, which continued to flourish. Here are two brilliantly effective novel openings from the 1930s (one could think of many dozens more). First, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies :

It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.

With Asiatic resignation, Father Rothschild S.J. put down his suitcase in the corner of the bar and went on deck. (It was a small suitcase of imitation crocodile hide. The initials stamped on it in Gothic characters were not Father Rothschild’s for he had borrowed it that morning from the valet-de-chambre of his hotel. It contained some rudimentary underclothes, six important new books in six languages, a false beard and a school atlas and gazetteer heavily annotated.)

We sense that the book will contain resources just as surprising and diverse. Or again, George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air :

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

One could not suggest with greater economy the mood of gloom and despair that is going to pervade this prophetic indictment of a modern world poisoned by synthetic food, cretinised by commercial advertisements and ransacked by real-estate developers.

* * *

Chekhov remarked that writers would often benefit by cutting off the beginnings and the endings of their stories — for these are usually the weakest parts in their work. It would not only be inconceivable but simply impracticable to effect such surgical interventions on Chekhov’s own stories; their beginnings and endings are all the more effective for being virtually invisible — and there lies one of the secrets of his art.

Lopping off the introductory sentences of a narrative is a conceit often used to startling effect in eighteenth-century literature. We don’t really begin to read Sterne’s Sentimental Journey : we are casually and unexpectedly dumped into it:

“They order,” said I, “this matter better in France.”

This sort of abrupt opening produces the youthful and exhilarating feeling one experiences when jumping into a train already in motion. We are carried away with similar speed and whimsicality by Diderot at the beginning of Jacques le fataliste —and, quite significantly, here again it is travel that provides the leading metaphor:

How did they meet? Perchance, like everybody. What were their names? What does it matter to you? Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where did they go? Who knows where he is going? What were they saying? The master said nothing; and Jacques said, that his Captain used to say, that whatever happens to us on earth, good and bad, was already written in heaven.

As we just saw, Chekhov used to put the difficulty of the ending on a par with that of the beginning. Yet it is impossible to present here any exemplary selection of endings: the emotional impact, the artistic excellence of a great ending is totally dependent upon the entire book that precedes it. To my mind, the ending of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is sublime; but either you have read the book, and naturally agree with me — or you have not read it, and my pronouncement will merely amount to a fatuous exercise in name-dropping. I must simply limit myself to a few marginal observations on some unusual forms of ending.

First is the delayed-release ending in which the real ending does not occur with the last sentence on the last page of the book but takes place a few seconds later, in the imagination of the reader. This technique somehow operates on the model of a very nasty type of bomb, whose truly devastating explosion is not the one that is produced on impact, but the second one that is delayed by a few minutes. Example: in Greene’s Brighton Rock , Rose, a naïve and kind girl, hopelessly in love with a young gangster, receives for the first time a present from her callous lover: a six-penny gramophone record on which he has recorded what she assumes to be a personal message of love. But the reader has already been told that what the little punk recorded was a dirty flow of savage abuse aimed at the innocent girl. The young man is killed, Rose returns to her sordid lodgings in a state of utter despair, her only comfort the thought that she still has the record of his voice — her only treasure — which, now at last, she will listen to; the book ends on this sentence describing her journey home:

She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.

Alternative endings are a trick famously performed by John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman . He proposes two options: gloomy or happy; the reader can take his pick. It is a cheeky display of savoir faire by a virtuoso of story-telling, but it is precisely the sort of artifice that helped give a bad name to the art of the novel. Perhaps Valéry had a point after all when he complained that fiction writing was essentially frivolous, since one can imagine different endings to the same novel — whereas the closure of a good poem has an immutable necessity.

Weird endings are a third category. In the exceptionally rich field of modern Japanese fiction, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro occupies a towering position and The Makioka Sisters (1948) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. Yukiko, the third of the four sisters, is in danger of becoming an old maid, when finally a suitable fiancé is found for her. The book ends as she prepares to go to Tokyo for her marriage:

[Yukiko’s] stomach had for some time been upset, and even after repeated doses of wakamatsu and arsilin, she was troubled by diarrhoea on the twenty-sixth [the day of her departure]. The wedding kimonos arrived on the same day. Yukiko looked at them and sighed — if only they were not for her wedding.

Yukiko’s diarrhoea persisted through the twenty-sixth and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.

Finally, there are missing endings. Two great novels that endeavour to tackle the ultimate questions of the human condition have remained without an ending — which, in retrospect, may be a most fitting conclusion.

Kafka, in his final masterpiece The Castle , tells the story of a young man who repeatedly attempts — always in vain — to overcome arcane hurdles to gain access to a mysterious castle. Will his persistence succeed? We shall never know, for Kafka died before he could complete his manuscript.