The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (70 page)

“Foreword to
The Sea in French Literature
” is adapted and translated by the author from Simon Leys,
La Mer dans la littérature française
, Vol. 1, “De François Rabelais à Alexandre Dumas”; Vol. 2, “De Victor Hugo à Pierre Loti” (Paris: Plon, 2003).

“In the Wake of Magellan” first appeared in the
Monthly
(August 2008).

“Richard Henry Dana and His
Two Years Before the Mast
” first appeared in English in the
Australian Literary Review
(3 November 2010).

“The Idea of the University” is the text of Simon Leys’s address to the Campion Foundation Inaugural Dinner, Sydney, 23 March 2006.

“I Prefer Reading” first appeared in the
Independent Monthly
(1994); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“A Way of Living,” first appeared in the
Independent Monthly
(1995); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“Tell Them I Said Something” first appeared in the
Monthly
(February 2006).

An earlier version of “Detours” first appeared in
Notes from the Hall of Uselessness
(Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2008).

“Memento Mori” first appeared in the
Monthly
(June 2006).

1
.  For this episode of Nabokov’s career, I am drawing most of my information from Brian Boyd,
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
(Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 213–14. The lectures were published posthumously as
Lectures on Don Quixote
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

2
.  Random observations on Cervantes and Don Quixote are scattered through several volumes of Montherlant’s notebooks. He also wrote an introduction to a paperback reprint of
Don Quichotte
(Paris: Livre de Poche, 1961), which in turn was reproduced in the posthumous collection of his critical essays (
Essais critiques
, Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

3
.  
La Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho
was first published in 1905. An English translation was issued by Princeton University Press as Vol. 3 of
Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno
(Bollingen Series, 1967). Here, I have used the French translation by J. Babelon,
La Vie de Don Quichotte et de Sancho Pança
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1959).

4
   . . . .
Sufro yo a tu costa,
Dios no existente, pues si Tú existieras
Existiría yo también de veras.
(from
Rosario de sonetos líricos
)

5
.  
Don Quixote’s Profession
, originally a series of three lectures, was first published as a monograph by Columbia University Press in 1958. It was subsequently reproduced in a collection of Van Doren’s essays,
The Happy Critic
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1961). This volume, like most of Van Doren’s other writings, has now become extremely rare.

1
.  The letter is a very fine one. The Prince is tactful enough to cloak his generosity with a jocular tone. Since Sophie Deroisin quotes only one sentence of it, let me give the text in its entirety:

I am, Sir, the person who came to see you the other day. I shall not return, though I am longing to do so; but you dislike both devotees and their devotion.

Consider my proposals. No one reads in my country; you will be neither admired nor persecuted. You will have the key to my library and gardens; you will see me there or not, as you please. You will have a little country-house a quarter of a league from mine. You can plant, sow, do what you like.

Jean-Baptiste [Rousseau] and his wit came to die in Flanders, but he was merely a writer of verse; let Jean-Jacques and his genius come and live there. Let it be in my house, or as it were in his, that you continue to live
vitam impendere vero
. If you want still greater freedom, I have a tiny plot of detached land, where the air is good, the sky fair; and it is only eighty leagues from here, I have neither archbishop nor Parliament, but the finest sheep in the world.

There are honey-bees at the other house I offer you. If you like them, I will leave them; if you do not, I will remove them elsewhere: their republic will treat you better than that of Geneva, which you have honoured so greatly and to which you will have done so much good.

Like you, I hate thrones and dominations; you will reign over no one, but no one will reign over you. If you accept my offer, I will come to fetch you and will conduct you myself to the Temple of Virtue, which will be the name of your abode. But we shall not call it by that name; I will spare your modesty all the triumphs you deserve.

If all this displeases you, Monsieur, consider that it has never been suggested. I shall not see you again, but I shall continue to read you and to admire you, though I shall not tell you so.

(translation by Sir Leigh Ashton, modified)

2
. Let it be said
en passant
that this observation actually reveals what is wrong with Wagner himself.

3
. It is worth noting that Ligne himself, though he considered Mozart “an excellent and charming composer,” gave higher marks to Gluck.

4
. In a recent work,
Het Belgisch Laberint
(Utrecht: De Arbeiderspers, 1989), Geert van Istendael has drawn the interesting corollary that “Europe will be Belgian or will not exist.”

5
. In Belgium, up until the end of the eighteenth century, the aristocracy and the various elites (e.g., painters) were conventionally looked upon as “Flemings.” Soldiers and multifarious other down-and-outs were deemed “Walloons.”

6
. Ligne would write to Casanova:

I used to believe like you that the sum of the good was greater than the sum of the bad.

But two years ago today, on the unhappiest day of my own life, I learnt that my poor Charles had lost his, and since then I feel that all my blessings combined (and I have received a prodigious quantity of them) have not brought me, either in general or in particular, one thousandth part in pleasure of all the pain with which this frightful loss afflicted, and will continue to afflict me. . . . Can I even compare the life of my poor Charles with his death? I adored him for his valour, his character, his simple, jesting and sociable gaiety; but he never gave me as much pleasure alive as he hurt me in ceasing to live. . . .

1
.  Quoted by Haydn Mason, “Voltaire et Shakespeare,” in
Visages de Voltaire
(Brussels: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Françaises, 1994), p. 23.

2
.  José Cabanis gathered a collection of these purple patches in his succulent
Plaisir et lectures
(Paris: Gallimard, 1982), Vols. 1 and 2.

3
.  This “Portrait de Balzac” was made for French radio and was broadcast in 1960. It is reproduced in Alain Bertrand,
Georges Simenon
(Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988), pp. 215–40.

4
.  These views may appear odd to Western minds, but they were commonly held in China, where they received special development in Daoist sexual theory and practice—and I wonder if Balzac did not draw from that very source. Robb points out that, in his youth, Balzac “profited from his father’s multifarious interests, which, at a time, included all things Chinese.” Balzac himself declared: “At the age of fifteen, I knew everything it was possible to know about China.”

5
.  This is exactly the definition of what psychologists call “eidetic memory.” Eidetic memory is similar in some of its effects to hallucination, but, unlike hallucination, it is not a morbid phenomenon. Many children are naturally endowed with this ability to store and recall at will accurate and vivid images from the past, but they lose it as they grow up. Some novelists and some painters maintain and develop this gift through the very practice of their craft. It was systematically cultivated by Chinese painters (the prevalence of eidetic memory among the Chinese may have resulted from their early learning, and constant use, of an ideographic script).

Sartre (in his treatise
L’Imaginaire
) took for granted the validity of Alain’s view that there is an essential difference between what is perceived and what is imagined; Alain used to illustrate the distinction by putting the question: If you pretend that you can
see
the Pantheon without standing in front of it, then please tell us how many columns you see on its façade. Yet a well-trained Chinese painter—or, in Europe, Leonardo da Vinci or Daumier—would have been able to meet that very challenge and, shutting his eyes, could have counted the columns from the image in his mind.

6
.  Following this, Balzac then singled out the two most pernicious practices that can sap the willpower of a writer: an excessive
consommation
of cigars and the frequent writing of book reviews. (For Balzac, the proper approach to literary journalism consisted simply in writing under a pen-name effusive praise of his own novels.)

1
.  
Oeuvres complètes de Victor Hugo
(Paris: Bouquins Laffont, 1989),
Océan
, p. 290. This detached fragment from the huge mass of Hugo’s posthumously published papers bears a small heading: “The Revilers.” What Hugo had in mind therefore was not the flaws of the great but the fact that greatness, by its very nature, presents an open field for base vermin. Taken in the first meaning, however, this observation could also be applied to Hugo, even in the most literal sense: the heroic Juliette Drouet—his loving, long-suffering mistress—noted that the great poet had filthy underwear, his personal hygiene was deplorable (he kept using her toothbrush) and, on occasion, he even gave her fleas.

2
.  Eighty years after their original publication as newspaper columns, these
Letters from Paris
were eventually collected in a volume, excellently edited and presented by Leon Edel. (
Henry James: Letters from Paris
, New York University Press, 1957.)

3
.  It would be inaccurate to ascribe these Hugolian flourishes to the onset of senility: thirty-five years earlier, he had already made similar pronouncements: “Vienna, Berlin, Saint Petersburg and London are only cities; Paris is a brain . . . At the present time, the French spirit comes to replace the old soul of every nation. The greatest intelligences of today, representing for the whole universe politics, literature, science and art, all belong to France, and France offers them to civilisation.” (
Oeuvres complètes, Le Rhin
, p. 425.) Or again: “French literature is not only the best, but the only literature there is.” (Quoted in Robb, p. 228.) But didn’t Hugo himself warn us? “All men of genius, however great, are inhabited by a beast which parodies their intelligence.” (
Ibid
, p. 137.)

4
.  
Time
, 27 April 1998.

5
.  If one day one were to compile an anthology of all the great books that
were never written
, this one should certainly enjoy pride of place. We only know how Baudelaire intended to conclude it: “In my novel, which will show a scoundrel, a genuine scoundrel, assassin, thief, incendiary and pirate, the story will end with this sentence: ‘Under the trees which I planted myself, surrounded by my family which worships me, by my children who cherish me, by my wife who adores me, I am now enjoying in peace the recompense of my crimes.’” (Recorded by Baudelaire’s first biographer, Charles Asselineau, and quoted in Henri Troyat,
Baudelaire
, Paris: Flammarion, 1994, p. 324.)

6
.  Solomon Volkov,
Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century
(New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 87.

7
.  Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,
Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire
(Paris: Bouquins/Laffont, 1989), Vol. 2, pp. 1, 162.

Edmond de Goncourt, who, in his notorious diary, turned himself into the peeping
concierge
of the French literary world, was always salivating on the latest piece of scabrous gossip. Hugo, with his ravenous sexual appetite (far from decreasing with old age, his carnal cravings developed into a compulsive mania that never relented, virtually until
his death at age eighty-three), provided a constant aliment for Goncourt’s prurient notes. With his wife Adèle, his permanent mistress, Juliette Drouet, and his numerous casual mistresses (actresses,
bas-bleus
, fashionable beauties, revolutionary heroines), Hugo was never short of female company; nevertheless, he also experienced a quasi-pathological need for furtive sexual encounters with all the successive maidservants of his own household, countless prostitutes and other humble and anonymous partners—volunteer or professional. He kept a personal record of these activities, usually including mention of the modest expenses they entailed (he was notoriously thrifty) and a brief description each time of the type of transaction involved; all this was written in a coded language (a macaronic mixture of Latin, broken Spanish and private hieroglyphs) in order to ward off the prying eyes of his principal mistress, who was fiercely jealous. Even in times of crisis and personal tragedy, his sexual urge seems to have escaped his control. When his beloved daughter Adèle became mentally unbalanced and eloped to the West Indies, she was eventually brought back to Europe under the care of a black nurse called Madame Baa. Adèle was incoherent (she never recovered her sanity) and could not recognise the members of her family. Hugo’s distress showed in his diary: “I saw Adèle. My heart is broken . . . Another door closed, darker than that of the tomb.” But a few days after this dramatic reunion, he could not resist the exotic curiosity which Madame Baa had aroused in him, and he was soon able to record in the same diary the success of this new experiment: “The first Negress in my life.”

8
.  Paul Valéry,
Degas, danse, dessin
, in
Oeuvres
(Paris: Pléiade-Gallimard, 1993), Vol. 2, p. 1208.

9
.  Volkov,
op. cit.
, p. 218. A fortuitous circumstance (fortuitous? Past a certain age, nothing we read can be fortuitous!) made me read simultaneously Brodsky’s
Conversations
and Robb’s
Hugo
. I found this totally unplanned
rapprochement
most inspiring. On the subject of “the linguistic impulse” in which Brodsky had a quasi-mystical faith (according to Volkov, he felt it was not only possible but inevitable that any crucial life decision would be reached first in a poem dictated by the inner demands of language), I find Brodsky’s testimony of particular value, for, in his case, these views could certainly not be lightly dismissed as some sort of formalistic cant: he had vouched for them with his freedom and his life.

10
. For Hugo, words had a physiognomy, a physical reality, akin to what ideographs represent for the Chinese: “Words have each their own figure. Bossuet wrote ‘thrône’ [
Note
: the regular French spelling is “trône’] in accordance with the splendid seventeenth-century spelling, which was so stupidly mutilated, simplified and castrated in the eighteenth century. If you take the ‘h’ out of ‘thrône,’ you take the seat away. Capital ‘H’ is the chair seen from the front, small ‘h’ is the chair seen in profile.” (
Océan
, p.153.) Paul Claudel (who did not like Hugo very much, yet shared essential traits with him—both were poets with a cosmic inspiration, who wrote their best work in prose) has made similar observations on the ideographic nature of alphabet writing. (But Claudel had a relatively long and deep experience of China.)

11
. Quoted in Robb, p. 337.

12
. It is not sufficiently recognised yet that Hugo is one of the greatest writers of the sea in any language—in my anthology
La Mer dans la littérature française
, he occupies 300 pages, which I hope may begin to set the record straight in this respect. (And, by the way, he exerted a direct influence upon the double vocation—nautical and literary—of Joseph Conrad, who mentioned in
A Personal Record
the works of Victor Hugo as among the most memorable readings of his childhood; note that Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, had translated
Les Travailleurs de la mer
into Polish, as well as other works by Hugo—novels and dramas.)

13
. He adopted “Ego Hugo” as his crest. “Hu(e)! Go!” is a Frenglish pun he coined after his expulsion from Jersey, where his political activities had upset the local authorities (he subsequently settled in nearby Guernsey, where he was to spend the remaining—and longer—part of his exile):

J’entends en tous lieux sur la terre

Un bon tutoiement compagnon
,

Et du Hu de la France au Go de l’Angleterre
,

Les deux syllables de mon nom.

(Everywhere on earth / I hear a familiar address / Calling with a French Hu [
Hue
= “Gee up,” to a horse] and an English Go / The two syllables of my name.)

His own name was an inspiring leitmotif for Hugo not only in his writings but, more especially, in his paintings.

14
. “I consider Baudelaire as the greatest poet of the nineteenth century . . . But I do not mean that, if one had to choose the most beautiful poem of the nineteenth century, one should look for it in Baudelaire. I do not believe that among all the
Fleurs du mal
. . . one could find one poem that equals ‘Booz endormi.’” He follows with two pages of subtle and perceptive analysis of the poem. See “À Propos de Baudelaire,” in Marcel Proust,
Contre Sainte-Beuve, Pastiches et mélanges, essais et articles
(Paris: Pléiade/Gallimard, 1971), pp. 618–20.

15
. “Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth” (All were asleep in Ur and in Jerimadeth). Jerimadeth (the word rhymes with
demandait
, three lines down) sounds like the biblical name of a place, but in fact there is no such place—it is a phonetic equivalent of “J’ai rime à
dait
” (I’ve got a rhyme for
dait
).

16
. In this perspective, one can better appreciate why the Surrealist movement and the practitioners of
écriture automatique
recognised Hugo as their ancestor. André Breton himself—the Pope of Surrealism—acknowledged it (such generosity was not usual for him): “Hugo is a Surrealist when he isn’t stupid.”

17
. Quoted in Claude Roy,
Victor Hugo témoin de son siècle
(Paris: Editions J’ai Lu, 1962), pp. 13, 14.

18
. Quoted in Jean-Marc Hovasse,
Victor Hugo chez les Belges
(Brussels: Le Cri, 1994), p. 27.

19
.
Océan
, pp. 273, 276, 286.

20
. Adèle Foucher (1803–1868) and Victor Hugo were teenage sweethearts; when they married, he was only twenty and she nineteen; both were virgins and passionately in love. Soon, however, their union did cool down. Adèle had no great interest in poetry and was quite bewildered by the frightful physical frenzy of Victor’s passion. Marriage gave the latter a first revelation of the ecstasies of the flesh, which from then on he was to explore relentlessly with other, more responsive partners. Nevertheless, Adèle dutifully bore him five children; after one early lapse, for the rest of her life she discharged with dignity her role of wife and mother; she became the loyal servant of Hugo’s glory, and until her own death gave him her unstinting support.

21
. Just a few months ago, I was struck to find in an influential Chinese magazine (published in Hong Kong) a dialogue between Jin Yong and Ikeda Daisaku on the subject of Victor Hugo. (Jin Yong—pen name of Cha Liang-yong [Louis Cha]—is a prolific, talented and hugely successful author of historical novels, who has rightly been called “the Chinese Alexandre Dumas.” The first volume of his most famous series,
The Deer and the Cauldron
, masterfully translated into English by John Minford, was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press. Ikeda is a religious leader, former president of Soka Gakkai.) Both read
Les Misérables
when they were adolescents, and they comment on the indelible impression this left upon them. The remarkable impact of Hugo on at least two successive generations of intellectuals and writers in China and Japan is a topic that deserves a special study. (See Jin Yong and Ikeda Daisaku: “Da wenhao Yuguo: yi renxing zhi guang zhaohui shijie,” in
Ming Bao
monthly, January 1998, pp. 82–8.)

22
. In Brussels alone, within two weeks of the first printing of Volume One,
eleven
pirated editions came out. See Hovasse,
op. cit.
, p. 98.

23
. Tolstoy worked on
War and Peace
from 1863 till 1868.
Les Misérables
, which he read in February 1863 as he was in the decisive gestation stage of his most ambitious project, revealed to him what could be achieved by combining the epic sweep of history with the particular incidents of individual destinies—by mixing fictional characters and historic figures. See
Tolstoy’s Diaries
, edited and translated by R.F. Christian (London: Flamingo, 1994), pp. 154, 158 and 508.

24
. Hugo’s involvement with China had two aspects: in public affairs, he showed active human concern and denounced vigorously Western imperialist aggressions in China. (To this day, the Chinese remember his generous interventions.) On the cultural side, however, his awareness of China never went beyond the superficial
chinoiserie
that was in fashion at the time. One can freely speculate on what his response would have been had he ever seen real Chinese paintings—especially the wild splashed-ink improvisations of the monk-painters of the Song, or the works of the great eccentric scholarly painters of the Ming and the Qing—but the fact is that he had no inkling of their existence. Hugo’s
chinoiseries
, however, have a grotesque exuberance that is mesmerising, humorous and delightfully crazy; during his exile, he designed an entire
salon chinois
for his mistress—complete with carved wood panelling,
carved and painted screens and furniture. This amazing ensemble has been moved to Paris and reconstructed in the Maison de Victor Hugo in the Place des Vosges.

25
. See
Journal de Eugène Delacroix
, A. Joubin ed. (Paris: Plon, 1950), Vol. 2, p. 88.

26
. See André Malraux,
Les Voix du silence
, (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), pp. 416–18.

27
. Pushkin was commenting in a letter on the indecent curiosity with which people were trying to obtain information about the private life of Byron. (Quoted in S. Volkov,
Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, op. cit.
, p. 141.)