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

by Leys, Simon

  *Speech to the Académie Royale de Littérature Française of Belgium on the occasion of my election to the Chair of Georges Simenon (1992).

  THE BELGIANNESS OF HENRI MICHAUX

  Georges Perros, who was a marvellously sensitive reader . . . had told me that “Even if one knows nothing of his background, reading Henri Michaux carefully leaves one in no doubt that he is Belgian.”

  —MICHEL BUTOR

  This need [of Michaux’s] to dig deep, this persistence of his, is not French. It is the advantage and the drawback of having been born in Brussels.[1]

  —CIORAN

  IN BELGIUM

  Je plie / Je coule / Je m’appuie sur les coups que l’on me porte / . . . / Et toi, qui en misère as abondance / Et toi, / Par ta soif, du moins tu es soleil / Épervier de la faiblesse, domine!

  I fold / I sink / I lean into the blows I am dealt / . . . / And you, who find abundance in poverty / And you, / who by your thirst, at least, are sunshine / Hawk of your weakness, dominate!

  —HENRI MICHAUX, Épreuves, Exorcismes

  ARTISTS who are content merely to hone their gifts eventually come to little. The ones who truly leave their mark have the strength and the courage to explore and exploit their shortcomings. Michaux sensed this from the outset: “I was born with holes in me.” And he knew in an inspired way how to take advantage of it. “I have seven or eight senses. One of them is the sense of lack. . . . There are sicknesses which leave nothing at all of a man who is cured of them.” Precautions were thus in order: “Always keep a reserve stock of maladaptation.” In this area, however, Michaux was well provisioned from birth.

  For in the first place he was Belgian. And not just Belgian, but a native of Namur—the province of a province. (The French tell Belgian jokes; the Belgians tell Namur jokes.) Speaking of Michaux, Jorge Luis Borges—rather well placed to appreciate such things, since Buenos Aires is not exactly the centre of the earth—stressed how great an advantage might be drawn from culturally marginal origins: “A writer born in a great nation is in danger of assuming that the culture of his native country suffices. In this, paradoxically, he is the one who tends to be provincial.”[2]

  At bottom, Belgianness is a diffuse awareness of a lack. The lack, first and foremost, of a language. In their use of French, Belgians are plagued by insecurities. Some stagger along in Walloon ruts; the rest flounder in a bog of Flemish expressions. Disturbed and anxious, they limp first on one leg and then on the other. For Michaux, however, the infirmity was even more radical: born in a Walloon town, then incarcerated while still a child in a strictly Flemish boarding school, he pulled off the remarkable feat of starting out in life hampered by both handicaps at once.[3]

  Of course, Michaux soon sloughed off his “Walloon,” and completely forgot the Flemish of his childhood, but something remained, something essential that imparts a unique flavour to his voice: “I do not always think directly in French.” What is more, this circumstance made him especially sensitive to his compatriots’ mistrustful, clumsy and hesitant attitude to language. In one of his very earliest writings, he observed that in Belgium “the commonest of insults is stoeffer, which means a pretentious person, a poseur. Belgians are afraid of pretentiousness . . . especially the pretentiousness of the spoken or written word. Hence their accent—their notorious way of speaking French. The key here is this: Belgians believe that words are pretentious in themselves. They cloak and muffle them as much as they can, so much so that they become inoffensive and well-behaved. Speaking should be done, they think, rather as you might open your wallet, making sure to hide the large bills, or as if raising the alarm in the case of an accident—and even then gesturing broadly with the hands to help ease the word’s passage.”

  After the lack of language comes a lack of space. “This sad, overpeopled land . . . muddy countryside squelching underfoot, terrain for frogs . . . no wildness. What is wild in this country? Wherever you thrust your hand you come upon beets or potatoes, or a turnip, or a rutabaga—stomach stuffing for the livestock as for this entire race of eaters of as much starch and stodge as possible. A few dirty, sluggish, devastated rivers with no place to go. Caskets, ho! . . . A landscape of little hills fit for motor-coach tourists; endless files go up, come down, looping, spiralling; ants, worker ants of a toiling country, toiling more that any other. . . .”

  Europe has a good many small countries, but this is the only one, seemingly, to take pride in its exiguity. It proclaims its smallness, boasts of it with satisfaction, basks in it, drapes itself in it like a flag. Have you ever heard the Dutch, the Danish, the Portuguese or the Swiss referring to themselves as “little Dutchmen,” “little Danes,” etc.? What is more, Belgium feels uncomfortable, uneasy, with its present form, and considers itself still too big! It would like to become even smaller, and it will no doubt do so. New plans are afoot to fragment the country even further, to split it up into ever smaller sections that can wriggle in complete autonomy like a worm severed by a gardener’s spade.

  * * *

  But from the beginning the worst thing for Michaux was people: “The Belgians were the first human beings that I had the chance to be ashamed of.”

  “A race of shiny noses! A disgusting race that dangles, loiters, trickles—such was the race in the midst of which he was born. Masses of poor people, or rather of petty-rich ones. Rich people. . . . A people bloated, but bursting with inner strength, not noble, but proliferating.” This original sin was very intimate for Michaux: “Have always felt estranged from my family. . . . The farther back I go into my childhood, the stronger my feeling of being a stranger in my parents’ house.”

  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 expedition
s 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.”

  * * *

  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.

  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 fo
r 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.