The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)
Page 57
157. Journal 2, pp. 1,057–8.
158. “Baudelaire et Monsieur Faguet,” in Essais critiques, pp. 248–9.
159. Criticising some pages by Duhamel, Martin du Gard was induced to extend his observations to the style of Gide himself: “The danger of being able to write well is also the ability to lend a pleasant form to thin or mediocre ideas, to ghosts of ideas . . . It generates the fatal temptation to give a veneer of consistency, density, weight and character to whatever comes to mind and should not deserve to be written down. Through this mechanical operation of style, one can present at little cost an appearance of thought without any effort . . . The shine of the varnish hides the low quality of the wood that was used.” (Martin du Gard: Journal 3, pp. 527–8.)
Gide had shown Martin a draft of the address he was going to deliver in Oxford, on being awarded a Doctorate honoris causa. Martin found that its form was very polished, but the elegance of the style could not redeem the vacuity of the content: “I told it to him very bluntly. He agreed, and for once, I regretted my frankness, for he immediately decided: ‘You are absolutely right! Tomorrow I will send them a telegram, and cancel everything!’ But I believe he will once again change his mind. As soon as I leave, it will seem to him that his speech was not so bad after all, he will read it again to himself, let his prose sing, and take delight in its subtle phrasing.” Martin guessed right: in the end, Gide went to Oxford and delivered his elegantly hollow speech. (Ibid., pp. 810–11.)
Schlumberger once pointed out to Gide a mistake he had made in a translation from Goethe, but he was shocked by Gide’s reply: “I know, I have tried to put it differently, but all my other versions lacked in rhythm.” Schlumberger commented: “I have noted this reaction, as, once again, it shows his constant willingness to sacrifice meaning to form.” (Schlum., p. 236.)
The Tiny Lady summed up: “I believe that he attaches so much importance to the question of form, that the question of content ceases somehow to interest him.” (PD 4, p. 16.) Earlier on, after reading his Journal, she put the question to him: “I confess I do not always understand why you select certain things for recording in your diary, whereas you omit other things that should have been equally, or more, interesting. Could it be that your choice is simply determined by the possibility of finding at once a form that is pleasing?” Gide confirmed the accuracy of her guess. (PD 3, p. 361.)
160. PD 4, p. 233.
161. Paul Claudel: Journal 1, p. 969.
162. Schlum., pp. 176, 246–7.
163. PD 2, p. 376.
164. PD 3, p. 78; Sheridan, p. 525.
165. Et nunc manet in te and Journal 1, p. 1,310; also Sheridan, p. 524.
166. This was addressed to Madeleine, and she had read it before marrying André. See Martin, p. 84.
167. Account of Martin du Gard (1920), quoted by J. Schlumberger: Madeleine et André Gide, p. 186.
168. Et nunc manet in te, pp. 1,128–9; and Sheridan, p. 525.
169. Et nunc manet in te (in the 1960 Pléiade edition of Journal 1939–1949), p. 1,134.
170. Schlum., pp. 178–9, 220.
171. Account of Martin du Gard, quoted in Schlumberger: Madeleine et André Gide, p. 191–2.
172. Account of the Tiny Lady, quoted in Schlumberger, op. cit., pp. 196–7.
173. Et nunc manet in te, op. cit., p. 1,148.
174. Martin, pp. 61–2.
175. Martin, pp. 131–2.
176. PD 2, p. 70.
177. Journal 1, pp. 798–801.
178. Journal 2, pp. 487–8.
179. Journal 1, p. 720.
180. PD 2, p. 531.
181. Well described by Sheridan, pp. 445–90. Quotes not otherwise identified here are drawn from Sheridan’s account.
182. PD 2, p. 204.
183. Schlum., p. 167.
184. Martin du Gard, Journal 2 (27 November 1936), pp. 1,208–9.
185. PD 3, p. 198.
186. PD 3, p. 201.
187. PD 3, p. 205.
188. Martin du Gard, Journal 3, p. 404.
189. Schlum., p. 266.
190. PD 4, p. 190.
191. Schlum., p. 16. (Quoted from La Porte est ouverte in Paul Mercier’s preface.)
192. Si le grain ne meurt, quoted in PD 2, p. 128; Journal 1, p. 573.
193. Martin du Gard, Journal 2, pp. 232–3.
194. Martin, pp. 96–8.
195. PD 2, p. 114.
196. Schlum., p. 368. On that same page, Schlumberger had just noted that Mauriac told him after reading the memoir of Jean Lambert (Gide’s son-in-law), which alluded to the old man’s monomania: “We must face the fact: Gide was truly a sick person, one of those madmen who need to be locked away.” (Once again, it should be recalled that Mauriac was himself a repressed homosexual, and that he had a genuine friendship with Gide.)
197. Gide’s moral blindness and capacity for self-deception staggered even his closest friends. Martin du Gard tells how Gide’s daughter, who was seventeen at the time, had become the object of the timid sentimental attentions of one of her former teachers. Gide was indignant and wanted to write to the man: “Sir, stop bothering this child. I forbid you to meet her again.” The situation, he said, was “odious.” This reaction bemused Martin: “Our good old Gide has in fact spent all his life committing breaches of trust that were far more severe! How many times did he worm his way into a friendly family, multiplying warm approaches to the parents, with the sole purpose of getting closer to their son—sometimes a thirteen-year-old schoolboy—and of joining him in his room, arousing his sexual curiosity, teaching him sensual pleasure! He was more clever than Catherine’s teacher, more diabolic with his temptations, more daring also. How many times did he succeed in hoodwinking the parents, in securing the complicity of the child, in indulging with him in sweet and perverse games? But then, to his mind, there was nothing ‘odious’ in this premeditated debauching of a young boy, whom his parents had entrusted to his friendly care!” (Martin du Gard, Journal 3, pp. 361–2.)
198. PD 4, pp. 253–4.
199. PD 2, p. 406.
200. Béatrix Beck tells in her memoirs: “Some time after the death of Gide, Dominique Drouin (his nephew) told me that the Tiny Lady had confided to him: ‘I have to fetch a little Annamite for him, and when I cannot find any, I act as a substitute.’ And Drouin added: ‘When you think of these two bags of bones.’ . . . I have a strong visual imagination and I somatise easily: I had to vomit on the spot.” (Beck, p. 161.)
201. Schlum., p. 346.
202. PD 4, p. 252.
203. Béatrix Beck, Preface to M. Saint-Clair, Il y a quarante ans, p. iv.
204. Sheridan, pp. 370 and 633.
205. Schlum., p. 96.
206. Schlum., p. 150.
207. PD 2, p. 58.
208. Quoted in PD 3, p. 16.
209. PD 4, p. 204.
210. Saint Augustine: Confessions, X, (xxiii) 34: “Sic amatur veritas, ut quicumque aliud amant, hoc quod amant velint esse veritatem, et quia falli nolent, nolunt convinci quod falli sint. Itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant.”
MALRAUX
1. In November 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, Malraux was awarded the form of immortality which the French nation bestows upon its most illustrious cultural heroes: his mortal remains were moved with great pomp into the Pantheon in Paris.
2. La Tragédie de la révolution chinoise, translation by R. Viénet (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
3. J. Andrieu, “Mais que se sont dit Mao et Malraux?” in Perspectives Chinoises, No. 37, October 1996. (An abridged version of this article was published in Le Nouveau quotidien, Lausanne, 3 December 1996.)
4. G. Duthuit, Le Musée inimaginable (Paris: José Corti, 1956). Duthuit pointed out, with great scholarly accuracy, the countless historical howlers in Malraux’s Musée imaginaire: les voix du silence. He also exposed his hollowness, obscurity, logical non sequiturs, and other factual mistakes. His demonstration (in two volumes of text
and one volume of illustrations) was brilliant, rigorous and devastating—but it reached only a small circle of specialised scholars.
5. B.Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here? (London: Picador, 1990), p. 133.
6. The Nabokov–Wilson Letters 1940–1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979), p. 175.
7. J.-P. Sartre, Lettres au Castor (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), Vol. 2, pp. 159, 167, 163, 192.
8. Letter to Roger Nimier, 8 January 1953 (in Jacques Chardonne–Roger Nimier, Correspondance, Paris: Gallimard, 1984, p. 91.) Two samples of Malraux’s galimatias (out of possible hundreds) are provided by Curtis Cate (p. 372): “The language of Phidias’ forms or of those of the pediment of Olympia, humanistic though it is, is also as specific as that of the masters of Chartres and Babylon or of abstract sculptures, because like that of the great Italians of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it simultaneously modifies the representation and its style.” Or again: “Between Cézanne’s Still Life with Clock, which strives only to be a painting, and his canvases which have become a style, there resurfaces the call which raises up Bach over and against negro music, and Piero della Francesca over and against barbarian arts—the art of mastery, as opposed to that of the miracle.”
9. B. Souvarine, Staline (Paris: Champ Libre, 1977), pp. 11–12.
10. R. Stéphane, André Malraux: entretiens et précisions (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 91.
11. C. Cate, André Malraux: A Biography (New York: Fromm, 1997).
THE INTIMATE ORWELL
1. On this subject, Orwell’s wife, writing to his sister (from Marrakech in 1938) observed with wry amusement: “He did construct one dugout in Spain [during the Civil War] and it fell down on him and his companions’ heads two days later, not under any kind of bombardment, but just from the force of gravity. But the dugout has generally been by way of light relief; his specialities are concentration camps and famine. He buried some potatoes against the famine, and they might have been very useful if they hadn’t gone mouldy at once. To my surprise he does intend to stay here [in Marrakech] whatever happens. In theory this seems too reasonable and even comfortable to be in character.”
2. Orwell and Spender became friends—but on the subject of Spender’s poetry, Orwell’s literary judgement never wavered; he simply chose not to comment.
3. This reminds me of Georges Bernanos (the two writers have much in common besides their fight against Franco). The great French novelist and pamphleteer exiled himself to Brazil shortly before the Second World War—he was disgusted by France’s political and moral decline. He sank all his meagre savings in the purchase of a cattle farm (which was soon to go bankrupt) and at the time wrote to a friend: “I have just bought 200 cows and thus acquired the right to call myself no longer ‘man of letters’ but cattleman, which I much prefer. As a cattleman I shall be able to write what I think.”
4. A young and beautiful woman—though somewhat hare-brained, she managed to edit (with the collaboration of I. Angus) the excellent Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969). These four volumes remain invaluable; not every reader can afford the twenty volumes of Davison’s editions of the Complete Works.
TERROR OF BABEL: EVELYN WAUGH
1. Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Collins, 1975); Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (London: Arrow, 1991). Postscript of 1998: one more title should be added now to this small bibliography—Selena Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994).
2. Once more, one is reminded of Belloc and of the remarkable letter he wrote to Chesterton on the occasion of the latter’s conversion to Catholicism: “The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is which the will deliberately confirms . . . I am by all my nature of mind sceptical . . . And as to the doubt of the soul, I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion . . . To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It lacks meat. It is my misfortune. In my youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man; or as a wounded dog, not able to walk, yet knows the way home.”
THE BELGIANNESS OF HENRI MICHAUX
1. As a matter of fact Michaux was born not in Brussels but in Namur (which only reinforces the point).
2. In the light of his own experience, Cioran, who was profoundly sympathetic to both Michaux and Borges, has this to say about the latter: “By the time I reached twenty, things Balkan had nothing further to offer me. Such is the tragedy—and also the benefit—of being born in a minor or indifferent cultural environment. I worshipped what was foreign. Whence my hunger to venture abroad into literature and philosophy, falling upon them with an unhealthy passion. What happens in Eastern Europe must necessarily occur too in the Latin American countries, and I have noticed that their representatives are infinitely better informed and more cultured than Westerners, who are incurably provincial. Neither in France nor in England have I encountered anyone with a curiosity to rival that of Borges, which is almost maniacal, almost a vice—and I say “vice” advisedly, for when it comes to art and thought anything that does not tend towards a slightly perverse fervour is superficial, and therefore illusory. . . . Borges was condemned to universality, forced into it, obliged to direct his mind in every direction if only to escape the asphyxiating atmosphere of Argentina. It is the South American void that makes the writers of the whole continent more lively and varied than West Europeans paralysed by tradition and incapable of breaking out of their prestigious atrophy.”
3. When Jacques Brosse told him how he had written an account of a psychological experience with the greatest of ease, Michaux responded enviously: “Ah, but it’s obviously not the same for you: you write in your mother tongue!”
“Surely,” Brosse replied, “you’re not telling me that they don’t speak French in Namur?”
“It’s not French they speak—it’s Walloon!”
Michaux added that, at the boarding school where he was locked up at the age of seven, “surrounded by stinking little peasants” who were brutal and spoke only in their own dialect, “Flemish became my second language, which I spoke as well, if not better, than French.” “Did you know,” the poet once asked an interviewer, “that as an adolescent I briefly contemplated writing in Flemish?” His very first revelation of poetry came from reading Guido Gezelle: “Gezelle was the great man. But I quickly realised that I could never equal him.” It must indeed be said that this West-Flemish priest-poet succeeded in making sublime verbal music in his obscure patois; his verses are forever engraved in the memory of anyone exposed to them on a school bench.
4. It is a strange French and English hybrid. The French equivalent of “schooner” is goélette. Michaux’s term might refer either to a cinq-mâts goélette or a goélette à cinq mâts. The difference between the two types of rigging is substantial: the first carries square sails on the foremast, whereas the five masts of the second are all fore-and-aft rigged. Late in his life, probably embarrassed by the juvenile bragging and exaggerations of his letters to Closson, Michaux prevailed upon his correspondent to return them to him, and no sooner did he get them back than he destroyed them—to the consternation of his old friend. But even though the originals thus perished, the content of the letters survived, unbeknownst to the two correspondents, in the shape of photocopies made fifteen years earlier by a third party who had access to Closson’s papers. This eventually made posthumous publication possible—something which Michaux would doubtless have opposed. One might well wonder, moreover, what caused the vehemence with which he sought to erase all traces of this unique phase of his life.
6. Needless to say, I have no desire lightly to pass a negative judgement upon editors who have accomplished a gigantic task, successfully assembling a mass of materials, texts and information otherwise inaccessible to general readers. (Without this indispensable reference tool, for instance, I should never have been able to write the present essay.) But still, from an aesthetic and literary standpoint, the great monument that they have erected seems very much like a tomb containing not a few eviscerated mummies.
7. L’Île noire in its successive revisions is a particularly sad illustration of this process.
8. [The English translation by Sylvia Beach (New York: New Directions, 1949; reprint, 1986) is of the original version. Beach’s translation is used here throughout, with occasional modifications—Translator.]
9. The reference to Bruegel here is more than a mere analogy. Michaux may very well have derived the idea of the diarrhoea of the Ourgouilles from Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels (in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, which the poet knew well): this work shows (among other figures) a hideous big-bellied demon who, as he plunges head-first down into hell, is devouring his own foot while firing off great fuliginous farts. Michaux acknowledged to François Cheng that, although he had scant interest in oil painting (he preferred ink washes, and most of all Chinese painting), Flemish art was well known to him, and he had a very special liking for Bruegel and his mastery of the art of combining the real and the imaginary. (See Cheng Baoyi, Ye Dong [La Nuit remue], introduction, p. x.)