The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (15 page)
Read The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) Online
Authors: Simon Leys
Once, a woman told him with naïve admiration that he seemed to know a great many things. He replied, “Madam, I know nothing: I am a journalist.”
All his life, Chesterton claimed no other title for himself but that of journalist. He gloried in being a journalist, he relished the atmosphere and romance of Fleet Street. As a perceptive critic observed, “He was a journalist because he was a democrat. Newspapers were what the ordinary people (the man on the bus!) like to read. There could therefore be no higher privilege than to write for the newspapers—whatever he might think of their proprietors.”
And he had all the qualities of a superb journalist: intelligence, clarity, liveliness, speed, brevity and wit. But these are the very qualities that always damn a writer in the eyes of pretentious critics and pompous mediocrities. To impress the fools, you must be obscure. (“What I understand at once never seems true to me,” confessed a female admirer to a modern French novelist). And for these people, it is
inconceivable that anything expressed with imagination and humour could also have an earnest purpose. How could you possibly say something important if you are not self-important? Chesterton constantly battled against this prejudice. He explained:
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 of nothing else. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German. The two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other . . . If you say that two sheep added to two sheep make four sheep, your audience will accept it patiently—like sheep. But if you say it of two monkeys, or two kangaroos, or two sea-green griffins, people will refuse to believe that two and two make four. They seem to believe that you must have made up the arithmetic, just as you have made up the illustration of the arithmetic. They cannot believe that anything decorated with an incidental joke can be sensible. Perhaps it explains why so many successful men are so dull—or why so many dull men are successful.
* * *
I have talked for much too long already, and yet I have barely skimmed the surface of this huge topic. But I now realise that I could have given it another title: Chesterton: The Man Who Was In Love With Daylight. He said, “If there is one thing of which I have always been certain since my boyhood and grow more certain as I advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical, if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us, if the normal man does not amaze.”
Most people tend to think of Chesterton as a “Catholic writer,” but they do not seem to realise that his conversion occurred fairly late in life (in 1922—only fourteen years before his death; a number of his major works were written long before he actually joined the Church).
But when he finally made the move, he said that he became a Catholic in order to get rid of his sins.
But there was, I think, another motivation, equally powerful: gratitude. He once said that if he were to go to hell upon his death, he would still thank God for this life on earth. From the very beginning, the urge to thank his creator is what impelled him to write.
In Chesterton’s experience, the mere fact of
being
is so miraculous in itself that no subsequent misfortune could ever exempt a man from feeling a sort of cosmic thankfulness. I wish to end here with a short prose poem which he jotted down in a notebook of his agnostic youth; it shows that this overwhelming sense of wonder and gratitude actually predated by many years his religious conversion:
EVENING
Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
*
Lecture to the Chesterton Society of Western Australia, Perth, September 1997.
A Little ABC of André Gide
To tell the truth, I don’t know what I think of him. He is never the same for long. He never gets engaged in anything, yet nothing is more engaging than his permanent evasions. You cannot judge him, for you haven’t known him long enough. His very self is in a constant process of undoing and remaking. You think you have pinned him down, but he is Proteus:* he adopts the shape of whatever he happens to love. And you cannot understand him unless you love him.
—A
NDRÉ
G
IDE
,
Les Faux-monnayeurs
[
1
]
Gide is one of the few writers who really nauseates me, so I am naturally not an authority on him.
—F
LANNERY
O
’CONNOR
,
The Habit of Being
[
2
]
T
HE STARTING
point of this (rather whimsical) little glossary of the Gidean enigma was provided to me by Alan Sheridan’s work
André Gide: A Life in the Present
(Harvard University Press, 1999). Sheridan’s massive
opus
(700 pages) is a model of meticulous scholarship.[
3
] To appreciate the biographer’s achievement, one should consider how daunting was his task. Gide was a compulsive diarist; besides writing some sixty books (essays, fiction, theatre, travelogues, criticism, poetry, literary translations), he kept for more than fifty years a
Journal
[
4
] that fills thousands of pages. Members of his small circle of close friends were equally addicted to graphomania. First of all, Maria Van Rysselberghe—nicknamed
la Petite Dame
(“the Tiny Lady”
*
), who
knew him for half a century and was his most intimate companion (or should we say accomplice?) during the last thirty years of his life (inasmuch as any sort of intimate companionship could be achieved with such a slippery eel)—kept an accurate and vivid record of his daily utterances and deeds, together with perceptive portraits of his literary friends and transcripts of their conversations (four volumes—nearly 2,000 pages—crammed with information). Gide’s best friends were also writers: Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Schlumberger, Pierre Herbart.* After his death, they all wrote memoirs of the Gide they knew. The figure of Gide also looms large in Martin du Gard’s monumental and fascinating
Journal
(three volumes—3,500 pages) as well as in Schlumberger’s diaries.[
5
] When they were away from Paris, in their respective country residences, the friends wrote to each other at great length: the correspondence Gide–Martin du Gard and Gide–Schlumberger fills three volumes (1,400 pages). Besides, Gide also corresponded regularly with a great number of literary acquaintances, editors, writers, artists, poets, critics—his position as the co-founder and main financial backer (with Schlumberger and Gallimard) of the prestigious
Nouvelle Revue Française
(literary journal
cum
publishing house) virtually established him as the
éminence grise
of twentieth-century French literature: his voluminous published correspondence with Valéry, Claudel, Jammes, Mauriac, Jouhandeau, Romains, Suarès, Rivière, Copeau, Du Bos, Cocteau, J.-E. Blanche, Arnold Bennett, Edmund Gosse, Rilke, Verhaeren, etc., etc., amounts to some 20,000 pages.[
6
]
Thus, the first and main problem of Gide’s biographer was not how to gather information, but how not to drown in it. Sheridan succeeded in bringing this literary flood under control, and in organising it into a lucid synthesis. Yet, just as the damming of a big river cannot be achieved without inflicting some damage on its wildlife, the discipline which Sheridan had to impose upon his rich material was perhaps not fully compatible with the lush ambiguities and contradictions of the subject. Now, in contrast with whatever certainties the reader may feel able to derive from Sheridan’s authoritative study, the only purpose of my disjointed notes is to warn him against the temptation to draw conclusions—for Gide must always present an irreducible
elusiveness: he was truly the great master of intellectual escape—the Houdini of modern literature.
ANTI-SEMITISM
In 1914—he was then a middle-aged, well-established writer—after a lunch with his old friend and former schoolmate Léon Blum, Gide noted in his diary[
7
] how he respected Blum’s intelligence and culture, but resented his Jewishness. He expounded at some length on this theme:
There is no need to enlarge here on Jewish defects; the point is: the qualities of the Jewish race are not French qualities. Even when Frenchmen are less intelligent, less resilient, less worthy in every respect than the Jews, the fact remains that only they themselves can express what they have to say. The Jewish contribution to our literature . . . is not so much enriching us, as it constitutes an interruption in the slow effort of our race to express itself, and this represents a severe, an intolerable distortion of its meaning.
One must acknowledge that nowadays there is in France a Jewish literature that is not French literature . . . The Jews speak with greater ease than us, because they have fewer scruples. They speak louder than us, because they ignore the reasons that sometimes make us speak in a lower voice, the reasons that make us respect certain things.
Of course, I do not deny the great merits of some Jewish works, such as the theatrical plays of Porto-Riche, for instance. But I would admire them much more willingly if they were offered to us only as translations. What would be the point for our literature to acquire new resources if it were at the expense of its meaningfulness? If, one day, the Frenchman’s strength should fail, let him disappear, but do not allow his part to be played by any lout, in his name and in his place.
A few years later (August 1921), he confided to his intimate little circle his irritation and disappointment at Proust’s newly published
Sodome et Gomorrhe
. He blamed Proust’s method: “It betrays avarice rather than riches—the obsession never to let anything go to waste, always adding instead of saving” and ascribed this to Proust’s Jewishness[
8
]: “The Jews have no sense of gratuitousness.”[
9
]
In 1929, commenting to the Tiny Lady on a new novel by Henri Duvernois (an author whom he had previously praised to the skies): “Read this, it is excellent; but here, he also shows some of his limitations. Oh, he is very sensitive and subtle, but he lacks a certain . . .” (he searches for a word) “. . . a certain virginity. It would be interesting to make a history of Jewish literature” (he had just learned that Duvernois was Jewish) “. . . Jews often defile somehow whatever topic they touch.”[
10
] And a few days later, on the same subject, chatting with old friends, he told them: “Of course, it always bothers me when someone happens to be Jewish. Take Duvernois, for instance; when I learned that his real name was Kahn Ascher, I suddenly understood many little things that had always bothered me in his books—my very genuine admiration notwithstanding.”[
11
] Two years later (May 1931), at lunch with friends: “As we chat about anti-Semitism . . . Gide says with a laugh: ‘Well, I would not like to receive a transfusion of Jewish blood.’”[
12
]
In 1935—German political developments were not taking place on another planet!—commenting upon a performance of the American Yiddish Art Theatre, Gide said: “I cannot get used to all these bearded faces; even when they are beautiful, they have no appeal for me . . . The very idea of any physical contact with them repels me, I don’t know why; I feel closer to animals.”[
13
]
After the war, at the end of his life, he was still casually making disparaging remarks on the Jewish character, in front of his secretary, Béatrix Beck, a young widow, whose dead husband was Jewish![
14
]
Yet would it make any sense to call Gide an anti-Semite? With equal reason, he might also be called a Stalinist Bolshevist, an anti-Stalinist and anti-communist, a Christian, an anti-Christian, a defeatist advocate of collaboration with Hitler, an anti-Nazi sympathiser, a libertarian, an authoritarian, a rebel, a conformist, a demagogue, an
elitist, an educator, a corrupter of youth, a preacher, a
débauché
, a moralist, a destroyer of morality . . .
Literature* was the exclusive concern of Gide—it was the very purpose of his life; beside it—as he himself proclaimed[
15
]—“only pederasty and Christianity” could absorb his interest and fire his passion. On all other matters—which were of basic indifference to him—he had no strong opinions; his views were vague, contradictory, ill-informed, tentative, inconsistent, malleable, banal, vacillating, conventional. Herbart—who was a close confidant and companion during the last twenty years of his life—observed that he usually thought in clichés that could have come straight from Flaubert’s
Dictionnaire des idées reçues
. Having quoted another of Gide’s offensively stupid remarks (“I suffered yesterday: all the interlocutors I had to chat with were Jews”), Herbart added this flat comment: “This means exactly
nothing
: he ‘thinks’ by proxy.”[
16
]
I do not know to what extent such an innocent explanation will satisfy most readers—but Blum himself would certainly have endorsed it, for even though he was hurt when he eventually read the passages of the
Journal
quoted above, his affection for Gide remained undiminished until his death.[
17
]
In conclusion: it would be very easy to compile a damning record of first-hand evidence on Gide’s anti-Semitism; most probably, it would also be misleading. This example may serve as a useful methodological warning before perusing my little ABC.
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
André Gide was born in 1869. Though he died in the middle of the twentieth century, he remains in many fundamental respects a nineteenth-century writer.
He was an only child; his father was a scholar (professor of Roman law)—a frail and refined man who died too early to leave any deep imprint upon his son: André was not yet eleven at the time of his death. The mother, possessive and authoritarian, came from a very wealthy line of business people in Normandy; she gave her son a stern
Protestant education. From a very early age, Gide experienced an acute conflict between the severe demands of his mother’s religiosity and the no-less-tyrannical needs of his precocious sensuality. Yet it was not until a journey to Algeria in 1895 that he discovered—under the personal guidance of Oscar Wilde—the exclusive orientation of his own sexuality.* That same year, his formidable mother died, and “having lost her, he replaced her at once with the person who most resembled her.” Within two weeks, he announced his engagement with his first cousin Madeleine* (niece of his mother), who had been his beloved soul-mate since early childhood. Their marriage was never consummated, Gide having assumed from the beginning that only “loose women” can have any interest in the activities of the flesh. And, in turn, when forty-three years later Madeleine died, Gide once again felt the same sense of “love, anguish and freedom” he had experienced at the death of his mother, and “he noted ‘how subtly, almost mystically’ his mother had merged into his wife.”[
18
]