The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (74 page)

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
.

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.”

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.

5
.  And let it not be objected that the original versions and variants are supplied in the endnotes! In the first place, only some of them are; but the most important thing is that average readers can hardly be expected to enjoy reading a text when, for every page, they have to flip back a dozen times to notes in microscopic print a thousand pages further on. The dismal truth is that Michaux’s greatest writings are now unavailable in their incomparable original versions. We can but dream of a sort of anti-Pléiade edition that brought them together in a single volume.

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.)

10
. Chateaubriand (who was no fool) gives us an eloquent sample of this national consciousness. During the retreat of the Armée des Princes (in whose ranks he had enlisted as a volunteer), wounded and sick, Chateaubriand collapsed by the side of the road near Namur; goodhearted Walloon peasant women took him up and cared for him. The Vicomte described this in the following terms: “I noticed that these women treated me with a kind of respect or deference: there is in the nature of the French something elevated and sensitive that other peoples recognise” (
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
, X, 2). It is hard to picture Plume abroad being led to voice a thought of that kind.

1
.  These are the words of Joseph Conrad, in what remains the classic manifesto of the art of the novel—his famous preface to
The Nigger of the “Narcissus.
” The first sentence reads in full: “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the
visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”

1
.  The civilisations of Egypt, the Middle East, Persia and ancient India are no less ancient, but their continuity has been broken. Only the Jewish tradition may present a significant parallel to the phenomenon of spiritual continuity which I am trying to study here.

2
.  “I have travelled a great deal in my life, and I should very much have liked to go to Rome, but I felt that I was not really up to the impression the city would have made upon me. Pompeii alone was more than enough; the impressions very nearly exceeded my powers of receptivity . . . In 1921 I was on a ship sailing from Genoa to Naples. As the vessel neared the latitude of Rome, I stood at the railing. Out there lay Rome, the still smoking and fiery hearth from which ancient cultures had spread, enclosed in the tangled root-work of the Christian and Occidental Middle Ages. There classical antiquity still lived in all its splendour and ruthlessness.

“I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for example, to Paris or to London. Certainly Rome as well as these other cities can be enjoyed aesthetically but if you are affected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognised, then it becomes another matter entirely. Even in Pompeii, unforeseen vistas opened, unexpected things became conscious, and questions were posed which were beyond my power to handle.

“In my old age—in 1949—I wished to repair this omission, but was stricken with a faint while I was buying tickets. After that, the plans for a trip to Rome were once and for all laid aside.” C.G. Jung,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(London: Collins, 1973), pp. 318–19.

3
.   AUX DIX MILLE ANNÉES

 Ces barbares écartant le bois, et la brique et la terre, bâtissent dans le roc afin de bâtir éternel!

 Ils vénèrent des tombeaux dont la gloire est d’exister encore; des ponts renommés d’être vieux et des temples de pierre trop dure dont pas une assise ne joue.

 Ils vantent que leur ciment durcit avec les soleils; les lunes meurent en
polissant leurs dalles; rien ne disjoint la durée dont ils s’affublent, ces ignorants, ces barbares!

 Vous! fils de Han, dont la sagesse atteint dix mille années et dix mille dix milliers d’années, gardez-vous de cette méprise.

 Rien d’immobile n’échappe aux dents affamées des âges. La durée n’est point le sort du solide. L’immuable n’habite pas vos murs, mais en vous, hommes lents, hommes continuels.

 Si le temps ne s’attaque à l’oeuvre, c’est l’ouvrier qu’il mord. Qu’on le rassasie: ces troncs pleins de sève, ces couleurs vivantes, ces ors que la pluie lave et que le soleil éteint.

 Fondez sur le sable. Mouillez copieusement votre argile. Montez les bois pour le sacrifice; bientôt le sable cèdera, l’argile gonflera, le double toit criblera le sol de ses écailles:

 Toute l’offrande est agréée!

 Or, si vous devez subir la pierre insolente et le bronze orgueilleux, que la pierre et que le bronze subissent les contours du bois périssable et simulent son effort caduc:

 Point de révolte: honorons les âges dans leurs chutes successives et le temps dans sa voracité.

 V. Segalen,
Stèles
(Paris: Crès, 1922), pp. 29–31.

4
. By “antiquarianism” I mean not only the taste and passion for all things antique but also their various corollaries: the development of archaeology, the activities of art collectors, dealers and forgers, the aesthetics of archaism (“ancient is beautiful,” the poetry of the past, meditation over ancient ruins as a literary theme, etc. etc.).

5
. A telling illustration of this point can be found in Li Qingzhao’s moving memoir,
Jin shi lu houxu
(1132). After the fall of the Northern Song, as Li was fleeing south, she had to carry with her the precious collections of her husband. The latter, who was prevented by his official duties from accompanying her, gave her precise instructions concerning those parts of the collections that could be discarded, and those that should be retained at all costs, should the situation force her to reduce her luggage. The most dispensable possessions were the
printed
books (as opposed to handwritten copies); then the pictorial albums (as opposed to individual paintings); then the bronzes that
carried no epigraphs
; then the printed books published by the Imperial College; then the paintings of average quality . . . The most treasured items—besides the vessels and relics pertaining to the ancestors cult (under no conditions were
these ever to be discarded)—were the antique bronzes with epigraphs, precious paintings and calligraphies and rare manuscripts.
Li Qingzhao ji jiaozhu
(Peking: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), pp. 179–81.

6
. The classic study on art collecting in China is R. van Gulik,
Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur
(Rome, 1958). (Reissued by Hacker Art Books: New York, 1981.) On the particular subject of the imperial collections, see L. Ledderose, “Some observations on the imperial art collection in China,” in
Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society
43 (1978–1979): pp. 33–46.

7
. The episode, which occurred in 818, involved Emperor Xianzong and the grandfather of the great art historian Zhang Yanyuan; the latter told it in his
Lidai ming hua ji
. See Zhang Yanyuan,
Lidai ming hua ji
(Peking: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1963), Vol. 1, Chap. 2, pp. 10–11. See also W. Acker,
Some T’ang and pre-T’ang texts on Chinese painting
(Leiden: Brill, 1954), pp. 138–41.

8
. It is at this time, for example, that
The Night Revels of Han Xizai
by Gu Hongzhong (tenth century) and
Qingming Festival along the River
by Zhang Zeduan (twelfth century) returned to China. (Both paintings are kept in the Ancient Palace Museum, Peking.)

9
. The fact that an author describes in vivid terms the pictorial style of a given artist never implies that he actually saw any works by that artist; sometimes, in another passage of the same text, he may even explicitly acknowledge that he never had such an opportunity.

10
. For example, Mi Fu (1051–1107), who was one of the most learned connoisseurs of his time, with privileged access to the best collections, confessed that, in his entire life, he only saw
two
authentic paintings by Li Cheng, the greatest and most influential landscape painter of the tenth century (Li Cheng died in 967, less than a century before Mi Fu’s birth). Mi Fu,
Hua shi
, in
Meishu congkan
(Taipei, 1956), Vol. 1, p. 88. See also N. Vandier-Nicolas,
Le Houa-che de Mi Fou
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), pp. 32–33. Similar evidence can be found in abundance, it only remains to be systematically compiled.

11
. Besides being an important business, art forgery also fulfilled very significant artistic and socio-cultural functions. Every scholarly family
had
to possess a collection of paintings and calligraphy; needless to say, not every scholarly family had the financial means to acquire ancient works
of art, the supply of which was necessarily limited. Hence, forgers provided “imaginary” collections, which conformed to stylistic stereotypes and simultaneously popularised those stereotypes. In this respect, forgeries played a role not entirely dissimilar to the one which is taken now by cheap, popular prints and reproductions. This situation largely persists till today: I have seen eminent Chinese intellectuals living in narrow circumstances, who derived immense enjoyment and spiritual solace from an assortment of ludicrous fakes. (One is reminded of Balzac’s notorious collections of phony Titians and ridiculous Raphaels—these bizarre c
roûtes
acted as a powerful stimulant on his visionary imagination.)

Finally, it should also be observed that Chinese forgeries could achieve very high standards of aesthetic and technical quality. In every period, including our own time, some of the greatest artists had no qualms about indulging in this activity.

12
. Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious,”
Labyrinths
(Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 87–95.

13
. On this subject see also Wang Gungwu, “Loving the Ancient in China,” in I. McBryde, ed.,
Who Owns the Past?
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985).

14
. Xun Zi’s journey to the totalitarian state of Qin, as its power was on the rise, calls irresistibly to mind the political pilgrimages that Western intellectuals undertook in the 1930s to the Soviet Union of Stalin. Xun Zi’s account of his visit (
Xun Zi
16: “Qiang guo”) could in a way be summarised by Lincoln Steffens’s notorious utterance: “I have seen the future and it works.”

15
. I am referring here to a famous passage of the
Zuo zhuan
(twenty-fourth year of Duke Xiang) which relates a dialogue that took place between Shusun Bao and Fan Xuanzi. Fan asked: “What is immortality? Could it be the continuous transmission of certain titles within a same family?” and he invoked the example of his own ancestors who had occupied high positions since the Xia dynasty. “No,” replied Shusun, “that is merely a case of hereditary privilege, which can be found everywhere and merely rests upon a continuity of the family clan. The true immortality consists in establishing virtue, in establishing deeds and in establishing words [that can continue to live in posterity], whereas the mere preservation of the greatest dignity cannot be called freedom from decay.” The philosophical interpretation which I present
here comes from Qian Mu,
Zhongguo lishi jingshen
(Taipei: Guomin chubanshe, 1954), pp. 94–5.

16
. The ancestors cult, which was the cornerstone of Chinese culture and society, should be studied in this connection.

17
. On this subject, I am drawing heavily from L. Ledderose’s masterful study,
Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy
(Princeton University Press, 1979).

18
. It was suspected that the
Orchid Pavilion
was in the hands of a monk called Biancai, but the monk denied possessing it. Emperor Taizong then dispatched the censor Xiao Yi, disguised as an itinerant scholar, to visit Biancai. Xiao Yi gained the confidence of the monk and showed him various autographs of Wang Xizhi from the imperial collection, which he had brought along to be used as bait. Excited by this sight, Biancai told his visitor that he could show him even better stuff—and he picked from among the rafters of the roof where it was hidden the original scroll of the
Orchid Pavilion
. In front of this masterpiece, Xiao Yi pretended to be unmoved and even questioned its authenticity. Biancai, suffocating with indignation, stormed out of his hut. Xiao Yi grabbed the calligraphy, put on his court attire, and when Biancai returned, the visitor informed the monk that, from now on, the
Orchid Pavilion
would belong to the imperial collection. Struck with horror and grief, Biancai fainted. When he recovered, it was found that he could not swallow anymore—the emotional shock having resulted in a constriction of his gullet. Unable to absorb any solid food, he died a few months later. This arch-famous anecdote has provided the subject of many paintings.

19
. L. Ledderose,
op. cit.
, p. 20.

20
. This is the positive aspect of the phenomenon—but it also has a negative side. Modern Chinese intellectuals, progressives and revolutionaries have increasingly felt strangled by the seeming invincibility and deadly pervasiveness of tradition. The outstanding exponent of the struggle to get rid of the past was of course Lu Xun, who analysed with unique clear-sightedness the desperate nature of the modernisers’ predicament: they can never pin the enemy down, for the enemy is a formless, invisible ghost, an indestructible shadow.

21
. Liu Shilong, “Wuyou yuan ji,” in
Wan Ming bai jia xiao pin
, pp. 104–7. This delightful (and very Borgesian!) little essay was brought to my attention
some years ago in a seminar given at the Australian National University by Dr. Tu Lien-che.

22
. Holmes Welch, “The Chinese Art of Make-Believe,”
Encounter
(May, 1968).

23
.
Rice University Studies
59.4 (1973).