Opening Life’s Windows

Simon Leys The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (Black Inc, 2011), 512 pages, $49.95

The first thing to be said about this extraordinary book is that it is among the best ever written and published in Australia. The second is that there is not a single chapter in it with an exclusively Australian theme. It takes its place among—and asks to be judged by—“the best that has been said and thought in the world”. This includes masterpieces of French, English or Chinese literature rather than Australian achievements. The author understands our loyalty to, say, Henry Lawson but he will not make the mistake of comparing him with Lu Xun or Anton Chekhov.

Essayist, sinologist, novelist, translator, the Belgian-born Simon Leys—or to use his natal name, Pierre Ryckmans—settled in Australia in 1970, at the age of thirty-five, as a teacher of Chinese literature at the Australian National University. (One of his students was Kevin Rudd.)

His first books were based on his horrifying experience of Communist China and its atrocities. He wrote them under the pen-name and disguise Simon Leys, but the unscrupulous French Maoists spared no pains to establish his real identity and to make sure he was never again permitted to visit China. (They succeeded.)

Later works include his translations into French and English of The Analects of Confucius; a novel The Death of Napoleon (the book of the film The Emperor’s New Clothes starring Ian Holm as Napoleon); the wonderful Boyer Lectures of 1996 on the meaning of civilisation, published as The View from the Bridge; a superb study of The Wreck of the Batavia (which, drawing on his experience of Maoism, reflects on the way ideology can turn men into beasts). Many of his works have won literary prizes, mainly in France but also in New South Wales.

Now we have The Hall of Uselessness—a collection of literary essays largely on French and Chinese writers but also on English-language novelists and critics ranging from Evelyn Waugh to R.H. Dana (whose “rich and complex” Two Years Before the Mast he translated into French). The uselessness of the book’s title means disinterestedness.

Leys develops his theme in the first chapter on Cervantes. To be quixotic like Don Quixote is to refuse to adjust to the smallness of “reality”: “The successful man adapts himself to the world. The loser persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the loser.”

In this spirit Leys escorts us through some of the French masters—Balzac and Victor Hugo—and some of its minor figures—Andre Gide and Andre Malraux. His commentary is always illuminating. Balzac’s genius, he says, is not a matter of intelligence (he had ideas of startling absurdity) or taste (he had the aesthetic sense of a prosperous Caribbean pimp) but of intuition and imagination—the intuition that “life is a prison, and only imagination can open its windows”.

Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Leys notes in passing, triggered Tolstoy’s War and Peace (“Giants breed giants”) and had a huge impact on Chinese and Japanese writers. He despises Gide’s “moral blindness” and finds Malraux “essentially phony”. But he also looks to Simenon, the great Belgian novelist and creator of the detective Maigret, “to draw the courage to contemplate our misery without flinching”. Among English writers he singles out George Orwell (who always distrusted intellectuals) and Evelyn Waugh (whose wit and wisdom now shine more brightly than ever).

A large section of the book is on Chinese themes—from Confucius to Mao Zedong—and a moving, recent chapter on the Cambodian genocide. There is also a brilliant essay of 1984 on Zhou Enlai. (Some readers may recall him as Chou En-lai.) 

He was one of the greatest and most successful comedians of our century. He had a talent for telling blatant lies with angelic suavity. He was the kind of man who could stick a knife in your back and do it with such disarming grace that you would still feel compelled to thank him for the deed. He gave a human face to Chinese communism. Everyone loved him. 

One chapter is the text of an inspiring lecture—“An Idea of the University”—which he delivered to the Campion Foundation Inaugural Dinner in Sydney five years ago. It may be read as both a statement of personal experience and as the guiding philosophy of Campion College: 

When a university yields to the utilitarian temptation, it betrays its vocation and sells its soul. Five centuries ago, the great Renaissance scholar Erasmus defined with one phrase the essence of the humanist endeavour: Homo fit, non nascitur—One is not born a man, one becomes one. A university is not a factory producing graduates, as a sausage factory produces sausages. It is a place where a chance is given to men to become what they truly are.

(“Men” obviously includes women.)

Leys recalls the day he received a memorandum from the vice-chancellor of the university in which he was then a professor, instructing him to consider students as customers. “On that day, I knew it was time for me to go.” 

It would be misleading not to note the Christian and Catholic underpinning of Leys’s essays. It emerges persistently, and sometimes unexpectedly.

He likes to quote G.K. Chesterton: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time.” (This is the same Chesterton who said he became a Catholic to get rid of his sins and who told an admirer: “Madam, I know nothing. I am a journalist.”)

There is a marvellous chapter demolishing Christopher Hitchens’s defamation of Mother Teresa. It concludes with these splendid words: 

True Philistines are not incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness. Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge; obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light; bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste; stupidity is not simply want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion. In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity … it is even more true in the world of ethics. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us is probably the saddest urge of human nature. 

In a similar polemical mode Leys directed his rage at “my benighted co-religionists, cretinous clerics and other Maoist morons who were to preach the gospel of the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution’”.

Deploring the ravages of modernity in the church he quotes from Evelyn Waugh’s diary: “Pray God I will never apostatise but I can only now go to church as an act of duty and obedience.” Yet he returns always to the theme he stated in the first chapter on Quixotism. Cervantes’s masterpiece, he says, is anchored in Christianity, specifically Spanish Catholicism, and in this sense Simon Leys remains quixotic to the end.

 Some years ago the American Susan Sontag wrote: “Lucky Australia that Pierre Ryckmans has chosen to live there.” How right she was!

Peter Coleman is a former editor of the Bulletin and Quadrant. Among his books are an autobiographical volume titled Memoirs of a Slow Learner, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe and The Last Intellectuals, a collection of essays published by Quadrant Books.