Pierre Ryckmans and the Heavenly Kingdom

Almost exactly forty years ago (November 1978), a special issue of this magazine was edited by Simon Leys, the well-known alias of the late Pierre Ryckmans (1935–2014). It featured a red cover with a snippet of Mao Zedong’s very own calligraphy in black. The meaning in English of that snippet was: “By verification of the facts, get at the truth; strive to eliminate all empty talk.”

It was fired at the deeply corrupted world of China “scholarship” in 1978 and remains apt now, as we ponder the rise of China to a level of wealth, power and strategic ambition it never had in Mao’s day. We are in the midst of debates about the use of that wealth and power by the overweening autocrat Xi Jinping. Simon Leys is an important reference point in setting the tone for these debates.

Morry Schwartz’s publishing house, Black Inc, has done us all a service by publishing Simon Leys’s The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (2011) and Philippe Paquet’s biography Simon Leys: Navigator between Worlds (2017), translated by Julie Rose, a recipient of the PEN Medallion and the New South Wales Premier’s translation prize. Black Inc also published Leys’s novel The Death of Napoleon in 2006 and his reflection With Stendhal in 2010. Schwartz is also, of course, publisher of the Monthly, which was set up in 2005 in explicit antagonism to Quadrant as a way for Robert Manne to reposition himself after he resigned as editor of this magazine, twenty years ago.

Although the two magazines compete, Simon Leys is a figure that spans the divide between them. He was, however, more of a Quadrant conservative than a politically correct social democrat in the manner of the Monthly. He was multi-lingual, mandarin, cosmopolitan, a conservative Catholic who nonetheless admired Stendhal; a classical moralist and satirist in the vein of Juvenal or Swift, not a politically correct “inner-city latte-sipping” type. He was a believer in what he unflinchingly called the aristocratic logic of higher education and a remorseless and mordant critic of those who lionised Mao Zedong and depicted his Cultural Revolution as a great “experiment” in social emancipation that should inspire the smashing of capitalism and “bourgeois” culture in the West.

The Hall of Uselessness has six sections: Quixotism, Literature, China, The Sea, University and Marginalia. The section on China has twelve essays, the variety of which demonstrates not only the breadth of the man’s scholarship and lines of inquiry, but his Olympian detachment from the destructive and craven polemics of the Cold War anti-anti-communists. The essays include reflections on the Chinese attitude to the past as exhibited, among other things, in their architecture; Chinese calligraphy; Confucius (whose Analects he translated into French and then into English); Chinese classical aesthetics in poetry and painting; the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in classical Chinese culture; Edward Said’s mutton-headed polemics about “Orientalism”; and the subtle attractions and substantive importance of serious Sinology.

They include, also, pieces on the political prejudices and scholarly errors of the “China experts”; Zhou Enlai and his deeply compromised role in Mao’s regime; the great Hungarian Jesuit and China watcher Laszlo Ladany; the Tiananmen massacre of 1989; and the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot. That, surely, is an impressive set of essays for someone who also had keen interests in art, calligraphy, architecture, ethics and poetry; was a translator, a novelist and a writer about the sea. That such a man remained a Chestertonian Catholic all his life and a free spirit when it came to politics and education only increases the fascination he ought to hold for all of us. His essays should be required reading for anyone claiming to be a China scholar or a contemporary public intellectual. The biography by Paquet places all this in a deeper perspective and deserves a wide readership.

Opening his essay on Zhou Enlai, Ryckmans wrote, in that characteristically subtle and yet biting style of his:

Alone among the Maoist leaders, Zhou Enlai had cosmopolitan sophistication, charm, wit and style. He certainly 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 (and a very good-looking one) to Chinese communism. Everyone loved him. He repeatedly and literally got away with murder. No wonder politicians from all over the world unanimously worshipped him.

This capacity for razor-sharp dissection of the pretensions and posturing of Zhou Enlai and the Chinese Communist Party makes Leys required reading right now. The systematic strategic effort by the Party to infiltrate, corrupt and suborn Australian institutions would be seriously hampered if only everyone approached by its minions and fellow travellers had graduated from the Simon Leys seminar in Sinology.

In his foreword to the special issue of Quadrant forty years ago, he wrote:

The momentous events which have taken place in China in recent years … have provoked everywhere in the world painful and dramatic revisions of the rosy images which the travelling salesmen of Maoism had previously succeeded in imposing upon the public. In its blessed isolation, Australia alone, it seems, has so far escaped from such a shocking encounter with reality. It usually takes a few years for world events to register here—if their impact is being felt at all …

Yet we now find that rosy images of the China of Xi Jinping have seamlessly displaced those circulated in the past about the China of Mao (whose portrait still sits above the Gate of Heavenly Peace) and that the Australian public is again being urged to trust China and distance itself from the United States. Plus ça change, as they say in Leys’s native French.

He saw that special issue, in 1978, as a matter of throwing un pave dans la mare (a cobblestone into the pond) and wrote that the essays chosen for the issue were intended

to challenge the conventional propaganda images by providing factual information and scholarly analyses, to raise questions, to provoke reflection. The only common denominator of the papers we are presenting here resides in the soundness and reliability of their information; otherwise they are quite heterogeneous …

How very refreshing. He added:

Though we tried to achieve some pluralism, we did not feel the need to include also the official Peking view: this can be obtained free of charge either from the Chinese Embassy in Canberra, or by tuning in to the public lectures of some of our prominent China scholars.

Remarkably, after forty years, extraordinarily little has changed in this regard, as the Chinese Communist Party continues to run a relentlessly propagandist public information campaign and far more people in this country and abroad now succumb to or collaborate with it than was ever the case at the height of Maoism and the Cold War. The Turnbull government, disturbed by the growing evidence of this, has begun taking steps to retrieve the situation—steps which Kevin Rudd has denounced as “McCarthyism”. In this context, it is timely to see a full-length biography of Ryckmans, precisely under the nom de plume that he used as the scourge of the Party and its fellow travellers in days gone by.

I was tempted, given Ryckmans’s pen name, his Catholicism, his Sinology and his elite intellectual interests, to call this essay “Simon Peter (or Simon Pierre or Saint Pierre) and the Heavenly Kingdom”, but none quite seemed to work. So I settled for the more straightforward “Pierre Ryckmans and the Heavenly Kingdom”. Ryckmans was, as his biographer calls him, a navigator between worlds. Unlike all too many others, he did not succumb to the exoticism and mystique of China that the Party hides behind, but observed it with both the aesthetic fascination and the scientific curiosity of a lepidopterist. One thinks of Nabokov and his interest in butterflies. Yet if Ryckmans was a kind of intellectual lepidopterist, he was, in his own way, also a species of delicate butterfly. In terms of the Greek etymology of Lepidoptera, his lepis (scale or psychological carapace) was his Catholic cultural background. His pteroi (wings) were his elite intellectual attainments. He was a fascinating being in his own right.

Paquet’s biography has five parts: “The Law, Art and Faith”, “The Other Pole of Human Experience”, “Communism in Action”, “The Inner China” and “The Sea and the Motherland”. The first two show us the cocoon in which Ryckmans was formed. The other three show him in flight. It also has a brief foreword by Julian Barnes, written especially for the Black Inc translation, which is a delightful little essay in its own right. Barnes writes:

I first came to know him thanks to The Death of Napoleon, that bravura piece of droll, wrong-footing counterfactual fiction. This made his name widely known, but, typically, he never wrote another novel. He evidently had no sense of a literary “career”: rather, a sense of where he would go and what he would write next … His work fits no previous or current literary profile. As Merimee wrote of Stendhal, he was “original in all matters—a rare achievement in this age of greyness and timidity”.

Barnes reminds us that Leys chose to become a resident of Australia and finally a citizen of this country. He never sought notoriety, fame or placement in the best-seller lists. He lived by the maxim of Confucius, “A gentleman resents his incompetence; he does not resent his obscurity.” Barnes concludes, “He may not have resented his comparative obscurity; but with his death, the rest of us are liberated to resent it on his behalf.”

The biographer begins by invoking this sense of the sublime “obscurity” of the Confucian gentleman (or Catholic contemplative) by analogy with Victor Hugo declaring of his exile in Guernsey that it left him with only two interlocutors: God and the ocean. Exile from Napoleon III’s France was for Hugo a second birth and the most productive period of his life. Simon Leys, domiciled in what Paul Keating notoriously dubbed “the arse end of the Earth”, wrote 80 per cent of his oeuvre in English, his third language. He also wrote in French and Chinese with distinction. He thought it remarkable, says Paquet, that writers such as Joseph Conrad, Vikram Seth, V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro had been able to excel in English, even though it was their second language. He was pleased to be in their company. But he developed, early, a habit of seclusion, in order to devote himself to reading and writing—and the company of his beloved muse and companion in life, Hanfang.

This Catholic/Confucian gentleman/érudit/recluse was born to one of Belgium’s most eminent bourgeois families in Brussels, on September 28, 1935. By coincidence, that is the official birthday of Confucius. Perhaps, therefore, we might indulge the notion that his magisterial translation of Confucius’s Analects was “predestined”. He translated it first into French (1987), his native tongue; then into English (1997) and would write, looking back on both, that he very much favoured the second:

French is a beautiful language but, compared to English, it has the rigidity of one that’s half dead. For a translator, it’s torture. Whereas the suppleness of English, the richness of its vocabulary, the flexibility of its syntax, allow us to play on a bigger keyboard.

That is, in fact, the key to the life of Pierre Ryckmans and his alter ego, Simon Leys: the aspiration to play on a bigger keyboard and the art of doing so.

Paquet provides a beautifully nuanced account of the Ryckmans family and its deep roots in upper-middle-class Belgian society: in law, government, colonial administration, religion, education and publishing. The index to the book in English contains the names of no fewer than thirty family members. The grandfather of Leys, Alphonse Ryckmans, born in 1857, became a distinguished lawyer and politician, married a very strong woman, Clémence Van Rijn, in 1881, fathered eight children and raised them in a “vast seventeenth-century house”. Leys’s father was Etienne Ryckmans. But the family member who most shaped Leys’s development was his uncle, “the homonymous Pierre Ryckmans” (1891–1959), who had a brilliant career as a military officer, senior public servant and “the best governor-general the Belgian Congo ever had”. The historian of the Congo David Van Reybrouck described him as standing out for “his great intelligence and moral integrity”, and as resembling Albert Camus in this respect and even in appearance. His nephew idolised him.

The Ryckmanses were fervent Catholics, which did much to shape the personality of Simon Leys. As Paquet writes, this was an inextricable part of his character and was exhibited in “his passion for writers like Pascal, Simone Weil and G.K. Chesterton” in “a never-ending spiritual quest”. Another of his uncles, Gonzague Ryckmans (1887–1969), was a priest, a brilliant linguist and a student of comparative religion, especially in the Middle East. He took a doctorate in Semitic languages from the Louvain, wrote the first Akkadian grammar in French, spent many years in relative isolation in Palestine and conducted learned expeditions into Saudi Arabia, looking for textual evidence of pre-Islamic cultures. Like his brother Pierre, Gonzague was a man of great integrity as well as deep learning and high intelligence. He inspired his nephew both directly and indirectly, urging him to go even further and deeper into “the East”. He had Uncle Gonzague in mind, Leys confessed, when he wrote his scathing review of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Yet another uncle was Albert Ryckmans (1893–1967), also ordained a priest, who, like Gonzague, took a doctorate from the Louvain; in his case, Thomistic philosophy. He became a lecturer in moral philosophy, giving passionate lectures in defence of intractable moral positions. Leys’s aunt Elizabeth (Lily), widowed in 1930 when she was scarcely forty years of age and had five children in her care, was a daredevil adventurer and traveller and a great lover of the work of Marcel Proust. She introduced young Pierre to In Search of Lost Time, volume by volume. It ignited in him a contagious passion. He became so absorbed in it that, for the first and only time at university, in the second year of a doctorate of law at Louvain, he failed an exam.

In short, the young Ryckmans had an upbringing that was singularly rich and provided openings and stimulants to learning wider than those available to less fortunate mortals; but also a strong and conservative moral and intellectual formation, which was crucial to how he saw and developed those enviable opportunities. His father, Etienne, died of throat cancer when Pierre was only nineteen years old. His mother, Marguerite Ryckmans nee Steels (1901–80) played a key role, both before and after that, in fostering the development of her brilliant young son. She was an exceptional woman: elegant, highly educated (including fluency in English), musical (she loved playing Liszt and Schumann on the piano), kind and compassionate. The young Pierre was fortunate in her, as in so many other ways.

Of course, having been born in 1935, he spent the second half of his boyhood in Nazi-occupied Belgium. Curiously, his education appears not to have been adversely affected by that or by the war. He was enrolled in an elite and progressive Catholic school and remained there until 1953, graduating in ancient humanities, with an emphasis on Latin and Greek. His passions during these years were reading, nature, drawing and painting. This was the young bourgeois boy who would become Simon Leys, nemesis of Maoism and its feckless Western acolytes, with a lifelong passion for rigorous higher education.

Months after his father’s death, he had the opportunity to visit China with a group of Belgian students. As Paquet writes, the young man:

focussed until then on his courses and the next exams, enamoured of Western art and in love with French literature, the sum total of his reading on China being the adventures of Tintin, was suddenly plunged into an entirely unknown universe, exploring at a rapid pace what he later referred to, quoting Malraux, as “the other pole of human experience”.

He naively thought of the Chinese revolution as a “prodigious awakening”, crucial to the future of the world, which all of Asia was watching. The invitation was, in fact, part of a Communist Party program to generate fellow travellers. Paquet covers this initial journey in detail and shows, step by step, how youthful illusions fell like scales from the young man’s eyes in the years after 1955. It’s worth reading the biography on this account alone.

The starry-eyed youngster of 1955, so amazed by China as such, awed by meeting Zhou Enlai, so ingenuous about revolution and “awakening”, kept learning and thinking—unlike so very many young idealists lured to Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s or Mao’s China in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The core of Paquet’s book is, naturally, devoted to the odyssey that took Ryckmans from his 1955 enthusiasm to his brilliant and unsparing dissection, in the 1970s, of the monstrous crimes and stupidities of the Chinese Communist Party. It is very well done. And it pivots on an observation Leys was to make thirty years later and which remains pertinent today.

He wrote, in the mid-1980s, as China’s reforms began to look promising:

All the other great civilizations are either dead (Egypt, Mesopotamia, pre-Colombian America), or too exclusively absorbed in the problems of surviving in extreme conditions (primitive cultures), or too close to us (Islamic cultures, India) to offer such a total contrast, such a complete otherness, such a radical and illuminating originality as China. It’s only when we look at China that we can finally take a more exact measure of our own identity and that we begin to see what part of our heritage derives from universal humanity, and what part merely reflects simple Indo-European idiosyncrasies. China is that fundamental Other without which, if it never encounters it, the West cannot really become conscious of the contours and limits of its cultural self.

This remark is worth pondering. He was not only deeply “Western”, while being a Sinologist of the first water; he was deeply and tenaciously Catholic. He does not appear to have seen Catholicism as a “simple Indo-European idiosyncrasy”. Nor did he believe that, in the quest for a more universal grasp of our humanity, we should abandon our Western heritage and fawn on the mandarins in Beijing. This combination of deep commitment to the culture of the West and deep appreciation of Chinese culture is what we are badly in need of right now—in Australia, not least.

I skip reluctantly over the many chapters of Paquet’s biography dealing with the development of Simon Leys. I commend them to others. They are, in general, the better-known aspects of the life under consideration, to which Paquet adds nuance and depth of perspective. Likewise, I shall pass over—also with commendation—the chapters on the damning indictments of Mao’s China by Simon Leys, in The Chairman’s New Clothes, Chinese Shadows and The Burning Forest; as well as the reactions of the precious cabal of Maoists and other Leftists whose conceits and delusions he exposed. Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s (2010) mentions Leys scantily, while indulgently treating the French intelligentsia as a brilliant vanguard that made a few mistakes. Tiphaine Samoyault of the Sorbonne, in her biography of Roland Barthes (2017), whom Leys excoriated for his stupidity on China, mentions Leys once, in passing. These omissions are made up for by Paquet’s detailed account of the matter.

Those issues are germane to our current debates and Paquet’s book should be read on their account. However, it raises some other issues that have received less attention over time and these, also, warrant our collective attention. Perhaps I should say the attention of as many individuals as possible. For this is not a matter of ideology, or the presumed need for a “collective” consensus on the fascinating and important issues raised by the life and work of one unusually talented and intellectually intrepid person. There is, for example, the issue of his writings on matters other than China, such as his meditation on shipwreck and humanity, The Wreck of the Batavia, his novel about Napoleon’s last years and his passion for the personality and writings of Stendhal. There is, also and vitally, his attitude to education in general and higher education in particular, since this is a very pressing matter right now, requiring our attention.

The Dutch ship Batavia, captained by Francisco Pelsart, was wrecked on a coral reef in the Abrolhos Islands, off the coast of Western Australia, in 1629, on its maiden voyage. Pelsart and a number of his staff set off for the Dutch colonial outpost of Batavia in a small boat, leaving numerous passengers and crew behind, men, women and children. In his absence, some of the crew mutinied, massacred many of the others and ran a tiny but brutal piratical state. Pelsart returned, captured them and had them flogged, keelhauled and hanged. In the 1980s, against the background of the atrocious rule in Mao’s China, in Stalin’s Soviet Union before it and in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea in the immediate past, Leys studied this obscure incident and wrote of it much as William Golding wrote of human nature in Lord of the Flies; except that this was history, not fiction.

Paquet’s chapter on the writing of this book is titled “The Little Gulag Archipelago” because the interest Leys took in the matter had to do with his attempt to get to the bottom of human nature and our proclivities for both good and evil. The virtues and advantages he had inherited from his bourgeois Catholic upbringing never made him naive or dulled the edge of his curiosity about human behaviour. Looking at what occurred on an atoll off the coast of Australia in the early seventeenth century was a remarkable, almost clinical way to delve into the psychological propensities which had, in the twentieth century, generated the colossal abuses of the Nazi, Stalinist, Maoist and Khmer Rouge regimes (among others). He might have settled for some platitude about “fallen man” and the Garden of Eden, but instead he undertook a painstaking empirical, historical and forensic investigation. The book would not be published until 2005, but his long labours on it are as good a key to Leys’s worldview as any of his writings on China.

His novella The Death of Napoleon, originally drafted in 1967, but not published until 1986, was, Paquet argues, yet “another way for him to approach the phenomenon of totalitarianism”. Leys placed an epigraph at the front of the little book that provides a clue as to his motivation for writing it. It is a remark by the French poet Paul Valery:

What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon’s devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention … How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?

This was similar to the attitude that Boris Pasternak (and Anna Akhmatova even more) adopted towards the Bolshevik regime and Stalinism. The central conceit of the little novel is that Napoleon escapes from his final exile on St Helena and returns to France, only to find that no one recognises him and he has to try to rediscover who he is and what it means to be an ordinary human being, rather than an emperor.

Paquet does a wonderful job in setting this out, for those who are either unfamiliar with the book or who may be tempted to imagine that Leys was succumbing to delusions of grandeur and projecting himself into the shoes of the “great man” unrecognised by others. He also reveals, however, that there was a fascinatingly personal root to the choice of Napoleon as a subject for the novel. The Ryckmans family had longstanding links with Waterloo itself—several of them live there to this day, Paquet reveals. Pierre Ryckmans himself, long before he became Simon Leys, went to school at the College Cardinal Mercier not far from the battlefield. Rather than being a strange exercise in megalomania, therefore, the novella was an attempt by the thirty-two-year-old Ryckmans to reflect creatively on his childhood and what it means to be human. He would be fifty-one when the book was finally published. A dozen publishers had rejected it. The more fool them. It was hugely successful, was translated into eight languages, won a lot of prizes and was turned into a film.

With Stendhal, published by Black Inc in 2010, is a highly idiosyncratic book about a highly idiosyncratic individual, Henri Beyle (1783–1842), whose writings and personality fascinated Leys. Beyle, like Ryckmans, adopted a nom de plume: Stendhal. Like Ryckmans, he had a passion for reading and writing. Like Ryckmans, also, he had a passion for colour and art. Like Leys, he wrote books without regard to their potential market, simply to give expression to what he cared about. He liked to say that he wrote for those “happy few”—they might be no more than twenty—who would understand what he felt and was attempting to communicate. At the front of With Stendhal, Leys placed a one-line dedication: “To the happy few.” This book was not about totalitarianism, but about its antithesis: the free and creative individual, scornful of authority and convention, but passionately reflective and creative.

It says a lot about the breadth of Leys’s mind that he was so taken with Stendhal, who was in many ways very different from him. Leys remained a Chestertonian Catholic all his life; Stendhal detested Catholicism and priests, once writing: “All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.” Perhaps his most famous witticism is “God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist.” Stendhal was a bohemian, where Leys was a mandarin aesthete. Stendhal had no ear for poetry, even in French. Leys was finely attuned to poetry in at least three languages. Stendhal wrote in a rather impulsive and unpolished manner. Leys was a fastidious stylist, who wrote pure and lucid prose. What, therefore, can have attracted the twentieth-century writer to the nineteenth-century one? Quite simply, his freedom of mind, his passion for creativity and his aristocratic attitude to all things: his disdain for all pettiness, cowardice, money-grubbing and vulgar celebrity.

This idea of aristocratic values was carried over by Leys into his biting critique of the drift of Western universities—specifically including Australian ones—from the standards he applauded to practices and standards that he execrated. The penultimate chapter of Paquet’s biography is titled “The University under Siege”. It should not be skimmed over by those reading the book hastily. Leys set exacting standards for himself and believed that any education worth the name must set such standards; especially if it wanted to claim the exalted status of higher education. He was appalled when the Université Catholique de Louvain, out of a concern to preserve good relations with the Chinese Communist Party, requested that, if invited there to talk about China, he avoid talking about “controversial” contemporary issues. As Paquet writes, “Leys declined the offer because he wasn’t available, but in any case this extravagant restriction on academic independence was unacceptable.”

Leys once quipped that what makes a university is “a community of educated people and a good library”. Material resources and students are important, but secondary to these first two requirements. He argued forcefully that we needed to shatter the illusion that education should or could be egalitarian and democratic. He wrote, in a paper headed “An Idea of the University”:

The demand for equality is noble and must be fully supported, but only within its own sphere, which is that of social justice. It has no place anywhere else … in its own field, education must be ruthlessly aristocratic and high-brow, shamelessly geared towards excellence.

Many years before he wrote that paper, he had written an essay for Quadrant, in 1987, under the title “Do We Need Universities? Things That Must Not Be Said in Public”. This was in the midst of the Dawkins “reforms”, which might better be dubbed the Dawkins deforms. He lacerated the Dawkins agenda as reducing universities to “an incoherent soukh, a bazaar, where a thousand wares are spread haphazardly, while the scholars themselves are turned into pedlars, touts and pimps, desperately competing to hustle a few more suckers”. He repeated the fireworks in March 1994, again in the pages of this magazine.

Things have not improved since. But those aspiring to an authentic education could do worse than read the collected works of Simon Leys. They could do a lot worse, actually: they could get a piece of paper in media studies or post-colonial mumbo-jumbo from one of our contemporary “universities”. To appreciate why they would be better off with Leys, they would do well to begin by reading Philippe Paquet’s splendid biography of the man.