The Urgency of Truth: The Writing of Simon Leys

Fame is not always proportional to merit: if it were, Simon Leys (who lived the last forty years of his life in Australia, and died last year) would have been one of the most famous writers in the world. After his recent death I asked a few Belgians of my acquaintance, all well-educated, what they knew of him, their great fellow countryman: and in none of them did his name ring more than a faint bell occasioned by having seen, but not actually read, an obituary notice in one Belgian newspaper or another. 

I do not think that Leys would have minded very much. The communication of truth, not the achievement of fame, was his ambition, and he became sufficiently well-known to have satisfied it. Few writers have ever conveyed so immediately, from their very first sentence, the urgency and authority, the intellectual integrity and moral probity, with which they speak, as did Simon Leys. And since his subject that made him known, Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, was one which was usually written about from a standpoint of ignorance and dishonesty, his setting of the record straight was of considerable historical importance.

Since, as Doctor Johnson says, all judgment is comparative, it is worth illustrating Leys’s quality as a writer by comparison with that of J.K. Galbraith, the celebrated Harvard economist (celebrated was a favourite word of Galbraith’s, especially, one suspects, with reference to himself). Both men were in China in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution, and both wrote a book, respectively Ombres Chinoises (Chinese Shadows) and A China Passage, about their experiences. But that is about all they had in common.

Leys spent six months in China as cultural attaché to the newly-opened Belgian embassy in Peking. He was a sinologist who had published extremely learned works on Chinese painting and was interested much more in civilisation than in politics, which is perhaps why he wrote so clear-sightedly about the latter. He was born Pierre Ryckmans, but adopted the pseudonym of Simon Leys to keep alive the possibility of future visas, for the Chinese authorities of the time did not take kindly to unfavourable comment. The choice of Leys as a pseudonym was not random: Leys was the protagonist of a novel, René Leys, by Victor Segelen, a doctor who became a sinophile and who, like Simon Leys sixty years later, deplored the destruction of a civilisation that he loved and admired, as well as the Western attitude to China. For literary purposes, he remained Simon Leys for the rest of his life.

Galbraith probably needs little introduction. A man ever on the side of the angels of big government, in A China Passage he succinctly (for once) summed up his philosophy. Referring to the spontaneous abandonment of stony farmland in the eastern United States by farmers seeking more fertile lands elsewhere, by contrast with the happy Maoist policy of making peasants stay put to cultivate infertile plots, he says, “The market can be ruthless as politicians cannot.” To be fair to Galbraith, he probably hadn’t heard of the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine that killed perhaps 30 million people.

At the beginning of his book, Leys says simply:

 

The notes that follow are a result of my six-month stay in China last year.

 

At the beginning of his book, Galbraith says:

 

I’m on my way to China—the most successful of five recent attempts—and I should be grateful to Richard Nixon. Instead, within reasonable limits, I propose to write down everything I hear or think and describe everything I see or seem to see. 

 

Instead? Is writing things down the antithesis of being grateful to Richard Nixon? There then follows, irrelevantly, some of the most concentrated name-dropping in the history if not of literature, exactly, at least of printing. For Galbraith, China is but another opportunity to exhibit himself and his attitudes to the world; for Leys, China is an object of love of such importance that it deserves that nothing less than the truth should be told about it.

In the first chapter of Chinese Shadows, titled Foreigners in the People’s Republic, Leys witheringly lays bare the vanity and stupidity of such as Galbraith, effortlessly gulled by the Maoist state:

 

We all know of the misadventure of an American journalist: like everyone else, he had written an account of a journey in China. The only problem was that he hadn’t been there.

 

The surprising thing, says Leys, is that he was found out: for by reading such accounts, all the same, the feeblest hack could concoct one of his own indistinguishable from that of a person who had actually been on an organised tour. And Galbraith, though not specifically mentioned, was no better than the feeblest hack: in fact worse because of his self-conceit as a man able from the heights of his chair at Harvard to penetrate realities hidden from others.

At every point we see how Galbraith typifies the class of willing fool gulled by tyranny that Leys describes with an irony that is instinct with moral and intellectual authority:

 

He [the Galbraith-like visitor to China] makes the same tour, stays in the same hotel, visits the same institutions, meets the same people from whom he hears the same declamations, is offered the same banquets during which the same speeches are made, conforming everywhere to the same invariable and unreal ritual which belongs neither to China nor the West, but to an abstract universe specially conceived by Maoist bureaucrats for the benefit of foreign guests.

 

Of all this, of course, Galbraith is too vain to have any awareness. Leys adds in a footnote:

 

A classic little example of this ritual … is that of the used razor blade, which is included in all accounts of visits to China: the traveller leaves a used razor in his hotel room, which is scrupulously returned to him at every stage of his journey; it is not until he reaches Hong Kong that he can finally disembarrass himself of it.

 

On page 84 of A China Passage we read:

 

As we were about to leave, a porter came running out of the hotel with a look of extreme urgency on his face. He handed me four Chinese cents—the equivalent of two American pennies—that had fallen out of my pocket in my room.

 

It never occurs to the great professor that this might just have been a Potemkin incident. As for the hotel conditions in which visitors were put up, the brilliant Galbraith has this to say in the midst of a convulsion that caused a million deaths and tens of millions of people to be dislocated, maltreated and humiliated, and resulted in untold damage to the country’s three-millennial cultural heritage:

 

The Nanking Hotel … is agreeable but not palatial. I have a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom and air conditioning. But that is enough.

 

What a wonderfully expressive use of the word but! Fortunately for the Comrade Professor, Paris awaited him on his return from China:

 

I was two days at the Ritz with no grievous sense of social guilt, no insuperable problem of cultural shock …

 

You can take Galbraith out of the Ritz, but you can’t take the Ritz out of Galbraith.

When asked by his guests for criticism of China during the Cultural Revolution, Galbraith made Dr Chasuble (susceptible to draughts, you remember) seem positively self-lacerating: “You are smoking far too many cigarettes.”

 

It was against this moral, emotional and intellectual dishonesty and cowardice, and in defence of the Chinese civilisation that he knew so well and loved so much, that Leys wrote his four books on Maoism: The Chairman’s New Clothes, Chinese Shadows, Broken Images, The Burning Forest. They were important to me for more than one reason. I had contemporaries, briefly, who were enamoured of the Cultural Revolution and had Maoist posters on their wall. Though the sight of millions of people brandishing the Little Red Book in unison appalled me, as the sight of millions of people brandishing anything in unison appals me, I, who knew nothing of China, wanted authoritative evidence that the Cultural Revolution was the murderous catastrophe that I thought it was. Leys’s books, almost alone, provided it. As for the wilful blindness of my contemporaries, it was not theirs alone: describing how Le Monde, once the Daily Bible of right-thinking Frenchmen, ignored a Chinese crisis that occurred in 1974, he wrote:

 

The best part is that the [newspaper’s] unfortunate correspondent in Peking was moreover perfectly capable of having remained ignorant of the crisis in good faith.

 

But Leys’s books were important to me stylistically also. Here was prose that was lucid, angry, scornful, ironic and funny at the same time, and that seemed to carry its own guarantee of honesty and authority with it. It was not for nothing that Leys was an admirer of Orwell, and in fact wrote a short book, Orwell, ou l’horreur de la politique, published not coincidentally in 1984, about him. In this book, Leys wrote:

 

Simplicity and innocence are qualities that children and savages display naturally, but no civilised adult can attain them without first submitting to quite a rigorous discipline … in him [Orwell] man and writer were one …

 

The same might be said of Leys, and certainly he achieved one of Orwell’s goals, that of making political writing into an art. None did it better, in fact (at least none known to me).

And yet he was not interested primarily in politics, which was for him something that had to be cleared away, like undergrowth, before you could start the cultivation that was so important to him. In the preface to Broken Images he cites the great Chinese write Lu Hsün (Leys, incidentally, was the greatest master of apt quotation, often from obscure sources, known to me, and must have been blessed with a formidable memory). Lu wrote the following apology for publishing a collection of his articles:

 

A few friends, believing that the situation has hardly changed since the time I wrote these things, have thought that it would be worth conserving them in a collection. This upsets me. I think in fact that polemics against the vices of an epoch normally disappear with their targets. It is with these writings as with the white corpuscles in the blood that form a crust over a wound; so long as they do not eliminate themselves, it is a sign that the infection remains active.

 

I think this is to underestimate the value of his own writings on the Cultural Revolution, now forty years in the past: first because they are a lesson in how to write political prose of the first order, that is still capable of giving an intense pleasure to those who appreciate good, indeed brilliant, writing, and second because the dishonesty against which they were written is with us still and perhaps will always be with us. However, the fact that the battle is never won for good and all does not mean that we should retire from the field; Leys teaches us how to fight.

 

Although Leys remained a university teacher of Chinese for many years and of course never lost his passion for China and its culture, he turned often in his subsequent writings to very different subject matter, in which his mastery and authority were equally great. Continuing to write about China, he also became a literary essayist of the greatest distinction. I do not recall having read any modern essayist with such great admiration or pleasure. His erudition in both French and English literature was formidable, but was always used to illuminate what he was saying and to increase the reader’s understanding, never to show off or to draw attention to himself. One felt one’s ignorance in his presence, but not as a reproach, rather as a stimulus. The world was almost more interesting for Leys than was Leys to himself: no writer was less egotistical. I often felt in reading him that twenty pages of his were worth an entire book of many others.

His ability to quote so appositely, at exactly the length necessary, was a manifestation of his precision of mind. I suspect that he thought that concision was next to godliness, at least for a writer; and he had that ability to say in a few lines what it would take lesser writers whole pages, chapters, books, to say. I take up one of his books of essays—L’Ange et le cachalot (The Angel and the Sperm Whale)—and look at the first sentence of the first essay, “An Introduction to Confucius”:

 

If one considers the greatest teachers of humanity—the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Jesus—one is struck by a curious paradox: nowadays, not one of them could obtain the lowliest teaching post in any of our universities. The reason for this is simple: their qualifications would be insufficient—they published nothing.

 

Leys continues with that delicious irony of which he was such a master:

 

(It is not impossible that Confucius edited certain texts, but, as every university teacher knows, edited works seem like padding in a curriculum vitae—one cannot say that they really count.)

 

This short paragraph distils the decline of universities as institutions which provide a haven from the everyday world in which disinterested reflection, thought and research—at least in the humanities—can take place. As Whitehead said that all Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato, so all reflection on the state of universities might be called footnotes to Leys.

This paragraph is not just a lucky hit, such as anyone who writes a great deal might expect occasionally; it is typical. Here is the beginning of his essay (in the same book) on André Malraux, a writer often uncritically admired:

 

We know the story (it is hackneyed): in a full church, the preacher climbs into the pulpit and pronounces a sermon of overwhelming eloquence. Everyone cries. One man, however, remains dry-eyed. They ask him the reason. “It’s because,” he says, “I’m not of this parish.”

 

And he continues:

 

A foreigner, but francophone, I feel at home each time I go to France. It is only when it is a question of Malraux that it becomes evident: I am not of this parish.

 

And he tells us why:

 

On Malraux’s death, a Parisian weekly asked me to write a page on the following theme: what did Malraux mean to you? I naively thought they wanted the truth, so I sent in all innocence—but the editor was horrified and put it in the waste paper basket. And yet my article only repeated something well-known to the most diverse foreign critics—from Koestler to Nabokov—who for a good half-century had regarded Malraux as a phoney.

 

Since, of course, Malraux’s best-known work treated of China, we know, if we had not already guessed from Leys’s prose style alone, that what will follow will not be a mere hatchet job, but a reasoned, informed and irrefutable destruction of Malraux’s reputation.

 

But Leys was not simply a man who was against: his praise could be as convincing as his criticism was devastating. I can think of no better summary of what Leys was for than what Chekhov, in one of his letters, said he stood for:

 

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and … freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter take.

 

For example, the beautiful essay on Don Quixote, published in Leys’s book Protée et autres essais, begins:

 

When, in a discussion, someone refers to someone else as a Quixote, is it always as an insult, which astonishes me. In fact, I can’t think of a more beautiful compliment.

 

And he then writes a eulogy to worldly failure, as success and failure are usually, very crudely, understood.

Leys’s style of criticism is the reverse of academic. He makes the writers about whom he chooses to write, and whom he likes, dislikes or partly likes, seem important to us because, for him, all true literature is contemporary. It comes as no great surprise that Leys was religious, though certainly not religiose; for him there were certain existential constants in human life, which is why, of course, all true literature is contemporary.

It also comes as no surprise, then, that he was, in addition to all the above, a writer of elegant, witty, amusing and profound little essays. Perhaps my favourite of his books is Le Bonheur des petits poissons (The Happiness of Little Fish), subtitled Letters from the Antipodes. He wrote these pieces, so slight in length that you might mistake them for casual off-scourings of a busy pen, for a French literary magazine.

In “Cigarettes Are Sublime”, for example, he recounts how he sought out the book by Richard Klein of that title but how, once he found it, he put it on his shelf and never read it for fear that it might not contain all that he hoped it would. An ex-smoker himself, he expresses his exasperation at the anti-smoking zealotry around him, suggesting that such zeal is a substitute for a deeper sense of morality. He ends:

 

Mozart confided in a letter that he thought of death every day, and that this thought was the deepest source of all his musical creation. It certainly explains the inexhaustible joy of his art. I don’t mean that the inspiration that one could draw from the funereal warnings issued by all the right-thinking health authorities is going to transform all smokers into Mozarts, but certainly these strident reminders come to endow smoking with a new seductiveness—if not a metaphysical meaning. Every time I see one of those threatening labels on a packet of cigarettes, I feel seriously tempted to start smoking again.

 

Mozart appears again in a profound little essay called “L’Empire du laid”, a model, typically Leysian, of how to draw an important and unexpected lesson from a slight, even banal incident, all in the simplest words:

 

One day, a long time ago … I was writing in a café. Like many lazy people, I like to feel animation around me when I am supposed to be working—it gives me the impression of activity. The murmur of conversation did not disturb me, not even the radio which blared in the corner—all morning, without interruption, it poured out current popular songs, stock market prices, muzak, sports results, a report on foot and mouth disease, more songs, and all this pabulum flowed like tepid water from a half-closed tap. Furthermore, no one listened to it. Then suddenly, for an inexplicable reason—a miracle!—this vulgar radiophonic drivel gave way without pause to sublime music: the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet took possession of our room with serene authority, transforming the café into an antechamber of Paradise. But the other customers, until then busy chatting, playing cards or reading the papers, were not deaf after all: on hearing these celestial sounds, they looked at each other, taken aback. Their disarray lasted only a few seconds—to the relief of all, one of them stood up firmly and went to the radio to change the station, thus restoring a stream of noise more familiar and reassuring that it was easy for everyone to ignore.

 

The conclusion that Leys draws is worth citing in full:

 

At that moment I was struck by a fact awareness of which has never since left me: the true philistines are not those who cannot recognise beauty—they recognise it only too well, they detect it instantly, with a flair as infallible as that of the most subtle aesthete, but it is only to be able to pounce on it so as to stifle it before it can take root in their universal empire of ugliness. For ignorance, obscurantism, bad taste or stupidity do not result merely in a deficiency, but are as much active forces which assert themselves furiously on every occasion, not tolerating any refusal of their tyranny.

 

I once had a powerful confirming instance of Leys’s insight. I had been called to an emergency in the prison in which I worked as a doctor. It was a hot day and I had the window of my car open. I stopped at some traffic lights. My radio was playing Chopin, not very loudly, but evidently loudly enough for a passing pedestrian to hear. He came across to my car, screwed up his face into an expression of real rage and hatred, and screamed, “What are you playing that shit for?” It goes without saying that had I been playing rap music loud enough to produce an earth tremor, he would have said nothing; and if the lights had not changed, I think he might actually have attacked me.

Leys continues, lucid as ever:

 

Inspired talent is always an insult to mediocrity. And if this is true in the aesthetic sphere, it is even more true in the moral. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to have the ability to exasperate our sad species. The need to reduce everything to our own miserable level, to soil, mock and degrade all that overwhelms us by its splendor, is probably one of the most distressing traits of human nature.  

This passage suggests that Leys was not a writer who was anxious to please the multitudes at all costs, though he admired those who pleased the multitudes without abandoning truth, quality or beauty. He was not a snob, but neither was he a flatterer.

I have a small declaration of interest to make. Leys quoted me (favourably) in one of his books. So great was my admiration for him that I felt that this in some small way was an apologia pro vita mea.