Read The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) Online
Authors: Simon Leys
Those who bear witness, staunchly and faithfully, to a spiritual tradition are reduced by the modern world to a condition of “aborigines,
vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure, so that things may be safe for the travelling salesmen.” Modern man, who moves with the times and seeks power without grace, is finally a much greater menace to human integrity than tattooed cannibals. Thus, in
Brideshead Revisited
, we are told that Rex Mottram, politico and tycoon, epitome of worldly success (he is still very much alive among us today, forever aspiring to become our leader), “wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce: a tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”
What is wrong with “the age of the common man” is not that it might endanger elitist privilege but the fact that it is built upon a false premise—for there is no such creature. In a memorable BBC interview, a journalist who thought he would cleverly expose Waugh’s social prejudices merely revealed his own incapacity to shed trendy stereotypes:
Journalist
: You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, have you, Mr. Waugh?
Waugh
: You must understand that the man in the street does not exist. He is a modern myth. There are individual men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to use streets from time to time.
But there are also more insidious forms of intellectual perversion—those which borrow a religious disguise to subvert religious values. The phenomenon is not limited to progressive-minded Christians who do not believe in Christ, or to enlightened theologians who preach atheism; it consists more broadly—as Desmond MacCarthy described in his perceptive comments on
The Loved One
—in the entire “silly optimistic trend in modern civilisation which takes for granted that the consolations of religion can be enjoyed without belief in them, and seeks to persuade us that there is nothing really tragic in the predicament of man.”
At the end of his life, with an anguish that came close to despair, Waugh witnessed the dreadful invasion of shallowness and puerility which began to undermine and destroy some of the most precious and venerable traditions of the Church. He confessed to a friend: “The buggering up of the Church is a deep sorrow to me,” and in the privacy of his diary he went further: “Pray God I will never apostatise but I can only now go to Church as an act of duty and obedience—just as a sentry at Buck[ingham Palace] is posted with no possibility of his being employed to defend the sovereign’s life.”
As he sank even further into a pathological state of melancholy, he reviewed the bleak landscape of his soul—his spiritual dryness, his emotional loneliness, the dreariness and boredom of his family life, the wretchedness of his own foul temper, the general aridity of his soul[
2
] and at the end of a desolate litany of failings, doubts and despondency, he pondered that even the saints did not seem much better off, and yet concluded: “But to aim at anything less than sanctity is not to aim at all.”
He did not derive much comfort or consolation from his faith: he simply knew it to be true, and that was that. As he explained in a letter to a friend: “Praying is not asking but giving. Giving our love to God, asking for nothing in return . . . Do you believe in the Incarnation and Redemption in the full historical sense in which you believe in the battle of El Alamein? That’s important. Faith is not a mood.”
Only his religion could—quite ruthlessly—put this proud man in his humble place; he realistically accepted that, in a theological perspective, his unique talents in the end did not amount to much: “I cannot think of a single Saint who attached much importance to art . . . The Church and the world need monks and nuns more than they need writers . . . A youth who is inarticulate in conversation may well be eloquent in prayer . . . The Church does not exist in order to produce elegant preachers, or artists, or philosophers. It exists to produce Saints.”
After reading
Helena
, John Betjeman confessed to him a certain puzzlement: “Helena did not seem to me like a saint.” Waugh replied: “Saints are simply souls in Heaven . . . and each individual has his own peculiar form of sanctity which he must achieve or perish. It is no
good my saying ‘I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross,’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh—after God knows what experiences in Purgatory.”
On the question of purgatory, it should merely be observed that the meanest judges in this world were not even able to keep him for one single day in their
literary
purgatory; as to the other one, God’s sweet mercy will have taken good care of that.
*
Review of Martin Stannard:
Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939–1966
(London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1992).
All writers are monsters.
—H
ENRY DE
M
ONTHERLANT
C
IORAN
wondered how the perspective of having a biographer never discouraged anyone from having a life. We should at least ask ourselves how the perspective of having to provide posthumously the topic of an academic eulogy does not discourage more people from becoming academicians. In Simenon’s case, perhaps, he believed that he had sufficiently succeeded in concealing his tracks, and thought that the false candour of his many confessions would always be protection enough against our indiscreet admiration.
Samuel Johnson said: “Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” I am not sure if this sort of experience would have been of much use to Simenon’s biographer—or to any other great writer’s, for that matter. Isaac Bashevis Singer once observed (forgive this abundance of quotations, it is not pedantry—simply, the fact is that, for the last fifteen years, I have been frequenting books more than people; furthermore, why should we attempt clumsily to reinvent what good writers have better said before us?) that, even if Tolstoy were living next door, instead of paying him a visit, he would rather stay home and read
Anna Karenina
again. This is elementary wisdom. The encounter of geniuses is not always an occasion for sublime exchanges. The only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust is a good
example: these two giants of modern literature once shared a taxi, but they spent the entire time arguing whether to open or shut the window. (This anecdote must be true, since it was invented by Nabokov.)
People are often surprised when they realise that, in life, great writers do not bear much resemblance to the image they had formed of them while reading their works. For instance, with naïve astonishment they may discover that a fierce polemicist, whose fire and violence had filled them with awe, actually is a quiet, shy and retiring man; or again, the orgiastic prophet of burning passion, who had stirred their sensual imagination, proves in fact to be a eunuch; or the famous adventurer, who set their minds dreaming of exotic horizons, wears slippers and never leaves his cosy fireside; or the aesthete from whose exquisite visions they drew so much inspiration eats from plastic plates and wears hideous neckties. They should have known better. Quite frequently, an artist creates in order to compensate for a deficiency; his creation is not the joyous and exuberant outpouring of an overflow—it is more often a pathetic attempt to answer a want, to bridge a gap, to hide a wound.
Hilaire Belloc admirably described this divorce between the writer and his writing:
I never knew a man yet who was consonant to his work. Either he was clearly much greater and better than his work, or clearly much less and worse . . . In point of fact it is not the mere man who does the thing: it is the man inspired. And the reason we are shocked by the vanity of artists is that, more or less consciously, we consider the contrast between what God has done through them, and their own disgusting selves . . . When the work is of genius, he is far below it: he is on a different plane. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent him from outside.
Simenon granted countless journalistic interviews. In his free time (that is, when he was not writing novels) he would entertain journalists sometimes as often as twice or three times a week. The media found him to be a golden topic. With apparent good will, but not without shrewdness, he complied with their many requests; in front
of television cameras, he performed his old routine with well-oiled smoothness; he deftly fed his numerous visitors all the humbug they wished to swallow, in the same fashion as, at the zoo, one throws peanuts to the monkeys.
He enjoyed worldwide celebrity. His fame can be conveniently encapsulated in a series of figures which, though often quoted, never cease to amaze: his books have been translated into fifty-seven languages and published in forty countries; he wrote some 450 novels—the exact figure, which may possibly constitute a world record of fecundity in the history of literature, still escapes the investigations of the most diligent researchers, as in his youth he produced countless pot-boilers (adventure stories, soft pornography watered down with sentimental romance) that were issued in cheap, obscure and short-lived serial publications, under twenty-seven different pen-names. In his early period, he would sometimes turn out one or two novels in the course of a single day. As success came, he began to travel restlessly; at the same time, he became a compulsive landlord, setting up for himself thirty-two successive residences. And also, naturally, let us not forget the 10,000 women with whom, according to his own computations, he managed over the years to have sexual intercourse.
However, Mauriac warned us: the true life of a writer can only be told by the children of his imagination. Do Simenon and his creatures tell the same story? We might, for instance, subject them to a single elementary test, such as the one Malraux suggested when he said that, in order to know a man, one should examine his attitudes towards God, towards sex and towards money.
On God, Simenon’s characters remain generally silent, which is fairly normal. Their creator’s silence, however, was positively shrill, which is rather odd: “I would rather walk stark naked in the streets than confess my true views regarding the existence of God.”
On the subject of sex, Simenon was fond of portraying himself as a man liberated from all taboos: “I enjoy perusing beautiful female bodies . . . Quite often, prostitutes give me more pleasure than non-professionals...I have sex straightforwardly, healthily, as often as I feel the need to.” He cultivates sexual pleasure “without afterthoughts and without fuss.” If we are to believe him, it would seem that, for
him, regular participation in orgies was some sort of exercise akin to bicycle riding or calisthenics.
For his creatures, however, things are not so easy or pleasant. Unremitting loneliness crushes the entire world of his fiction, where loveless passions are leading inexorably to disaster, and sex is nearly always a grim, shameful, hasty and furtive experience. Thus, for instance, the protagonist of the most autobiographical of all his novels imagines:
...dingy beds, wallpaper in tatters, a broken-down and stained sofa; he sees, he wants to see the face of a woman, with dark rings under her eyes, a weary mouth and a sickly body, slowly stripping her clothes in a grey twilight, with a mixture of boredom and disgust . . . Everything is so ugly! It is dirty—that is the word: dirty—and he wished it to be even more dirty, dirty to a point which would make you cry from disgust or pity, which would make you crawl on the floor and moan.
Finally, one cannot leave this subject without mentioning the contrast—rather striking, you will admit—between, on the one hand, Simenon’s jolly polygamist binges and, on the other, Maigret’s austere monogamy (and there is no need to be Freud or Jung to be able to identify Maigret as Simenon’s “mythical ego”).
On the subject of money, it would be all too easy to juxtapose the spectacular success of the creator with the sordid end of nearly all his creatures. Paradoxically, as the former became a prisoner of his own wealth and fame, we see the latter dropping their worldly moorings and drifting away in a sort of desolate freedom. At the peak of his career, Simenon was living in a pseudo-castle which he designed himself—a mixture of palace, factory, health resort and fortress where he was waited on by an army of secretaries, butlers, chauffeurs, cooks and gardeners. Whereas Simenon’s novels resemble life, his life increasingly resembled a novel—one of those cheap romances which, in his early years, he would sign with phony aristocratic pseudonyms such as Jean du Perry or Germain d’Antibes, and entitle suggestively
Voluptuous Embraces, Frivolous Perversities
or
Alone Among Gorillas
.
In contrast with this literary businessman, beaming and prosperous,
Simenon’s characters break your heart: they are small people, humble and lonely; rebels and misfits; failures, losers, victims. Look at Maigret (even him!): “When Maigret has to enter a wealthy household, he feels unwelcome and embarrassed, he is uneasy, he knows he does not fit into these splendid surroundings...”; “Maigret is not comfortable when he must deal with important people . . . He is both in awe of, and shocked by, the upper class.” His father was the intendant of an aristocrat, and he himself remained indelibly marked by his servile origin: “There is a certain type of human relations, of social habits, for which there is no cure. One can recover from many diseases, but never from that—a certain humility in front of certain people.” In fact Simenon told the same story a hundred times; his major novels have only one theme: the fall of a man. Fate, an outside incident, an inner impulse, suddenly triggers an implacable process of disintegration. A man wakes up and finds himself a stranger amidst his own people; he tries to break free from his familiar chains, and he perishes.