The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (11 page)

Hugo’s exile came to an end with the fall of the Second Empire. His return to France was triumphal, and the last fifteen years of his life were one long protracted apotheosis. He continued to produce: poems, political addresses, polemical essays (the eloquence and ferocity of
Histoire d’un crime
—1877—contributed to saving the Republic from the menace of a new coup), and one last magnificent novel,
Quatre-vingt-treize
. But not even death could put an end to his career: posthumous publication of his private papers (notebooks, drafts, prose and verse fragments, diaries, correspondence, etc., which equal the published works in quantity, and sometimes even exceed them in interest) have occupied another three-quarters of a century.

* * *

Four years ago, Graham Robb published a splendid biography of Balzac. He has now applied the same winning methods—sharp judgement, wit, lively style and vast information—to the writing of a new
biography of Hugo. If his Victor Hugo does not afford the same delights as Balzac, it is, I think, through no fault of the biographer. It simply would be unfair, and foolish, of us to expect that the same methods applied to a different object may achieve identical results.

Balzac is an essentially endearing character. But if one had to characterise Hugo’s multi-faceted personality, a hundred adjectives may come to mind, yet “endearing” would certainly not be one of them. In fact, it is precisely when dealing with figures such as Hugo that one feels obliged once again to question the desirability, if not the very feasibility, of literary biography.

It is not simply that giants do not bear close scrutiny (as Gulliver discovered to his utter discomfort when he had to climb into the bosoms of the court ladies of Brobdingnag) but, more essentially, there is this basic truth: the only thing that could justify our curiosity is precisely what must necessarily escape the biographer’s analysis—the mystery of artistic creation. Hugo’s long exile was the climax of his life, but these momentous twenty years could be described in merely one sentence: He stood in front of the ocean and he wrote.
§

The thesis that literary biography is doomed to fail by its very nature is not new, and creative artists have expounded it most persuasively. Proust wrote an entire treatise on the subject,
Contre Sainte-Beuve
, and it would be rather fatuous for me to attempt rehashing it here. Closer to us, Malraux summed up the issue quite pointedly: “Our time is fond of unveiling secrets—first because we seldom forgive those whom we admire; secondly, because we vaguely hope that, amid these unveiled secrets, we may find the secret of genius. Under the artist, we wish to reach the man. But when you scrape a fresco, if you scrape it down to its shameful bottom layer, all you get in the end is mere plaster.”[
26
] But well before him the indignation that a poet must experience before our indiscreet appetite for biographical information was most memorably expressed by Pushkin: “The mob reads confessions and notes, etc., so avidly because in their baseness they rejoice at the humiliations of the high and the weaknesses of the mighty. Upon discovering any kind of vileness they are delighted.
He’s little like us! He’s vile like us!
You lie, scoundrels: he is little and vile, but differently, not like you.”[
27
]

Note that I am quite aware of my own contradictions. If my readers derive any enjoyment from this little article, they should also keep in mind that a great deal of its information was directly drawn from Robb’s work. And even as I question the point of writing literary biographies, I know all too well that I shall continue to read them—especially when they are as intelligent and readable as this one.

*
Review of Graham Robb:
Victor Hugo: A Biography
(New York: Norton, 1997).

†
My italics.

§
Hugo used to write
standing
at a high desk.

W
HEN
V
ICTOR
Segalen died in 1919 at the age of forty-one, he had published only one book,
Les Immémoriaux
(1907), and two slim collections of poetry,
Stèles
(1912) and
Peintures
(1916), and he was barely known beyond a small circle of intimates.[
1
] His widow Yvonne—a devoted wife who had supported and loved him with intelligence and followed him with courage—strove to preserve his memory by arranging for posthumous publication of two manuscripts,
René Leys
(1922) and
Équipée
(Expedition, 1929). Despite her efforts, it was to be feared that the writings and even the name of the poet were doomed to oblivion.

In this connection I must ask the reader’s forbearance if I now insert a personal parenthesis (rest assured, it will be the last). In 1971, when I published
The Chairman’s New Clothes
,[
2
] I needed, at short notice and for trivial bureaucratic reasons, to sign the book with a pseudonym. If I was bold enough to borrow my false surname from Segalen’s masterpiece, it was solely because at that time
René Leys
was completely out of print and had been impossible to find for over twenty years, so that the name had no resonance save in the memories of a handful of faithful admirers of Segalen, lovers of literature and somewhat smitten by things Chinese. It was to this happy few—my like, my brothers—that I was directing an innocent wink. Had I had the slightest notion at that time of how Segalen’s work was to become the object of an extraordinary renewal of interest, I would have modestly chosen some other banal Flemish patronymic—Beulemans, say, or Coppenolle—but now it is rather too late for that.

As a matter of fact Segalen’s triumphant return had been foreshadowed by Professor Henri Bouillier’s magisterial biography
Victor
Segalen
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1961). The same Henri Bouillier has now given us the poet’s correspondence.[
3
] Thirty years after Bouillier’s biography, Gilles Manceron’s
Segalen
appeared (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1991); so far from duplicating the earlier biography, it rounded it out admirably.

In the interim, thanks above all to the devoted efforts of Victor’s daughter Annie Joly-Segalen (1912–1998), the issuing of unpublished manuscripts and posthumous fragments, reprints, selected works, popular editions, scholarly editions, collector’s editions, commemorative exhibitions and international conferences all proliferated. Segalen became the subject of a steady flow of books, essays, studies and articles; as far away as the Antipodes, doctoral theses focused on him, while in Brest a university has now been named after him.[
4
]

As to the indefatigable activity of Madame Joly-Segalen, Bouillier is hardly exaggerating when he speaks of a “prodigious filial love from beyond the grave” and “the miraculous resurrection of a father by his daughter.” But he is, I feel, on much less certain ground when he adds that “it was thanks to her” that “Segalen has become one of the century’s greatest poets.” In the previous century Rimbaud had only a sister (a blundering busybody to boot), while Laforgue had no one, and surely both these poets have endured solely by virtue of their poetry?

The three high points of Segalen’s existence—the two years in Polynesia (1903–1905), his first great Chinese adventure (1909), and finally his anguished quest on the threshold of the beyond, in the last twelve months of his life—provide the finest and most intense pages of this enormous correspondence. The remainder (and the two volumes of letters, along with the supplemental
Repères
[Reference Guide] comprise 2,850 pages), though perhaps not always of burning interest, nevertheless serve to confirm John Henry Newman’s dictum that “the true life of a man is in his letters.”

Segalen’s prime correspondents, from his adolescence up until his return from Polynesia and marriage, were his parents, especially his mother. Thereafter his wife became the soul mate to whom he wrote almost daily during his frequent and prolonged absences; his last letter to her was written on the eve of his death. His close friends—and
Segalen attached great importance to friendship—included his fellow naval officers (Henry Manceron, Jean Lartigue) but also admired elders, intellectuals and artists (Daniel de Monfreid, Debussy, Jules de Gaultier, Claudel, etc.).

Segalen was born in Brest into a modest middle-class family with deep Breton and Catholic roots. His father was a gentle and self-effacing civil servant and an amateur painter. His mother, somewhat musical—she played the church organ and the piano—was a formidable and frighteningly possessive person, and she long wielded tight control over her son (who as a twenty-one-year-old medical student was still obliged to write her, not only to justify his smallest expenditures but even to explain on one occasion what had prevented him from receiving Holy Communion at Mass, a tale-bearing chaplain having duly reported this misdemeanour to Madame Segalen).

* * *

Segalen’s background was certainly narrow and smothering in many respects, but it is worth bearing in mind that this provincial bourgeoisie did know how to sacrifice for the education of its offspring. Thus Victor received a solid literary, classical and scientific education; he was also introduced in childhood to music and painting, which remained passions of his throughout his life. Nor must we overlook the essential: he benefited from what only the warm affection of a united family can supply, a happy childhood, which arms one to face life and, once adult, to eliminate the risk of losing time in some fatuous and vain quest for happiness.

But Segalen had a frail and nervous disposition, and he was prone all his life long to bouts of melancholy. At boarding school, far from home, he was laid low by depression. While he was a student at the Bordeaux School of Naval Medicine, his sister and mother had to come and support him during another attack. He needed his family, yet at the same time he longed to take wing. This desire for emancipation manifested itself in various ways—in his rejection of the organized Church as in his liaisons with young women (liaisons which he had to conceal from his mother—another source of anxiety).

True freedom from the family’s grip came only, in the nature of things, with his great departure for Polynesia, his first overseas posting. But loving ties with his parents were maintained by letter well beyond that moment, and right up until his marriage. Thereafter, however, though still respectful and courteous, his communications became rare and more distanced. Five years before his death, Segalen confided to a very dear friend that “Nothing at all has been a disappointment to me except my mother (the reluctant affection I once felt for her perished long ago).” Two years before his death, in a letter to his wife concerning the education of their older son, in whom he wished to instil high standards, he remarked that “I feel that my parents were satisfied with mediocrity, and for that I shall never forgive them.”

Segalen became a Navy doctor for simple practical reasons: his family could not have afforded extended study for him. In point of fact he liked neither the sea nor medicine. He suffered from seasickness, and he cursed the time-consuming demands of a profession that distracted him from his true passions. On both matters his correspondence is explicit.

The sea: “I find the open sea boring, nauseating and stupid.” “My Pacific crossing was bleak, banal, and long.” “Fifteen stupid days on this stupid sea. How horribly monotonous the South Pacific is as a mass of water!” “I shall relish with ever-renewed joy the charm of a night on land, cool and with no rolling.” “Ah! How good the solid, fragrant earth is after five days on the high seas! Decidedly, the sea is beautiful only as seen from the coast, or framed by shores, beaches, and rocks. The open sea is paltry and odourless. . . . And the vast horizon shrinks and squeezes you like an iron ring.” “Life at sea gives me the slightly stale feeling of a pious old maid in religious retreat. . . . The open sea is really and truly imbecilic. Its only virtue is that it conveys you ‘elsewhere.’”

As for medicine, Segalen hardly ever speaks of it in any but exasperated terms: “For me medicine means oppressive and monotonous boredom.” At one point he complains of “the vile butchery of medical practice” that prevents him from playing his piano; at another, he fancies that “Sinology, an exact science” might “save him once and for all
from the vileness of medicine.” It should be noted, nevertheless, that Segalen was a good doctor who combined competence with compassion. During the struggle against an outbreak of plague in northeast China he distinguished himself by his courage, devotion and organizational skill.

In any case, it was surely better to be a Navy doctor than a pharmacist in Brest, as his mother had originally wanted for him. And he had no reason for complaint with respect to the French Navy, which treated him generously, and underwrote the two most fruitful episodes in his career, namely the revelation of Polynesia and the revelation of China, which would successively inspire and nourish his entire literary output.

In Polynesia he discovered a paradise in agony and, simultaneously, the work of Gauguin, who had just died there. In the islands he experienced a kind of happiness—or was it perhaps simply the fact of being young, and released at long last from the oppressive bigotry of his provincial childhood? Many years later he could still write to a friend about that time: “I have told you that I was happy in the Tropics. That is violently true. For two years in Polynesia I slept badly from joy. I had awakenings in tears at the arriving light of day. . . . I felt gaiety coursing through my muscles. Thinking was itself a delight. . . . I had my work in hand, I was free, recovering, fresh, and sensually rather well practiced. The whole island came to me like a woman. And from women indeed I received gifts that more complete countries no longer offer. Apart from the traditional Maori wife with her sweet fresh skin, smooth hair, and muscular lips, I experienced caresses [etc.].”

* * *

This lyrical outpouring is no doubt partly due to the writer’s distance in time from what he is recalling. His original letters from Tahiti tell a rather different story. Following the usual custom of officers at that time, he had indeed set out by taking a native mistress, but he seems to have tired of her rather quickly, as he confided in various somewhat caddish letters to an old pal of his: “For the time being I have left the
full-blooded Tahitian vahine as being too far removed from our own race. They would be perfect, these brown-skinned girls with their long sleek hair, long eyelashes and velvet skin, if only, instead of launching a full-scale courting ritual, replete with palaver and haggling, they would comply with simple commands, just as they used to in the past. . . . They are dishonest, egoistic, and obviously not very intellectual or even intelligent. What is the use, then, of showing them the same respect as would be appropriate towards a lover very close to us, submissive, devoted, such as we are surer to find among female species less far removed from our own. . . . In six months, after experiencing the Tahitian, then the half-White, I came back to the White woman, and now from her too, willingly, I am drawing away. . . .” Furthermore, “the sexual act is indifferent to me, it takes too long, and then those women who truly please me I would rather have as friends than as mistresses.”