The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (32 page)

With the passage of thirty-five years, the poet is a convert to the use of soap. Originally, he had noted approvingly that the Chinese “
detests water (dirt, moreover, is excellent for the personality)
”—words that disappear completely in the revised version. Elsewhere in
Barbarian
, he had written: “
In the opinion of a relatively dirty man like myself
, washing, like a war, is a trifle puerile, because it has to be done all over again after a while.” In the corrected version, the general idea is retained, but the touching personal allusion goes by the board.

A scatological tendency had long been spontaneous and natural for Michaux, but the revision meant purging his prose of any reference, even the most figurative, to alimentary functions. The Indians, he had written, “are all constipated. . . . This constipation is the most irritating of all, a constipation of the breath and the soul.” This is turned in the corrected version into “The Indians are all rigid, set in concrete. . . . This constriction, the most irritating of all, that of the breath and the soul. . . .” The same obsession with decency led him, in the case of
Ailleurs
, to suppress “La Diarrhée des Ourgouilles”—a whole section of earthy Bruegelian imagining describing “diarrhea accompanied by autophagy: man is digested and evacuated little by little by his own gut.”[
9
]

By cutting and rewriting so many passages, Michaux certainly
damaged
A Barbarian in Asia
, but what put the finishing touches to the destruction were his
additions.
I have shown how he disavowed his critical vision of Japan—a distinctly perverse disavowal when one considers that in 1932 he had very accurately grasped the nature of a society suffocating under a sinister military-fascist regime. (By analogy, intelligent and sensitive visitors to Berlin in the late 1930s who testified in all honesty to their revulsion would scarcely need to apologise today!) But on the subject of China, things are even worse: Michaux unquestioningly accepts the image of China put about by Maoist propaganda in France during the “Cultural Revolution.” He denies a reality he so clearly perceived in the past on the basis of crass lies being fed him in the present. From the start, in the new preface, he strives to invalidate his masterpiece: “In China, the [Maoist] revolution, by sweeping away habits and ways of being, acting and feeling unchanged for centuries, even for millennia, has also swept away a great many opinions, including not a few of mine.
Mea culpa
—not only for not
seeing
well enough, but even more for failing to
feel
what was gestating, what was about to undo the seemingly permanent. Did I really see nothing? Why? Ignorance? . . .” This is enough to make one weep. And then, throughout the book, Michaux inserts new notes intended to rectify, in the light of the sacred revelations of Maoism, everything heretical in his earlier thoughts.

“In a single generation,” he writes, “politics, economics and the transformation of the social classes have created a new ‘man in the street’ in China. The man I once described and the one that I and other visitors once observed is no longer recognisable. . . . China has returned to life. We should be happy no longer to recognise it, to perceive it differently: as ever startling, ever extraordinary.” Michaux comments as follows on a passage in which he had evoked the fear that restrained the Chinese from making connections with foreign visitors: “How extraordinary it must feel for anyone returning there now—in the very towns where people once shrank away from them—to encounter self-confident faces, no longer evasive but smiling, friendly, open.” By a grim irony, Michaux added this note while the “Cultural Revolution” was in full spate, at a time when passers-by in the street dared not give you directions, because the mere act of
exchanging a couple of words with a foreigner could immediately be treated as a crime. Similarly, whereas the first edition of
Barbarian
simply stated that “No city has gates as massive as Peking,” the revised version embellishes: “No city in the world has gates as massive, as beautiful, or as reassuring as those of Peking.” How true! But how in the world could Michaux have made these additions at the very moment when the “Cultural Revolution” was completing the demolition of those very gates?

The poet who fifteen years earlier had so very well understood that “One who sings in a group will, when asked, put his brother in prison,” now joined the vast chorus of “useful idiots” singing the praises of Chairman Mao—that “man of boldness, author of the Little Red Book, so simple, so reasonable. . . . Mao Zedong who turned China around, utterly transforming a thousand-year-old society in a few years, who conceived the boldest of projects, some of which were unrealisable, but were realised [
sic
], others almost harebrained in their audacity, as for example the setting up of small village blast-furnaces to produce steel, an idea that bucked the advice of all the technicians, or the creation of new villages with collective dormitories. . . .”

* * *

There is no need to continue with this inventory of nonsense. Even coming, as they do, from eminent writers, such claims are inane; coming from Michaux they are terrifying. How could this irreducibly free spirit have calmly swallowed propaganda addressed by criminals to idiots? How could this utterly original poet have changed into a yes-man thinking in clichés and writing in slogans? How could such a master of insolence fall to his knees and fill the air with fake incense?

What happened?

What happened, quite simply, is that
Michaux turned into a Frenchman
!

But whoa! Don’t let me be misunderstood. I am not silly enough to think that the nation that produced Rabelais and Hugo, Montaigne and Pascal, Stendhal and Baudelaire is in any way lacking in literary intelligence (even if, when it comes to Maoism, some members of the
French intellectual elite have easily beaten the world record for stupidity). No, what I am saying is something quite different.

If there is one thing that Belgians are absolutely convinced of it is their own insignificance. Paradoxically, this vouchsafes them an incomparable kind of freedom—a salutary disrespect, a blithe impertinence bordering on the ingenuous. The ant has no qualms about walking across an elephant’s foot; and there are little birds that go pecking inside the crocodile’s gaping mouth (the crocodile does not mind—after all, it saves him brushing his teeth). To put it another way, the Belgian is a sort of court jester: since nothing he says can be taken seriously,
he can say whatever he likes.
Throughout the first half of his long existence, this was how Michaux spontaneously saw himself. A reader largely unacquainted with Michaux, or one whose knowledge of
A Barbarian in Asia
was confined to the samples of self-censorship that I provided above, might even suppose that Michaux’s work must amount to an odious racist tract produced by the colonial-imperial era. Michaux must have fallen victim himself to this misapprehension of the uninformed reader when, later, after he had turned into a Frenchman, he re-read his writings; indeed he acknowledged this when he said that he felt “embarrassed” and “ashamed” and undertook to cut all the passages that offended his newfound sense of the proprieties.

The truth is that Michaux’s most ferocious barbs were aimed at his compatriots, which is quite natural inasmuch as he knew the Belgians full well, and did not like them. But when, amidst his Asiatic travels, he published a journal article, a funny and pitilessly accurate short essay on Argentina and the Argentines, the splenetic reaction of the Buenos Aires press staggered and dismayed him. He immediately vented his confusion in a vehement and telling letter to a South American woman friend. Clearly, he did not understand how these Argentines, whom he liked very much, could take umbrage at his statements, for as a Belgian he was quite used to hearing far worse things said about his own country.

Michaux settled down in Paris at twenty-five. He had fled Belgium; in the early days he returned as little as possible, and eventually not at all. But—and this is significant—in order to write
Ailleurs
(1928), one of his major works, he felt the need to spend six months at
a hotel in Antwerp. In Paris, indiscernibly and gradually, his life became more livable; he began to enjoy an intelligent, sociable and agreeable type of existence. Solitary and withdrawn as he was, there was nothing wild about Michaux. His circle of acquaintances, though hardly fashionable, was by no means narrow. Cioran, who had friendly feelings for Michaux, and who knew him well (though affection never blunted the acuity of Cioran’s judgement), gently applied to him Jean-Louis Forain’s cruel description of “a hermit who knows the railway timetable.”

When I say that Michaux became French, I am not, of course, talking about a change of passports, which is inconsequential, but rather about adopting a different attitude: he was now entitled to bestow certificates of good conduct and medals for meritorious contributions, be it to Mao’s China or to post-war Japan (something that would never have occurred to him while he was still Belgian). But at the same time he was obliged to mind his language. An arrogant Belgian is a contradiction in terms—a notion whose very evocation is laughable. But arrogance is something the suspicion of which the French must continually beware. In foreign parts, among disinherited indigenous people, the French are often led willy-nilly to parade their national identity like some kind of holy sacrament that must never be dishonoured.[
10
] Thus Michaux, being a decent man, felt a moral obligation to censor
A Barbarian in Asia.

In the end Michaux forgot his own principles—“Always keep a reserve stock of maladaptation” and “There are sicknesses which leave nothing at all of a man who is cured of them.”

Delivered from his Belgianness, he cut himself off from the central inspiration of his genius, but he now lived with less difficulty. Perhaps, indeed, he eventually succeeded in finding a kind of happiness. Even if his readers were thereby the losers, who can blame him?

POSTSCRIPT

A reliable source, whose information comes from someone close to Michaux, tells me that, at the very end of his life, for a foreign edition
of
A Barbarian in Asia
, Michaux urged his translator to use not the revised but the original version of his book. If this information is correct—and I have no reason to doubt it—then we must conclude that Michaux eventually became aware of the error he had made in rewriting his masterpiece. And, further, that the choice of the Pléiade editors, which served to ratify and consecrate this error, is all the more deplorable for it.

The Posthumous Publication of Nabokov’s Unfinished Novel

W
HEN WRITING
novels, Vladimir Nabokov proceeded in a very peculiar fashion: he used first to form in his mind a complete vision of the entire work, and then would start to jot down, on filing cards, a first draft of disconnected fragments without logical or chronological order. These cards—of a size slightly smaller than a standard postcard—carried each, on the recto side only, a short passage (from one line to one or two paragraphs) couched in his large and fairly legible handwriting. Some cards stood in isolation, presenting one detached sentence—an idea, a descriptive touch; others formed numbered sequences of sustained narrative (twenty-odd cards in two instances). In a second stage, he would shift and assemble the cards, elaborating a tentative structure, sketching links and connections, weaving together the various threads of the plot. The composition would progressively take shape, till a continuous, final, clean draft could be established, welding together all the earlier elements into a seamless whole.

Nabokov began work on his last novel in 1975, but he was soon interrupted by a series of accidents and deteriorating health. At the time of his death (1977), the first stage of the process was not even half
complete; what remains is only a set of 138 filing cards—which, if printed continuously in standard book-format, would scarcely fill thirty pages.

What should have been done with these 138 filing cards? As his son, Dmitri, recalls, during his final illness on his hospital bed Nabokov instructed his wife, the admirable Vera, that should the book “remain unfinished at his death, it was to be burned.”

The devoted widow could not bear to execute this instruction to the letter—it would have entailed the destruction of what was for her a most precious memento—but she respected her husband’s will in its essential aspect: she never disclosed these uncorrected fragments to the reading public. After her death in 1991, Dmitri Nabokov, only son of the extraordinary couple, became sole custodian of the Nabokov literary estate. Eighteen years later, after having done “a great deal of thinking” (described in a convoluted and obscure paragraph in his introduction), he finally decided to have them published in the present form as
The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments
: a large, luxurious volume presenting, on 138 cardboard pages printed on only one side, detachable facsimile reproductions of the 138 filing cards; each card occupies the upper half of a page, with its contents reproduced in printed form on the lower half.

If the reader so wishes, he can detach any card (or all of them) by simply pressing along the frame. Then, having the cards in hand, he becomes free to shuffle or re-arrange them in whatever order he deems to be closer to Nabokov’s original design (or finds more pleasing to his own personal taste). Without its cards, the book, now hollowed out, can be shelved back in your library: its outer aspect remains unchanged, yet it now conceals a cavity in which you can conveniently store your last will, your house keys, a small flask of old Calvados or your wife’s favourite earrings.