Free The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) by Simon Leys

impractical schemes he ensured his own ruin; but he allotted the practical ones to some of his characters, thus making plausible their fabulous fortunes. Robb writes:
    Certainly a contemporary reader using La Comédie humaine as an investment guide would probably have made a handsome profit . . . Balzac steered his banker, Baron Nucingen, and the money-lender Magus to undreamt-of wealth by having them invest, for example, in the Orléans Railway, while he lost his own money on the Northern Railway.
    There is no escaping the radical difference between the capacity for conception and that for execution: imagination and action are often at opposite poles. That is why novelists usually do not become millionaires, whereas millionaires do not even read novels. Serious people involved in weighty affairs have no time for the puerile games of artistic creation. A man who is entirely “adult” and totally healthy (the latter state, as Sterne warned us, is a most abnormal condition, one that should warrant constant caution) would certainly never contemplate playing the flute all day long, or telling idle tales, or acting and singing on a stage, or playing with clay, paints and brushes. “Genius,” Baudelaire said, “is childhood recalled at will.”
    The paradox by which Balzac could be financially wise in his fiction while losing all his money in life was duplicated in various other matters. For instance, the very women who had been drawn to him by the penetrating intuition of the female heart that he showed in his novels were appalled to discover how insensitive, naïve and awkward the real man could be. (The same contradiction has characterised many creative people: for example, Mozart in his operas composed what is perhaps the only music endowed with acute psychological perception—and yet he was notoriously inept at handling, or even at understanding, the most basic human relations in his life.)
    Balzac presents one of the purest examples of the creative genius: “pure” in the sense that he was largely free of extraneous virtues. What enables great artists and writers to create is not intelligence (theirs can sometimes be average, or even mediocre: Balzac, for instance, often had ideas of startling absurdity; not only was he lacking in elementary common sense, but at times he verged on insanity). It is not sensitivity (many people can “feel” with utter intensity without being necessarily able to express themselves). It is not a matter of education and taste (in thedecor of his lodgings, Balzac displayed the aesthetic sense of a prosperous Caribbean pimp). The real source of all creation (as Baudelaire again pointed out) is imagination. Balzac’s fiction originally sprang from an intuition he first discovered as a wretched little schoolboy locked in a dark closet at his boarding school—an intuition to which he remained faithful until death, and which enabled him to enlarge immeasurably the world of countless readers: life is a prison, and only imagination can open its windows.
    * Review of Graham Robb: Balzac: A Biography (London: Picador, 1994).

VICTOR SEGALEN REVISITED THROUGH HIS COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE
    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 ]