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

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 VictorSegalen (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interim, thanks above all to the devoted efforts of Victor’s daughter Annie Joly-Segalen (1912–1998), the issuing of unpublished manuscripts and posthumous fragments, reprints, selected works, popular editions, scholarly editions, collector’s editions, commemorative exhibitions and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—andSegalen 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