2. Once more, one is reminded of Belloc and of the remarkable letter he wrote to Chesterton on the occasion of the latter’s conversion to Catholicism: “The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is which the will deliberately confirms… I am by all my nature of mind sceptical… And as to the doubt of the soul, I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion… To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It lacks meat. It is my misfortune. In my youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man; or as a wounded dog, not able to walk, yet knows the way home.”
THE BELGIANNESS OF HENRI MICHAUX
1. As a matter of fact Michaux was born not in Brussels but in Namur (which only reinforces the point).
2. In the light of his own experience, Cioran, who was profoundly sympathetic to both Michaux and Borges, has this to say about the latter: “By the time I reached twenty, things Balkan had nothing further to offer me. Such is the tragedy — and also the benefit — of being born in a minor or indifferent cultural environment. I worshipped what was foreign. Whence my hunger to venture abroad into literature and philosophy, falling upon them with an unhealthy passion. What happens in Eastern Europe must necessarily occur too in the Latin American countries, and I have noticed that their representatives are infinitely better informed and more cultured than Westerners, who are incurably provincial. Neither in France nor in England have I encountered anyone with a curiosity to rival that of Borges, which is almost maniacal, almost a vice — and I say “vice” advisedly, for when it comes to art and thought anything that does not tend towards a slightly perverse fervour is superficial, and therefore illusory…. Borges was condemned to universality, forced into it, obliged to direct his mind in every direction if only to escape the asphyxiating atmosphere of Argentina. It is the South American void that makes the writers of the whole continent more lively and varied than West Europeans paralysed by tradition and incapable of breaking out of their prestigious atrophy.”
3. When Jacques Brosse told him how he had written an account of a psychological experience with the greatest of ease, Michaux responded enviously: “Ah, but it’s obviously not the same for you: you write in your mother tongue!”
“Surely,” Brosse replied, “you’re not telling me that they don’t speak French in Namur?”
“It’s not French they speak — it’s Walloon!”
Michaux added that, at the boarding school where he was locked up at the age of seven, “surrounded by stinking little peasants” who were brutal and spoke only in their own dialect, “Flemish became my second language, which I spoke as well, if not better, than French.” “Did you know,” the poet once asked an interviewer, “that as an adolescent I briefly contemplated writing in Flemish?” His very first revelation of poetry came from reading Guido Gezelle: “Gezelle was the great man. But I quickly realised that I could never equal him.” It must indeed be said that this West-Flemish priest-poet succeeded in making sublime verbal music in his obscure patois; his verses are forever engraved in the memory of anyone exposed to them on a school bench.
4. It is a strange French and English hybrid. The French equivalent of “schooner” is goélette. Michaux’s term might refer either to a cinq-mâts goélette or a goélette à cinq mâts. The difference between the two types of rigging is substantiaclass="underline" the first carries square sails on the foremast, whereas the five masts of the second are all fore-and-aft rigged. Late in his life, probably embarrassed by the juvenile bragging and exaggerations of his letters to Closson, Michaux prevailed upon his correspondent to return them to him, and no sooner did he get them back than he destroyed them — to the consternation of his old friend. But even though the originals thus perished, the content of the letters survived, unbeknownst to the two correspondents, in the shape of photocopies made fifteen years earlier by a third party who had access to Closson’s papers. This eventually made posthumous publication possible — something which Michaux would doubtless have opposed. One might well wonder, moreover, what caused the vehemence with which he sought to erase all traces of this unique phase of his life.
5. And let it not be objected that the original versions and variants are supplied in the endnotes! In the first place, only some of them are; but the most important thing is that average readers can hardly be expected to enjoy reading a text when, for every page, they have to flip back a dozen times to notes in microscopic print a thousand pages further on. The dismal truth is that Michaux’s greatest writings are now unavailable in their incomparable original versions. We can but dream of a sort of anti-Pléiade edition that brought them together in a single volume.
6. Needless to say, I have no desire lightly to pass a negative judgement upon editors who have accomplished a gigantic task, successfully assembling a mass of materials, texts and information otherwise inaccessible to general readers. (Without this indispensable reference tool, for instance, I should never have been able to write the present essay.) But still, from an aesthetic and literary standpoint, the great monument that they have erected seems very much like a tomb containing not a few eviscerated mummies.
7. L’Île noire in its successive revisions is a particularly sad illustration of this process.
8. [The English translation by Sylvia Beach (New York: New Directions, 1949; reprint, 1986) is of the original version. Beach’s translation is used here throughout, with occasional modifications—Translator.]
9. The reference to Bruegel here is more than a mere analogy. Michaux may very well have derived the idea of the diarrhoea of the Ourgouilles from Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels (in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, which the poet knew well): this work shows (among other figures) a hideous big-bellied demon who, as he plunges head-first down into hell, is devouring his own foot while firing off great fuliginous farts. Michaux acknowledged to François Cheng that, although he had scant interest in oil painting (he preferred ink washes, and most of all Chinese painting), Flemish art was well known to him, and he had a very special liking for Bruegel and his mastery of the art of combining the real and the imaginary. (See Cheng Baoyi, Ye Dong [La Nuit remue], introduction, p. x.)
10. Chateaubriand (who was no fool) gives us an eloquent sample of this national consciousness. During the retreat of the Armée des Princes (in whose ranks he had enlisted as a volunteer), wounded and sick, Chateaubriand collapsed by the side of the road near Namur; goodhearted Walloon peasant women took him up and cared for him. The Vicomte described this in the following terms: “I noticed that these women treated me with a kind of respect or deference: there is in the nature of the French something elevated and sensitive that other peoples recognise” (Mémoires d’outre-tombe, X, 2). It is hard to picture Plume abroad being led to voice a thought of that kind.