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 essentiaclass="underline" 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.”
Clearly, for all his intelligence, all his heart, Segalen was also, willy-nilly, a child of the stupid nineteenth century. Later in the correspondence, moreover, there are more signs of this, no less distressing, in his reactions to China.