essays
Peter Steele
Simon Leys
The Angel and the Octopus
Duffy & Snellgrove $22.95pb, 283pp
1 8755989 44 7
FLAUBERT WROTE ONCE to George Sand, 'Despite your great sphinx
eyes, you have seen the world through a golden haze.' Simon Leys
has a touch of the sphinx about him -- certainly of the leonine
and the enigmatic -- but he has been spared the golden haze. One
of the most conspicuous features of his book of essays is a
readiness to stare into darkness and to call it for what it is.
That is appropriate in a writer who is, in the archaic phrase,
a man of letters -- a term which implies more than wide reading
and disciplined articulation, and looks to the possibility of
elements of vision and of warranted injunction. Leys, as himself
so to speak and as Pierre Ryckmanns, has practised abundantly in
that vein, and does so here once more. He knows that ink is in
part a mordant: and he does not sound as if he minds this.
The Angel and the Octopus consists of twenty-three pieces which
are grouped under six headings: 'China', 'Quixotism',
'Literature', 'Australia', 'The Idea of a University', and
'Celebrations'. He has his title from Chesterton, that maestro of elliptical insight, and with it an enthusiasm for baroque analysis and for unflinching affirmation. Nobody in Australia, so far as I know, writes like him: in a country all too rich in stylistic ostentation and in stylistic catatonia, Leys is a real original.
That cannot mean that his views will please all, nor even all please any -- if they did, surely the ink would have been wasted. What it does mean is that, although some of his allegiances -- among them a traditional Catholicism and a scholarly integrity -- are clear, you cannot be sure where he will wind up in a given piece of writing. He undertakes them for the essential reason of the genuine essayist: to find out what will happen.
This is especially cheering when one remembers that many of the writings here -- they have all been published previously -- began life as book-reviews. Leys has written to his commissions, and the books in question are indeed illuminated: but each of his anatomies also becomes an anatomy of the mind at large and, usually, of the heart as well. Chinese calligraphy, Don Quixote, Balzac, Simenon, Lawrence in Australia, Bill Hayden on euthanasia -- these turn metamorphic, not from boredom or evasion, but in the interests of disclosure.
Reading the book, I thought of an air to be found, sometimes, in eighteenth-century polemic: an air of calm appraisal out of which, inescapably, icy or fiery judgment emerges. Asking, 'Do We Need Universities?' Leys remarks, 'It is quite evident that bad scholars make highly efficient administrators, and this is precisely why they should be kept away from the positions of responsibility. University-educated crooks are to be feared much more than the street variety.' Of a charmless exercise in pamphleteering on Mother Teresa,
We live in an age of hyperbole. Plumbers are now called 'sanitation engineers', waiters have become 'food and beverage attendants', barbers devote themselves to the cultivation of 'creative coiffure stylism', garbage collectors are turned into 'solid waste disposal officers' -- and Christopher Hitchens' own little piece of solid waste is called 'a book'.
And, quoting from the writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) a bitter fantasy of which Swift himself might have been proud,
...The rulers also issued codes of laws that were marvellously modern, complex and complete; however, at the beginning of the first volume, there was one blank page; this blank page could be deciphered only by those who knew the instructions -- which did not exist. The first three invisible articles of these nonexistent instructions read as follows: 'Art. 1: some cases must be treated with special leniency. Art. 2: some cases must be treated with special severity. Art. 3: this does not apply in all cases.