Mere mortals and beautiful conservatism
The Angel and the Octopus
Simon Leys, Duffy and Snelgrove, 1999
Review by Allan Patience
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 64
Winter 1999

THIS BOOK IS A collection of reprinted essays by the eminent China scholar and latter-day Renaissance intellectual Pierre Ryckmans, writing under his literary pseudonym Simon Leys. A reviewer is simply obliged by the insightfulness of the prose in the book to quote frequently; to do otherwise belies its elegance.

The essays were written over the period 1983 to 1998 and originally appeared in such august literary journals as The New York Review of Books, Quadrant, The Australian's Review of Books and Independent Monthly. They would not therefore attract a high score in our contemporary university 'research quantum', but they are none the worse for that. Indeed, the book is a clear measure of the failings of the research quantum that shackles much good scholarship in Australia's universities today.

The essays are grouped into six sections. Section one is about China and the essays here are educative in the richest sense. Section two ("Quixotism") contains two lovely pieces of literary criticism posing modestly as reviews. Section three's essays are reviews, generally full of wit and sharpness (for example: "Half of the misery of the world is caused by people whose only talent [is] to worm their way into positions for which they otherwise have no competence"). Section four contains three pieces under the label "Australia". Section five contains two profoundly important essays on "The Idea of a University". And Section six has two connected series of notes on some wry and rather self-indulgent themes.

A sharp wisdom pervades nearly all of the essays. Some of the older essays (such as "Do We Need Universities?", which was written over a decade ago) marvelously stand the test of time. The first essay, on the ancientness and fluidity of the Chinese historical imagination, has a characteristically Leysian sting in its tail:

If this observation is correct, it could also have interesting implications in other areas, and you would naturally be free, for instance, to read in it a forecast regarding the eventual fate of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

The essay on Chinese calligraphy is almost a poem in its own right. "Calligraphy is par excellence an art of interpretation." It is achieved when the artist can forget the rules because he has mastered them. It articulates an aesthetic that is ascetically cultivated-by hermits perhaps, or monks in remote monasteries, who are said to have achieved a "complete obliteration of self" yet they are "the most forceful and original personalities". This paradox is bothersome. The mind's-eye picture Leys evokes, of the meditating monk, brush in hand, exquisitely transferring a character from the depths of his imagination on to a parchment is all very well. But is this not evidence of a supreme form of self-absorption rather than the transcendence of ego?

In "The Art of Interpreting" Leys examines the painstaking book by Father Laszlo Ladany SJ, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985. He lauds the book's methodology that is based on detailed and systematic interrogations of official and other public sources. This requires, inter alia, a native speaker's agility in Chinese and, as Leys acidly observes: "during the Maoist era, a majority of leading 'China experts' hardly knew any Chinese". He summarises Fr Ladany's analysis nicely-for example:

The Communist Party is in essence a secret society . . . presenting a striking resemblance to an underworld mob. It fears daylight, feeds upon deception and conspiracy, and rules by intimidation and terror . . . Marxism is merely an optional feature; the regime can do without it most of the time . . . Besides its cruelty, the Maoist practice of launching political 'campaigns' in relentless succession generated permanent instability, which eventually ruined the moral credit of the Party, destroyed much of society, paralysed the economy, provoked large-scale famines, and nearly developed into civil war . . . [Mao] never forgot how, as a young man, intellectuals had made him feel insignificant and inadequate . . . he distrusted the independence of their judgements and resented their critical ability . . .

Leys, like Fr Ladany, came to these views well before the bulk of Western scholars on Chinese communism. He was sometimes pilloried for his judgements against Mao and his cronies by as anti-intellectual and stupid bunch of ideologues and fellow-travelling fools as you could get. Like Fr Ladany, he experienced the harshness of true believers who nonetheless came to parrot, and even plagiarise, his (and Ladany's) analyses when the horrifying facts of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution caught up with them. In so subtly appreciating Fr Ladany's exemplary scholarship and faithfulness to the truth, Simon Leys highlights his own intellectual integrity.

And so this glorious prose and scrupulous truthfulness roll on in the other essays in this volume. "The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote"-as most reviewers have noticed-is an archetypal exercise in civilised scholarship: every secondary school and university student should be required to read and understand it. In the sublime review of Graham Robb's biography of Victor Hugo, Leys leaps breathtakingly from a profound grounding in Hugo's own work, to insights from Henry James, to comparing Hugo with Chuang Tzu in China more than two thousand years ago.

In "An Empire of Ugliness" Leys shows he has fabulously sharp fangs:

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 Hitchen's own little piece of solid waste is called 'a book' (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice).

What follows is arguably one of the most brilliant attacks on the myth of secularism yet penned in Australian scholarship. It is also perhaps the most insightful account so far of a woman, whose capacity to love unconditionally in the framework of a simple spirituality and an utterly unsophisticated faith-belief system, has simultaneously inspired and bemused (and even rather frightened) the modern world.

In "An Open Letter to the Governor-General", Leys takes Mr Hayden to task for his defence of euthanasia. In two and a half pages he articulates a defence of human life more profoundly than any papal encyclicals have managed in this overly-encyclicalled century.

How do you know that . . . the condition of a senile, incoherent, amnesic and incontinent old Bill Hayden in a wheelchair would constitute a demotion from the fullness of humanity that he had supposedly achieved as Governor-General?

Thus is the egregious narcissism that poisons most contemporary ethical discourses, shot down in flames, forever.

In his essay on universities, the intellectual culture Leys argues for-believes in passionately and persuasively-has been bled out of Australia's universities long ago, ever since, in fact, our universities became places to which intellectuals like Pierre Ryckmans no longer want to belong. They are places in which "originality and talent are usually defenceless against the 'confederation of dunces'".

To break this fatal mould, one would need some sort of institutional guarantee ensuring that scholars alone (in the strict sense of the word) be appointed to run our universities. Unfortunately, the present economic crisis makes it even less likely that such an approach will be followed-some universities have even been inspired to ask economists to become their Vice-Chancellors.

So why am I also a bit bothered by this wonderful book even as I am educated by it every time I pick it up? I think that the kind of generous, sensitive, even beautiful conservatism it is ultimately conveying so cogently-its respect for historical truth, its enjoyment of civilising traditions, its humanity, its glorious religiosity-is being undermined by a certain misanthropy in Leys' writing. He holds we lesser mortals at arm's length while holding his nose with his free hand, to escape our unintellectual smelliness. He wants to float delicately above us all where traditions and institutions (but probably not people) are grander, life is more refined. But maybe Simon Leys is therefore guilty of the sin of which Paine is said to have unjustly accused Burke-admiring the plumage while ignoring the dying bird.

Allan Patience is an academic at Victoria University of Technology in Melbourne.