Simon Leys: Navigator between Worlds

By Philippe Paquet and Julian Barnes

An award-winning biography of one of the greats.

Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in 2014.

Writing in three languages – French, Chinese and English – he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His writing on China and on varied literary and cultural topics appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.

This substantial biography – recently published by Gallimard in France to wide acclaim and winning an award from the Académie Francaise – draws on extensive correspondence with Ryckmans, as well as his unpublished writings. It has been translated by an internationally renowned French translator Julie Rose (based in Sydney).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Sep 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925435566

Philippe Paquet

Philippe Paquet is a Belgian journalist and sinologist. He was president of the Society of Editors of La Libre Belgique from 1997 to 2007. He is a lecturer at the Free University of Brussels and at the Higher Institute of Translators and Interpreters. His previous biography, Madame Chiang Kai-shek: A Century of Chinese History, won several literary prizes.

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Published by La Trobe University Press,

an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

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Copyright © Philippe Paquet 2016

Originally published in French by Gallimard, 2016

This English translation by Julie Rose published by Black Inc. in 2017

Julie Rose asserts her right to be known as the author of this translation.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Paquet, Philippe, author.

Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds / Philippe Paquet.

9781863959209 (hardback)

9781925435566 (ebook)

Ryckmans, Pierre.

Leys, Simon, 1935–2014.

Authors, Belgian—20th century—Biography.

Authors, Belgian—21st century—Biography.

Sinologists—Belgium—Biography.

Historians—Australia—Biography.

College teachers—Australia—Biography.

Cover design by Peter Long

Cover photograph by Ray Strange / Newspix

Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main

For my mother

CONTENTS

Foreword Julian Barnes

Prologue: Under the Sign of Confucius

Horror of Biography – The Fruit of a Miracle – 28 September – Spitting Image – An Honest Man – A European Moralist – A Giant Viewed Up Close

I

THE LAW, ART AND FAITH

1. One Big Family

The Uncle from the Congo – On Native Tracks – Happy as a King – An Adventurer Scholar – Large Families – An African Career

2. The Cardinal and the Abbé

The Trap of Comradeship – At Captain Blake’s – First Prize for Eloquence – Experimental Proof – The Missionary Position – A Simple Soul – Every One of Us Is a Cripple

3. At the Grand Béguinage

Cantatas and Cigars – Scottish Rapture – An Interlude of Crime – An Aristocrat

II

THE OTHER POLE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

4. The Discovery of China

A Snakeskin Maple – Sincere Sketches – The Chinese and Their Past – The Age of the Cathedrals – An Empty Boat – A Heady Mix

5. Formosa

A Most Mysterious Master – Scholarship to Taiwan – Ilha Formosa – The Taiwan Strait Crisis – Eight to a Room – The Last Emperor’s Cousin – A Poker Player

6. The Husband of an Exquisite Woman

Muse and Telephonist – Sailing with Shen Fu – A Fugitive Edition – The Chinese Condition – The Invisible Man – Supreme Reader – Leys’s Idiosyncrasy – One Hell of a Forecastle

7. Shitao

Sinological Mountain-Climbing – A Dream in Kyoto – A Hollywood Fantasy – Divine Paintings – Buddha and the Numismatist – A Dreadful Dissertation – The Bandits of Zahedan

8. In the Hall of Uselessness

Ambassador van Gulik – Han Suyin’s Umbrella – Once an Expert, Always an Expert – Driven Out of Nanyang – Like a Fish to Water – Songs of Exile

9. A Dwarf on the Shoulders of Giants

Shitao and the Flemish Primitives – A Single Brushstroke – Life Support – Exemplary Lives – A Man of Genius Combined with a Lout – Art Dealer – A Series of Little Articles – Rebel, Painter and Madman

III

COMMUNISM IN ACTION

10. An Incredible Mess

Something to Pay the Rent with – Rhinoceros Sausage – The Aztecs and May ’68 – The Bratislava Spring – A Kind of Egypt

11. The Birth of Simon Leys

Pseudo-Cultural Pseudo-Revolution – A Great Enigma – Boors and Buffoons – A Birth Certificate – Impudent Conclusions – A Lingering Feeling of Embarrassment – False Notes in the Footnotes

12. ‘Frivolous’ Writings

Memories of Shame – Red Fascism – The Mystery of Lin Biao – A Painful Dose of the Truth

13. Pierre Ryckmans’s New Clothes

Leys & Co. – The Sinologist and His Double – Eugène Lenormand – A Second Birth

14. A Belgian Shadow in Peking

On the Peking Ice Floe – Travelling in a Glass Bowl – In the Middle of a Vast Garden – A Feast in an Art Shop – The Bethelehem of China – Mao Outlives Maoism – A Failed Artist – The White Skeleton Ghost – Proust in Beidaihe

IV

THE INNER CHINA

15. A Region of the Mind

Beyond the World of Dust – The Infidel and the Ulemas – An Earth Mother – The Dead Planet – Pilgrims and Charlatans – In Praise of the Amputee – A Bland and Quiet China – Pious Bleatings

16. The Modest Contribution of the Fool

In the Orwellian Tradition – New York Consecration – We Are All Chinese – The Goose and its Stuffing – A Tin of Sardines – Sinophile and Maophobe

17. Mao After Mao

Very Creative Writing – Sollers After Sollers – Icarus Struck Down in the Skies Over Mongolia – Proof Through Sartre – Tempered Despotism – A Spring Without Flowers – Father and Son – Two in One – A Very Bad Lunch

18. The Man Who Was Indignant

Stupid Apple Trees – Divine Wrath – An Unsellable China

19. The Little Gulag Archipelago

Anatomy of a Massacre – Mao in the Abrolhos – The Mysterious Island

20. Back to Waterloo

One Woman’s Goodness – An English-Language Writer – Massive Integrity – A Funeral Postponed – Outlandish Anecdotes

21. Protean Curiosity

The Cement of Style – One Writes for Oneself First – The Critical Love of Literature – From Malraux to Fairweather

22. A Floating Life in Sydney

Long Live Maoism! – ‘A Distinguished Intellectual’ – A Respectable Writer – From the Bridge – Rimbaud Versus Rambo – The War of the Sexes – Everlasting Gain – The Old Man – An Australian Citizen

V

THE SEA AND THE MOTHERLAND

23. The Young Man and the Sea

On a Breton Sailing Boat – At the Glénans with Viannay – Pilgrimages to the Islands – A Romantic Cruise

24. A Sea Writer

A Visa For Tuléar – The Blues in Papeete – Moaning in the Marquesas Islands – The Governor of the Kerguelen – A Sea Monster

25. Indestructible Belgianness

Henri Leys – Simenon’s Chair – The Genius and the No-Hoper

26. The University Under Siege

Innocent Silliness – An Ivory Tower and a Tide of Shit – Caravanserai, Soukh, Bazaar – The Chinese Lesson – A Heavy Standard – A Barbarian in Belgium

27. The Final Battle

The Belgian ‘Cretinocracy’ – The Heart of Darkness – Zazie’s Dream

Epilogue: The Pursuit of Truth

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Endnotes

Bibliography of Simon Leys

Index

Foreword

Julian Barnes

His handwriting was very particular: elegant and calligraphic; black ink, a thin nib, strokes of even weight; small lettering, but of absolute clarity. Sometimes he signed himself ‘Simon Leys’, sometimes ‘Pierre Ryckmans’; I was always ‘Mr Barnes’. We exchanged books for many years, and though we never met, had one of those distant, warm friendships which didn’t require us to. It also felt to me like that rare thing, an entirely literary friendship. At one point he urged me to translate Prosper Mérimée’s tribute to Stendhal, H.B. I felt slightly guilty at not doing so, but my indolence proved fruitful when he decided that, if no-one else would, he’d better do the job himself. I knew nothing of his private life, and we had just one friend in common, Murray Bail. Yet it also felt like a full, proper relationship: atypical, yet nonetheless full. I suspect that there were many others who had the same sort of relationship with him.

Like most, I first came to know him thanks to The Death of Napoleon, that bravura piece of droll, wrong-footing counterfactual fiction. This made his name widely known but, typically, he never wrote another novel. He evidently had no sense of a literary ‘career’: rather, a sense of where he would go and what he would write next. I recently went round my house trying to gather up the books of his I owned. With any other writer, this would be simple, since they would either be found all together, or, at worst, in two places (poetry and fiction, say). But some of Leys’s were on my French shelves, alongside Stendhal; others in a catch-all section I can only label ‘Miscellaneous Thinking’. But where was his translation of The Analects of Confucius? Eventually I found it next to Epictetus. His book on the wreck of the Batavia – now where was my nautical section? And what about The Death of Napoleon? It should have been among fiction, had I not lent it and never received it back (it’s that kind of book). His work fits no previous or current literary profile. As Mérimée wrote of Stendhal, he was ‘original in all matters – a rare achievement in this age of greyness and timidity’.

I was awed by his range of interests and languages; he wrote and translated in and from English, French and Chinese. When I was nineteen, I knew nothing, had barely travelled, and had no detectable ambitions. When he was nineteen, he went to China and met Zhou Enlai (admittedly with others) and wrote of that visit: ‘My overwhelming impression … was that it would be inconceivable to live in this world, in our age, without a good knowledge of the Chinese language, and a direct access to Chinese culture.’ In the 1970s, he was to prove a ferocious exposer of Mao and Maoism. He knew about literature, painting, poetry, calligraphy, music, politics – and the sea (he spent fifteen years translating Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast). I trusted every word he wrote: his prose breathed integrity, though never a self-conscious integrity. He could also be sternly dismissive, suffering few fools, and clever ones not at all. Bruce Chatwin caught a lethal sideswipe; and the Parisian intelligentsia received the rough edge of his calligraphic pen. Malraux was ‘a phony’; Roland Barthes’s comments after a visit to China were so blithe and blind that Leys’s response was simply to quote Orwell: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.’

In a short essay in Le Bonheur des petits poissons, Leys considers the question of writer’s block, a phrase which (and perhaps only he would know this) has no equivalent in either French or Chinese. But the phenomenon, of course, is universal. In this brief chronique of less than five pages, Leys refers to Conrad, Graham Greene, Jules Renard, Hemingway, Camus, Shostakovich, Flaubert, Guo Xi, Henri Michaux, D.H. Lawrence, Jean-François Revel, Ted Hughes, Randall Jarrell and Cyril Connolly. In another writer this might seem like showing off; with Leys, the effect is of his mind calmly and inquisitively moving from one familiar place to another, while courteously assuming that the reader will be able to follow. What in another might be arrogance, in Leys is modesty. Just as he thought it futile to chase happiness, he would have thought it intellectually vulgar to chase success. He was not a writer who sought fame. He rarely gave interviews. I don’t know anyone who ever ran into him on the international literary circuit. Indeed, his absence from that noisy carousel might be taken as a rebuke to those of us who are inclined to enjoy it. But then, Leys had translated The Analects, and therefore knew that ‘Clever talk ruins virtue’ (no wonder he had a run-in with Christopher Hitchens).

For thirty years he lived in Canberra, a place the outside world thinks of as somehow both important and obscure. But then, he also knew these words of The Master: ‘A gentleman resents his incompetence; he does not resent his obscurity.’ For ‘gentleman’ read ‘moral being’ (and so, perhaps, ‘writer’). Leys was a writer of great virtue and great competence; he was obscure mainly in the minds of those who think of writing in terms of the bestseller lists. He was read by good readers in many parts of the world, and this was, I would guess, exactly what he wanted. Will this biography make him less ‘obscure’? I suspect that he would not have cared one way or the other; he would be serene about the matter. But for those of us who admire his daring, darting and capacious mind, I hope very much that it does. He may not have resented his comparative obscurity; but with his death, the rest of us are liberated to resent it on his behalf.

A good biographer basically just provides the material for a trial in which the final judgement is handed down by the reader: the mission of the first, then, is to deliver the second a file containing information that is as full and accurate as possible.

SIMON LEYS, ‘SEGALEN’S EXOTICISM’

Note

I have used pinyin, the official phonetic system of the People’s Republic of China, to transcribe Chinese names. However, whenever it doesn’t interfere with understanding, I have kept the transcriptions used by the authors I quote, so as to preserve the integrity of their texts along with the flavour of writings of the era (Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Ch’ing and Lin Piao thereby cohabit with Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing and Lin Biao). The same goes for names associated with Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora and non-communist China (Kowloon, Taipei, Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Kuan Yew, etc.). I use Peking, and not Beijing, not out of ill-conceived nostalgia for the colonial era, but because, as Simon Leys once took the pain to explain, using Beijing in a language other than Chinese is as odd as using Lisboa or München in English. Finally, I write ‘Tiananmen’ because the English reader is accustomed to this spelling, despite the fact that pinyin requires to write ‘Tian’anmen’ for phonetical reasons.

Prologue

Under the Sign of Confucius

In the early days of his brilliant beginnings in Paris, Victor Hugo, Simon Leys tells us, had a host of admirers, inquisitive idlers and parasites of all stripes falling over each other to get inside his apartment. But once he was exiled to the Anglo-Norman island of Guernsey, he received scarcely any visitors at all. Rare indeed were those who dared brave the English Channel’s gusting winds and the spies sent by Napoleon III, or Napoléon le Petit. In his solitude, ‘the poet found himself left with only two interlocutors – but with these at least, he felt on the same footing: God and the ocean.’¹

That evocation came back to us one night in the southern hemisphere’s autumn. Leys had insisted we leave Canberra and drive to the little retreat that he and his wife, Hanfang, had acquired in 1978 at Malua Bay, a hamlet on the south coast of New South Wales. The sole purpose of the excursion was to admire the moon rising over the Tasman Sea, a spectacle Leys visibly never tired of. After an aperitif, which was a good excuse for contemplating the sea at length from the verandah, we went inside for dinner – just the three of us, as in Li Bai’s famous poem where, feeling melancholy, the poet invites his shadow and the moonlight to have a drink with him. More than once, though, Leys rose from the table and went outside – to go into raptures at the sumptuous scene that lay before him. To commune, like Hugo, with God and the ocean.

The aesthetic thrill was enough to explain the almost childlike² enthusiasm of a man who would have liked to be a painter and who dedicated his life to the love of art, whether Western or Chinese. Perhaps Leys was also lulled by nostalgia for the Europe he had left behind half a century ago to settle in the Antipodes: even if he had cast off his moorings, he never quite cut his ties with the Old Continent. Chinese men of letters, for whom meditating under the moon was a favourite pastime, might in similar circumstances have felt the emotion expressed in two lines of another poem of Li Bai’s, one all Chinese children learn at school:

Looking up, I see the bright moon.

I hang my head, and long for home.³

But where was ‘home’ for Leys, divided as he was between Belgium, where he was born and grew up; France, where he published and experienced a number of high points in his intellectual life; China, from which he drew what he called his ‘life support’; and Australia, where he found the ideal conditions for coming up with what he calculated to be ‘eight-tenths’ of his oeuvre? Leys really didn’t like being pigeonholed and subjected to reductive formulas, but ‘a writer of Belgian origins settled in Australia’ suited him well enough. A French-language writer, he was more than a little proud of being seen as an English-language writer, too. He thought it was amazing that the writers Joseph Conrad, Vikram Seth, V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro were able to excel in a language that wasn’t their mother tongue, and he was certainly delighted to furnish another example of this.

Of Victor Hugo, Leys also liked to say that exile had been for him ‘a second birth’⁴ because it was the most productive period of his life. Australia was never a place of exile for Leys, but it was, on the other hand, definitely the place where he had a new beginning. Not a second birth, in reality, but a third. Before becoming an English-language writer, Simon Leys had already become a Chinese-language writer – a feat curiously overlooked in most of the articles published about him since his death. Even more than the texts he wrote in that language (essentially on painting),⁵ his very beautiful calligraphy testifies to his achievement: it was admired by the Chinese themselves. And so it was only fitting – poetic justice, in fact – that, very late in the day, his work was finally published in China: as Leys lay dying in Sydney, on 11 August 2014, a Shanghai publisher was putting the finishing touches to a Chinese version of Le Bonheur des petits poissons (The Happiness of Small Fry).⁶ The first, they promised, of a suite of translations in communist China.

Horror of Biography

Unlike Hugo in his glory days in Paris, Simon Leys never had adoring fans or rubbernecks trying to crash through his door. Discreet and reserved, he fled noise and the social whirl as much as he could, to live in the safe harbour of his books and the almost exclusive company of his wife. Friends were, of course, regularly welcomed into the house in Garran, Canberra, or the apartment in Darling Point, Sydney, but they weren’t allowed to disturb for long the tranquility of hours dedicated to reading and writing. The dormitory of the university in Taiwan where Simon Leys, who was then still just the student Pierre Ryckmans, developed his expertise in Chinese was no doubt the only scene of exuberant socialising in his life. The hovel that housed him after that in Hong Kong, that ‘Hall of Uselessness’ which he shared with three companions in misfortune in a shanty town of refugees, was the first of the retreats in which he got into the habit of cutting himself off.

So it comes as no surprise to learn that Leys distrusted biographies and systematically discouraged any approach made to him on that score. In his anthology Other People’s Thoughts – a compilation of thoughts which are clearly in large part his own, too – he devoted a heading to biography to remind us of that fact. He first quotes Emil Cioran: ‘It’s a wonder the prospect of having a biographer never discouraged anyone from having a life.’ Next comes the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who distrusted so-called privileged witnesses avidly interrogated by biographers in quest of confidences and anecdotes: ‘Geniuses have the shortest biographies because their inner lives are led out of sight and earshot; and in the end, their cousins can tell you nothing about them.’ Ultimately, Leys shared Valery Larbaud’s conviction that ‘the essential part of a writer’s biography consists in a list of all the books he read’.⁷ Leys concluded that the only thing about him potentially worthy of interest lay in the books he wrote.⁸

Based on that, we could apply to Leys what Nicolas Cavaillès, the editor of Cioran’s works in the ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ edition, once judiciously said of Cioran:

He who envied Lucretius because we know nothing about him, he who counselled young literary types to remain mysterious (with Paul Valéry as a counter-example, and fragments of the pre-Socratics as models), he who talked about the ‘line of fate’ that poets follow, which is not reducible to the biographical – he would have liked to leave no traces apart from his works, carefully wreathed in obscure legends, but which allow you to retrace a fate that was all austerity.⁹

Welcoming Simon Leys into the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium (ARLLFB), in 1992, the writer Pierre Mertens confessed that he shared Leys’s fears about biography because ‘it often flattens a life the way an examining magistrate would do in court, retaining neither its mystery nor its tang’; and because, on top of that, ‘it obscures the work more than it illuminates it’. The author of Les Éblouissements (Dazzlements) nonetheless swiftly homed in on his compatriot’s contradictions. Speaking of Victor Segalen, Mertens revealed, Leys had remarked: ‘Although the oeuvre delights us, it’s the man we’d like to know better.’ So, Mertens asked Leys, ‘Why wouldn’t we show the same curiosity about you?’ Then he drove his point home: ‘Talking about another author who is particularly dear to you [George Orwell], you say, His life was definitely less important than his work, but it stood surety for it. Once again, how can we not think that the same goes for you?’¹⁰

Plainly, Leys had anticipated the move. In a note to the Revue des Deux Mondes in September 2013, he adopted Albert Thibaudet’s observation. The critic for La Nouvelle Revue française divided the world of writers into two categories, which Leys redefined as those we’d like to know more about, and the rest.

Thibaudet made a distinction between two kinds of writers: those who have a position and those who have a presence. He’s not making a value judgement there, but a simple statement of fact about a fundamental difference. Hugo would be a good example of the first type – and Stendhal is the very incarnation of the second. We read and reread Les Misérables, or L’Homme qui rit (and Choses vues!), but without necessarily feeling a desire to know Hugo, the man, better. With Stendhal, it’s the reverse (it seems to me): letters, diaries, the tiniest fragments and personal notes are treasures for us, perhaps even more than his great novels. (But here, I am perhaps putting forward a heresy?)¹¹

The Fruit of a Miracle

Should we rank Simon Leys with Victor Hugo, a writer he relished to the point of devoting three hundred pages to him in his anthology La Mer dans la littérature française (The Sea in French Literature)? Would we read and reread Leys ‘without necessarily feeling a desire to know the man’, Pierre Ryckmans, ‘better’? Some people seem to think so, classifying him as one of those writers about whom you feel you can say peremptorily: ‘His life is his work!’ For such people Leys would not merit a biography. It’s true Leys led a relatively quiet life, far removed from scandals and intrigues, with the debates and controversies his books gave rise to as his sole glorious feats. Given that fact, what could we actually reveal about him? It’s also true that reading his essays on China; the literary columns (collected in The Angel and the Octopus, Le Bonheur des petits poissons and The Hall of Uselessness); the translations (into French, of Shen Fu, Lu Xun, Confucius, Dana; into English, of Stendhal, Simone Weil and Confucius again); the scholarly monographs on Chinese painting; and not forgetting the wonderful philosophical fairytale that is The Death of Napoleon – all of this might very well satisfy ‘connoisseurs of Simon Leys’ (as we say ‘connoisseurs of fine wine’).

But that doesn’t stop Simon Leys from being one of those writers we feel we want ‘to know better’. Because the man behind the writer led a life that was anything but ordinary. We imagine a Chinese scholar, draped in his dignity and wisdom, absorbed in his studies and works, far from all contingency and tumult. We discover a young man from one of the great families of the Belgian bourgeoisie who, as a backpacker before the term existed, preferred freighters to planes for his to-ing and fro-ing between Europe and Asia. A nephew of the governor-general of the Congo who, after an eye-opening stay in Léopoldville and a memorable expedition into the African bush, denounced, at the age of twenty, the failings of colonialism in vehement and indignant tones that prefigured those of Simon Leys. An idealist who lived by his wits in Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong to satisfy his passion for the East and who, tired of menial jobs and under pressure to feed a wife and four children, dreamed of leading the comfortable life of a diplomat – but who, once he’d become a cultural attaché in the Belgian embassy in Peking, only lasted six months, having rapidly exhausted the joys of the job.

By walking as I have done in Pierre Ryckmans’s wake, I realise to what extent the birth of Simon Leys hung by a thread, how truly miraculous – as this genuine Catholic would have liked to say – it was. Simon Leys is the product of a succession of strokes of luck and providential encounters. The first trip to China of April 1955, for a start. It should never have happened: the invitation to join a delegation of young Belgians was unexpected to say the least, and to honour it, in the middle of the Cold War, you had to brave at your own risk the predictable disapprobation of the authorities at the Université catholique de Louvain, who were revolted by the religious persecution taking place in communist countries. Then there was the birth of twins, in 1967: this made the prospect of living as a family of six in the small Waterloo Hill apartment in Hong Kong tough and the proposition of going and teaching in Canberra, where a nice house with a big yard (which Hanfang would turn into a garden) opened its arms to the Ryckmans family, irresistible. And finally, illness, which floored the professor in the middle of a class one day in 1971: that health crisis could have carried Simon Leys off after months of traumatising convalescence (he could no longer read or write or even speak), and it convinced him that he was now living on borrowed time.

And then there were the decisive friendships: with Li Wen-ts’ien, the Taiwanese student who brought his Belgian classmate the revelation of Shitao (on whom Pierre Ryckmans did his doctoral thesis, the open sesame of a resounding entrée into the closed circle of classical sinology); Lo Meng-tse, the colleague at the New Asia College in Hong Kong who helped the future Simon Leys decode the mysteries of Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; Liu Ts’un-yan, the director of the Chinese curriculum at the Australian National University, who, in recruiting Ryckmans, offered him living and working conditions he would doubtless never have attained otherwise; and, of course, René Viénet, the French ‘situationist’ sinologist who, by encouraging him to write The Chairman’s New Clothes and facilitating its publication, literally, in Ryckmans’s own words, ‘invented Simon Leys’.

28 September

Pierre Ryckmans was born in Brussels in 1935, on 28 September. All of Simon Leys is in that 28 September, a birthday which is also, officially, that of Confucius.¹² Ryckmans laughed at the coincidence and drew no particular conclusion from it, but it’s only too tempting to put those two characters together – to appreciate the ideas and battles of Simon Leys by examining the life and thought of Confucius.

Ryckmans translated the Lunyu – the Analects – of Confucius, ‘a discontinuous series of brief statements, short dialogues and anecdotes’ that constitutes ‘the only place where we can actually encounter the real, living Confucius’, the equivalent in a way of ‘what the Gospels are to Jesus’.¹³ Of all his translations, it is not the one that most delighted him – that merit goes, he later claimed, to the mariner’s tale of the American Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast. Nonetheless Lunyu is the only work that Leys undertook to translate twice, first into French and then into English, at an interval of ten years. That says enough about its importance in his eyes.

The French translation, published in Paris in 1987 by Gallimard in its ‘Connaissance de l’Orient’ collection, had required six years of work. But the writer and comparative literature specialist René Étiemble, who directed the collection, left Ryckmans only three pages to discuss why he’d undertaken such a huge job in the first place. So, the translator could only remark that, without necessarily subscribing to the view of the Japanese sinologist Yoshikawa Kojiro, who held the Analects to be ‘the most beautiful book in the world’, it was nevertheless inarguable that ‘in all History, no piece of writing has exerted a more lasting influence on a greater part of humanity’. He added: ‘Without this basic key, we would not have access to Chinese civilisation. And anyone ignorant of that civilisation could only ever achieve a very partial understanding of the human experience.’¹⁴

Given that he thought translating the Analects into French no longer really posed problems of Chinese (the unclear passages having already been interpreted every possible way,¹⁵ and the obscure passages being doomed to remain obscure forever), but only problems of French, Ryckmans’s ambition was to take the only avenue open to him: ‘to try to reconstruct in French the rhythms, monumental concision, flavour, force, and tough and artful economy of the original’.¹⁶ Some sinologists held that against him. Jacques Gernet, while admitting that ‘the book is enjoyable to read’, claimed that ‘accuracy has often been sacrificed in quest of literary bons mots and colourful expressions’. Certain parts of the translation ‘are not felicitous’ and ‘there are thus numerous approximations’, the Collège de France professor noted, deploring the fact that in the translated description of a certain meal, ‘the melon has vanished’.¹⁷ Étiemble, on the other hand, thought that Confucius had been ‘translated as he should have been: close to the text’, and that this version would be ‘as enduring as the thoughts of Master Kong’.¹⁸

Yet it was only when he transposed his work into English that Simon Leys had the feeling he was taking his project as far as he could. ‘My English translation, done ten years after the French, was written in a state of elation,’ he explained. ‘It’s a writer’s translation and the one I like best. My commentaries are more up-to-the-minute, alive and thought-through, free of academic inhibitions. French is a beautiful language but, compared to English, it has the rigidity of one that’s half dead. For a translator, it’s torture. Whereas the suppleness of English, the richness of its vocabulary, the flexibility of its syntax, allow us to play on a bigger keyboard.’¹⁹ The result once again gave rise to opposing reactions. Anne Cheng condemned various ‘approximations’²⁰ in a translation that, at times, in her estimation, spurned the specifics of the cultural context or didn’t sufficiently clarify the meaning of the text. ‘It is an intimate, confiding portrait, drawn in subtle shades and vibrant with moods and feelings that we can all share – so that we grow as the persona grows, braced by his indignation, reproved by his irony, moved by his grief, solaced by his fortune,’ Alice Cheang thought, on the contrary. ‘Leys has negotiated a relationship between the text and the English reader in such a way as to enable the reader to meet the person in the text on the ground of their common humanity… Truly, this is an Everyman’s Confucius.’²¹

Spitting Image

If Simon Leys is to be believed, his Chinese friends greeted his intention of translating the Analects with dismay. ‘They wondered how I could suddenly lapse into that sort of intellectual and political regression.’ The reason was simple. ‘Imperial Confucianism only extolled those statements of the Master’s that prescribed submission to the established authorities, whereas more essential notions were conveniently ignored – such as the precepts of social justice, political dissent and the moral duty of intellectuals to criticise the ruler (even at the risk of their lives) when he was abusing his power, or when he oppressed the people.’ Consequently, Leys noted, ‘in modern times many enlightened and progressive-minded Chinese came spontaneously to associate the very name of Confucius with feudal tyranny; his doctrines became synonymous with obscurantism and oppression.’²²

Confucius having accordingly been restored to his original integrity, we immediately see what led Simon Leys to feel so close to the Chinese philosopher. We can of course hail Confucius as ‘China’s First and Foremost Teacher’, a role to which the successive authorities in China, from the Empire to the nationalist and communist republics, have tried to confine him – 28 September is still ‘Teacher’s Day’ in today’s Taiwan. The comparison would be all the more appropriate since, although he gave education an essential place, Confucius never thought of teaching as a vocation; we will see that Pierre Ryckmans, while having a long university career, had iconoclastic ideas about the University.

We might also remember that, like Leys after him, Confucius was not just a man of letters, ‘frail and delicate and living among books’. He was also ‘a man of action and an accomplished sportsman’ – which is what Pierre Ryckmans was whenever the great lover of the sea took over from the sinologist or the literary critic. All things considered, the man who emigrated to Australia must have taken malicious pleasure in recalling how Confucius seriously toyed ‘with the idea of sailing away on a seagoing raft, such as were used in his time for ocean voyages’ in search of more receptive audiences.²³

But the connection is most pertinent when we approach Confucius not in his ‘guise as a blithering old preacher, forever and unfailingly proper’, but more precisely in his portrayal as ‘a man driven by so much passion that, in his enthusiasm, he often forgets to eat’.²⁴

I don’t know if Simon Leys ever forgot to eat, but I do know he never lacked passion in the pursuit of his objectives, whether these involved sharing his love of a book or a painting, or denouncing injustice and deception. The French journalist Claude Roy, who was among the rare defenders of the author of The Emperor’s New Clothes and Chinese Shadows at the height of the Maoist tumult in Paris in the 1970s, saw, in glancing through the Analects, how striking the resemblance to Confucius was. ‘The reader says to himself at every step: but that sentence is the spitting image of Ryckmans-Leys!’ Roy went on to quote examples, in his column in Le Monde, such as the following: ‘The Master rejected four things absolutely: empty ideas, dogmas, pig-headedness and the self.’²⁵

As though he wanted to mark the filiation even more clearly, Ryckmans-Leys signed his two translations of Confucius with both his names: Pierre Ryckmans for the French, Simon Leys for the English. He justified himself in the introduction to the English translation, explaining that, if he’d chosen to use his ‘literary pen name’ rather than ‘the original name under which I had taught, pursued research, and published in the field of sinology for the last thirty years’, that was mainly because he wanted to produce ‘a writer’s translation’.²⁶ But we know that was already his ambition with the French version, and critics as qualified as Jacques Gernet and Anne Cheng found the two translations pretty similar.

Even if we can’t be sure that there was a deliberate intention, it remains revealing that both Pierre Ryckmans and Simon Leys thereby claimed a connection to the tutelary figure of Confucius. Leys and Ryckmans never ceased to conduct themselves as Confucian men of letters, whether honouring the filial virtues in the private realm, promoting the status of knowledge in an academic career, or condemning all abuses of power – which were sometimes appalling in Mao’s China, and sometimes small-minded in a Belgium whose government, as we will see, arbitrarily stripped two of the Ryckmans children of their nationality. Ryckmans-Leys could not imagine remaining impassive in the face of injustice, large or small, wherever it arose. This is why he enjoyed the intellectual company of Don Quixote, George Orwell, Mother Teresa and Confucius. In an unpublished document he wrote while preparing his thumbnail biography for the ARLLFB, Ryckmans was to say, eloquently, of the Analects he’d translated: ‘The aim of that work was to constitute a genuine manifesto of humanism for our time.’²⁷

An Honest Man

Simon Leys was grateful to Confucius for having reinvented the ‘gentleman’, which Confucius designated by the term junzi. Before him, the word referred to a well-born man, an aristocrat – that is, Leys specified, ‘a member of the social elite’. Confucius went on to revolutionise understanding of this essential concept of Chinese civilisation by decreeing that the ideal man ought to be ‘a member of the moral elite’. A man was no longer born a gentleman; he became one – through the practice of virtue and through education. An immoral or uneducated aristocrat could not lay claim to the status of ‘gentleman’, whereas people of humble standing could elevate themselves to this status through their merits. As a result, Leys stressed, ‘since only gentlemen are fit to rule, political authority should be devolved purely on the criteria of moral achievement and intellectual competence. Therefore, in a proper state of affairs, neither birth or money should secure power.’ It also follows from this that the prince governs by example, his virtues guaranteeing the confidence his subjects have in him. ‘The ultimate asset of the state is the trust of the people in their rulers: if that trust is lost, the country is doomed.’²⁸

This vision permeated Ryckmans’s conception of his job as an intellectual: an intellectual by definition engagé, politically committed, who was meant to gain general esteem as much – and even more – for his determination to criticise weak rulers, as for the quality of his literary or scientific work. In this order of things, Simon Leys could only be born of Pierre Ryckmans. Leys went on to justify the publication in 1971 of the book that made him famous, The Chairman’s New Clothes, by noting the impossibility, for the art historian and translator he was then, of sitting comfortably in his ivory tower while he had before his very eyes, in Hong Kong, manifold evidence of crimes committed in the name of the Cultural Revolution in China. Confucius dreamed of going into politics, but was never entrusted with the smallest responsibility. It didn’t take long for Leys, who claimed to have no interest in politics, to get involved in it thanks to his writings, which were at the heart of the debate about Maoism in France, but also in Australia, America and even China itself.

Pierre Ryckmans was very wary of comparing himself to Confucius’s ‘gentleman’. One day, though, while we were talking about these issues in his house in Canberra, his eyes gleamed with amusement as he took down from his bookshelves a book on Chinese astrology by Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec. The twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac were presented there, including the pig, the sign Ryckmans was born under.²⁹ That animal, de Kermadec declared, is associated with ‘honesty’. And he went on to give a description that was initially flattering: ‘Incapable of dissimulation, he always goes straight to the point. His heart is pure and without malice. He deserves confidence but can be easily swindled. Scrupulous, he likes to take the initiative by himself.’ The pig ‘is not made for social life. He does not care too much about his reputation. Outwardly calm and stable, he is very willful and obstinate’, de Kermadec went on to say, before concluding on a less gratifying note: ‘the pig loves discussion and is often a mischief-maker. He is often mistaken and his arguments are weak. Credulous and suspicious, he is not far from being stupid. He often gives in without a struggle for he is tolerant and hates disputes.’³⁰

Ryckmans could only laugh at the idea of being convicted of naivety, indeed of stupidity, by Chinese astrology. But he acknowledged with relish certain character traits in that outline. He obviously didn’t like social engagements or arguments. On the other hand, he didn’t dislike playing, if not the mischief-maker, then at least someone who stopped people chasing their tails.

What is in fact generally remembered about Simon Leys is that he was ‘the first’ to denounce the imposture of Maoism. I say ‘generally’ because, after vainly trying to discredit his work, certain sinologists, particularly the French, are today attempting to diminish its scope. ‘Rather than marking a turning point, a break, as has often been claimed’, Marianne Bastid-Bruguière thereby assures us apropos The Chairman’s New Clothes, ‘it becomes clear at the end of Camille Boullenois’s amazingly rich study that the book is just one of many illustrations of awareness of what was going on in China.’ For want of being able to assert that Leys was wrong, they are now instead trying to demonstrate that he was neither the first nor the best. ‘With the passing of time’, Bastid-Bruguière goes on to decree, Leys’s analysis of political events in China ‘has revealed itself to be less valid than the analyses produced by diplomats to China’.³¹ In support of this claim, she invokes a false ‘prophecy’ of Leys’s about the inevitable advent of an authentic ‘red power’ in China. Unhappily for Bastid-Bruguière, that prophecy was made not by Leys but by René Viénet, in his preface to the French edition of The Chairman’s New Clothes?³²

Others before Simon Leys had certainly seen through the authoritarian and repressive nature of the Chinese communist regime, starting with the missionaries whom the Party wasted no time expelling, and certain experienced journalists such as, in France, Lucien Bodard (whose La Chine du cauchemar was published by Gallimard in 1961) and Robert Guillain (the Far East correspondent for Le Monde) – although he swung strangely, at different times, between remarkable lucidity and woolly wishful thinking.³³ Among those who weren’t taken in – a pretty small number – figures a witness who, it is not generally known, spent fifteen months or so in Peking as a proofreader on the monthly propaganda magazine La Chine en construction (China Reconstructs). This was the poet and essayist Marcel Mariën, a major figure in Belgian surrealism. Mariën related his experience candidly in a series of four articles published by the newspaper Le Soir over the summer of 1966. In his memoirs, self-published at the end of the 1980s, Mariën would revisit that experience in greater detail, emphasising the difficulty of leading the fight for the truth alone against the world. He made an allusion, there, conscious or not, to the theme of The Chairman’s New Clothes: ‘It is hard when you are the only one who realises that the emperor is completely naked, to persist, against the universal blindness, in seeing what you see.’³⁴

Simon Leys never aspired to originality when he published his blistering attacks on Maoism. But he did lay claim to a lucidity and honesty lacking in most of the observers of events in China in the 1960s and ’70s. He acknowledged his debt to models of rigour and seriousness, chief among whom were two Hungarian sinologists, Étienne Balázs and the Jesuit priest Lazlo Ladany. Where Leys was first, was in putting together scraps of information picked up here and there, like so many pieces of a vast puzzle, and in delivering a faithful picture of what was happening in China and exposing the machinery of the political movements shaking the place up. That’s how he could say with confidence what the Cultural Revolution launched under Mao’s banner in 1966 really was: a power struggle. And he said it very early on. The Chairman’s New Clothes may date from 1971, but the documentation on which the book relies was gathered over the years before that and fuelled the confidential reports he handed over every fortnight to the Belgian Consulate in Hong Kong. We will see that Pierre Ryckmans’s correspondence shows he understood the meaning of events from the outset. That sagacity made him a precursor, and it would not be long before he was subjected to the ordeals inflicted on those who are right too soon; those who, in Mariën’s words, are the only ones to see that the emperor is completely naked.

A European Moralist

The critic Michel Crépu asked one day if Simon Leys wasn’t ‘one of our rare moralists’.³⁵ The director of the review Commentaire, Jean-Claude Casanova, replied a few years later by handing the sinologist, who was also his friend, the sixth Prix Guizot from the regional council of Calvados³⁶ for his whole body of work, and in particular The Wreck of the Batavia. He inducted Simon Leys into ‘a school that upsets academics, officials and conformists’, ‘the school of discreet, lucid, indignant writers, definitely one of moralists, which is to say those who decipher the mysteries of the human soul in an attempt to console or educate it’. Justifying the choice of the jury he chaired, Casanova stressed that the awarding of a prize bearing Guizot’s name was even more legitimate in Leys’s case because, among the French Reformers Guizot belonged to, ‘independent and courageous judgement in denouncing injustice has always been admired and encouraged’. Honouring someone like Leys, Casanova concluded, meant celebrating, ‘what Pascal called true greatness, which has to do with morality, art and truth’.³⁷

Twenty years earlier, the philosopher Jacques Dewitte had already placed Leys in the tradition of the likes of Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, Simone Weil and Albert Camus. ‘Let’s call it, for want of something better, the tradition of writer-moralists (who were most often religious souls, as is Ryckmans), which doesn’t mean they were moralisers, for the moralising pose is precisely the province of critic-intellectuals of Sartre’s ilk’, as he wrote in an article written in 1983 and offered fruitlessly to the review Esprit.³⁸ Dewitte, who had studied Milan Kundera and translated Leszek Kołakowski, thought moreover that Leys was ‘very close to the figure of the Middle European intellectual: not just political, but concerned with moral, metaphysical and aesthetic issues, and especially wrapped up in culture.’³⁹

In his essay on l’exception européenne, in which he analyses the unique capacity of European civilisation, as he sees it, to ‘shift focus, call into question its own position of superiority, get interested in the customs of other nations, adopt a critical attitude towards its own, question itself about the absolute value of its values… and to confront its past’, Dewitte defines Leys’s place in relation to that exceptionality. It is the place of ‘a European who champions China, straddles two worlds, questions his own Eurocentric assumptions and tries to give an account of the contribution of the Chinese’. In Leys, Dewitte continues, ‘it is Europe that sets itself a challenge and agrees to call itself into question. Simon Leys has made himself a passionate spokesman for China and is also, by the same token, an exemplary representative of the European spirit.’⁴⁰

Ryckmans would no doubt have rejected any claim to embody an identity or a spirit. In a brief introduction to an anthology of essays on post-Maoist society in China, he derided the notion of ‘national literature’, which seemed, he said, to come with ‘the basic paraphernalia of nationhood’ along with the flag, the seat at the UN, the national airline and the national university. ‘As long as they organise a local branch of the Pen Club and go to international conferences, in due course, when it comes to their country’s turn, [National Authors] may even receive a Nobel Prize’, he jeered.⁴¹

There was never any question of Leys receiving a Nobel Prize,⁴² which might amaze us in the case of this truly universal writer who wrote in three of the most widely spoken languages on the planet – Chinese, English and French – texts that dealt with diverse cultures while transcending those cultures’ specific points of view. Perhaps he wasn’t broadly appealing enough, perhaps he was too elitist. He deplored ‘a competitive streak’ whereby certain writers feel ‘this fatal desire to show off their ability’. And he invoked Arthur Koestler, for whom the ultimate ambition of a writer should be ‘to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years, and for one reader in a hundred years’.⁴³ Or maybe for an admirer in a lift, as this nice thought of Philippe Labro’s suggests:

In some questionnaire or other I was one day approached to do, I was asked: ‘Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with?’ I answered, without hesitation: ‘Simon Leys, of course’.⁴⁴

A Giant Viewed Up Close

Leys’s intelligence, the beauty of his writing, the independence of his judgement, the accuracy of his knowledge, the number of his interests and fields of investigation (what is there in common between Zhuang Zi’s apologues and those who survived the wreck of the Batavia, between the life of Su Renshan and the life of Napoleon, between the paintings of Huang Binhong and the short stories of Chesterton?) made him a giant of the intellectual life of the twentieth century. But Leys was happy just to be ‘a dwarf standing on giants’ shoulders’, proud only of having relied on renowned specialists, notably Chinese, to gain altitude and see a bit further than his colleagues, shut away in their familiar world – as a sinologist, he boasted of not having been educated within the academic establishment, but in direct contact with the Chinese world.

Modesty had one advantage. Reviewing Graham Robb’s biography of Victor Hugo, published in New York in 1998, Leys praised the excellent work of the British historian, but nevertheless concluded that ‘it’s precisely when dealing with figures such as Hugo that one feels obliged once again to question the desirability, if not the very feasibility, of literary biography’. ‘Giants,’ he explained, ‘do not bear close scrutiny.’ Being merely a ‘dwarf’ perched on their shoulders, Leys must have felt he had less to fear from prying eyes.

The public’s misplaced curiosity, which the biographer might seek to satisfy, was, Leys reminded us in the same essay, an obstacle to understanding that warped the truth, as Pushkin and Malraux had pointed out. Yet Pushkin had also come up with an argument that swept that objection aside. He noted that if the reader revelled in discovering the pettiness of the great and the weakness of the powerful, and if he believed he could deduce from these that the great and powerful were ‘small like us’, ‘vile like us’, he would have no choice but to observe that such people were, certainly, petty and vile, ‘but differently, not like you’.⁴⁵ The singularity of subjects of biographies may well be one good reason to read them. Leys, in any case, did not deny the ambivalence of his feelings. ‘And even as I question the point of writing literary biographies, I know all too well that I shall continue to read them.’⁴⁶

The last biography he held in his hands was his own. As he lay in a Sydney hospital fighting the disease that would carry him off, Simon Leys was still able to read the final draft of this book.

I

THE LAW, ART AND FAITH

1

One Big Family

The Ryckmanses are a family of old Belgian stock from Malines. Born in 1857, the grandfather, Alphonse Ryckmans, whom Pierre never knew, was a lawyer like his own father, but in 1879 chose to go to the bar in Antwerp – at the time a port city so thoroughly French-speaking that several daily newspapers were published in French – because one of his older brothers had already taken over the paternal law firm in Malines. Renowned for his mastery of the profession, he was twice elected President of the Bar. But his personal qualities – his eloquence, his humanism, his pragmatic spirit, his extremely steady judgement and his sense of compromise – meant he was fated to have another career. He went into politics at the age of forty-two,¹ and became a local councillor – not a burgomaster, as has sometimes been claimed – for Antwerp in 1899.² He continued in that role until the debacle for the Catholics of the 1911 elections. As a happy substitute, he became a county senator the following year and was never to quit the senate, where he acted as vice president from 1929 until his death in 1931. He was one of the people who negotiated the surrender of the city to the Germans on 10 October 1914.

In 1881, Alphonse Ryckmans had married Clémence Van Rijn, a woman one year his junior. She was, in the general consensus, authority made woman and was clearly the one who wore the pants in the household. ‘Apparently as cold and severe as her husband seems good-natured’,³ she impressed everyone with the rigour of her principles and the energy she devoted to benevolent works in hospitals, retirement homes and prisons. Stern and given to sarcasm, her relationships with her children, particularly the boys, were not exactly overflowing with affection. Yet the family Alphonse and Clémence Ryckmans raised was big. The deeply devout couple first moved into ‘a very modest house’⁴ at Saint-Jacques Market, a stone’s throw from the eponymous church where Rubens rests, then for a short while to the rue de l’Empereur, and finally to the posher neighbourhood of Le Rosier, where they occupied a vast seventeenth-century house opposite the Carmelite convent founded in 1612 by Austrian Archduke Albert and his wife Isabelle, the Infante of Spain.⁵ Eight children were born of the union: Paula, Marie-Magdeleine, Gonzague, Élisabeth, Étienne (Leys’s father), Pierre, Albert and Xavier.

The Uncle from the Congo

In this large family that surrounded the future Simon Leys, one figure dominated: his uncle, the homonymous Pierre Ryckmans. Born in Antwerp on 26 November 1891 and dying in Brussels on 18 February 1959, the man had a brilliant career, as an officer in the Cameroon and in East Africa during the First World War, then as a senior public servant in colonies and territories under Belgian protection, first in Ruanda-Urundi and then in the Congo. In his critical history of the Congo, David Van Reybrouck doesn’t hesitate to call him ‘the best governor-general the Belgian Congo ever had’. ‘He stood out by reason of his great intelligence and moral integrity. In terms of appearance he bore a great resemblance to Albert Camus; in terms of humanity he did in many ways as well.’⁶ His competence, dedication, and achievements made him an ideal candidate for the Ministry of the Colonies, a portfolio he was offered in 1958, but which illness forced him to decline. The future Simon Leys ‘adored’ this uncle, ‘who really was an admirable man’. In him, his nephew recalled, ‘the public man and the private man coincided perfectly, equally true and good.’⁷

The two Pierre Ryckmans differed on many points, but it’s not hard to find resemblances and to imagine the example one must have been for the other.

To characterise the Pierre Ryckmans who was governor-general of the Belgian Congo from 1934 to 1946 (a term twice as long as normal), the historian Jean Stengers stressed not only the ‘affection’ he bore ‘for the Africans’, but the fact that he was ‘interested in everything about them, and liked to understand them’, and that he sought ‘to highlight all that the culture of the African peoples had that, in his eyes, was positive and endearing.’⁸ The essayist Pierre Ryckmans and the lampoonist Simon Leys behaved no differently in relation to the Chinese and their civilisation.

Another character trait of the Ryckmans uncle is suggested by the title he gave, in 1931, to a first book in which he took stock of his experience as a territorial administrator of Ruanda-Urundi: Dominer pour servir (Dominate in Order to Serve).⁹ ‘Servir, in that expression, concerns the African’, notes Stengers, ‘but Ryckmans never ceased for a moment to dream of also serving his country. He was a Belgian patriot to the marrow.’¹⁰ Although he had left home very young to go to study in Formosa,¹¹ work in Hong Kong and teach in Australia, Leys, too, never hesitated for a second to profess a profound attachment to Belgium, offering abundant proof of his patriotism and closely following the mother country’s development. He only decided to become an Australian citizen very late in the day, preferring to keep his Belgian nationality for as long as his country of origin failed to recognise dual nationality.

A third point of comparison is to be found in ‘an essential dimension of their personality: the Ryckmanses are fervent, even militant, Catholics’.¹² The uncle’s convictions were strong and overt, even if Pierre and Madeleine Ryckmans were a little disconcerted by their daughter Hélène’s decision to enter the convent. Those of the nephew were hardly any less profound, as we see in the important role Christian thinkers played in his thinking. Leys’s passion for writers like Pascal, Simone Weil and G.K. Chesterton can be understood as part of a neverending spiritual quest.

Literature was another factor that made them similar. Uncle Pierre Ryckmans did more than try his hand at writing. Apart from Dominer pour servir, he published a short essay on colonial policy in 1934, La Politique coloniale, and, the following year, his radio talks, Allo! Congo!; then, in 1945, his Messages de guerre (War News); and, in 1946, a selection of his speeches, Étapes et jalons (Steps and Milestones). He dabbled in literature a year later, with Barabara, an anthology of essays dedicated to his wife. ‘Don’t try and find Barabara on any map’, he explained in the book. ‘Every colonial has had his own. A road, a bridge, a new post surging up in the middle of the bush, a church, a camp, a plantation, a flock…’ It’s ‘what the colonial has given of himself, the labour of his love and his sweat, of his enthusiasm and his appalling bouts of weariness. What’s left of his faded youth; the long slow labour through which he gradually comes to devote himself to the land of Africa, to the point where even when he has had to leave, never will he get over missing it, never ever will he be able to stop cherishing it.’¹³

There is no doubt Simon Leys also had his ‘Barabara’, which made it impossible for him to ‘get over missing’ China. And although the ex-governor-general didn’t find literary fame, there is no doubt that he, too, wrote with talent:

‘Nija’ is the indigenous path that forms all by itself, the path that goes straight to its goal via a thousand detours, as the ant races rather than as the crow flies. The slightest obstacle throws it off-course; an unfailing instinct puts it back on-course straightaway. Even on perfectly open ground, the path snakes endlessly around. The red or grey mushroom of a termite mound, a stump cropping up; less than that: a pebble, a thicker tuft of grass, and the path deviates, hesitates, goes on again, like the needle of a compass returning to north. If you have to go over a ridge or cross a ravine, the blacks follow an optimum whose formula escapes us. The indigenous shortcut