IN BELGIUM
Je plie / Je coule / Je m’appuie sur les coups que l’on me porte /… / Et toi, qui en misère as abondance / Et toi, / Par ta soif, du moins tu es soleil / Épervier de la faiblesse, domine!
I fold / I sink / I lean into the blows I am dealt /… / And you, who find abundance in poverty / And you, / who by your thirst, at least, are sunshine / Hawk of your weakness, dominate!
— HENRI MICHAUX, Épreuves, Exorcismes
ARTISTS who are content merely to hone their gifts eventually come to little. The ones who truly leave their mark have the strength and the courage to explore and exploit their shortcomings. Michaux sensed this from the outset: “I was born with holes in me.” And he knew in an inspired way how to take advantage of it. “I have seven or eight senses. One of them is the sense of lack. .. There are sicknesses which leave nothing at all of a man who is cured of them.” Precautions were thus in order: “Always keep a reserve stock of maladaptation.” In this area, however, Michaux was well provisioned from birth.
For in the first place he was Belgian. And not just Belgian, but a native of Namur — the province of a province. (The French tell Belgian jokes; the Belgians tell Namur jokes.) Speaking of Michaux, Jorge Luis Borges — rather well placed to appreciate such things, since Buenos Aires is not exactly the centre of the earth — stressed how great an advantage might be drawn from culturally marginal origins: “A writer born in a great nation is in danger of assuming that the culture of his native country suffices. In this, paradoxically, he is the one who tends to be provincial.”[2]
At bottom, Belgianness is a diffuse awareness of a lack. The lack, first and foremost, of a language. In their use of French, Belgians are plagued by insecurities. Some stagger along in Walloon ruts; the rest flounder in a bog of Flemish expressions. Disturbed and anxious, they limp first on one leg and then on the other. For Michaux, however, the infirmity was even more radicaclass="underline" born in a Walloon town, then incarcerated while still a child in a strictly Flemish boarding school, he pulled off the remarkable feat of starting out in life hampered by both handicaps at once.[3]
Of course, Michaux soon sloughed off his “Walloon,” and completely forgot the Flemish of his childhood, but something remained, something essential that imparts a unique flavour to his voice: “I do not always think directly in French.” What is more, this circumstance made him especially sensitive to his compatriots’ mistrustful, clumsy and hesitant attitude to language. In one of his very earliest writings, he observed that in Belgium “the commonest of insults is stoeffer, which means a pretentious person, a poseur. Belgians are afraid of pretentiousness… especially the pretentiousness of the spoken or written word. Hence their accent — their notorious way of speaking French. The key here is this: Belgians believe that words are pretentious in themselves. They cloak and muffle them as much as they can, so much so that they become inoffensive and well-behaved. Speaking should be done, they think, rather as you might open your wallet, making sure to hide the large bills, or as if raising the alarm in the case of an accident — and even then gesturing broadly with the hands to help ease the word’s passage.”
After the lack of language comes a lack of space. “This sad, overpeopled land… muddy countryside squelching underfoot, terrain for frogs… no wildness. What is wild in this country? Wherever you thrust your hand you come upon beets or potatoes, or a turnip, or a rutabaga — stomach stuffing for the livestock as for this entire race of eaters of as much starch and stodge as possible. A few dirty, sluggish, devastated rivers with no place to go. Caskets, ho!… A landscape of little hills fit for motor-coach tourists; endless files go up, come down, looping, spiralling; ants, worker ants of a toiling country, toiling more that any other. ..”
Europe has a good many small countries, but this is the only one, seemingly, to take pride in its exiguity. It proclaims its smallness, boasts of it with satisfaction, basks in it, drapes itself in it like a flag. Have you ever heard the Dutch, the Danish, the Portuguese or the Swiss referring to themselves as “little Dutchmen,” “little Danes,” etc.? What is more, Belgium feels uncomfortable, uneasy, with its present form, and considers itself still too big! It would like to become even smaller, and it will no doubt do so. New plans are afoot to fragment the country even further, to split it up into ever smaller sections that can wriggle in complete autonomy like a worm severed by a gardener’s spade.
* * *
But from the beginning the worst thing for Michaux was people: “The Belgians were the first human beings that I had the chance to be ashamed of.”
“A race of shiny noses! A disgusting race that dangles, loiters, trickles — such was the race in the midst of which he was born. Masses of poor people, or rather of petty-rich ones. Rich people. .. A people bloated, but bursting with inner strength, not noble, but proliferating.” This original sin was very intimate for Michaux: “Have always felt estranged from my family. .. The farther back I go into my childhood, the stronger my feeling of being a stranger in my parents’ house.”
For someone guilty of being a stranger at home, it was absolutely essential to find an elsewhere to offset this alarming state of affairs. But where to run to? “That Flemish countryside! You cannot contemplate it without putting everything in doubt. Those low houses that have not dared to risk another story upward, then all of a sudden a tall church steeple shoots into the air, as if this was the only thing in man capable of ascending, the only thing with a chance in the heights.” Michaux too had sought that “chance in the heights”: his earliest wish was to become a saint. In time, alas, you abandon such a wish, but you never get over it, never find consolation for its loss: “My father refused to let me join the Benedictines. The dream of my adolescence had been sainthood. I fell from a great height — very disorientated — when I lost my faith around twenty years of age. .. I got into literature for lack of any better alternative. .. Too impressed by the saints to take other people and their writings seriously. .. What I am and what I do seemed to me then, and still seem to me — quite objectively, and by no means out of modesty — to be wretched. The achievements of almost all others seem likewise wretched, if not worse. The saints, even if their starting-point — at least as I see it — is mistaken… are a magnificent fullfillment of man.” (Much later on, moreover, during Michaux’s visit to India, this never-forgotten aspiration of his adolescence gave him a particularly acute insight into a certain kind of professional holiness: “Nothing is sadder than failure. Rarely do the religious Hindus bear the mark of divinity. They have it as the critic of the Times and professors of literature have the stamp of literary genius.”)
ELSEWHERE
The author has often lived elsewhere. .. He has found himself more at ease than in Europe. That is already something. At times he was very nearly domesticated. But not truly. One cannot be too wary about countries.
— HENRI MICHAUX, Preface to Ailleurs
From the start travel emerged as Michaux’s essential activity. It has been said that illnesses are the journeys of the poor; how much truer still to say that illnesses are the first and most prodigious journeys of children. Michaux had his full ration very early on, and throughout his life, and what is more he continually drew inspiration from those journeys. In parallel with this experience of sickness, he began botanical and entomological explorations in the family garden that foreshadowed the great expeditions of his youth and maturity. He observed the battles of ants and made friends with plants (“at the age of eight I was still dreaming of being classified as a plant”). Insects, mollusks and invertebrates never lost their fascination for him: “At the age of 34, and only then, I discovered cuttlefish. I adopted them, and came to believe, after hours and hours of watching them, that they likewise adopted me.”