Navigator Between Worlds by Simon Leys aka Pierre Ryckmans
Simon Leys was scholar and gentleman, and his life revealed the complex nature of such attributes.
In 1953 when Pierre Ryckmans, better known to the literary world under his pen name Simon Leys, was 18, he crewed for a time on a fishing trawler in Icelandic waters. Soon afterwards he undertook a solo trip by foot through remote villages in the Congo. Between university studies in art history, philosophy and law in Belgium, he travelled to China and met Zhou Enlai, first premier of the People’s Republic of China.
In coming years he would move to Formosa — Taiwan — to learn Mandarin. There he would win an audience with Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Republic of China in exile, and learn calligraphy from the cousin of the last emperor of China, as well as meet the woman who would become his wife.
Having spent subsequent months in Japan learning the language, Ryckmans perfected his English by travelling through North America, where the bearded walker with his Japanese parasol was often stopped by suspicious local police. By the time he settled in Hong Kong and Singapore, where he began establishing himself as one of the eminent Sinologists of his generation, Ryckmans had already published his first literary essays and translations from Mandarin. He was not quite 25.
The first marvel of Belgian historian, journalist and Sinologist Philippe Paquet’s biography of Leys (translated with wit and exactitude by Julie Rose) is that it returns us to a primary sense of Ryckmans’s virtues, whether as a scholar, adventurer, aesthete, political demythologiser or writer.
The venerable academic and Catholic conservative who presided over university departments in Sydney and Canberra, and who wrote lightly learned essays in his spare time for The New York Review of Books, turns out to have been as intrepid as Herge’s Tintin. (Indeed, one of the quickening details we learn is that the young Ryckmans’s drawing teacher worked with the great Belgian cartoonist.)
The second marvel has something to do with Ryckmans the man. He emerges from these pages as a figure whose public achievements were cancelled by a private modesty, someone whose breadth of talents meant he never concentrated his distinct presence in a single field. As Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Julian Barnes writes in his foreword, “I trusted every word he wrote: his prose breathed integrity, though never a self-conscious integrity.”
Barnes also acknowledges that this combination of virtue and competence may be partly responsible for Ryckmans’s relative obscurity. “He was read by good readers in many parts of the world, and this was, I would guess, exactly what he wanted.”
Paquet, who has an evident fondness for his subject, agrees. He would have readers understand Ryckmans in old-fashioned terms, as a scholar and a gentleman. But what this life reveals is that those terms mean different things in different cultural contexts; we need the long view to tease out their complexities.
Ryckmans was certainly a gentleman in terms of genetic lucky dip, born into a large, talented, devout family of lawyers, priests, publishers and civil servants who played no small part in 19th and 20th-century public life in Belgium. Most significant among these was Pierre’s uncle and namesake, who spoke six languages including Irish Gaelic, translated novels from Spanish and wrote his own lauded fiction in French — and who was, for a dozen years, an enlightened and highly regarded governor-general of the Belgian Congo.
The cosmopolitan outlook, the polyglot skills, the sense of mission inherited via caste and religious belief: these admirable qualities were replicated in the nephew. It is not surprising that the younger Ryckmans should have been suspicious, later in life, of those, such as Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said, who damned colonial encounters with the “other” as invariably aggressive and appropriative in nature. Ryckmans surely would have been thinking of his uncle when he wrote in response to Said’s Orientalist polemic:
Why could it not equally end in admiration, wonderment, increased self-knowledge, relativisation and readjustment of one’s own values, awareness of the limits of one’s own civilisation?
For the younger Ryckmans, this virtuous cultural discombobulation came from the East. As a 19-year-old student he was one of a small group of outsiders permitted to visit the People’s Republic of China for a six-month stint. It would be the most consequential sojourn of a life filled with travel. He returned to his studies in Belgium, confirmed in the idea that “it would be inconceivable to live in this world, in our age, without a good knowledge of Chinese language and a direct access to Chinese culture”.
But he did not do so with a Eurocentric bent, treating his object of study as some abstract construct designed merely to illuminate what it was to be a mid-century European. It is not too much to say that, on the evidence of Paquet’s biography, Ryckmans reverenced this encounter with otherness; that he permitted it to undo him and remake him, without relinquishing the virtues of openness, curiosity and subjective judgment that were his Western inheritance.
his demanded a profound reorientation in life for the young Belgian. He moved away from his family and a settled career in the law in Europe to those island outposts of Chinese culture where he could meet and learn from native writers, artists and thinkers, relatively unencumbered by the restrictions in place on the Chinese mainland.
He married a beautiful and independent young Chinese woman who would become the most enduring figure in his life. And he devoted himself to lifelong study of one of the longest continuing cultures on earth.
As Paquet observes, in depth and at length, it was this combination of rampant Sinophilia and adamant intellectual independence that landed Ryckmans in serious trouble with left and right in the years to come. By the late 1960s, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution had been instituted and a great nation had begun to consume itself. By this time Ryckmans had become a father and a scholar of modest standing; he was also a valuable diplomatic conduit to the West of news from the black hole of Mao’s China.
Ryckmans was not unsympathetic to revolution, either in the Chinese or the French context (the events of 1968 were by then in full swing back in Paris), but he was deeply concerned by radical political change unaccompanied by hard thought in relation to what a new political dispensation might require.
Mao’s China was no longer, in his view, renovating ancient traditions in new forms. It was expunging the past in every respect. When a new French friend who was wary of the blind adoration of Mao back home suggested that Ryckmans assemble the documents he had collected in recent years, then fuse them together using his emerging scepticism with regard to the progress of the communist revolution, Ryckmans’s first major publication, The Chairman’s New Clothes, hove into view.
To publish without damaging his scholarly credentials on the Chinese mainland, however, Ryckmans was obliged to adopt a pseudonym. Simon Leys was the nom de guerre under which the young scholar would fight to tell the world of the profound political, social and cultural crisis occurring in Mao’s China.
For progressive intellectuals of the moment, especially in Francophone Europe, Leys was betraying the revolution. From our privileged historical vantage, we see that he showed himself willing to stand up to a vast, murderous state apparatus in the face of great personal and professional risk.
Leys’s loss in that short-term battle was Australia’s gain: he arrived in Australia with his family in 1970 and remained here until his death in 2014. As an academic he taught generations of young Australians about China, our most important geopolitical neighbour (including an ambitious postgrad named Kevin Rudd) while continuing to undertake the translations, essays and literary writings (in French and English) that made his name in quite different circles. He never resiled from his criticisms of China, though across time these proved the integrity of his insights rather than the existence of hardened ideological arteries.
If Paquet is guilty of any sin in his otherwise splendid biography, it is that of completism. There is no need to annotate the six-year battle Leys enjoined on behalf of his sons over a bureaucratic dispute with Belgian authorities in relation to their citizenship status. Nor does every minor academic contretemps require a chapter in its own right.
That said, there is so much that many readers will not understand about intellectual, political or aesthetic currents outside their immediate purview: the pro-Chinese French intelligentsia of the 70s, for example; or the many exiled Chinese artists, writers and thinkers in Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan who were of huge importance in their home culture but who survive only through the biographer’s explanatory efforts today.
If this is an error on Paquet’s part, it is a useful one. Ultimately, his love and respect for the man who became Leys shines off every page.
Several years ago, nature writer Barry Lopez found himself trapped on a plane beside a man with a wannabe writer daughter. He asked Lopez for advice to pass on to her.
Trapped yet sympathetic, Lopez found himself boiling it down as follows: “Read. Find out what you truly are. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these three I trust.”
Every line in Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds attests to its subject’s reliability in relation to that trinity of obligation. Ryckmans was one of the great readers — a translator, critic and collector of other men and women’s words — but he was able to achieve this literary valet’s modesty only because of a quiet confidence in his own words, a sense that they emerged from a coherent style, a rigorous philosophy or ethical orientation towards the world.
As for getting away from the familiar, there can be few figures of comparable intercultural expertise. In a moment when solemn defences of Western civilisation feel like the intellectual equivalent of a drunk football fan wrapping himself in a flag, Leys is the real thing: a man certain enough in the glories of his tradition to speak when they are not being lived up to, and generous enough to embrace and enumerate the virtues of others, elsewhere.
Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.
Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds
by Philippe Paquet
Translated by Julie Rose
Foreward by Julian Barnes
La Trobe University Press, 720pp, $59.99 (HB)