A SOPHISTICATE IN MARCO POLO LAND
A BARBARIAN IN ASIA. By Henri Michaux. Tronsloted by Sylvio Beoch.
New Directions. $2.50.
It is very hard not to like this book; it is written largely in
some of the shortest paragraphs since one's second-grade reader and
the apotheosis of Gertrude Stein's work; the prose has an illusive appear–
ance of simple sentence structure that in contrast to the early Heming–
way makes that writer's style compoundly infantile, and it is as stripped
of cliche as though subjected to some new scientific process to eliminate
dust from the air. Everything that is monumental or ample or ornate
or numerous in Asia is reduced to the dimension of the tersest linguistic
graffito as though the author made use of elegant extensions of
Time's
ideographic captions. And the most elusive characteristics are seen in
nothing but sunlight, face to face, as when Michaux terms the Chinese
soul "concave," or Calcutta a city "exclusively composed of ecclesiastics,"
or Japan a nation of "aesthetes."
To obtain this intimacy of efl'ect-Michaux's tone throughout the
book is the perfectly tempered courtesy of the natural aristocrat-the
author has had to institute an at-arm's-length view of his subjects, quite
unrelaxing so that a "focussed vision" (see page 69, top) "can be re–
tained."
If
he is perpetually magnetized or repelled-and these interpolar
feelings succeed one another rather bewilderingly-there is no hint of
really personal
involvement;
it is as though he had sworn not to carry into
the fantasy of Asia any shred of Western personalism, of that dangerous
afl'ectiveness that might lead to a "conversion," and to stay on a common
level where everything could be seen, or rather, as he says, "interpreted."
And it must be admitted that everything here
is
superlatively interpreted.
Like the hero who seeks the nectar of immortality in so many
myths, Michaux wanted to bring back a prize from Asia, but con–
sidering the stature of his ambition, the quest turned out oddly anti–
climactic; .since then a world war and other things have taken place. In
a preface written for this American edition, Michaux declares: "When
I went on a journey to Asia twenty years ago, I was innocent enough
to believe that I could give my impressions, and perhaps above every–
thing I exulted in the great multiform, living challenge of the Asiatic
peoples to our terrible Western monotony. Long live the last resistants!"
And the next paragraph continues: "As well as exulting, I certainly
made propaganda, after my own fashion, for an endless variety of civil–
izations. (Down with the idea of only one!)"
For me at least, this good-natured, sentimental, idealistic bravado
of twenty years later has its pathos. Michaux, though infinitely alive intel–
lectually and in sensibility, has no more conceptual coherence than the
