Pierre Ryckmans (writer)

Biography

Pierre Ryckmans was born at Uccle, an upper middle class district of Brussels, to a prominent Belgian family living in a house on Avenue des Aubépines. He was the son of a publisher, the grandson of Alfonse Ryckmans, an Antwerp alderman and vice president of the Senate, the nephew of Pierre Ryckmans, a governor general of the Belgian Congo, and Gonzague Ryckmans, a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain and a recognized expert of Arabic epigraphy.

He attended the Servites de Marie primary school near his home, then studied Greek and Latin humanities at the Cardinal Mercier diocesan school in Braine-l'Alleud. There, one of his teachers, abbé Voussure, "finished ingraining in him an unwavering Christian faith."

From 1953 he studied law and art history at the Université catholique de Louvain.

In 1955, his father died prematurely. In May, he became a member of a delegation of ten young Belgians invited to spend a month in China. During that visit he took part in a conversation with Zhou Enlai, the Premier of the People's Republic of China. As a result, he became sympathetic to the Maoist regime: "I confidently extended to the Maoist regime the same sympathy that I felt for all things Chinese." He returned from the trip with also the firm view 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."

Upon his return to Belgium, he finished his studies in art history and began to learn calligraphy.

In the summer of 1958, he travelled to Étel, a port in French Brittany, to board one of the last remaining tuna boats. The account he wrote of the fishing expedition was only published 45 years later, under the title Prosper.

After being awarded a small bursary from the Chiang Kai-shek government, he enrolled at the Fine Arts department of the National Taiwan University. There he studied under the guidance of Pu Hsin-yu, a cousin of Pu Yi, the last emperor, and did some research for his future PhD dissertation on Shitao, a Chinese painter at the time of the Qing empire.

After completing his studies in Taiwan in 1960, he was called up for military service in Belgium. Instead, he chose to become a conscientious objector and perform civil service in the field of development cooperation for the next three years. First, thanks to the intervention of Eurasian writer Han Suyin, he was able to take up a part-time student and teaching job at Nanyang University in Singapore. However, in 1963, under suspicion of being a communist by the Lee Kuan Yew regime, he had to pack up and leave for Hong Kong, at the time a British colony.

For two years he taught at the New Asia College, one of the colleges of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He lived in a Kowloon squatter area, sharing with three friends a small accommodation they dubbed Wu Yong Tong (the "hall of uselessness") and living a life redolent of an Eastern Scènes de la vie de bohème.

He supplemented his income by writing summaries of articles from the mainland Chinese press and collecting testimonies from refugees from the mainland on behalf of the Belgian diplomatic delegation. He also gleaned information from China News Analysis, a weekly publication produced in Hong Kong by the Jesuit scholar Father Laszlo Ladany. These reports would become the basis of his 1971 book Les Habits neufs du président Mao (The Chairman's New Clothes).

He also taught courses at the local Alliance française. In 1964, he married Han-fang Chang, a journalist he met in Taiwan, and became the father of twins in 1967.

While in Hong Kong, Ryckmans was introduced to French sinologist René Viénet, then a member of the Situationist International, by another sinologist, Jacques Pimpaneau, whom he had met at the New Asian College. René Viénet, who took the view that Chinese press reports on the Cultural Revolution were less sanitized than the writings of Western journalists and sinologists, obtained Pierre Ryckmans's agreement for his essay Les Habits neufs du président Mao to be published in Paris by Champ Libre, a publishing house run by Gérard Lebovici.

For his PhD thesis, Ryckmans chose to translate and comment on a masterpiece of the history of Chinese art, the treatise on painting by Shitao, a creative genius of the early nineteenth century. It was published in 1970 by the Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinoises in Brussels, under the title Propos sur la peinture du moine Citrouille-amère de Shitao. Contribution à l'étude terminologique des théories chinoises de la peinture.

On his publisher's advice, he decided to assume a pen name to avoid being declared persona non grata in the People's Republic of China. He chose "Simon" as his first name, a reference to the original name of the Apostle Peter, and "Leys" as his second name, a tribute to the main character of Victor Segalen's René Leys published in 1922, in which a Belgian teenager residing in Peking in the final days of the Qing Dynasty entertains his employer with accounts of the intrigues and conspiracies taking place behind the walls of the imperial palace. It is also suggested that his nom de plume is an allusion to a dynasty of painters from Antwerp under the name of Leys, with Henri Leys as its most famous representative.

In 1970 Ryckmans settled in Australia and he taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he supervised the honours thesis of future Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

He returned to China in 1972 for six months as a cultural attaché for the Belgian Embassy in Beijing.

In 1983 Ryckmans appeared on the literary talk show Apostrophes on French television. The host, Bernard Pivot, had also invited Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, a "China expert" and author of the book De la Chine. After the latter had waxed lyrical on the subject of the New China, Ryckmans responded ferociously, pointing out errors of fact that suggested she had not verified her sources before writing her book, a work that he judged as being "d'une stupidité totale" (totally stupid) or "une escroquerie" (a fraud).

In the period 1987–93 he was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. He took early retirement, later explaining that, near the end, "deep modifications" had begun to affect universities in Australia and worldwide, "transformations ... progressively taking the university further away from the model to which I had originally devoted my life".

Following his retirement he returned to Canberra, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

He died of cancer in Sydney at the age of 78 in August 2014 surrounded by his wife and four children.

Works

Ryckmans wrote in French, English and Chinese.

His books on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and on Maoist China - beginning with his trilogy Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), Ombres chinoises (1974) and Images brisées (1976) - gave scathing descriptions of the cultural and political destruction in mainland China while denouncing the hypocrisy of its western defenders.

In 1971, on the advice of his publisher, he decided to adopt a pseudonym before the release of Les habits neufs du président Mao, in order to avoid the risk of becoming a persona non grata in the People's Republic of China. He chose "Leys" after the main character of Victor Segalen's novel René Leys (published in 1922).

During the 1970s these books by Ryckmans provoked intense hostility among many Western intellectuals, particularly the French Maoists associated with the journal Tel Quel (such as Philippe Sollers) and attracted attacks from daily newspapers such as Le Monde. However, he was defended by some intellectuals such as Jean-François Revel and Étiemble.

In 1996 he delivered the Boyer Lectures on the theme "Aspects of Culture", in which he argued the need to cultivate the gardens of the mind and which were later published as The View from the Bridge: Aspects of Culture (1996).

Ryckmans was also a translator of Chinese literature, such as the Analects of Confucius and The Treatise on Painting by Shitao. His translation of The Analects of Confucius (1997) sought to introduce readers to "the real, living Confucius" rather than the official Confucian cult portraying him as "always proper, a bit pompous, slightly boring" — and appropriated by authoritarians.

The 2001 film The Emperor's New Clothes, directed by Alan Taylor, was based on Leys' novel The Death of Napoleon. Leys expressed distaste for the film, however; stating in an afterword accompanying a reprint of the novel that this "latter avatar [The Emperor's New Clothes], by the way, was both sad and funny: sad, because Napoleon was interpreted to perfection by an actor (Ian Holm) whose performance made me dream of what could have been achieved had the producer and director bothered to read the book."

His collection of essays, The Hall of Uselessness (2011), revealed the scope of his eccentric interests, wit and insights.

His translation (2013) of Simone Weil’s 1940 essay On the Abolition of All Political Parties was inspired, he said, by the "toxic atmosphere" that had started to pollute Australian politics.

He wrote regularly for the English-language press — The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Quadrant, and The Monthly — and for the French-language press — L'Express, Le Point, Le Monde, Le Figaro littéraire, and Le Magazine Littéraire.

He was a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, an Honorary Commander of the French Navy and member of the Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique.

He received many awards including the Académie française's Prix Jean Walter, prix d’histoire et de sociologie, the Prix Renaudot de l'essai, the Prix Henri Gal, the Prix Femina, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot-Calvados, the Prix Quinquernal de Literature, and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.

Bibliography

For a more comprehensive list of his publications in various languages and editions, see World Cat for Pierre Ryckmans and Simon Leys; see also this list of articles by Simon Leys in The New York Review of Books.