Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.
THE DEFINITIVE JUDGMENT OF HONORE DE BALZAC
[no dispute will be accepted]
Five months ago, I wrote on this blog the following paragraph…
“ Anybody who had read this blog regularly will be aware that Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is one of my literary idols. In fact on this blog I have, over the years, written reviews of eight of his novels and a review of a collection of his short stories. To put them in the order in which I would judge his best and his second best, you can find on this blog his very best Le Pere Goriot [Old Goriot], La Rabouilleuse [known in English as The Black Sheep], Le Cousin Pons [Cousin Pons], and La Cousine Bette [Cousin Betty]. Second best – in my humble opinion - are Eugenie Grandet , La Peau de Chagrin [The Wild Ass’s Skin], and the disjointed Les Illusions Perdues [Lost Illusions]. And, as I have often declared, if you really want to be turned away from reading Balzac, then torture yourself by reading his dullest and most tiresome novel Cesar Birotteau . As for the volume of Balzac’s Selected Short Stories it contains some of the Master’s best work.”
Looking back now, I think I was a little too harsh in relegating Eugenie Grandet and La Peau de Chagrin to second best. Since I made this judgement, I have reviewed on this blog six more of Balzac’s novels, Les Chouans, Une Tenebreuse Affaire, Usule Mirouet , Le Medecin de Campagne, Histoire desTreize , and Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes . and I promise you that this will be the last time I review a novel by Honore de Balzac.
I was going to write a new detailed judgement of Balzac’s work, but then I decided to resort to plagiarism – namely plagiary-ing myself. Some years ago I gave a talk about Balzac at the Auckland Central Library, with two readers supporting me by reading [in English] extracts from Balzac’s novels which I had chosen. What follows is a very abridged version of what I wrote. After giving examples of Balzac’s urban realism I said…
*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *
…we’ll never get the measure of Honore de Balzac if we don’t understand that he is at once and equally Realist and Romantic. The 33-year-old Honore de Balzac first conceived the idea of drawing together the novels, novellas and short stories he had already written into a single literary whole, and then extending it to make it a systematic imaginative survey of the whole of French society. When the idea occurred to him, he is reputed to have rushed into the next room and declared to his sister “Salute me because I’m quite plainly on the way to becoming a genius”. But it took him ten years to decide how exactly all the works he was pouring out would fit together. It wasn’t until 1842 that he worked out the total plan of what he now called The Human Comedy / La Comedie Humaine, that massive literary “study of morals”, and then wrote his famous preface.
I’ll play the game of Balzac and Dickens, partly because I think they inhabit similar niches in their respective cultures. Let’s do this comparison. Honore de Balzac and Charles Dickens were more-or-less contemporaries – or at any rate their lives and careers overlap. Balzac was born in 1799 and died in 1850. Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870, so there were some years – the 1830s and 1840s - when they would have been working at the same time. Both men came from lower-middle-class backgrounds. Dickens’ father was a clerk; Balzac was the grandson of peasants, whose name had been Balssa. His father was a clerk who had come up in the world as a result of the Revolution, and changed his name to the tone-ier sounding Balzac; and it was left to Honore to add the aristocratic “de” to pretend that he came from a higher social stratum. Both Balzac and Dickens had a jokey, blokey side to them and identified more with their father than with their mother. Balzac’s main grudge against his mother was that she was most opposed to his pursuing a career in writing, and spent years trying to steer him towards a more respectable career in the law.
As ambitious lower-middle-class boys who wanted to make a career in writing, both Balzac and Dickens started in journalism and hackwork. Balzac began as a totally anonymous hack, churning out sensational formula “historical” novels at speed, most of them anonymously and most of them which he never acknowledged later. It’s been left to scholars over a century later to work out which of these forgettable works Balzac probably wrote. This points to another thing the two men had in common – they were both workaholics who wrote voluminously, and their hard work probably contributed to their relatively early deaths. Dickens, with his punishing schedule of public readings as well as his writing, died at the age of 58. Balzac, who I think was even more of a workaholic than Dickens, died at the age of 51.
I could add that Balzac probably lived a more unhealthy life than Dickens. Balzac was what was once euphemistically known as a “trencherman”. Like Dr Johnson, like his contemporary Rossini [whom he admired and whose music he references in some of his novels] Balzac loved to eat and was sometimes a sheer glutton. The invaluable Book of Lists informs me that at one meal, Balzac reputedly consumed a dozen cutlets, a duck, two partridges, 110 oysters, 12 pears and a variety of desserts – accompanied by the finest red wines, of course.
From all that, however, I’d hate you to draw the conclusion that Balzac was some sort of gourmandizing buffoon, even though he was a fat and physically unprepossessing figure. When he was writing, he took his writing very seriously, concentrating on it to the exclusion of other things. He approached it almost as a religious rite. He would fast. For inspiration he would wrap himself in a special white robe, the ownership of which was eagerly disputed by admirers after his death. He would stay in his room and, sustained by endless draughts of strong black coffee, work for sixteen or eighteen or twenty hours at a stretch. One source says that his average working day began at 1 a.m. and ended at 7 p.m. with two naps in the middle. And when his works came back from the printers he would start the writing process all over again. To the confusion of textual scholars he would take the first proofs of his works and basically re-write them before sending them back to the printers a second time.
I must make it clear that in one major respect, Balzac’s working methods were very different from Dickens’s. Although Balzac often wrote for newspaper or magazine publication, unlike Dickens he rarely wrote his novels in serial parts or for serial publication, although exceptions seem to have been the long and structurally banged-together Les Illusions Perdues/ Lost Illusions and Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes. Balzac tended to conceive and write his novels whole.
Only when he was about 30 did his first really good and memorable novel appear in 1829 – this was his historical novel Les Chouans, set among the royalist Bretons who fought against the new French republic in the 1790s. So when you consider this late start, it makes his production of La Comedie Humaine even more extraordinary as it was all written in about twenty years between 1830 and 1850. This means – when you add up the total contents of La Comedie Humaine - that for each of those twenty years, he produced on average two full-length novels, about twelve novella and many short stories. And this included some lightning quick composition. The first draft of the full-length novel Le Medecin de Campagne/The Country Doctor was said to have been written in three days and three nights. His mature masterpiece La Cousine Bette / Cousin Bette was written in six weeks.
You see what I mean by workaholic.
And to end with all this biographical data, I must make a comparison between the sexual life of Balzac and that of Dickens. Dickens was at least open to the charge of hypocrisy, being the respectably married father of ten children, and the chief Victorian promoter of the domestic virtues of hearth-and-home; who, as every biographer has been telling us for the last 40 years, sent his wife packing and in later years had a long, secret affair with a young actress. Balzac was a lot nastier in his business dealing than Dickens was [he frequently cheated publishers out of advances, or took payment from one publisher for works he had promised to another]. But at least in sexual matters Balzac was less hypocritical. He openly had the mistresses before he ever had the wife. His most serious and long-lasting mistress was a Polish noblewoman Evelina Hanska [married with children]. She said she would marry him when her husband died and he agreed, looking forward to the wealth of her estate – then he went back to France and, never the man to miss an amorous opportunity, picked up a few more mistresses, by one of whom he had his only child, who was adopted by the woman’s complaisant husband. I believe this is what the French call savoir faire. Eventually Evelina Hanska’s husband died, and she married Balzac a matter of months before Balzac himself died in 1850 [she outlived him by over 30 years].
Now by this stage, I’ve said a great deal about the biographical side, and you’re probably asking where the literature comes in.
In his famous preface to La Comedie Humaine he set out to look at all of humanity, characterised by different scenes - Scenes from Private Life, Scenes from Parisian Life, Scenes from Provincial Life, Scenes from Political and Military Life and the pretentiously titled Philosophical Studies. In fact these categories not only don’t exhaust all the categories of human life or social classes; but they don’t even exhaust all the categories of human life available in early nineteenth century France. That hasn’t stopped Marxists - including that Hungarian Stalinist hack Georgy Luckacs in his book The Historical Novel - from seeing Balzac as a great genius for attempting to use the novel as a vehicle for the criticism of all society. And of course, the type of masterwork Balzac created – with its recurring characters who may be minor characters in one novel and are major characters in the next – was to be the template for other French novelists. Without Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine, Emile Zola would probably have taken longer to think up the plan for his 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart and there wouldn’t have been those other romans fleuves that were highly esteemed in the early 20th century.
You can say this for the Marxist view of Balzac, however. There has never been a novelist who has had such a materialistic appreciation of wealth, or who accounts so closely for every last penny that his characters possess. Every last crown, livre, franc, sou or centime his characters possess, how they earned their income, how they dispose of their income and how it affects the way they live are chronicled by Balzac. If there is one novel by Balzac I would earnestly entreat you NOT to read, it is Cesar Birotteau, which is the simply and flatly told tale of a man who makes a fortune, then loses it, then regains it. Page after page is filled with technical details on how money is invested, how it earns interest, how business cartels are formed etc. etc. and clearly Balzac expects us to be as excited as he obviously was by every business deal his protagonist makes and by every minute accounting of how much money he has at every given stage of the story. It is, in a word, a very boring book. [ By the way, Balzac himself thought that Cesar Birotteau was a masterpiece… Oh well. Even Homer nods].
Yet in Balzac the Realist runs side by side with the Romantic; and the Romantic delivers us some ripe melodrama, as in his provincial domestic tragedy Eugenie Grandet, essentially the story of a young woman whose life is blighted by a miserly father and a fickle sweetheart. Or for that matter La Duchesse de Langeais with its over-the top romanticism etc.
Balzac is realistic about the material facts of life and certainly far franker about the facts of sex than any of his English contemporaries. You certainly wouldn’t have Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot so casually chronicling marital infidelity, mistresses and lovers; or writing a story of lesbian desire like Balzac’s novella La Fille aux Yeux d’Or / The Girl with Golden Eyes; or so strongly implying a homosexual attachment like that between the criminal Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempre in Les Illusions Perdues and its sequel. But melodrama is to Balzac what sentimentality is to Dickens – the Achilles’ Heel in his great artistic creation, and it can be pushed to extremes. Read his L’Histoire des Treize / The History of the Thirteen, and you have three novella held together by the absurd novelettish contrivance of an all-powerful secret society – which could have crept out of the sillier fictions of Alexandre Dumas or Eugene Sue; or for that matter out of the early movies of Fritz Lang.
So we can accuse Honore de Balzac of being obsessed with money, of indulging in outrageous melodrama and of presenting a simplistic psychology of monomaniacs and criminal supermen. There’s also the philosophic charge that he worshipped the human will and material success. Eugene de Rastignac is the young man who, through many of the novels, rises in the world, not always by the most scrupulous of means. He is presented positively with Balzac implicitly saying this is the only way one can rise if one uses one’s talents. By contrast Lucien de Rubempre, the central character of Lost Illusions, is so guileless and innocent that he is completely destroyed when he attempts to be a literary figure in Paris. Balzac sympathises with him – the novel is essentially Lucien’s tragedy - but he seems to be saying that such innocence simply doesn’t survive.
It is very rare indeed in a Balzac novel to find people of moral probity who are able to survive by their own efforts. Most commonly he shows innocent and virtuous people either destroyed or helped by sharpers who happen to know the way of the world. Virtue has to lean on vice. One of the very few exceptions I can think of is the novel Ursule Mirouet, where the titular heroine is helped by a band of good people – almost her “good uncles” – who are also able to take action to thwart the villains. But then in that novel, Ursule is also helped by direct divine intervention and prophetic dreams.
And yet, as I hope I’ve made plain in everything I’ve said so far, we have in Balzac a man who could survey as much of society as he perceived, spin robust plots and certainly create memorable characters. When you enter Balzac’s novels you enter a whole world, and the term Balzacian is at least as justified as the term Dickensian. And, of course, his characters are as memorable – Eugene de Rastignac; Lucien de Rubempre; the publicist Felix Gaudissart; the criminal Vautrin; Lisabeth Fischer or “Cousin Bette”, the vindictive old maid who destroys a whole family; the title character the art-collector Pons in Le Cousin Pons and his humble Alsatian friend Wilhelm Schmucke – if we were all French we would savour them as much as Pickwick, Bumble, Pecksniff, Miss Havisham, Lizzie Hexham or Betsy Trotwood
So how have critics reacted to Balzac? Like any writer of note, he has been subject to extreme judgements. Just as there are Dickensians in England who worship everything their hero did, so are there in France ardent Balzacians. In England, W.Somerset Maugham declared “Of all the great novelists who have enriched with their works the spiritual treasures of the world, Balzac is to my mind the greatest. He is the only one to whom I would without hesitation ascribe genius.” But at the other end of the critical spectrum you have the fastidious Bloomsberry Lytton Strachey telling us “Balzac’s style is bad; in spite of the electric vigour that runs through his writing, it is formless, clumsy and quite without distinction; it is the writing of a man who is highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar.” Oh the condescending tone of that last word. Even worse, there is the man who was once regarded as the doyen of English-language critics of French literature, Martin Turnell, In his 1950 opus The Novel in France, he basically tells us that Balzac is at best a cheap entertainer and purveyor of crime stories; and says the best of Balzac’s stories are those of provincial people “where a simple mentality was in keeping with his own very real but undeniably limited talents”. This chimes in with what was probably the most elegant put-down of all, from Balzac’s fellow Frenchman Andre Gide: “Il est bon de lire Balzac avant vingt-cinq ans; après cela devient trop difficile” That is “It’s good to read Balzac before you are 25. After that, it becomes too difficult.” – which seems an elegant way of saying Balzac is kidstuff.
But before you succumb to the view that Balzac is only for vulgarians, it’s worth reminding you that Balzac’s number one nineteenth century English-speaking fan was Oscar Wilde, who wrote “The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac…. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.” Wilde wrote of his evening entertainments “Who would care to go out to meet Tompkins, the friend of one’s boyhood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempre?” For the record of allusion, by the way, when Wilde famously said that in meeting male prostitutes he was “feasting with panthers” he was in fact quoting from Balzac where Lucien de Rubempre speaks of visiting brothels as “feasting with lions and panthers”. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was quite clearly influenced by Balzac’s Wild Ass’s Skin.
I would agree that some of Balzac’s tales are crude, sensationalist, blood-and-thunder shockers. But that ignores his many more perceptive novels, novella and short stories, in spite of his obsession with money.
So choose for yourself. Either Honore de Balzac was a clumsy vulgarian who occasionally happened to strike the right note. Or he was a great creative genius without whom world literature would be much the poorer.
I prefer to believe the latter.
*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *.
When I delivered my talk some years back [of which you have seen an abridged version], I finished by telling my audience about the number of films that have been based on novels or stories by Balzac. I won’t bother you by listing all the relevant films I noted. But I will suggest two films and one television series that are worth seeking,
First, Yves Angelo’s production of Le Colonel Chabert made in 1995, with Gerard Depardieu doing a great performance as the Napoleonic soldier, virtually returned from the dead, who finds that Restoration France really has no place for him. Then made in 2021 [years after I did my talk on Balzac] there was Xavier Giannoli’s lavishly made Illusions Perdues wherein a young man has his dreams of literary glory crushed by cynical Parisian journalism. Deservedly it was a huge hit in France and won many awards, and it wisely did not include the last third of Balzac’s long novel, which is unrelated to the rest of the tome. Finally – and this is really cheating – there is the very old BBC TV series of Cousin Bette, made in 1971, with Margaret Tyzack frighteningly true to the character of the spurned woman who manages to destroy a whole family.
*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *
Final Comment: Like you, I am now all Balzac-ed out. In fact I’m now tired of him, for all his brilliance. Dear reader, unless you ask for more, or if you are very naughty and need to be punished, I will pluck off my shelves four of Balzac’s novels which I have not yet read – The Country Parson and About Catherine de Medici [in English translations] and [in French] La Vieille Fille and Le Cure de Tours ).
No comments:
Post a Comment