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…
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…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.
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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.
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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 ).
