Journal-ists

My oldest son and I often exchange guilty musical pleasures – songs we enjoy but are usually too ashamed to confess (“If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, is not my most shameful choice). Books can be similarly ranked, and near the top of that list is a work that for more than 30 years has given me inordinate pleasure: the journal kept by the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. In French, the work is published in 22 volumes. In 1962, Robert Baldick edited and translated a one-volume selection, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, recently returned to print by New York Review Books. I have the original Oxford University Press edition, given to me in 1975 by a friend with a deep absorption in 19th-century French literature and culture.

The Goncourts started keeping their journal in 1851, and usually wrote it in the first-person plural. Jules died in 1870 at the age of 40, and Edmond continued writing it until his death in 1896. The brothers, who also wrote novels, plays and social history, knew Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Daudet, Degas, Rodin and Zola, among other Parisian luminaries, and they also knew the city’s brothels and society balls. Their journal is history as a higher, wittier, more observant form of gossip. They were neurotic. They were proto-bloggers, with temperaments nasty and generous, goatish and cerebral. Their prose is alternately rambling and aphoristic. Their appetites for life and everything else – including words -- were bottomless. The most moving portion of the journal is the watch kept by Edmond over his younger brother as he died slowly and agonizingly of syphilis. Here is a brief selection of favorite passages:

Feb. 25, 1860: “Moliere is the accession of the bourgeoisie, a solemn affirmation of the soul of the Thirds Estate. He is the inauguration of common sense and practical reasoning, the end of chivalry and poetry in everything. Woman, love, all the gallant and noble follies of life, are reduced in him to the mean yardstick of home and dowry. Everything spontaneous and impulsive is condemned and corrected. Corneille is the last herald of the aristocracy; Moliere is the first poet of the middles classes.”

Dec. 7, 1860: “As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.”

July 30, 1861: “The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.”

Dec. 6, 1862: “[Flaubert] is full of paradoxes which, like his vanity, have something provincial about them. They are coarse, heavy, clumsy, laboured, and graceless. He has a dirty wit. On the subject of love, which he often talks about, he has all manner of complicated, fanciful theories, affected theories designed to impress. At bottom, there is a great deal of the rhetor and the sophist in him. He is at once coarse and precious in his obscenity.”

July 23, 1864: “A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.”

May 22, 1865: “There is now only one consuming interest left in our life, the passion for the study of living reality. Apart from that there is nothing but boredom and emptiness. Admittedly we have galvanized history into reality, and done so with a truer truthfulness than other historians. But now the truth that is dead no longer holds any interest for us. We are like a man accustomed to drawing from a wax dummy who has suddenly been presented with a living model, or rather life itself with its entrails warm and active, its guts palpitating.”

“Jan. 2, 1867: A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. France was the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat and waste a little time between sales. Nowadays books are bought standing. A request for a book and the naming of the price: that is the sort of transaction to which the all-devouring activity of modern trade has reduced bookselling, which used to be a matter for dawdling, idling, and chatty, friendly browsing.”

The Goncourts lived enviably thoughtful, engaged, bookish lives. They knew Paris as Dickens knew London, Joyce knew Dublin and Bellow knew Chicago. Their Paris – Walter Benjamin called it “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” -- was small enough for the brothers to have known almost everyone, and they were observant and dedicated enough to leave us an immense album of prose daguerreotypes.