'Zola Came to See Me Today'

There’s a category of reading I think of as functional or expedient. I associate it with appointments where I know I will have to wait – doctor, dentist, auto repairs. It’s usually a book I’m not currently reading and never one I haven’t read before. I pull it from the shelf just as I’m about to leave the house. It needs to be somewhat fragmentary; that is, made up of discrete bits of text, readily digestible fragments, such as letters, brief essays, a diary. Never a novel or history or anything with a lengthy narrative. Even short stories are too long. With an uncertain amount of time waiting ahead of me, I look for brevity and solidity – something that will consume my time but not waste it. 

While recently waiting to have an MRI performed I browsed an old favorite, Pages from the Goncourt Journal (trans. Robert Baldick, 1962) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. The brothers started their account of Parisian life in 1851, resulting in the novelty of a record of social and literary events recorded in the first-person plural. Following Jules’ death in 1870, Edmond continued writing the journal until a few weeks before his own death in 1896.

The brothers are gifted gossips and name-droppers. Among their acquaintances are Flaubert, Maupassant, Gautier, Baudelaire, Degas, Rodin and Saint-Beuve. Jealousy and self-promotion are constant themes. Their dealings with Emile Zola are especially complicated and interesting. While recognizing Zola’s talents, they are convinced he had borrowed his style and subject matter from their own jointly written novels. Here is a passage dated December 14, 1880 (written by Edmond):

“Zola came to see me today. He came with that gloomy, haggard air which is characteristic of his way of entering a room. That man of forty really is a pitiful sight; he looks older than I do. . . .

“Life really is cleverly arranged so that nobody is happy. Here is a man whose names echoes round the world. Who sells a hundred thousand copies of every book he writes, who has perhaps caused a greater stir in his lifetime than any other author, and yet, with his sickly constitution and his melancholy state of mind, he is unhappier than the most abject of failures.”

Goncourt confirms my impression that grousing, an unbuttoned fit of complaining, really is quite funny – a grown man whining like a spoiled schoolboy. Here are the brothers writing on July 23, 1864, unknowingly expressing an accurate self-prophecy: “A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.”

Like Maupassant and Daudet, Jules died of tertiary syphilis. He was thirty-nine and died on June 20, 1870. For a brief time after his brother’s death, Esmond stopped keeping the journal but changed his mind and resumed by writing about his brother’s agonizing, protracted madness and death. These entries are the most powerful in the entire journal. There’s no gossip or backbiting. This is dated April 18:

“To witness, day by day, the destruction of everything that once went to mark out this young man—distinguished among all others—to see him emptying the salt-cellar over his fish, holding his fork in both hands, eating like a child, is too much for me to bear. 

"So it is not enough that this busy mind should stop producing, should cease creating, should be inhabited by nothingness. The human being had to be stricken in these qualities of grace and elegance which I imagined to be inaccessible to sickness, in these gifts of the man who is well born, well bred, well brought up. And finally, as in the old vengeances of the gods, all the aristocratic virtues in him, all the superior graces inherent so to speak in his skin, had to be degraded to the level of animality.”

William Maxwell wrote to Sylvia Townsend Warner in a letter dated December 30, 1958:

“Someone gave me a copy of a paper-backed one-volume edition of the journals of the brothers Goncourt, and I am beside myself with pleasure over it. Every night I get through one page, and then sit and hold it, all of it, in my mind, with rapture. At such times, knowing, alas, that it isn’t true, I say to myself that all I ask of life is the privilege of being able to read.”

 

[You can find the letter in The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell 1938-1978, 2001).