Not decadent enough
Anita Brookner
THE ROAD FROM DECADENCE: FROM BROTHEL TO CLOISTER: SELECTED LETTERS OF J. K. HUYSMANS edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont
The Athlone Press, f25, pp.273
0 f the great group of Naturalist novel- ists — Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourts, Maupassant, Huysmans — only Huysmans remains unread. More attention is paid to Flaubert in the 20th century than he ever received in his lifetime; Zola does well in every medium; Maupassant has never fal- len from grace; the Goncourts are annually remembered, if only for the wrong reason. Even Daudet, a minor practitioner whom they all disliked, has won his sentimental Place. Huysmans, however, who started so brilliantly and ended so disconcertingly, is something of a case apart. The anxiety. of the schoolroom descends on the critic Whose task it is to defend him, for he seems to have been a genuinely unpopular man, Whose gifts of sharpness and ennui repudi- ate sympathy and even exert a fascination that repels. Best known for his worst novel, A Rebours, a compendium of nerveless arti- fices which became the Bible of the Deca- dence, Huysmans is perhaps insufficiently decadent himself. He died an agonising and uncomplaining death, after an uncom- fortable and irritating life, and was buried In a monk's habit, for the one-time disciple of Zola had almost opted out of the Modern world, had laid down his burden of oPposition to the eternally and unthinking- ly banal, and had became an oblate in the Benedictine order. The old Adam, or rather the old Des Esseintes, died hard, and throughout the churches and convents of France he pursued a career halfway between penitent and dilettante, begging the protection of the Virgin while at the same time condemning a badly sung motet or any religious painters except Griinewald and Fra Angelico, the one a realist, the other a true believer. He himself aspired to be both.
He was born Jean-Charles Huysmans and became Joris-Karl out of deference to his Dutch descent on his father's side. He does indeed seem to inhabit some kind of emotional north, fearing the sun, com- plaining of those afflictions brought on by lack of it, notably indigestion and neural- gia, incapable of finding a habitable lodg- ing or a digestible, let alone an enjoyable meal. His mother married again a year after his father's death, thus duplicating the behaviour of Mme Aupick, formerly Baudelaire, but without the same dis- astrous consequences for her son's mental health. Huysmans' stepfather, a certain Monsieur Og, owned a bookbinding busi- ness at 11, Rue de Sevres, and when the old couple died Huysmans took over the management of the business, together with the accounts, combining this with a career at the Ministry of the Interior, where he worked for 32 years, retiring in 1898 with a pension and the Legion d'Honneur. Condi- tions of work were ideal; the hours were from midday to 5.30, and there was plenty of paper for writing the grave and cour- teous — and only occasionally prurient letters reproduced in this admirable and admirably translated selection. Nothing could be further from the working life of Flaubert, roaring like a bull when he failed to hit on the right word, than this life of meticulous service. It was supplemented by the production of novels, all of them curious, and by art criticism, all of it notable. Yet the burden of the letters remains the same. 'Nothing new. Every- thing calm', he writes. 'Nothing new here'. The early novels were written under the aegis of Zola, although temperamentally Huysmans was nearer to Edmond de Gon- court. Marthe, Les Soeurs Vatard, and En Ménage, written between 1876 and 1881, are the most exemplary from the Naturalist point of view, concentrating as they do on working-class lives in seedy corners, poor diets and cheap distractions. They are also the most nearly written as fiction, for the peculiarity of Huysmans as a novelist is that he despises or ignores the conventions of the novel as they pertained at the time. He chooses a protagonist — Durtal — who is not only himself but in some ways prefigures the hero as alienated urban wanderer, disaffected and uningratiating. The novels of the middle years, in which Huysmans relinquishes the Naturalist for- mula, are in effect novels containing only one character, as Durtal pursues his search for novelty through black masses to white cathedrals, from black to white mysticism, as Huysmans himself put it. Who now reads En Rade, A Vau l'Eau, even La-Bas? Yet everyone has a nodding acquaintance with A Rebours, which can be variously translated as 'Against Nature', or 'Against the Grain', in which Durtal becomes Des Esseintes, searching not for any ideal but only for the ideal distraction, reading Mallarme and the early Fathers of the Church, contemplating engravings after Odilon Redon and Jan Luyken. The novel struck an alarming pose and constituted a password for rare spirits anxious to meet others of the same nature. Sales were good, but not so good as those of the later unreadable novels, La Cathedrale and L'Oblat, in which the same cataloguing approach is used as that favoured by Des Esseintes in his library. The method was pioneered by Edmond de Goncourt in his melancholy, obsessive, and heart-breaking book, La Maison d'un Artiste, heartbreak- ing because, as Huysmans came to see, art was a delusion. 'I have lived for art', he wrote to his friend Arij Prins in 1893, 'and now that I am 45 I am aware of its nothingness.'
Yet he continued to proceed as an art critic, even when assessing the attributes of various convents and monasteries in which he thought he might spend his last days. The novelists of this period had a curious relationship with contemporary painters; jealous of their method, they occasionally extended a fraternal hand, more often than not withdrew it. The argument was one of precedence: which of them should take the honours for having portrayed the heroisms of modern life? The attitude does at times seem marvellously shared, yet Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt affected to despise the Impressionists. Only Zola had the nobility and the magnanimity to defer to Manet, while Huysmans carries on this honourable tradition by consistently prais- ing Degas. He is a shrewder critic than Zola and his verdicts have stood the test of time. He had the wit to discover Gauguin, and he had a weakness for Forain and for Raffaelli, the latter still not yet rehabili- tated in the market. With his modernity went a genuine tackiness which made him a natural convert to Gustave Moreau's high- handed but thin-blooded fantasies. With steps taken towards conversion he came to despise the art he had once admired: art without a religious dimension induced pa- ranoia. Painters of the Renaissance were castigated as a bunch of actors, while Bianchi di Ferrari was singled out as having introduced vice into a depiction of the Holy Family. The terrifying description he gives of Grunewald's Crucifixion, in more than one text, shows him at the foot of the Cross, yet taking a sado-masochistic de- light — a Naturalist's delight — in the details of the martyrdom.
I doubt if he will ever be popular again, although the novels and the art criticism have been reissued in paperback format in France. He remains a writer of genuine gifts at war with inadequate vitality and an immoderate desire to tease or provoke; his life was compounded of devotion to duty and a definite lack of greatness. He suffers from the moral equivalent of dyspepsia, miserable in what he called 'this badly run rooming house of life': The occasional marvellous phrase, the odd unexpected simile (Pointillism characterised as 'col- oured fleas') are not quite enough to make him an easy read. He fell out with every- body, including his confessors; even in the convent, life turned out to be a badly run rooming house. Yet when the toothache that had plagued him all his life turned out to be cancer of the mouth and throat he was quite resigned, and he died in peace though in unendurable pain. It was a Naturalist's death, much worse than any- thing Flaubert had devised for Emma Bovary, yet it was redeemed by spiritual acquiescence. This curious glossary on the phases of his life seems entirely appropri- ate.
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