Books

The great technologist

Jonathan Benthall

Jules Verne: A Biography Jean JulesVerne, translated and adapted by Roger Greaves (Macdonald and Jane's E6.50)

Most educated Englishmen still think of Jules Verne as the author of four or five well-known novels for boys which have inspired some spectacular films. Actually he published over sixty novels, most of them appearing in English though sometimes in bad translations—and some of the best novels are difficult to find. Many can be called 'science fiction', and virtually all are affected by Verne's interest in various branches of natural science and technology; but his raw material came also from political history, ethnology and folklore, and (in his novel about a crazed inventor, For the Flag) psychopathology. One reason why he has been relatively little read in England may be his anglophobia: while admiring the English for their energy, he thought them arrogant, cruel and greedy. It is hardly surprising if Foundling Mirk, which attacks absentee ownership in Ireland and the decadence of the English aristocracy, was not on the shelves of our school libraries alongside Kipling, Henty and Rider Haggard.

Verne has recently attracted the attention of French intellectuals of structuralist, psychoanalytic or Marxist persuasions. It is only a matter of time before he is analysed at greater length in the American universities. In the meantime, here is a biography by his grandson Jean Jules-Verne, who was twelve when Jules died in 1905, and who himself retired in 1961 as chief justice of Toulon. He has used family archives and his own childhood memories; but firmly denies a rumour that the family had been concealing papers which it thought embarrassing. Yet, with a touch reminiscent of a Nabokov novel, he regrets having previously let slip the surname of his grandfather's mysterious lady friend in Asnieres. about whom little else is recorded. Jean Jules-Verne writes judiciously with dry, understated commonsense. Like many biographies of other men, this owes some of its structure to running skirmishes with earlier interpretations of its subject-matter. One earlier biographer. Marguerite Allotte de la. Fuye, is Jules's niece; she is coy and gushing. She writes of Jules's mother, strolling through some autumn leaves and meeting the man who was to be her husband, that she was 'gold and ruddy and light as the leaves themselves'. Another biographer, Marcel More. is a promoter of sometimes shaky psychoanalytic hypotheses. But Jean never humiliates these unfortunates, sparing a compliment for each here and there, as a judge may

for a defeated advocate.

Anyone who is already addicted to Verne will be fascinated by this new biography. We learn of two lavish fancy-dress balls which he gave in the usually staid town of Amiens. At the first, in 1877, three guests come as the cosmonauts in From the Earth to the Moon, while the poor hostess Madame Verne is laid up in bed with a haemorrhage. At the second, in 1885, their house is turned into an inn called 'The Around the World', and Verne and his wife dress up as cooks. But such piquant details will appeal only to the converted, while the revelations of Jules Verne's grave personal shortcomings in his close family relationships may give ammunition to those who dismiss Verne's writings as immature and superficial. Jean Chesneaux's The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne (1972) is a more exciting introduction, especially in its attempt to site Verne's novels against the complex ideological background of the nineteenth century.

Verne's most striking importance is in the history of commercial publishing. According to his grandson. Jules abhorred businessmen. But Verne's technological and geographical range, and his world market, make him like a multi-national conglomerate in publishing history. In fact, a slander did spread during Verne's lifetime that he had given up writing, and that the narratives appearing under his name were really the work of a syndicate of 'ghosts'. The uneven quality of Verne's work, and his secluded life, must have made the rumour plausible. Having established his brand-image, Verne wrung many permutations out of his reading —from which he kept abstracts on 20,000 data cards. His publisher, Hetzel, was a shrewd partner. Popular novelists since Verne's day have adopted very similar permutative techniques, but are forced by competition to be far more specialist in their approach : an author may, for instance, write a whole series of novels about motor-racing. But if Verne's novels are mechanical in their composition, they have also something of the attractive generosity of scale that marks early industrial and transport machinery. Jean Jules-Verne's biography of his grandfather shares this attraction: it is like the leisurely history of a family firm by the founder's heir. Ruefully, Jean records that his father Michel was improvident enough to allow the film rights to be sold out of the family.

But why read Verne today? One type of modern reader, trained to read fiction as language-play in a world analogous to dream, is arrested by Verne's passion for sonorous dictionary-words, and by his mannerist

flourishing of narrative devices. (For example, of a Jewish pedlar in Transylvania: 'Where was he going? It's of little importance. He is just passing through the story. We shall not see him again.') This seems a good way to appreciate Verne's creative gift. It could be criticised as a pretentious way of reading an unpretentious popular novelist, but this criticism is not valid since Verne's style of fiction, with its systematic permutations of book-learning and narrative devices, lends itself admirably to such a reading. For compelling allegories by Verne about the splendours and horrors of industrial technology, one would recommend novels such as The Begum's Fortune, Propeller Island and The Barsac Mission. But Castle of the Carpathians (1892) is, as Jean JulesVerne argues, undervalued. This gothic science-fiction is dominated by a counterpoint between rustic superstition and objective technology, between the delusions of the primitive fancy and the illusions made possible by the telephone and gramophone. Baron Gortz, a lovesick melomane, takes refuge with a loyal inventor Orfanik in a remote castle in the Carpathians, alone with the gramophone recordings of the voice of a dead prima donna, La Stilla. They useelectrical tricks to scare the inquisitive but credulous peasantry away from the castle.

The beginning of chapter 2 shows Verne's prose at its best :

The appearance of rocks piled up bY nature in the geological eras after the last convulsions of the earth, and that of marl' made constructions on which the breath of time has passed, are fairly similar when they are looked at from a distance of sonic miles. Rough stone and worked stone are easily confused with one another. Front far off, the same colour, the same lineaments, the same deviations of lines in Per. spective, the same uniformity of tint under the greyish patina of centuries. Such was the castle of the Carpathians' It would not have been possible to recrig; nise its doubtful shape on the plateau 0' Orgall, which it crowns to the left of (het Vulcan pass. It does not stand out against the background of the mountains. Wila one is tempted to take for a tower is Per: haps only a stony hill. The onlookei thinks he sees the battlements of a curt ill when perhaps it is only a rocky crest. In5. whole is vague, floating, uncertain. Tbi'Le if various tourists are to be believed. t "hie castle of the Carpathians exists only in imagination of the people of the country' Stone is a familiar metaphor for the techni and psychological resources of creative art--th a metaphor explored with particular del/ e and delicacy by Ruskin. But in this WO, of Verne's, the stone is dematerialised becomes a castle in the air, a fevered ha!1_,, cination, a construct of painstaking rhetdPa

cal and linguistic technique. It would be

molar

mistake to be patronising about a

adventure tale that begins with such soPf its own ityterdeaelqu.ivocation over the nature °