Against Nature (Á Rebours) Read online

  AGAINST NATURE

  JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS was born in Paris in 1848, the only son of a French mother and a Dutch father. After a childhood saddened by his father’s death and his mother’s speedy remarriage, he became a junior clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained for thirty-two years. He spent the first half of the Franco-Prussian War in hospital, suffering from dysentery, and the second half under fire in the besieged capital. When peace returned he went back to the Ministry, and three years later published his first book, Le Drageoir à épices (1874), a collection of prose-poems after Baudelaire. He then turned to novel-writing and published Marthe (1876), Les Sæurs Vatard (1879), En Ménage (1881) and A Vau-l’Eau (1882). A Rebours, published in 1884 and hailed by Arthur Symons as ‘the breviary of the Decadence’, marked his break with Zola’s Medan Group and the beginning of an attempt to widen the scope of the novel. His other novels were En Rade (1887), Là-Bas (1891), En Route (1895), La Catbédrale (1898) and L’Oblat (1903). He died in 1907.

  ROBERT BALDICK, the late co-editor of the Penguin Classics, received his MA and D. Phil. from Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of Pembroke College. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he wrote biographies of J.-K. Huysmans, Frédérick Lamaître and Henry Murger, a study of the Goncourts, The Siege of Paris and The Duel. Authors whose work he translated from the French include the Goncourts, Montherlant, Radiguet, Restif de la Bretonne, Sartre, Simenon and Jules Verne. For the Penguin Classics he translated Flaubert’s Three Tales and Sentimental Education, Chateaubriand’s Memoirs and Huysmans’ Against Nature. He died in 1972.

  PATRICK MCGUINNESS was born in 1968 in Tunisia. He is a fellow of St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, where he lectures in French. He is the author of Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (2000), and has edited T. E. Hulme’s Selected Writings (1998), Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de siècle (2000), Anthologie de la poésie Symboliste et décadente (Paris, 2001) and Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry (2002). His translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb was published in 2003. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors, and his poems and translations have appeared in a variety of books and reviews. He lives in Cardiff.

  JORIS – KARL HUYSMANS

  Against Nature

  Translated by ROBERT BALDICK

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  PATRICK MCGUINNESS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This edition first published, 2003

  1

  Translation copyright © Robert Baldick, 1956

  Introduction, Notes and translation of Appendices copyright © Patrick McGuinness, 2003

  Chronology copyright © Terry Hale, 2001

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editors have been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90660–7

  Contents

  Chronology

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  Note on this Translation

  Against Nature

  Appendix I: Preface, Written Twenty Years After the Novel

  Appendix II: Reviews of and Responses to Against Nature

  Notes

  Chronology

  1815 Birth of Godfried Huysmans, father of the novelist, in the Dutch town of Breda. A lithographer and miniaturist by profession, he settles in Paris as a young man.

  1845 June Godfried Huysmans proposes to a young French schoolmistress, Malvina Badin.

  1848 5 Feb. Birth of Charles Marie Georges Huysmans at no. 11 (now no. 9) rue Suger in the 6th Arrondissement.

  1848 Ordination of Joseph Antoine Boullan.

  1856 24 June Death of Godfried Huysmans.

  1857 Mother re-marries, to a M. Jules Og.

  1858 May Mother and stepfather purchase a small bookbindery at no. 11 rue de Sèvres in the 7th Arrondissement.

  1862 Huysmans enrols at the Lycée Saint-Louis.

  1864 First sexual experiences with prostitutes.

  1866 7 Mar. Huysmans passes baccalauréat.

  1866 1 Apr. Following in the footsteps of other members of the family on his mother’s side, Huysmans enters the Ministry of the Interior as an employé de sixième classe (employee: sixth grade) on a salary of 1,500 francs p.a.

  1866 Autumn Enrols in the Faculties of Law and Letters of the University of Paris.

  1867 8 Sept. Death of stepfather.

  1868 15 Aug. Salary increases to 1,800 francs p.a.

  1870 30 July Mobilized in the 6th Battalion of the Garde Mobile during the Franco-Prussian War. Dysentery prevents him from seeing action.

  1870 15 Aug. Salary increases to 2,100 francs p.a.

  1871 Feb. The Government and its staff relocate to Versailles.

  1871 Summer Huysmans rents rooms in Paris.

  1872 First draft of his war memoirs which will become Sac au dos.

  1873 1 Feb. Salary increases to 2,400 francs p.a.

  1874 10 Oct. Le Drageoir à épices (tr. Dish of Spices, 1927), a collection of prose-poems, is published at the author’s own expense.

  1876 4 May His mother dies, leaving Huysmans responsible for his two half-sisters and the management of the bookbindery. He transfers to a post at the Sûreté Générale in Paris.

  1876 12 Sept. Marthe, histoire d’une fille (tr. Marthe, 1927 (US) and 1958 (UK)), a short novel dealing with the life of a prostitute in a licensed brothel, is published in Brussels.

  1877 Early Enters into contact with Zola, Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt.

  1877 Aug. L’Artiste serializes Sac au dos.

  1878 1 Jan. Salary increases to 2,700 francs p.a.

  1879 26 Feb. Les Soeurs Vatard (tr. The Vatard Sisters, 1983), a study of the lives of women working as bookbinders, is published. The work is dedicated to Zola.

  1879 17 May Le Voltaire, on Zola’s recommendation, publishes Huysmans’ first article on the Salon, the main artistic event in the Parisian calendar.

  1880 1 Jan. Salary increases to 3,000 francs p.a.

  1880 April Sac au dos (tr. Knapsack, 1907) appears in Les Soirées de Medan, a collection of war stories, together with tales by Zola and Maupassant.

  1881 Feb. En Ménage (tr. Living Together, 1969), a pessimistic study of everyday life, is published.

  1881 22 May Croquis Parisiens (tr. Parisian Sketches, 1962) is published.

  1882 1 Jan. Salary increases to 3,300 fra
ncs p.a.

  1882 26 Jan. A Vau-l’Eau (tr. Downstream, 1927 (US) and 1952 (UK)), the study of the wretched existence of a minor fonctionnaire (civil servant), is published in Brussels.

  1883 May L’Art Moderne, a collection of critical essays championing progressive artists (Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, the Impressionists), is published.

  1884 1 Jan Salary increases to 3,600 francs p.a.

  1884 May A Rebours (tr. Against the Grain, 1922; Against Nature, 1959) is published to enormous acclaim.

  Friendship commences with Léon Bloy.

  1886 Jan. Only a loan from the poet François Coppée prevents Huysmans from becoming bankrupt due to losses incurred by the bookbindery.

  1887 1 Jan. Salary increases to 4,500 francs p.a.

  1887 16 April Salary increases to 4,800 francs p.a.

  1887 26 April En Rade (tr. Becalmed!, 1992 (UK) and A Haven, 1998 (US)) is published but fails to find favour with the public.

  1887 31 Oct. Letter to Zola first mentioning Là-Bas.

  1888 Spring The Universal Review commissions a novella from Huysmans but subsequently declines La Retraite de M. Bougran (M. Bougran’s Retirement).

  1888 Summer Huysmans encounters the work of the Primitives during a visit to Germany.

  1889 21 Aug. Funeral of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Mallarmé and Huysmans are named his literary executors.

  1889 Sept. Huysmans visits Tiffauges, the stronghold of Gilles de Rais. Huysmans meets Berthe de Courrière.

  1889 Nov. Publication of Certains, the author’s second volume of critical essays.

  1890 5 Feb. Huysmans writes to introduce himself to the former Abbé Boullan.

  1890 July La Bièvre (tr. The Bièvre River, 1986), an evocation of the river and its surroundings, is published.

  1890 Sept. Huysmans visits Boullan in Lyons.

  Berthe de Courrière is interned in Bruges.

  1891 15 Feb. L’Echo de Paris begins serialization of Là-Bas (The Damned).

  1891 March Henriette Maillat attempts to blackmail Huysmans over the author’s use of her correspondence in Là-Bas.

  1891 April Là-Bas published in book form.

  1891 28 May Berthe de Courrière introduces Huysmans to the Abbé Mugnier, who will become his spiritual director.

  1891 July Pilgrimage to La Salette, followed by a visit to Boullan in Lyons.

  1891 25 Sept. Paul Valéry visits Huysmans in his office.

  1892 Jan Huysmans holds a seance in his flat.

  1892 1 Feb. Salary increases to 5,000 francs p.a.

  1892 July Huysmans’ first retreat at Notre-Dame d’Igny.

  1893 3 Jan. Boullan dies at Lyons.

  1893 3 Sept. Huysmans appointed Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

  1894 Spring Huysmans meets Dom Besse, who is seeking to develop the small Benedictine community at Saint Wandrille in Normandy.

  1895 1 Jan. Salary increases to 6,000 francs p.a.

  1895 12 Feb. Death of Anna Meunier, his mistress, in Sainte-Anne.

  1895 25 Feb. Publication of En Route (tr. 1896), which describes Durtal’s conversion and subsequent retreat at Notre-Dame d’Igny.

  1896 Oct. Sojourn at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes.

  1898 Jan. La Cathédrale (tr. The Cathedral, 1898), the third volume in the Durtal cycle, is published.

  1898 16 Feb. Huysmans retires from the Civil Service after thirty-two years’ service.

  1899 June Leaves Paris to take up residence in his purpose-built house at Ligugé.

  Publication of La Magie en Poitou (Magic in Poitou).

  1900 18 Mar. Huysmans undergoes the ceremony of taking the robes of an oblate novice.

  1900 April First meeting of the Académie Goncourt, of which Huysmans is president.

  1901 Jan. Three studies by Huysmans of the old quarters of Paris – La Bièvre; Les Gobelins, St-Séverin – are reissued in a de luxe edition.

  1901 21 March Huysmans takes his final vows as an oblate.

  1901 8 June Publication of Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (tr. 1923), the harrowing story of the Dutch martyr.

  1901 Nov. Publication of De Tout (This and That), a collection of articles.

  1901 Oct. Government laws on religious communities oblige Huysmans to leave the abbey at Ligugé.

  1903 April Publication of L’Oblat (tr. The Oblate, 1924), the last volume in the Durtal cycle, recounting his stay at Ligugé.

  1906 Sept. Les Foules de Lourdes (tr. The Crowds of Lourdes, 1926) published.

  1906 8 Nov. Huysmans, realizing the gravity of his condition, drafts his will.

  1907 Jan. Promoted to Officier de la Légion d’Honneur.

  1907 12 May Death of Huysmans half an hour after the departure of Lucien Descaves, his literary executor.

  1907 15 May Huysmans is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in the family grave.

  1908 Posthumous publication of Trois Eglises et Trois Primitifs (Three Churches and Three Primitives).

  Introduction

  Thus when the universal sun has set does the moth seek the lamplight of privacy.

  Karl Marx

  ‘Against Nature fell like a meteorite into the literary fairground,’ Joris-Karl Huysmans remembered in the preface to the 1903 de luxe edition of this notorious book.1 The image of the meteorite – spectacular, explosive, otherworldly – to convey literary strangeness had been used by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé in his enigmatic poem ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ (‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’, 1877). ‘Calm block fallen here below from an obscure disaster’, Mallarmé had written, and it is perhaps this line that Huysmans had in mind when he recalled the bemusement, the outrage and the marvel Against Nature provoked when it appeared in May 1884. In France and across Europe the book was read as the most flamboyant expression of what came to be known as ‘the Decadence’. It was held up by some as a cautionary tale and by others as a manual of modern living; it was read as a moral fable and as a chilling case study of crisis and debauchery. Many felt that it marked the end of the novel, while a few saw it as the beginning of a new way of writing. For many critics, including Huysmans’ former mentor and friend Emile Zola, Against Nature was an eccentric and unhealthy book, passionless, introspective, and above all glorying in its removal from the world. For others, like the critic and novelist Remy de Gourmont, it was formally and thematically liberating. It was a novel that seemed not to want to be a novel; nothing happened, and yet the writing was dense, crowded and allusive. It was obscene, garish, depraved; but it was also a curiously ascetic and inward book. It dwelt fascinatedly on bodily functions, messy ailments and lurid sexual adventures, but it appeared also to strive for serenity and peace. In at least one respect Against Nature can be called a classic: it portrayed its time but also intervened in it. There are poems and stories inspired by or indebted to Against Nature in almost every European language, and Huysmans’ creation even found its way into fiction as every wit, dandy or femme fatale had a copy ready to hand. The novel’s hero, Duke Jean Floressas Des Esseintes – hoarder of literary treasures, lover of artifice and liver of the artistically mediated life – had joined Edgar Allan Poe, Schopenhauer and Baudelaire on the fin de siècle bookshelf.

  Against Nature is a brazen enough title in English, but in fact Against the Grain would better have captured the suggestive range of its French original, A Rebours, a far more open-ended title. To do something à rebours is to run countercurrent, to go against the flow, to do things the wrong way around; but it also suggests stubbornness, perversity, wilful difficulty – qualities and tendencies which Huysmans’ hero, Des Esseintes, shares with the novel that tells his story. By contrast, Against Nature is too reductive and unsubtle a title, and reflects the climate of its English reception rather than the range and complexity of the novel Huysmans wrote.2 By comparison with some of the more outlandish titles that appeared in 1884 – such as Péladan’s Le Vice suprême (The Supreme Vice), Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus or Elémir Bourges’ Crépuscule des Dieux (Twilight of the Gods) �
� A Rebours seemed mysterious and understated. The novel has proved critically inexhaustible, but it is also exhaustively written and perhaps exhausting to read. It is also about exhaustion: racial, social, moral, historical and aesthetic. It is a book of endings; yet for its author in his ‘Preface Written Twenty Years after the Novel’ (Appendix I), it is also a compendium of beginnings. Arthur Symons, the poet and critic who interpreted European Symbolism for modernists such as Yeats and Eliot, called it the ‘breviary of the Decadence’,3 while its most famous fictional reader, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, found it ‘poisonous’ and ‘the strangest book that he had ever read’.4 The novel has retained its cultish hold, as Marianne Faithfull recalls in her autobiography: ‘You would ask your date, “Do you know Genet? Have you read A Rebours?’’ and if he said yes you’d fuck.’5 It is a fine irony that a novel about an impotent, reclusive and prematurely aged reactionary should become a must-read in the vigorous counter-culture of the 1960s. Today’s readers may or may not feel the same as Dorian Gray or Marianne Faithfull; what is certain is that they will find it unlike any work of fiction they have encountered.

  HUYSMANS, ‘DECADENCE’ AND AGAINST NATURE

  [I]t is the difference between the raw, white and direct light of a midday sun beating down on all things equally, and the horizontal light of evening, firing the strange clouds with reflections… Does the setting sun of decadence deserve our contempt and anathema for being less simple in tone than the rising sun of morning?

  Théophile Gautier, Histoire du romantisme (History of Romanticism)

  For Gautier, discussing his friend Charles Baudelaire, ‘Decadence’ is the dying sun as it projects its intricate and complex fires across the sky. It is twilight; not the Yeatsian ‘Celtic Twilight’ prior to daybreak and revival, but the twilight of a sun setting for the last time on a tired globe and its tired inhabitants. For the artists and writers who proclaimed themselves ‘Decadent’, it was a compelling metaphor: ‘we are dying of civilization’, wrote Edmond de Goncourt, a writer Huysmans admired and learned from. Many artists of the period invoked the decline and fall of the hyper-civilized Roman Empire as the most resonant ‘culture rhyme’ for modern France. Certainly there were grounds for such views: a sense of historical decline symbolized by a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, who marched on the French capital in 1870, followed by the Commune and the siege of Paris in 1871, a bloody and divisive episode in French history whose memory endured until the Second World War. This they called ‘the débâcle’, and the symbolism was powerful: invaded and humiliated by the ‘barbarian’ Germans, then ruinously tearing itself apart, French civilization, guardian of ‘Latin’ values, appeared to have peaked and begun a slow collapse. Huysmans, a (non-combatant) soldier during the Franco-Prussian war and a civil servant during the siege of Paris, witnessed the French defeat, the Commune and its brutal repression, and the national soul-searching that came in their aftermath.