A contrapelo Read online

  But there was also a malaise more difficult to pin down: a sense that everything had been done, said, written, felt. As Des Esseintes muses reading Baudelaire, the late nineteenth century’s was a ‘mind that ha[d] reached the October of its sensations’. Yet there was something wilfully self-dramatizing about all these decadent attitudes – after all, the nineteenth century had known extraordinary technological, political and scientific advances, and all of these had happened at breathtaking pace. While many embraced these changes, others saw them in unambiguously negative terms: ‘we have spent the nineteenth century splitting hairs; how shall we spend the twentieth? Splitting them into four?’ asked one of Huysmans’ contemporaries. Against Nature is full of references to the century’s end, the end of art, the end of creativity, and it was to what Mallarmé called the ‘modern muse of Impotence’ that the new generation looked: all writing seemed a rewriting, every reading a rereading. But there was another story, equally compelling: in art, literature, social and political theory and in science, the second half of the nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented innovation. With poets such as Mallarmé, Verlaine and the Symbolists, novelists such as Zola and Maupassant, artists such as Manet and Rodin, composers such as Debussy or Erik Satie, we might object that, on the contrary, this was no decadence but a period of astonishing artistic richness and diversity. Perhaps the belief that there was nothing new was itself a necessary prelude to creating the new. This is one of the great paradoxes of the late nineteenth century: that these contradictory views – of decadence and renewal, beginnings and ends, exhaustion and innovation – could be held simultaneously and often by the same people.

  One of the great formative novels of French Romanticism, Chateaubriand’s René (1802), had helped define what came to be called the ‘sickness of the century’ (mal du siècle) felt by the rootless, aimless, self-indulgent aristocrats in a world which seemed not to need them. ‘Alone in the great desert of men’ was how René, ‘last of his race’, put it: it was a historical, sexual and cultural dispossession, but it gave the Romantic writer opportunity to explore the mysteries of the infinitely desiring but finite self. As late as 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson mocked the persistence of ‘René’s malady’ among the young of his own period: ‘Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year… look down from their pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life.’6 When Huysmans loosed Des Esseintes upon the reading public, people interpreted his character, for all his disturbing newness, as part of an unfolding tradition: an orphan perhaps, but an orphan with a pedigree.

  The end of the nineteenth century seemed to mirror its beginning, but whereas the Romantics had their illusions shattered, the Decadents merely had their disillusionment reinforced. Osip Mandelstam uses a 1913 review of a Russian translation of Huysmans’ Croquis Parisiens (Parisian Sketches, 1881) to distinguish between the Romantics and their Decadent successors, between the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century:

  This book is almost intentionally physiological. Its primary theme is the clash between the defenceless but refined external organs of perception and insulted reality. Paris is hell… Huysmans’s boldness and innovation stem from the fact that he managed to remain a confirmed hedonist under the worst possible conditions… The decadents did not like reality, but they did know reality, and that is what distinguishes them from the romantics.7

  ‘Live? Our servants will do that for us’: the defiant words of the heroic and princely recluse of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (1890) became a supreme idealist battle-cry, uttered in heroic defiance of materialist society and its stultifying cult of bourgeois ‘common sense’. This was the epoch of the superman and of the individualist, but it was also the epoch of his less fortunate twin: the sickly, the consumptive, the neurotic. In Huysmans’ novels, the self is not a goal but a refuge, no longer an aspiration but a point of final fallback; the heritage of individualism remained, but wounded, humiliated and in retreat.

  The Romantic heroes had travelled to exotic places in search of themselves, only to discover that it was themselves they were trying to escape. They had, like René, posed on seashores, mountain tops and volcanoes. Their Decadent successors were mired in the filth of the crawling cityscape, compulsively drawn to its alternating tedium and exhilaration; but they were drawn also to interiors, the ornate, meticulously furnished, airless rooms that symbolize their retreat. Huysmans’ characters, as Mandelstam notes, are among the most physiologically sensitive in literature, and their quest for peace or fulfilment takes its toll not just on their spirits but on their bodies. In Des Esseintes’s case, the quest terminates indoors, the final bastion of the privacy that feeds on itself until there is nothing left. Des Esseintes thus became the exemplary Decadent figure: the last, sickly scion of a once great family, his mind addled by fantastical luxury and his body wracked by abuse, he retires from the nineteenth century – the ‘American century’ as both Des Esseintes and Huysmans call it – to build his own dream fortress. Against Nature is the tale of this obsession.

  HUYSMANS AND AGAINST NATURE

  It was as if everything that was disgusting and horrible in every sphere of life forced itself on his attention, and that all manner of abomination had produced an artist uniquely made to paint them and a man created expressly to suffer from them.

  Paul Valéry, ‘Souvenirs de J.-K. Huysmans’ (‘Memories of J.-K. Huysmans’)

  Joris-Karl Huysmans was born in 1848, the revolutionary year in which Flaubert set part of L’Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education), the novel Huysmans claimed in his 1903 preface had most influenced him. His father, who died in 1856, was an artist of Dutch origins, and the son would later refer to himself as a mystical Fleming beneath the skin of a neurotic Parisian. J.-K. Huysmans would produce some of the finest art criticism of his generation, and his attention was particularly drawn to nordic artists, the Flemish and Dutch, with whose cultures he retained a lifelong sympathy.

  In 1866, Huysmans joined the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained until 1898. The drudgery of bureaucratic routine was minutely detailed in a number of works, notably A Vau-l’Eau (Downstream, 1882), the novella that gave rise to Against Nature, and the strange story, La Retraite de M. Bougran (Mr. Bougran’s Retirement), written in 1888 but first published in 1964), of a retired bureaucrat addicted to the banality of his job. In 1870 Huysmans was conscripted into the army and later worked for the Versailles War Ministry during the Paris Commune. He describes some of his army experiences in Sac au dos (Knapsack, 1880), the story he contributed to the volume Les Soirées de Medan (Medan Evenings), a collective book by Zola and his disciples intended to showcase the work of the Naturalist writers. However, Huysmans’ first published work, Le Drageoir à épices (Dish of Spices, 1874), was far from being a Naturalist specimen. It was a collection of lurid, flashy and precocious prose-poems which one Parisian publisher, refusing the manuscript, accused of launching a ‘revolutionary Paris Commune in the French language’.8 Two years later, when Huysmans became associated with the Naturalists, he was a vocal defender of Zola and his principles, publishing a passionate defence of Zola’s L’Assommoir and of Naturalist writing. Huysmans soon became acquainted with the most innovative writers and artists of the period. Among his friends and correspondents were Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Mallarmé – a representative cross-section of the many literary tendencies of the time.

  Huysmans’ first novel, Marthe, histoire d’une fille (Marthe: Story of a Prostitute), was published in 1876. According to his biographer (and the translator of this edition of Against Nature), Robert Baldick, it was the first novel to deal with prostitution in licensed brothels, memorably described as ‘slaughterhouses of love’. His next book, Les Soeurs Vatard (The Vatard Sisters), which appeared in 1879, contains a character, the artist Cyprien Tibaille, who is eccentric and inward, an idealist caught in a disappointing world. Flaubert
, to whom Huysmans sent his novel, admired it but criticized it on two counts. First, he claimed that, like his own L’Education sentimentale, there was no ‘false perspective’ in the novel and thus no ‘progression of effect’: ‘art is not reality’, Flaubert told him, ‘like it or not, we must choose carefully among the elements [reality] provides’ (undated letter of February–March, 1879). Flaubert’s second criticism concerned Huysmans’ passion for rare, difficult or specialized vocabulary: whether refined or coarse, arcane or streetwise, Huysmans’ love of words attracted notice from his earliest work. After Les Soeurs Vatard, there followed En Ménage (Living Together, 1881), about a failing and claustrophobic marriage, which Zola describedas‘a page of human life, banalyet poignant’. Interestingly, several of Huysmans’ early ‘Naturalist’ novels were important to André Breton, the self-styled leader of the Surrealists, who was fascinated by Huysmans’ apparently subversivelife: a penpusher and bureaucrat writing his disturbing novels at his ministry desk, often on ministry headed paper. This is how Breton, in his Anthologie de l’humour noir (Anthology of Black Humour, 1939), imagined Huysmans at work:

  With a derision whose secret pleasure he has discovered, the life of this great imaginative writer ebbed away between ministerial filing boxes (reports from his superiors depict him as a model employee). It fits perfectly with this writer’s style, at once crushing and elevating, that in breaks from work, with a few technical manuals within reach and a cookery book always open before him, Huysmans should – with unique foresight – have pieced together most of the laws which would govern modern feeling.9

  Huysmans was attached to the bureaucratic life. It gave him time to write as well as subjects to write about; but above all it kept the world at bay. When in 1893 he retired from his ministry he kept the headed notepaper, doctoring it so that it read ‘Ministry of the Interior [Life]’.

  Some critics have suggested that there was little in Huysmans’ previous work to prepare for Against Nature, but this is misleading. Readers of his early novels had already noticed his fixation with the demeaning mundanities of life, with daily existence as a pleasureless assault course of disappointment and minor degradation. Huysmans was interested in the stuff of lives that would never amount to tragedy, but this did not mean that his prose needed to be flat and factual. Besides the descriptive detail, documentary precision and social observation associated with Naturalism, Huysmans’ style – as Goncourt, Flaubert and Zola noticed – was colourful and nervy, full of rare words and startling adjectives. Edmond de Goncourt had found even in Marthe that Huysmans was too easily tempted by ‘the fine expression, the brilliant, startling or oddly archaic word’, and that this threatened to ‘kill the reality of [his] well-conceived realistic scenes’ (letter of October 1879). Reviewing Sac au dos, the novelist Jean Richepin had called Huysmans’ writing ‘the debauchery of style: rare substantives, strange epithets, unexpected fusions of words, archaisms and neologisms’ (Gil Blas, 21 April 1880). It is curious to see how responses to Huysmans’ ‘Naturalist’ work resemble responses to Against Nature, in which, as Léon Bloy puts it, Huysmans is ‘continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax’.10 Huysmans’ contemporaries had noticed also his attentiveness to the intimate emotional and intellectual processes of characters who were often sensitive creatures, men (very occasionally women) designed for pain and disappointment, battered by the casual brutality of modern life. These characters were often isolated; lost and bruised and ill-fitted to their lives, they were not ‘types’ but exceptions. Where Zola excelled at painting the crowd, Huysmans excelled at portraying the individual; where Zola plotted the progress of a family, Huysmans fixed his eye on the bachelor, the unpartnered or the isolated. The Naturalists are often simplistically read, with critics crying foul whenever they spot a metaphor or an imaginative reflex in a ‘Naturalist’ book. We do not need to worry about classifying Huysmans, but to remember that there was plenty of room in Naturalist theory and practice to exercise the imagination and to perfect the art of illusion. A valuable insight into Huysmans’ style and his contexts (those in which he was read as well as those in which he wrote) comes from James Joyce. ‘The very intensity and refinement of French realism betrays its spiritual origins’, wrote Joyce, before noting, in a beautiful and precise formulation, ‘the angry fervour of corruption… that illuminates Huysmans’s sad pages with a blighted phosphorescence’.11

  The nearest analogy to Huysmans’ manner, this sense of ‘blighted phosphorescence’, was what was known as ‘écriture artiste’, the rarefied, hypersensitive style of the Goncourt brothers, the aristocrats of Naturalist writing. In one of Against Nature’s most memorable images, Des Esseintes describes the Goncourts’ style as ‘gamey’, and calls Edmond de Goncourt’s writing ‘penetrating and sickly, tense and subtle’. For Des Esseintes, language, like meat, is at its tastiest as it is turning – as, on the cusp of rotting, the flavours are released. It is one of Against Nature’s recurrent analogies: between food and language, and if the reader finds Huysmans’ style ‘hard to swallow’ or ‘hard to keep down’ this is as it should be. After all, this was an author who regularly wrote to his friends asking for information on technical language, bureaucratic lingo, street slang, and who relished the strange words he dredged up from glossaries and manuals.

  It was the short novel A Vau-l’Eau that opened the way for Against Nature. Its hero Folantin searches without success for good food, decent furnishings, good male and female company. The story ends with him crying out, echoing Schopenhauer, the German philosopher whose pessimism shaped a generation of French writers: ‘only the worst happens’. In the 1903 preface Huysmans recalled that in starting Against Nature, he had

  pictured another Mr Folantin, better-read, more refined and richer, who had discovered in artifice a diversion from the disgust of life’s petty torments and the Americanized manners of his day. I envisaged him soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings.

  Although Against Nature is unique, it forms part of a series of novels of retreat that occupied Huysmans up to and including his extraordinary tale of satanism and sadism Là-Bas (The Damned) of 1891.12 Three years after Against Nature Huysmans published En Rade (Becalmed), the story of a young couple who move to the countryside to escape the expense and stress of Paris. Their rural idyll becomes a hell, as they are swindled by rapacious peasants and tormented by sickness and pests; their food is disgusting, the countryside too hot, too wet, too cold. In La Retraite de M. Bougran a retired ministry clerk misses his job so much that he has his flat decorated exactly like his former office and pays a retired office boy to bring him the letters he has posted to himself the previous day. He drafts tedious reports in his most bureaucratic French and is eventually found dead at his desk having scribbled a few last words of ministerial jargon.

  Huysmans’ books are full of retreats: to the office, the bedroom, the library, the past, the monastery. The working title of Against Nature had been ‘Seul’ (‘Alone’), but in a sense all of his novels and stories had explored solitude, the aspirations of the yearning individual in a valueless world. It now remained for Huysmans to attempt a book that banished that world.

  WRITING AGAINST NATURE

  This book will at least have curiosity value among your works.

  Zola to Huysmans, May 1884

  In spring 1883 Huysmans told his friend, the Belgian poet Théodore Hannon, that he was ‘immersed in a very strange novel, vaguely clerical, a bit homosexual… A novel with only one character!’, adding that the book would contain ‘the ultimate refinement of everything: literature, Art, flowers, perfumes, furnishings, gemstones, etc.’13 A few months earlier Huysmans had requested help from Mallarmé for the literary dimension of this ‘ultimate refinement’, asking him to send a few uncollected poems for use in depicting Des Esseintes’s tast
es in modern literature. Huysmans addresses Mallarmé as ‘Dear Colleague’, praising the ‘troubling sublimity’ of his poetry,14 but his correspondence reveals that he was playing literary double agent. In May 1884 he told Zola that in Against Nature, ‘I expressed ideas diametrically opposed to my own… this complete dichotomy with my own preferences allowed me to enunciate really sick ideas and celebrate the glory of Mallarmé, which I thought was quite a joke.’15 In the same letter he insists on the book’s methodological Naturalism, assuring Zola that he had followed the medical treatises on breakdown and nervous disorder, and emphasizing his extensive use of documents. But the following year (in September 1885), he was telling Jules Laforgue:

  When I wrote that chapter on modern profane literature in Against Nature and I praised Corbière, Verlaine and Mallarmé, I thought I was writing for myself, and did not suspect that the whole movement was getting under way in that direction… As yet no one has penetrated the intimate depths of that chapter, despite the fact that I explained Mallarmé, that most abstruse of poets, so as to make him almost clear.16