Emerson said that “books are for nothing but to inspire.” There could be no better description of the worth of this one.
*Preface to Sophie Deroisin, Le Prince de Ligne.
BALZAC
*
ARTHUR Waley said that he preferred to read Dickens in Chinese translation (Dickens’s first Chinese translator was indeed an exquisite writer). I wonder if Balzac does not also belong to the category of writers who actually benefit from being translated. I suspect that his visionary imagination would remain unaffected by the transposition into another language, whereas it would be relatively easy for tactful translators to soften the jarring notes and straighten the blunders that, in the original, frequently jolt the reader or threaten, at the most dramatic moments, to set off anticlimactic laughter.
Balzac’s prose is littered with ludicrous conceits, mixed metaphors, clichés and various manifestations of naïveté and bad taste. Mere haste and negligence cannot fully account for so much awkwardness; although his first drafts were often dashed off at astounding speed and in enormous creative bursts, Balzac was also a painstaking, obsessive — and notorious — re-writer. His revisions, corrections, re-corrections and corrections of re-corrections that swelled into the margins of his galley proofs, smothering the printed text under their exuberant growth, famously drove typesetters to fury and despair.
That such a great writer should have written so badly was a source of puzzlement for some of the best connoisseurs (who were also his warmest admirers), from Baudelaire to Flaubert. The paradox was aptly summed up by Flaubert himself: “What a man Balzac would have been had he known how to write! But that was the only thing he lacked. After all, an artist would never have accomplished so much, nor had such breadth.”
French literary taste always finds it difficult to deal with those aspects of genius that do not readily fit within a classical frame. An early illustration of this tendency was provided by Voltaire when he apologised for having foolishly introduced Shakespeare on the French stage: “I first showed the French a few pearls I had retrieved from his huge heap of dung… I did not realise at the time that I was actually trampling upon the laurels of Racine and Corneille in order to adorn the head of this barbaric play-actor.”[1] Later on, native literary giants did not fare much better. Victor Hugo, who was Balzac’s junior by only three years (but whose career lasted nearly twice as long), came to enjoy even greater popularity; yet, for all his triumphs, he never fully succeeded in disarming the reservations of the purists. In our own time, two comments that summarise, with cruel wit, the critical ambivalence that still persists towards Hugo would fit Balzac much better. On being asked who was the greatest French poet, André Gide replied: “Victor Hugo — alas!” And Jean Cocteau added: “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo.” Both in greatness and in lunacy, Balzac certainly scaled heights that were at least as spectacular.
Balzac’s claim to the title of Greatest French Novelist of All Time can hardly be disputed: he simply bulldozed his way into that position, propelled by the sheer mass and energy of his production. The total cast of his Comédie humaine amounts to some 3,500 characters (including a few animals) — in all Western literature, only Shakespeare and Dickens approached such a bewildering fecundity.
To engage in a complete reading of his Comédie humaine is akin to climbing onto a raft and attempting the descent of a huge wild river: once you start, you cannot get off, you are powerless to stop, you are carried away into another world — more exciting, more intense, more real than the dull scene you left ashore. Everything is larger than life, loaded with energy. In Balzac’s novels, Baudelaire observed, even doorkeepers have genius, and Oscar Wilde added:
A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent, fiery coloured existence. They dominate us and defy scepticism… Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.
If the ride is exhilarating, it can also be rough. At times you will surge and soar, but you will also be bumped about and struck by absurdities: “Children, said the old marquess, as he took all three of them by the hand.” You will have to swallow a ration of indigestible, insipid or silly images: “She was more than a woman, she was a masterpiece!” “Socrates, the pearl of mankind.” Sometimes, however, the tastelessness is relieved by grotesquerie: “The Countess’s breasts, which were lightly veiled by a translucid gauze, were devoured by the charmed eyes of the young man, who could, in the silence of the night, hear the murmur of these ivory globes.” (In fact, women’s breasts seem to have fed some of Balzac’s oddest inspirations. Elsewhere, he describes the visual impact produced by a middle-aged woman’s “low-cut dress”: “Mlle. Cormon’s treasures were violently thrust out of their jewel-cases.”) In some passages the gap that usually separates literature from cheap sentimental fiction is boldly bridged, for instance in this description of a loose actress falling passionately in love with a handsome young poet:
Coralie took advantage of the darkness to bring to her lips Lucien’s hand, and she kissed it, and wetted it with her tears. Lucien was moved, down to the very marrow of his bones. The humility shown by a courtesan in love sometimes presents a moral splendour that could teach a lesson even to the angels.
Yet even popular women’s magazines have their editorial standards, and one doubts if they would ever have been willing to publish the passage in which Lucien is in his loge and Coralie is on stage, behind the curtain which is still down, and “suddenly the amorous light flowing from her eyes pierced the curtain and flooded into Lucien’s gaze.” These quotations (which I have translated directly from the French)[2] all come from Balzac’s mature masterpieces. If an aspiring writer were to show such samples of his prose to a competent critic, publisher or editor, the only sensible advice that could be given him would be to renounce forever any literary ambition, never again to touch a pen; any activity would be preferable — instead of writing fiction, let him start a pineapple farm or go into the grocery business, sell manure, import railway sleepers from the Ukraine, dredge the Tiber for lost Roman antiquities or dig for gold in Brazil. In fact, these were some of the many enterprises that Balzac seriously contemplated; had he achieved a measure of success in any of them, he himself believed that he would have devoted his creative imagination entirely to business, and that he would have forsaken all literary endeavours. Or would he?
In his hugely entertaining new biography of Balzac (certainly the best of all those I have read), Graham Robb does not directly address the central paradox of Balzac’s prodigious achievement: How was it possible that the greatest monument of European fiction was built by a man singularly devoid of literary taste? Although Robb takes a purely biographical and non-literary approach (the novels are not analysed but merely mentioned, as chronological stages in Balzac’s career), he eventually provides most of the clues that may help to solve this riddle.
Balzac’s mother was a cold and frivolous woman, who denied him her affection. This childhood wound never healed. He himself was later to say: “All my misfortune came from my mother: she destroyed me purposefully, for the fun of it.” Georges Simenon — the poor man’s Balzac of our time — recognised here his own predicament and commented: