Drifting a Vau-L'eau (Dedalus European Classics)

by J.-K. Huysmans

  58 The scent New Mown Hay was one that had a certain vogue during the 1880s and was marketed by a number of perfumers, most notably Guerlain in Paris. It contained coumarin, one of the first perfumery ingredients to be created synthetically. Huysmans was obviously taken with the perfume’s name, which is in English on the original bottle, and he referred to it in subsequent works such as L’Art moderne (1883) and À rebours (1884).

  59 In the original, Huysmans uses the word ambre, a reference to ambergris, which in the nineteenth century was used as an ingredient in perfumes. In 1895, the New York Times described the earthy smell of ambergris as being “like the blending of new-mown hay, the damp woodsy fragrance of a fern copse, and the faintest possible perfume of the violet.” Huysmans made reference to ambre in a number of his books, usually to signify sensuality or female sexuality: in Marthe, histoire d’une fille (1876), for example, it is used to convey the heady smell of a brothel. I have substituted ‘musk’ for ‘amber’, as it is a more commonly recognised scent and has similar overtones of sensuality.

  60 In the original, the woman uses the phrase mes petits gants, which has the same meaning as the now out-of-date English phrase “glove money”, a term for a tip or gratuity given to a servant.

  61 This quote appears in Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818). Huysmans came across the philosopher’s ideas, as well as an account of his life, in a small selection of his work entitled Pensées, maximes et fragments, which was translated into French by Jean Bourdeau in 1880. Both quotes used in À vau-l’eau can be found in Bourdeau’s book. Schopenhauer’s philosophy represented an important stage in Huysmans’ thinking about the notion of suffering, and his ideas would influence subsequent books such as À rebours and En Rade.

  62 The last words are an adaptation of a phrase in Schopenhauer’s On the Sufferings of the World, as it appeared in French: “Aujourd’hui est mauvais, et chaque jour sera plus mauvais, jusqu’à ce que le pire arrive.” (“Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse; until at last the worst of all arrives.”) In the manuscript of À vau-l’eau conserved at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, the originally intended ending, after the words “horizon of his life”, reads as follows:

  “He understood the inutility of changing course, a pace slowed or hurried, the abyss of desires and of hopes, the inanity of action and effort. It’s really not worth the effort to go on or to retreat, he thought. It was a mistake to renew the hopes of my youth, to have gone to the theatre, to have visited a woman, it was a mistake to leave one bad restaurant in order to go to another no less bad, and after all that to end up eating rotten sausages from a patisserie!

  Well, tomorrow I’ll go back to the old eatery, I’ll return to the frightful herd. Certainly, there’s no such thing as the best for people with no money, only the worst arrives. And as he went back home he repeated melancholically Karamzin’s despairing lament: ‘What good does it do me, what good does it do you, what good does it do us all, to be alive? What good did living do our ancestors, what good will living do our descendants?

  ‘My soul is exhausted, feeble and sad.’”

  At a late stage in the book’s production, however, Huysmans first decided to expand the anonymous Schopenhauer reference by inserting the following sentence after the word “arrives”: “Schopenhauer was right to say that the life of a man swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom.” Then, clearly dissatisfied by this uneasy mix of quotes from two different writers, he struck the whole section through and, underneath it, wrote out the ending as it now appears in the published edition. Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826) was a Russian writer, poet, journalist, historian and critic. The source of the quote isn’t clear, but it must have been something that passed around Huysmans’s set of close friends, as Léon Bloy used the same quote in Le Désespéré (1886), which appeared a few years after À vau-l’eau.

  J.-K. Huysmans: Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui1 (Men of Today),

  No 263, 1885

  Monsieur J.-K. Huysmans was born in February 1848, in Paris, at No. 11 Rue de Suger, an old house that still exists, with its ancient arched doorway and double doors, painted green and studded with enormous nails. His father, Gotfried Huysmans, was originally from Breda (Holland), and plied his trade as a painter; his grandfather was also a painter, and one of his uncles, now retired in The Hague, was a long-standing professor of painting at the Academies of Breda and Tilburg. From father to son, everyone has painted in this family, which counts Cornelius Huysmans, whose paintings figure in the Louvre, among its ancestors. Uniquely, the last of the line, the writer who now concerns us, has substituted a pen for the brush; but in order not to belie the traditions of his lineage, no doubt, he has written a book about art, one that would certainly astonish his forefathers, men who diligently applied themselves to painting tiny clusters of leaves on trees against an ultramarine background. Imagine that: to defend Pissarro and Claude Monet and yet be the offspring of a line of classical painters!

  “And on your mother’s side?” I asked, the morning I was interviewing him in the bizarre apartment he occupies in a former Premonstratensian convent, in the Rue de Sevres.

  “Lower middle class. My grandfather was a cashier in the Ministry of the Interior. But, since you seem to be concerned about my hereditary antecedents, I can tell you that my grandmother’s father was a sculptor, a winner of the Prix de Rome. He produced that heap of uniforms jutting out on the pedestal of the Vendôme column, he helped with the more pompous decorations on the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, and I believe he even perpetrated some of those astonishing bas-reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe in the Champs-Élysées.”

  “You don’t seem to profess a very high esteem for the work of your ancestor…”

  “Old Gérard2 was, I believe, a bit like Maindron,3 a sort of conscientious plaster cast man; he sculpted neither better nor worse than those of his day; basically, I neither esteem nor disrespect his work. It leaves me indifferent, that’s all.”

  I looked at the man as he spoke to me. He had the air of a courteous cat, very polite, almost amiable, but nervous, ready to show his claws at the slightest word. Dry, lean, grizzled, an agile face with a slightly annoyed air, that’s the impression I felt at first glance.

  “Now then,” I said, getting down to the matter, “you must be pleased with the literary success of Against Nature?”4

  “Yes, the book exploded among the artistic youth like a grenade. I thought I was writing for ten people, constructing a sort of hermetic book, inaccessible to fools. To my great surprise, it seems that several thousand people scattered around all points of the globe were in a state of mind analogous to mine, sickened by the ignominious stupidity of the present century and likewise avid for books that were more or less good, or at least honestly written, without that miserable haste for copy which is now afflicting France, from the great to the small, from top to bottom!”

  “And this recognition by a modest audience, albeit one that loves you, hasn’t made you any less pessimistic?”

  “Oh, let’s leave pessimism aside if you don’t mind. I’m not a sort of Swiss Obermann5 to be interrogated on that subject. There’s a special shelf of it at the market stall for clapped-out literary hacks, or go to the department store of literature’s past, they’ll sell you pessimism by the yard.”

  “And if I were to ask you about Naturalism, because, after all, you pass for one of its most fanatical partisans?”

  “I would reply quite simply that I write what I see, what I live, what I feel, while writing as well as I can. If that is Naturalism so much the better. Basically, there are writers who have talent and others who don’t, whether they be Naturalists, Romantics, Decadents, or whatever you will, it’s all the same to me; it’s enough for me to have talent, that’s all.”

  “Lastly, in spite of the contempt you display for criticism, you have to admit there’s some good in it, because it no longer dismisses you now as it did in the past, it even has a cer
tain respect for you.”

  Here Huysmans smiled strangely. “The good old days are gone,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “those days of The Vatard Sisters,6 when they’d pour buckets of filth over my head every day. Chaperon is dead and Véron has fallen silent.7 They were evidently good souls those fine upstanding men, because they hounded me for the immorality of my books! No, now the disagreeable articles are simply silly, the journalists’ stupidity is predictable, their hatred’s lost its edge!”

  At this moment a beautiful ginger cat made its entrance.

  “Aha,” I said, “that’s no doubt ‘Barre de Rouille’, the celebrated cat from Living Together.”8

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t often mix with men of letters, I believe?”

  “As little as I can. All their complaints about publishers and enquiries about earnings weary me. I’m positively happy not to have to endure such repeated refrains.”

  “One more question. Was it your own story of the war that you recounted in Backpack?”9

  “Absolutely.”

  “So I don’t need to ask you what your feelings about patriotism are?”

  “In truth that wouldn’t take us very far. All that I can tell you is this: above all things I hate exuberant people. Now all men from the South yell, they have an accent which horrifies me, and what’s worse they gesticulate. No, between these men with astrakhan curls on their skulls and ebony whiskers on their cheeks, and the great phlegmatic and silent Germans, there’s no doubt where my choice lies. I shall always feel more affinities for a man from Leipzig than for a man from Marseilles. Any man in fact, except those from the South of France, because I know no race that’s so particularly odious to me.”

  I didn’t want to discuss the outrageousness of such ideas; I took leave of the author of Against Nature and shook his hand, an extraordinary hand by the way, the hand of a very thin infante, with small, slender fingers.

  In short, my first impression was justified: Huysmans is very certainly the sour misanthrope, the anemic-nervous type of his books, which I will now briefly review.

  He began with a mediocre collection of prose poems, entitled A Dish of Spices;10 then he wrote a novel – the first on the subject – about girls in a brothel, Marthe, which appeared in 1876, in Brussels, and was, in spite of the purity of its aims, banned in France as an outrage against morals. L’Assommoir11 hadn’t yet made that formidable breach that everyone is aware of now. Marthe has since been republished in Paris and obtained a certain success. The book contains, here and there, some exact observations, and already reveals sickly qualities of style, but if you ask me the language recalls that of Goncourt too much. It is a beginner’s book, curious and vibrant, but too restrained, insufficiently personal.

  We must look to The Vatard Sisters to find the bizarre temperament of this writer, an inexplicable amalgam of a refined Parisian and a painter from Holland. This fusion, to which one can add a pinch of black humour and coarse English comedy, is the trademark of the works that now occupy us.

  The Vatard Sisters contains some beautiful pages, bringing for the first time into modern literature – it appeared in 1879 – the railway and its locomotives, which are singularly described. It’s a slice of life of two female bookbinders, sordid but exact, it’s got the patina of an old painting by Steen,12 worked by an alert and fine Parisian hand, but for my part, I prefer Living Together, which moreover remains my favourite book among those we owe to this author.

  It’s because this book provides insights into melancholy, and reveals the souls of those who are particularly desolate and feeble. It is a song of nihilism, a song made darker still by flashes of sinister gaiety and given in the words of a ferocious spirit. This novel stuffed full of ideas ends, logically enough, in resignation, in letting things go, as does Drifting, which is like a liturgy of everyday miseries. But in Against Nature, rage appears, the indolent mask is broken, invectives about life blaze in each line; we are far from the placid and anguished philosophy of the two preceding books. It is a book of delirium and foaming at the mouth; I don’t think the hatred and contempt of a century has ever been more furiously expressed than in this strange novel, so unconnected to all contemporary literature.

  One of the great defects in M. Huysmans’ books is, in my opinion, the singular personality running like a thread through each of his works. Cyprien Tibaille and André, Folantin and des Esseintes13 are, in short, but one and the same person, transported into different environments. And very obviously that person is M. Huysmans, that much is clear; we are far removed from that perfect art of Flaubert, who effaced himself from his work and created characters so magnificently diverse. M. Huysmans is quite incapable of such an effort. His sardonic, crabby face appears in ambush at the turn of every page, and the constant intrusion of his personality, however interesting it may be, diminishes the greatness of his work and, if you ask me, in the long run one tires of its invariability.

  I will not speak here of his style. Everything has been said about it in a very judicious article by M. Hennequin.14 Some of his pages have a splendour, to cite only one quality, that is and will remain justly famous; but there is another point that criticism has generally affected not to see: I mean his psychological analysis and his characters – or rather his character, because there is only one, as I have already said: a weak-willed character, anxious, skilled in torturing himself, rational, seeing far enough to explain the diagnostic of his own sickness and to summarize it in eloquent and precise phrases. It is in the analysis of this character that one of the originalities of this author lies, an originality that is equalled, in my opinion, by that of his style. Read the ‘petticoat crisis’15 in Living Together, and consider that nowhere else has this miniscule district of the soul been glimpsed before him. How right the monograph of this crisis is, and with what clever lucidity he shows it to us! In addition to this, read that superb chapter in Against Nature, the chapter devoted to childhood memories and to theological vacillations, which is so ingeniously explained, and see whether these explorations of the cavernous spiritual depths of the soul are not absolutely profound and absolutely new.

  In addition to these works, M. Huysmans has published a volume of Parisian Sketches,16 in which, like Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire,17 he attempted to refashion the prose poem. And somehow he has renovated and rejuvenated it, using curious artifices, free verse as a refrain, topping and tailing his poems with a rhythmic, repeated, bizarre phrase, sometimes even endowing them with a sort of ritornello or a separate, final stanza, like those in the ballads of Villon and Deschamps.18 He has also written some reviews of art exhibitions, collected together in his book Modern Art,19 the first volume to seriously explain the Impressionists and assign to Degas the high place he will occupy in the future. J.-K. Huysmans was also the first to make Raffaëlli20 more widely known, at a time when no one gave any thought to this painter, and likewise the first to explain and launch Odilon Redon.21 What other art critic is endowed with this acute flair and this understanding of art in its most diverse manifestations?

  In short, if there’s any justice, the fate of M. Huysmans – so despised by the vulgar – will be a good one. Now I confess that, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t share his beliefs. Personally, I believe in a healthier form of literature, in a style that’s less dazzling, no doubt, but also less obscure; I believe, too, that psychological analysis has a more general aspect, one that is broader and less idiosyncratic. Balzac seems to me to be, from this point of view, the master, having so marvellously dissected the great and universal passions of human beings: fatherly love and avarice. As high as I would place M. Huysmans among the true writers of a century that can count so few of them, I can’t help considering him an exception, a strange and sickly writer, capricious, daring, an artist to his very fingernails, “dragging” – in the words of another strange writer of far-out, splenetic, plain-spoken epithets, with singularly disconcerting ideas, Léon Bloy22 – “dragging the Image, by the hair or by the
feet, down the worm-eaten staircase of a terrified Syntax”. But whatever admiration one might feel, all this doesn’t seem to me to constitute that healthiness of ideas and style which can produce incontrovertible and unequivocal masterpieces.

  A. Meunier23

  Notes

  1 Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui (Men of Today) was a review founded in 1878 by André Gill and Félicien Champsaur, with each issue comprising an illustrated monograph on a famous contemporary. No. 263, published in 1885, was devoted to J.-K. Huysmans, but unlike all the other monographs in the series Huysmans was allowed to write his own copy, which was published under a pseudonym, ‘A. Meunier’. One reason for this was, no doubt, the friendship between Huysmans and the man who took over the running of the series in 1883, Léon Vanier. Vanier would also publish the second, expanded edition of Croquis parisiens (Parisian Sketches) in 1886. Huysmans writes of himself in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion, criticising his own work and ironically using the clichés that were often repeated in other journalistic profiles.

  2 Antoine-François Gérard (1760-1843), a sculptor, was Huysmans’ great grandfather on his mother’s side.

  3 A reference to Hippolyte Maindron (1801-1884), a sculptor perhaps best known for funerary statuary.

  4 Huysmans’ iconoclastic novel À rebours of 1884, which diverged from many of the tenets of Zolaesque Naturalism, and which signalled a cooling off in the friendship between the two men. Unsurprisingly, it was the last of Huysmans’ novels to be published by Charpentier, who was also Zola’s publisher.

  5 An epistolary novel by the French writer, Étienne Senancour (1770-1846), which was begun in Paris but finished in Switzerland two years later. Seen as Senancour’s masterpiece, the book expressed a brooding pessimism through the figure of Obermann, that had a powerful influence on the Romantic movement. It was published in 1804.