The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  These interests, and the viewpoints they generated not only led Rosny to repeated early experiments in scientific romance—although he neglected such endeavors for a long time once he had realized that his work in that vein was commercially unviable—but they also affected the manner in which he framed the descriptions included in his neo-naturalistic works, and the kinds of explanations he gave for the behavior of his characters. He was well aware of the fact that he was highly original in this regard, and was right to take some pride in the fact, although he soon learned that readers were often unsympathetic to it—especially the kind of readers that Albert Savine had hoped that he might attract, on the basis of the somewhat misleading example of Nell Horn.

  Marc Fane, which Savine chose to release after Le Bilateral and L’Immolation, is the most frankly autobiographical of Rosny’s works and must have been in progress for many years. Savine followed it up in the same year with Les Corneilles but then seems to have become thoroughly disillusioned; after publishing Le Termite [The Termite] (1890) he gave up, cutting Rosny loose, for reasons which Rosny had made painfully clear within the text of Le Termite, and which Anatole France highlighted in his review-essay on the text and its writer.

  Although Le Termite is not, strictly speaking, a roman à clef, it contains easily-recognizable portraits of several significant figures in the Parisian literary community, including Edmond de Goncourt (Fombreux), Zola (Rolla) and Alphonse Daudet (Guadet). The central character, Noel Servaise, is a purely hypothetical straw man—an unsuccessful and embittered neo-Naturalist who probably would not even have been invited to sign the Manifeste des Cinq had he actually existed—who is there mainly to be insulted for his lack of imagination, but the text is less interested in what the leading lights of literary Paris think of Servaise than what they think of a more promising writer named Myron, who is very obviously based on Rosny himself. Fombreux/Goncourt—painted, somewhat riskily, with less obvious sympathy than Guadet/Daudet, though far more than Rolla/Zola—likes Myron’s work but disapproves of his incessant use of scientific language and thinks his style “tortuous;” Rolla/Zola likes it far less, but is keen to make exactly the same criticisms in somewhat stronger terms. Even the narrative voice makes no bones about the relevant tendencies in describing Myron:

  “A bitter disputant, full of confidence before the old masters, he appeared a presumptuous as well as a tiresome and emphatic repeater of arguments; he was at the same time tolerant and pig-headed. He repelled Servaise, by reason of his involved style and prophetic poses, at every point at which an exuberant nature may clash with a sober and depreciative one.”

  Given this self-judgment, it is hardly surprising that Anatole France, while obviously wishing to praise Rosny’s good points, also feels obliged to admit that he cannot abide his “terrible defects,” which he sums up, brutally, in a single clause: “he lacks taste, proportion and clarity.” Later, having summed up all the arguments that Myron/Rosny repeats against himself, France concludes that: “M. Rosny is no man to listen to these timid counsels. He will never give up.” France was wrong about that—Rosny had already given up on the more exotic produce of his poetic passion and was about to start soft-pedaling the other tendencies to which his friends objected—but he was right to observe a certain resentful stubbornness in Rosny’s character, which would persist in rearing its head in later life. Albert Savine—who might well have thought that there was a little of his own staid philosophy in the “anti-metaphysical mind” of Noel Servaise—had been even quicker to give up on what he had come to consider a lost cause.

  By 1890, therefore, Rosny’s career had reached a crossroads, and the prospect of a long struggle lay ahead of him. It was not only his association with La Revue Indépendante that had suddenly become problematic, but his ready welcome at many of the other periodicals that had taken him up while he was fashionable, and he was condemned from then on to a relentless search for new outlets.

  There is little doubt that the optimistic period that began in 1886 was the happiest of Rosny’s life, save for the stresses of his unhappy marriage, and there is an exceedingly powerful nostalgia in his reportage of it in Torches et lumignons, but it did not last long. The situation was further confused by the fact that, from 1891 onwards, Rosny began to advertise the fact that he was no longer one writer but two. Daniel Valgraive, which Rosny had been working on since the mid-1880s but did not publish until 1891, was the first J.-H. Rosny novel in which the younger brother’s contribution was acknowledged by the elder, and most of the work published thereafter was completed without any such contribution, but that did not inhibit Joseph from making much of the name’s now-dual ownership.

  The reasons for the publicization of a collaboration that might have been more apparent than real remain stubbornly unclear, although Rosny reported in his own published comments that it was a possibility that the two brothers had discussed long before it became any sort of actuality. Lucien Descaves mentions the move in his interview in Huret’s Enquête in terms suggesting that he thought it a mere publicity stunt, and clearly believed Rosny had entered into the allegedly-close collaboration partly in order to imitate his mentor, who had worked so closely with his own younger brother, and partly because such a collaboration was so “rare and difficult” that his supposedly overweening vanity simply could not resist the challenge.

  The memoirs that Rosny Aîné wrote, long after the sharing of the pseudonym had been formally ended in 1907, make almost no mention of the younger brother beyond the essential, perhaps reflecting the fact that their falling out had by then become a kind of cold enmity. There is, however, a brief memoir by Jules Renard, recorded in the printed version of his Journal, reprinted in the Laffont omnibus of Rosny’s prehistoric romances, in which Renard recalls snatches of various conversations he had with Rosny prior to March 1908 (when the record was first made), in which Renard alleges that: “He does not collaborate with his brother; they juxtapose themselves. His brother finishes a book commenced by his elder, and reciprocally.” He quotes Rosny as having said “My brother has fewer words than me at his disposal, but we think the same thing.”

  This is an extremely flimsy, and perhaps unreliable, basis for evaluating the terms of the Boëx brothers’ literary association, but if it is combined with the appearance of the works themselves, it seems highly likely that the vast majority of the works published under the Rosny name while it was being shared were produced by Joseph alone, with a minority—mostly consisting of short stories—that were produced by Justin alone, and a relatively small number of novels that were the result of one brother finishing off a fragmentary work that the other brother felt incapable of completing. The most compelling reason for considering this likely is the pattern and volume of their subsequent publications once they had split the pseudonym in two. It must be admitted, however, that the components of Joseph’s own personality seem always to have been working “in juxtaposition” rather than collaborating, and the patchiness of his solo work is so extreme that it is difficult to identify instances in which another hand might have been involved.

  Although he claimed in Torches and lumignons to have “revised” some of his works, Rosny’s texts give absolutely no indication of being anything other than first drafts, often cobbled together, or at least strung together, as patchworks that the author never made the slightest attempt to amalgamate into coherent wholes. The principal reason that reading his works remains so frustrating is that so many of them seem to be continually changing course, stubbornly refusing to seek any kind of overall unity of direction, theme or ambition. This tendency is particularly obvious in scientific romances, the composition of which was unable to take advantage of the natural dynamic that comes from setting carefully-designed characters to work in familiar social contexts, where both they and their imagined situations have an intrinsic narrative momentum. When dealing with extraordinary characters and/or extraordinary circumstances, that natural dynamic and its corollary narrative momentum are l
ost, and authors who are used to making their stories up as they go along very often find themselves floundering when producing “heterocosmic” texts; Rosny was not only no exception to this rule, but might well be reckoned its most obvious exemplar. Given the inherent difficulty of picking up such texts, it is hardly surprising that Justin—who had no poetic passion for science—seems only to have taken over texts of a much more conventional character.

  If Lucien Descaves was right to think that the original basis for the advertisement of the fact that “J.-H. Rosny” was two people working in uncanny sympathy was a desire to emulate Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, at least in Edmond’s eyes, it is not difficult to see why Rosny might have wanted to do that. Rosny must have been aware of the value of his status as Goncourt’s favorite, and also of the precariousness of that status. Although it would be unjust to be unduly cynical about it, that value went beyond mere matters of influence; it actually had a promise of hard cash attached to it, which must have been doubly attractive to Rosny, in that the commercial failure of his novels ran parallel to an increasing desire to divorce his wife—a move that was bound to prove expensive, given that he would have to make formal financial provision for their four children.

  The reason that Edmond de Goncourt’s favor had a cash value is that the ageing author had no direct heirs, and made no secret of his intention to pass on his fortune to a select society of writers, who would constitute a kind of “alternative Academy” fostering and sponsoring writers excluded by the notoriously conservative Académie Française—to which Goncourt had never been elected. The society would also have the duty of obtaining publication for the journals that the Goncourt brothers had maintained for many long years, but which were still considered far too scandalous for publication by contemporary publishers. To say that Goncourt “made no secret” of this intention is, in fact, a drastic understatement, for it was a carrot he continually dangled over the heads of his entourage, perpetually teasing them with the possibility that they might or might not be included.

  Rosny was obviously desperate to be named as one of the members of this select company; indeed, he testified to the pride he took in his membership by altering his by-line as soon as his appointment was confirmed. His signature then became “J.-H. Rosny de l’Académie Goncourt,” and Joseph’s literary signature remained “J.-H. Rosny Aîné de l’Académie Goncourt” after the split with his brother until the day of his death—after which his publishers promptly dropped the latter part as an unnecessary embellishment (and, strictly speaking, an inaccurate one, since the organization’s official designation was as a Societé rather than an Académie, although the latter appellation became almost universal). Joseph Boëx clearly considered that it was J.-H. Rosny’s appointment to the Académie Goncourt that confirmed and symbolized the status he had so eagerly sought, and it became a key component of his identity, as he conceived it. It presumably seemed all the more valuable to him because he had to live so long in expectation of it, not merely while Edmond de Goncourt was still alive, but for seven long years after the latter’s death in 1896.

  Rosny’s own version of the story of the problematic foundation of “L’Académie Goncourt” is told in the long essay that begins his second volume of Mémoires de la vie littéraire [Memoirs of Literary Life] (1927), and is usually reckoned to provide its title because it appeared in larger type on the cover and title page than the overall title. The essay explains how Goncourt’s will was challenged by a group of distant relatives, who took the challenge through the available courts, all the way to the Conseil d’Etat (which, as the notional regulator of the real Académie, was rumored to be implicitly hostile to the founding of a rival). Thanks to their lawyer, Raymond Poincaré, however, the surviving writers named by Goncourt to occupy the seats of the new Societé (Alphonse Daudet had died in the interim) won the day, and the Goncourt Academy was finally founded in 1903. Unfortunately, Goncourt’s investments had only been worth half what he had expected when he drafted the provisions of the will, with the result that the salaries attached to the seats were only 3000 francs per annum, instead of the anticipated 6000. Even so, that salary was far from trivial, in terms of contemporary literary incomes—especially the incomes of writers who sold as poorly as Rosny.

  Although the Academy had ten seats, at its inception, it only had nine names, because the appointment of “J.-H. Rosny” required two of them. The problem of Daudet’s death was solved by allowing his son Léon to inherit his seat. Rosny dutifully notes in his memoir that Goncourt’s former favorite, Jean Lorrain, was devastated to find that he had not been named, although Rosny did not repeat the observation he had earlier made while describing Lorrain in Torches et lumignons, when he mentioned that the Academicians “dared not” repair Goncourt’s omission by electing him to one of the seats that subsequently fell vacant. Lorrain had, alas, tainted his literary reputation by tackling too many subjects deemed dubious on moral grounds, and had failed to escape the censorious cut that had let in Joris-Karl Huysmans (who had reverted to piety as well as Naturalism after penning the controversial Bible of Decadence À rebours) and Octave Mirbeau (who had not yet written the equally Decadent Le Jardin des supplices), along with Elemir Bourges, Léon Hennique, Paul Margueritte, Gustave Geffroy and Lucien Descaves.

  Although Rosny’s great expectations had been somewhat delayed, and were eventually reduced by half, he nevertheless went through with his divorce in 1896, having already become reconciled to the fact that he would have to cut his literary cloth more to market expectations if he was to make a living from his pen. He was married again, to Marie Borel, in 1900, and that presumably put a further burden on his finances, requiring him to concentrate even more intently on the commercial viability of his published work. Although he did not give up entirely on eccentric productions—Les Femmes de Setnê [The Women of Setne] (1903), which he signed Enacryos, is set in ancient Egypt and briefly features an exotically-populated lost land—the work published under the J.-H. Rosny name after 1896 remained carefully conventional, occasionally descending to such blatant popularity-courting endeavors as La Tentatrice [The Temptress] (1897), Les Amours d’un cycliste [A Cyclist’s Love-Affairs] (1899), Le Crime du docteur [The Doctor’s Crime] (1903) and Le Millionnaire [The Millionnaire] (1905). Whether or not this seems regrettable in retrospect, the collaboration did maintain the two brothers’ production at a reasonably prolific level; they averaged about three novels a year from 1894-1906, and rarely reached that level thereafter, even when the production of the divided pseudonym is added together.

  Although “J.-H. Rosny” did publish a handful of scientific romances after Joseph had announced his collaboration with his brother, most were brief or conscientiously moderate, and it is probable that the more adventurous examples were based on material written many years previously. Jean Morel, who wrote two articles on Rosny’s prehistoric romances and scientific romance for the Mercure de France in 1923 and 1926 (the former in collaboration with Pierre Massé) said in both that he had “good reason to believe” that the younger brother had not made any contribution to the relevant work; if he did not get that information directly from Rosny he presumably obtained it at only one remove, via Alfred Vallette; the Mercure’s editor. The situation was slightly confused by Pierre Versins, whose article on J.-H. Rosny Jeune dutifully included a list of relevant titles produced during the period of collaboration, but Versins was equally careful to state that any contribution Justin might have made must have been “minimal,” and all the other available evidence suggests that it was non-existent. Although he produced two items of lost land fiction after the pseudonym was split, neither of which involves any kind of alternative evolution, Versins observes that J.-H. Rosny Jeune’s only work based in scientific speculation was Le Destin de Marie Lafaille (1945), produced some years after his brother’s death and perhaps intended as a belated homage to him. For the duration of the collaboration, however, even Joseph wrote little or nothing new in a speculative vein, and
the naturalistic novels he wrote on his own—whichever ones they might have been—also became conspicuously less idiosyncratic. The change of direction and modification of ambition the brothers quickly routinized after 1893 did not, alas, prevent something of a backlash against the brief hyping of Rosny’s work as the promise of a brighter literary future. The spearhead of that backlash was Anatole France’s review-essay, but the relatively sympathetic tone of that piece was decisively set aside by a cruelly sarcastic demolition of Rosny’s work and reputation in an 1895 issue of the prestigious Revue de Deux Mondes penned by René Doumic—a critic renowned for carrying out hatchet-jobs, on behalf of a steadfastly conservative literary philosophy that eventually won him election to the Académie Française in 1909.

  Doumic’s article on “Les Romans de M. J.-H. Rosny” begins by inviting the reader to transport himself forward a few years, into an era in which “the tendencies that have begun to manifest themselves in education have conclusively triumphed. Letters have finally been exiled to information… The University has realized its desire to be modern… For everything concerning art and literature, the younger generation have entered a world where their gaze is no longer saddened by the vestiges of ancient things; everything is recent. It is not that the times have attained ignorance; quite the reverse; men have never been so wise. They know everything, once they have been to school… They have been taught all the sciences, for there is no useless science. Every year brings its new quota of discoveries. The brain of every French citizen is like an encyclopedia; it is a repository of formulas, a storehouse of scientific ideas. Humankind has crossed an important threshold. It has entered, under full sail, a positivist and utilitarian era, frankly democratic and resolutely scientific.”