by Stuart Kelly
In the ensuing struggle for justice, a seam of anti-Semitism opened that convulsed the press and the nation with poisonous intensity. The Jews, it was whispered in print, had a syndicate to fund Dreyfus’s appeal. They were profiting from both sides of the conflict. Most of Zola’s friends were unabashed about their distrust of “the parasite among nations . . . the cursed race which no longer has a country of its own” (those words, incidentally, are Zola’s: Saccard in L’Argent reflects his era). Dreyfus’s brother and the vice president of the Senate sought Zola’s support, and expertise with the papers, a support which he readily gave. When his third article on the affair was published in Le Figaro, he was promptly sacked. Cartoons depicting an obese Zola, tattooed with pigs and Stars of David, began to appear in the so-called loyalist papers.
It is difficult, accustomed as we are to monotonous shock-horror revelations, to recapture the sheer power of the front page of L’Aurore of January 13, 1898. Under the stark title J’ACCUSE . . . !, Zola named the conspirators who, in his opinion, had framed Dreyfus, and those whose incompetence, apathy, or stupidity had consolidated the plot. He ended this blistering denunciation with a challenge: “Let those who dare do so try me at assize court and let the inquest take place openly, in broad daylight. I shall wait.” They did, and found him guilty. Six months later, when his appeal against conviction failed, Zola assessed the situation, weighed his options, and fled to London, as Paris echoed to the sound of lynch mobs baying for their own particular brand of justice. He had already written, “So there exists such a thing as anti-Semitic youth . . . fresh young brains and souls that this idiotic poison has already deranged? How very sad, and how ominous for the coming twentieth century!”
Under the pseudonym “M. Jacques Beauchamp,” he settled into a fugitive’s exile in Sussex. He tried to read the Daily Telegraph with the help of an English dictionary, watched a bit of cricket, and worked as furiously as ever. Ernest Vizetelly, a long-term supporter, nearly blew his cover by describing Zola’s English sojourn in The Athenaeum.
He certainly intends a book on it [the Dreyfus affair] in due season and has made many notes with that object—meantimes, between chapters of Fécondité—his new novel, and the start of a new quartet, The Four Evangelists—M. Zola has been preparing an account of his adventures, experiences and observations in exile. This will be completely illustrated from photographs and sketches.
With the exception of a rather dull ghost story, based on a haunted house at Penn, but relocated to the Médan in Contes et nouvelles, the album of English anecdotes failed to materialize (a shame, since Zola was an accomplished photographer).
Zola’s first inclination on learning the full details of the Dreyfus miscarriage of justice was that it was prime prospective material. He considered it as a subplot in a novel, and indeed elements of the case were used in Vérité, the third of The Four Evangelists, alongside the tedious Grand Guignol of a murderous, sexually deviant Catholic priest. He made a “mental reservation” that the affair might do as a drama. But no work truly captures the intensity, the power, and the significance of the episode, except its own history. Henry James claimed—not without a note of rancor—that Zola’s zeal stemmed from being a man “with arrears of personal history to make up.” After a life devoted to the aloof vivisection of the world, he had become embroiled in a situation that required action, not redaction. To James, Zola was “treating himself at last to a luxury of experience.”
In 1899, Dreyfus was cleared, and Zola was free to return to France—albeit a France where the unleashed anti-Semitic antipathies still seethed, barely in secret. He worked on: he could do little else. With three of The Four Evangelists completed, he toyed with a set of dramas that would “do for the Third Republic what I did for the Second Empire.” But the prose robot was succumbing to its inevitable entropy. The critics were bored rather than scandalized. Zola spoke wistfully of retiring to the Balearics.
Justice—the final part of the final quartet—remained to be written. In The Four Evangelists, Zola had written about the lives of the children of Pierre Froment from the previous Trois Villes trilogy. The auspiciously named Mathieu, Marc, Luc, and Jean represented the new virtues: wholesome families, honest and well-rewarded labor, adherence to the truth, and determination for justice. One reviewer archly noted that the new Septuagint of novels showed the Froments as the Rougons who conquered the world. Zola described the final volumes as “a great prose poem, full of life and sweetness,” ruefully adding, “and then perhaps they won’t accuse me of insulting mankind.” Did he recall his unwritten poem “Future” as he laboriously attempted to manufacture his own vision of an earthly paradise? “I have been dissecting for forty years . . . You really must let me dream a little in my old age.” The book would envisage a United States of Europe, an alliance of all the nations, the “kiss of Peace” in a New Jerusalem.
More controversially, Zola’s friend Maurice le Blond claimed that Justice “was to have as its theme Zionism.” How many others knew this? How many others suspected that the Dreyfus material, the taxonomy of anti-Semitism, might well work its way into a novel? Given that his talents were fraying, his phenomenal voltage faltering, perhaps it is better that the triumphal unveiling remains forever hypothetical, rather than half-glimpsed underneath a prolix and turgid last gasp. And yet the reason it must remain so reveals the extent to which the world was not ready for his vision of tolerance.
Zola died before he could finish Justice, and Vérité appeared with a black border on the cover. The coroner recorded that Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning. At three in the morning on September 29, 1902, he had complained of nausea, headaches, and dizziness. He opened a window, collapsed, and choked to death. Reconstructions of the state of the fireplace in his bedroom and demolition of the flue failed to explain the lethal buildup of gas; indeed, several guinea pigs later spent an untroubled night in the same room under similar conditions. Worried by how news of any suspicion surrounding Zola’s death might be taken by the volatile public, the coroner recorded accidental death.
In 1953, one M. Haquin, an elderly reader of the paper Libération, responded to an article on Zola’s death. A chimney sweep friend of his, one of the many anti-Dreyfusards who considered the author nothing more than a traitor, had confessed: “I and my men blocked the chimney while doing repairs next door. There was a lot of coming and going and we took advantage of the hubbub to locate Zola’s chimney and stop it. We unstopped it the next day, very early. No one noticed us.”
Arthur Rimbaud
{1854–1891}
IN MAY AND JUNE 1886, the French literary magazine Vogue published a work called Les Illuminations, a haunting sequence of prose poems. The effect was galvanic. Critical acclaim was immediate: the author, in the words of one enthusiast, was “a sort of legendary figure,” whom younger poets already “claim as their Master.” His hallucinatory, synesthetic texts were replete with alchemy, socialism, drunkenness, and adolescence. He was literature’s fallen angel. Nearly all his poetry had been written before he was twenty years old. According to the magazine, this titanic talent was “the late Arthur Rimbaud.”
Rimbaud, in fact, was not dead. He had left France for Africa in 1880 and was currently living in Tadjourah, awaiting a consignment of guns he intended to sell to King Menelik. A taut, tanned adventurer, Rimbaud was something like a Baudelairean poet transformed into a cohort of Richard Burton. His new attitude toward writing can be seen, askance, when his business partner, Pierre Labatut, dies suddenly the next year. Despite his widow’s pleas and in front of her eyes, Rimbaud burns all thirty-four volumes of Labatut’s memoirs, “a great misfortune, I later learned,” he says, “as certain property deeds were shuffled in amongst these confessions.”
He had never been particularly reverential with manuscripts. Les Illuminationshad been constructed from a sheaf of papers handed by Rimbaud to his ex-lover, the poet Paul Verlaine, in 1875. Almost the entire print run of Une Saison en enfer (A Season i
n Hell) was moldering in a warehouse in Brussels, eventually to be rediscovered ten years after Rimbaud’s actual death. The editors of the Pléiade edition described his “slim and flashing work which, at the end of the nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud left to us with a kind of disdain, and without having bothered to publish almost any of it.”
Rimbaud’s corpus is slight, but as thin and sharp as a stiletto. Had Verlaine, in one of his jealous rages, discarded the papers, Rimbaud’s reputation would be as the ghostly memory of a petulant and deliberately impudent youth on Verlaine’s arm, and a few scattered works in literary magazines. His entire oeuvre could well have stretched from the school-book, where phrases like “Arthur / The infinitely little” sit beside his denunciations of Latin (“maybe it’s some sort of made-up language”) and his arithmetical notes (“If 2 cubic metres of wood cost 32F how much would 7 decimetres cost?”), up to the African accounts (“35 Abyssinians @ 15 Thalers for the journey and two months back pay @ 3 Thalers, payment promised on arrival, 34 × 21 . . . 714 Thalers”), with nothing in between.
Assiduous scholars and opportunistic friends have attempted to enlarge this smattering of genius. Verlaine, for example, quoted as an epigraph to his poem “Ariettes oubliées” a line by Rimbaud—“It rained softly on the city”—which does not appear in any of his works. Rimbaud’s school friend Ernest Delahaye had remembered by heart two rather coprophilic little sonnets, which were published in 1923. He could also recollect a snatch of a satire against pro-monarchist grocers, though the text no doubt ended up in the bin at the newspaper to which it was supposedly sent.
Another school friend, Paul Labarrière, waited until 1933 to confess that he had managed to lose a notebook containing fifty or sixty of Rimbaud’s poems while moving in 1885. Apart from remembering a poem about “geese and ducks splashing around in a pond,” almost all he could recollect was a line full of the typical Rimbaud bravado: “And the drunken poet rebukes the Universe.”
Desperate for any extra scrap, how many scholars must have lamented the aside left by another of Rimbaud’s colleagues in Africa, Ugo Ferrandi? “He provided me with some precise and lucid observations about Tadjourah which I once intended to publish, along with some notes of my own, but fate did not decree this to be. I still have several pages of these notes by Rimbaud.” The trail goes cold just there.
There is a blank at the heart of Rimbaud. How did the homosexual, blasphemous, drunken, demonically gifted poet transform himself into a reputedly temperate merchant who discussed the Qur’an with local Muslims? Are the poems some kind of ciphered message that can explain, or enact, the metamorphosis? Is it all supposed to mean something? Is the answer lost in a misplaced notebook?
“If I don’t write to you any more it’s because I’m very tired and also because with me, as with you, there is nothing new to write about,” he wrote to his family in 1882. And two years later: “In the end, as the Muslims say: It is written! That’s life and it’s no laughing matter.”
Frank Norris
{1870–1902}
TWELVE YEARS AFTER his death, a novel by Frank Norris that was thought destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was found. Vandover and the Brute, his study of moral degeneration and lycanthropy, was Norris’s second posthumous novel. Literature is so rarely found, once lost, that Vandover and the Brute should be a cause for celebration. But the pleasure was subdued, given that another, possibly more significant, work was irretrievably gone.
Norris had found fame in 1899 with McTeague, an unremittingly ferocious novel about human greed and inhuman desires. With its deviant psychologies and frank depictions of brutish sexuality, critics immediately associated it with the work of Émile Zola. It was a comparison relished by Norris, who signed letters and autographed books with his self-given nickname “the Boy Zola.” Just as Zola had announced himself with the shocking La Bête humaine and then progressed to a more ambitious project, so too would Norris.
Even before McTeague, he had fixed his eye on his major literary goal. In 1897, in a letter to the literary editor of the San Francisco Examiner, he had written, “There are two ways of considering the question of the ‘great American novel.’ One as to the best novel produced by an American author, and the other as to the novel which is the most thoroughly American in its tone and most aptly interprets the phasos of American life.” Norris’s intention was to produce the latter.
In 1899, he had the Idea, an idea so immediate and vast he woke his friend Bruce Porter at five a.m. to tell him. He wrote to the novelist and critic William Dean Howells, explaining it in detail. It was “thoroughly American,” and took California as its background:
My Idea is to write three novels around the one subject of Wheat. First, a story of California (the Producer), second, a story of Chicago (the distributor), third, a story of Europe (the Consumer) and in each to keep to the idea of this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from the West to the East.
The business of America was business: before Calvin Coolidge’s dictum, Norris was using an economic process as the structural underpinning of his epic trilogy. Although it was “straight naturalism with all the guts I can get into it,” Norris was presenting a radically different vision from Zola. Whereas Zola’s characters were driven by inherited conditions, Norris was to explore economic conditions. As Cedarquist in the first part of The Octopus presciently puts it: “The Great Word of the nineteenth century has been Production. The Great Word of the twentieth century will be—listen to me, you youngsters—Markets.”
The Octopus appeared in 1901. It deals with the conflict between California farmers and the Pacific and Southwestern Railway Trust. The farmers have leased the land, irrigated it, planted it, and expect to buy it for around $5 an acre. The company, however, alters its prices, pushing them up to $40 an acre. Political machinations and corrupt bureaucracy spawn armed resistance and internecine violence. It is an archetypal American conflict: the individual frontiersman versus the capitalist monopoly. Norris researched thoroughly, and even in its journalistic factuality and fidelity (though some called it muckraking) The Octopus was a new benchmark in the Americanness of American novels.
When the second volume, The Pit—about the brokerage of the wheat on the Chicago exchange—appeared, Norris was already dead from peritonitis. He was only thirty-two. Nonetheless, the preface was published as he had planned. It announced a book he would never write.
The Trilogy of The Epic of the Wheat includes the following novels: THE OCTOPUS, a Story of California.
THE PIT, a Story of Chicago.
THE WOLF, a Story of Europe.
The Wolf, we are told, “will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a famine in an Old World community.” Norris was planning his trip to Europe, and another trilogy on the Battle of Gettysburg, only days before his death. Welcome though Vandover and the Brute is, if we had The Wolf, Norris’s reputation might now be far higher. William Dean Howells captured the elegiac quality of the incomplete epic precisely:
The two novels he has left behind him are sufficient for his fame, but though they have their completeness and their adequacy, one cannot help thinking of the series of their like that is now lost to us. It is Aladdin’s palace, and yet,
“The unfinished window in Aladdin’s palace
Unfinished must remain,”
and we never can look upon it without an ache of longing and regret.
Franz Kafka
{1883–1924}
FRANZ KAFKA WAS exceptionally clear about what should happen to his literary remains. In 1921 he said to his friend Max Brod, “My will is going to be quite simple—a request to you to burn everything.” Brod refused, and Kafka never made a will, but among his papers, two notes were found.
DEAREST MAX, my last request: everything I leave behind me (that is, in the bookcases, chest of drawers, writing-table, both at home and in the office, or wherever anything may have got to, whatever you happen to find), in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, lette
rs, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name. Letters which are not handed over to you should at least be faithfully burned by those who have them.
In pencil, rather than in ink, was what appeared to be a draft of this note:
DEAR MAX, perhaps this time I shan’t recover, pneumonia is likely enough after the month of pulmonary fever I have had, and not even setting it down in writing will keep it off, although there’s some power even in that.
Just in case, then, this is my last will concerning all I have written:
Of all my writings the only books that count are these: The Judgement, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor, and the short story: Hunger-Artists. (The few copies that exist of the Meditationcan be left; but I don’t want to give anyone the trouble of pulping them, but there’s to be no reprinting.) When I say that these five books and the short story count, I don’t mean that I want them to be printed again and handed down to posterity; on the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would be what I want. Only, since they do exist, I don’t mind anyone’s keeping them if he wants to.
But everything else of mine that I have written (printed in magazines or newspapers, written in manuscripts or letters) without exception, so far as it can be got hold of, or begged from the addressees . . . —all this without exception and preferably unread (though I don’t mind you looking into it, but I would much prefer that you didn’t, and in any case no one else is to look at it)—all this, without exception, is to be burned, and that you should do it as soon as possible is what I beg of you.
To Gustav Janouch, an aspiring poet and the son of one of his colleagues, Kafka was equally adamant. Janouch had bound some stories in leather, and Kafka insisted that his “own materialization of horror . . . should be burned.”