Creators
Page 20
Indeed, had he thought deeply, he would have become uncomfortably aware of the logical insecurity of his own position. He was both the beneficiary and the victim of his own double standard. In youth a legitimist, he became a republican in 1830, briefly, then an Orléanist; but when Napoleon’s ashes were returned to France, all the veterans of the wars turned out in the streets of Paris, and Hugo wrote, in Retour des Cendres, “It was as if the whole of Paris formed to one side of the city, like liquid in a vase that was being tilted.” He became so excited that he found himself, without any rational process of thought, a Bonapartist, before reverting to Orléanism, which suited his personal convenience. With the revolution of 1848, which took him completely by surprise, he found himself a republican again. He wrote in exultation: “Paris is the present capital of the civilized world…. It is the thinkers of Paris who prepare the way for great things, and for the workers of Paris who carry them out.” Three days later, on 23 June 1848, those same workers sacked and burned Hugo’s house in what is now the Place des Vosges, understandably placing him in the ranks of the existing regime, since he was a member of the House of Peers in the parliament.10
This confusion on the part of the revolutionaries was the inevitable result of Hugo’s trying to have things both ways, to be both a man of the people and a peer of the Orléanist realm. This led to a ludicrous incident in 1845, which in various respects was characteristic of Hugo’s entire life, public and private. From being puritanical as a young man, he had graduated to promiscuous bohemianism by 1830. He had a regular mistress—Juliette Druet, an actress—and was involved in many other affairs, usually casual, with chambermaids and their kind. In 1844 he began an affair with Léonie Biard, the discontented wife of a mediocre painter, Auguste Biard, who was her senior by twenty years. She was in the process of obtaining a legal separation when she met Hugo. Léonie was only four years older than Hugo’s daughter Léopoldine. When she became his mistress, he began to write her frequent love letters. She loved them. What she did not know was that many of the most ardent passages in them were copied from love letters Hugo had written to Juliette, and from Juliette to him (he also used bits in his novels).11 He also wrote for Madame Biard eleven poems about sexual love, again much cannibalized from other poems. It is worth noting that Hugo’s love letters, whether original or derivative (and many hundreds survive), always follow a pattern, as Verlaine sharply noted. “I like you. You yield to me. I love you. You resist me. Push off.” They were, said Verlaine, “the joy of the cock and then its full-throated cry.”12 Hugo found a love nest for his meetings with Léonie in the discreet Passage Saint-Roch, off the Rue Saint-Honoré. What he did not know was that Léonie’s husband was having her followed. On 4 July 1845, Hugo (under the name of “Monsieur Apollo”) and Léonie, both naked, were wakened up in bed by two police detectives. For a married woman to engage in “criminal conversation” was a serious offense, and Léonie, caught in the act, was hauled off immediately to the women’s prison at Saint-Lazare, where prostitutes and adulteresses were incarcerated. She served six months. Hugo, on the other hand, produced a gold medal, which he wore on a chain around his neck at all times, certifying that he was a peer of France, immune to arrest on such matters except by command of the House of Peers. He was accordingly released and returned at four in the morning to his house, where he woke up his wife and confessed. She, interestingly enough, was not disturbed to find that Juliette, whom she hated, had a rival. On the contrary she took Léonie under her wing, visited her in prison, gave her refuge when she was released, allowed Hugo to resume his affair with her, and took good care to let Juliette know all about it. Hugo, meanwhile, outraged at this display of French justice, of which he felt himself to be the victim (he was not much concerned about Léonie’s sufferings), began work on Les Misérables, his great fictional epic about the workings of the law. Hugo did not get away with this episode completely, however. Though the scandal was not reported in the censored Parisian press, word of it got around. It brought the system of aristocratic privilege into disrepute, and the king was very angry. The husband, who might have gone public about his wife and Hugo, was bought off by being given a commission to do some wall painting at Versailles. The king also authorized Léonie’s transfer from prison to the Convent of Dames de Sainte-Michèle, fearing that she, too, might publicly complain about the inequality of treatment. At the convent, Léonie helped the nuns to make a selection of Victor Hugo’s poems for the edification of teenage schoolgirls, before moving into Hugo’s home under Adèle’s supervision. It was Hugo who eventually threw her out, complaining to Adèle: “Must you always boss me about? Cannot you even allow me to choose my own mistress?” The episode cast Hugo in a comic and disreputable light, and he never quite got over it. Balzac, in his Cousine Bette, written the next year (1846), made fun of Hugo’s arrest and the circumstances, and other writers continued to make covert allusions to it. Mallarmé claimed to have been born in the house where Hugo was arrested.
All the same, Hugo’s embarrassment did not last long, even if it may have played a part in the sacking of his house. He continued to have affairs, to seduce servants whenever possible, and to frequent prostitutes for the rest of his long life. His diaries contain a symbol for copulation, which appears eight times in the spring of 1885. The final one is on 5 April, thirty-eight days after his eighty-third birthday, and six weeks before his death on 22 May 1885. When I was a young man living in Paris in the early 1950s, I was given an unforgettable picture of the elderly Hugo’s sexuality by an old society gentleman who, as a small boy, had been a visitor at a château, along with Hugo, in 1884. In those days, children and women servants had rooms on the attic floor, which was uncarpeted and spartan (the male servants slept in the basement). He said he got up very early one summer morning, being bored, and went out into the corridor, the unvarnished boards under his feet, the strong sunlight slanting through the windows at a low angle, picking out the motes of dust. He was, perhaps, four. Suddenly an old man hove into sight, striding purposefully along, white-bearded, eyes penetrating and fierce, wearing a nightshirt. The boy did not know at the time, but surmised later, thinking of the episode, that Victor Hugo had risen early too, having noted a pretty serving girl handing plates at dinner the night before; had, possibly, made an assignation with her; and anyway was now in search of her bedroom. The old man, whom the boy thought was possibly God, paused in his stride, seized the boy’s hand, and, lifting his nightshirt, placed the hand on his large, rampant member and said: “Tiens, mon petit. Il parait que c’est très rare à mon age. Alors, en temps d’avenir tu auras le droit à dire à tes petits-enfants, que tu a tenu en ton p’tit main, le machin de Victor Hugo, poète!” Then he lowered his nightshirt and strode off down the corridor, in search of his prey.13
The events of 1848–1851 were the pivot of Hugo’s life, though they were in control of him, rather than the other way around. There were appalling scenes of radical violence in Paris during 1848, which shook Hugo’s newfound radicalism; and when Louis-Napoléon came to the fore, Hugo supported him and entered the new legislature as a Bonapartist. But though Louis-Napoléon, on forming a government, offered Hugo an office, it was not the senior office he felt he deserved, and he declined it in disgust. Thereafter, he became increasingly hostile, and when Louis-Napoléon staged a coup d’état in 1851, which as usual took him by surprise, he passed into open and violent opposition, taking refuge first in Belgium, then in the British Channel Islands—Jersey in 1853, Guernsey from 1855 on. Both his wife, Adèle, and his mistress Juliette shared this self-imposed exile for two decades. In some ways exile suited Hugo. He created a medieval universe of his own at Hauteville House, as he called his mansion, writing and surveying the world from his top-story aerie; writing poems and pamphlets denouncing “Napoléon le Petit,” as he called the emperor; and enjoying the wild coast and sea, which he drew endlessly in pen and wash and portrayed in his great novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer. He always predicted that Louis-Napolé
on’s regime would end in a debacle, as indeed it did in 1870. But then everyone could see that, and the end came as a result of the emperor’s pursuing precisely the vainglorious nationalist courses which Hugo himself had periodically urged, and which were now beyond France’s power. Nonetheless, Hugo was able to return to Paris in 1871 vindicated, a national hero, and was again elected to the parliament, though his speeches made no sense. His books continued to sell in vast numbers, promoted by a huge publicity machine in which Hugo took the closest interest, and he effortlessly assumed what he (and others) took to be his natural position as doyen de la littérature française.
Moreover, after all his oscillations around the monarchical traditions in France, he ended up as the embodiment of republicanism, so that his death in 1885 was a national event and his funeral a public ceremony recalling le retour des cendres. Hugo had planned it well in advance, and it was (in a sense) the final statement of his philosophy of a double standard and having things both ways. In his will, he appointed the president of the republic, Jules Grévy; the president of the senate, Léon Soy; and the president of the chamber of deputies, Léon Gambetta, as his three executors. His deathbed was a long-drawn-out drama. He let it be known that he believed in God. The archbishop of Paris foolishly offered to give him the last rites. Hugo, having toyed with the idea for a few days, finally declared himself a secular figure, and arranged to be buried in the Panthéon, a reconsecrated church which had to be specially deconsecrated again, by a hastily passed parliamentary statute, in order to receive his secular coffin. On the night of 19–20 May 1885, Hugo gave a virtuoso performance as a dying cultural giant, speaking phrases in French, translating them into Latin, then into Spanish. He uttered alexandrines such as “C’est ici le combat du jour et de la nuit”—grand but empty of meaning. He had accepted the government’s offer of a state funeral on the grandest possible scale but insisted that the actual coffin and hearse should be of the type provided for paupers—a peculiar proviso, since Hugo had been a millionaire for a long time and had guarded his money with anxious care. The turnout for the funeral was enormous, a million or more, and Edmond de Goncourt recorded that the police told him that all the brothels were closed and draped in black crepe as a mark of respect (appropriately, since Hugo had been one of their best customers), though the night before, while Hugo’s body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe, the girls had been hard at work in the surrounding crowds. The pauper’s hearse raised some eyebrows even among those long inured to Hugo’s double standard. Ford Madox Ford, an eyewitness, wrote that it was “like a blackened packing case drawn by two spavined horses…an inconceivable shock effect of grinning hypocrisy.” There followed eleven carriages full of flowers. Several people were killed during the funeral, and a woman gave birth. People remembered it as a later generation would remember the day Kennedy was assassinated.14
Ford’s remarks were typical of the mixed feelings with which the English reacted to Hugo as a phenomenon. Tennyson, almost as famous in England as Hugo was in France, called him a “weird titan.” He was “an unequal genius [and] reminds one that there is only one step between the sublime and the ridiculous.” (This, oddly, recalled Bonaparte’s comment on the retreat from Moscow.) In 1877 Tennyson wrote a sonnet in Hugo’s honor (“Victor in Poesy, Victor in Romance”), and sent it to the old man, who replied: “How could I not love England, when she produces men like yourself.” Thackeray read Hugo’s book on the Rhine and noted: “He is very great and writes like God almighty.” But later, seeing Hugo in a Parisian church, Thackeray dismissed him as a “queer heathen.”16
Dickens was impressed both by Hugo himself and by Hugo’s apartment in the Place Royale: “the most fantastic apartment and stood in the midst of it, a little, fine-featured, fiery-eyed fellow.” It was
a most extraordinary place, looking like an old curiosity shop or the Property Room of some gloomy, vast old theatre. I was much struck by Hugo himself, who looked a genius, as he certainly is, and is very interesting from head to foot. His wife is a handsome woman with flashing black eyes, who looks as if she might poison his breakfast any morning when the humor seized her. There is also a ditto daughter of fifteen or sixteen, with ditto eyes and hardly any drapery above the waist who I should suspect of carrying a sharp poignard in her stays, but for not appearing to wear any. Sitting among old armours, and old tapestry, and old coffers, a grim old chair and tables, and old canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they make a most romantic show, and looked like a chapter out of one of his books.16
It is illuminating to compare Dickens with Hugo. Dickens is the English equivalent, as close as one can get: a tireless romantic, fertile in invention, loving strange tales and brilliant at telling them; a descriptive writer of pure genius, never at a loss for words; a lover of mysteries, ancient nooks and corners, and human peculiarities. Yet what a difference! It is the difference between France and England. The marvelous Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters, in a dozen volumes and profusely annotated, allows us at last to see the man, fully and in all his activities (save one: his relations with Ellen Ternan, still, and perhaps forever, shrouded in mystery). Both men were creators on the largest possible scale. But in all else they differed. Where Hugo was a bombastic orator and noisy politician who sat in parliament under three regimes, Dickens flatly refused repeated invitations to enter the House of Commons, and confined his public activities to practical projects such as running a hostel for fallen women and shipping them out to Australia. Where Hugo was mean and miserly, Dickens was profuse and generous. Where Hugo was a thunderous nationalist and noisy jingo, Dickens deplored the Crimean War, loathed politicians like Palmerston, and always sought peaceful ways out of international disputes. Hugo shouted about injustice in general, but Dickens actually worked hard to remedy it in particular instances. His letters show a hardworking life of dedication and courage and are punctuated by endless kindnesses to all. Hugo, by contrast, appears vainglorious, selfish, and totally absorbed in his own egotism. He is also unconsciously comic, with a sinister twist to his buffoonery. Both men treated their wives badly, and both had salient weaknesses of character, together with much strength of will. But whereas greater knowledge of Dickens’s works and life makes one warm to him, with Hugo the same process repels one more and more. Which was the greater creative artist? Impossible to judge.
10
Mark Twain: How to Tell a Joke
MARK TWAIN, or, to give him his real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), stands at the center of American literature. Indeed he may be said to have invented it. All earlier writers who achieved prominence in the United States, such as Washington Irving (1783–1859), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), to name the quartet who dominated transatlantic letters in the first half of the nineteenth century, were very much part of the English tradition and suffered in varying degrees from what was later to be called “cultural cringe.” It is true that James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) used an American background, from 1826 on, in his celebrated Leatherstocking stories of backwoods Indians and the scout Natty Bumppo. These stories were read all over the world and had a perceptible effect on European migration to the United States. But Cooper was, in all essentials, a follower of Sir Walter Scott, writing traditional romantic adventures in an American vernacular, and in all his voluminous works he was always looking over his shoulder at English models. Moreover, Cooper was a writer of such grotesque ineptitude, as Twain himself pointed out in his essays “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and “Further Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper,” that he scarcely merits membership in any artistic canon, however meager.1
By contrast, Twain was not only a great creative artist but a quintessential American artist from first to last. His material was American, even though he garnered or stole much of it from all over the world; his style (if that is the right w
ord) was American, as were his vocabulary, verbal accent, ideological humor, comedy, indignation real or stimulated, self-presentation, methods of literary commerce, and journalistic flair. He was an American opportunist, an American plagiarist, an American braggart and egoist, and an American literary phenomenon. Once and for all he liberated American letters from its slavelike cringe and taught American writers, and public performers of all kinds, a completely new set of tricks, which have been in use ever since. His creativity was often crude and nearly always shameless. But it was huge and genuine, overpowering indeed, a kind of vulgar magic, making something out of nothing, then transforming that mere something into entire books, which in turn hardened into traditions and cultural certitudes. He was the greatest of all literary con men, and the joy he derived from conning his audience—a joy which was greedy, bitter, contemptuous, and exultant all at once—was an essential part of his creative spirit.2