Against Nature (27 page)

In the absence of a solution which he could obviously not offer, Des Esseintes should have considered the question from the point of view of transgression and at least expressed some regret; he refrained from self-blame, and he was wrong. But although he was brought up by Jesuits whose praises – more than Durtal – he sings, he later grew so defiant of divine constraints, so brutishly determined to wallow in the mud of his carnality!

In any case, these chapters seem like staging-posts unconsciously planted to show the way to
Là-Bas
. It should also be noted that des Esseintes' library contained a certain number of books of magic and that the ideas on sacrilege put forward in
chapter VII
of
Against Nature
are a hook on which to hang a future volume which will treat the subject in a more sustained way.

As for
Là-Bas
, which terrified so many people, I would not write the book in the same way now that I have returned to the Church. Certainly the wicked and sensual side of the book is reprehensible, yet I affirm that I skipped a great deal. I hardly said anything; the evidence found in that book is, by comparison with what I omitted and what I still have in my files, insipid and flavourless confections!

But I believe that despite its cerebral dementia and its alvine madness, this book, by virtue of its very subject, rendered a service. It refocused attention on the machinations of the Evil One who had succeeded in making people disbelieve his existence; it was the starting-point for all the renewed studies of the eternal advance of Satanism. By revealing the hateful practices of necromancy it has helped to annihilate them; in short, the book took the side of the Church and fought against the Devil.

To return to
Against Nature
, for which
Là-Bas
is a substitute, I can only say about the chapter on flowers what I have already said about the chapter on precious stones.

Against Nature
considers them only from the point of view of their shapes and shades, not from the meanings they might divulge; Des Esseintes only chose bizarre orchids, but silent ones. I should add that in this book it would have been difficult to make voiceless flora speak, for the symbolic language of flowers died with the Middle Ages, and the vigorous pidgins cherished by Des Esseintes were unknown to the allegorists of that period.

The companion-piece to this botanical chapter I have since written in
La Cathédrale
on the subject of the horticultural liturgy which is the
source of such strange pages by Saint Hildegaard, Saint Meliton and Saint Eucher.

Quite different is the question of scents, whose mystical symbols I revealed in the same book.

Des Esseintes was interested only in secular perfumes, essences or extracts, and worldly perfumes, composites or bouquets.

He might also have tried out the aromas of the Church, incense, myrrh, and that strange Thymiama cited in the Bible which is still required in ritual to be burned with incense beneath the mouths of church bells when they are baptized, after the Bishop has washed them with holy water and made the sign of the cross over them with the Holy Chrism and the oil of extreme unction; but this fragrance seems to have been forgotten by the Church itself and I suspect that it would astonish a priest if he were asked for Thymiama.

The recipe is none the less recorded in
Exodus
. Thymiama was made of storax, galbanum, incense and onycha, and this last substance is nothing other than the operculum of a certain kind of shell which is dredged up from the marshes of the Indies and yields purple dye.

Given how little is known about this shellfish and where it comes from, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to prepare authentic Thymiama. This is a pity, for had it been otherwise this lost perfume would surely have aroused in Des Esseintes lavish imaginings of ceremonial festivals and liturgical rites of the Orient.

As for the chapters on contemporary secular and religious literature, these have, to my mind, like those on Latin literature, remained true. The chapter devoted to secular writing helped throw into relief poets who were then not widely known among the public: Corbière, Mallarmé, Verlaine. I retract nothing of what I wrote nineteen years ago: my admiration for these writers remains; indeed the admiration I professed for Verlaine has even grown. Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue would have deserved a place in Des Esseintes' anthology, but they had at the time published nothing and it was only much later that their works appeared.

I do not imagine, on the other hand, that I shall ever come to enjoy the modern religious authors that
Against Nature
laid waste to. No one will change my opinion that the critical works of the late Nettement are imbecilic and that Mrs Augustus Craven and Miss Eugènie de Guèrin are flabby bluestockings and sterile bigots. To me their concoctions are flavourless; Des Esseintes passed on his taste for spices to Durtal, and I believe that they would still understand one another well enough to create, in place of these insipid emulsions a spicey essence of art.

I have not changed my mind about the literature produced by the Poujoulat and Genoude fraternity either, but I would be less harsh today on Father Chocarne, mentioned among a bunch of pious cacographers, who at least composed a few pithy pages on mysticism in his introduction to the works of Saint John of the Cross, and I would likewise be gentler on de Montalbert who, though lacking in talent, provided us with an incoherent and incomplete but in the end moving work on monks. Above all, I would no longer write that the visions of Angela de Foligno are silly and shapeless; it is the opposite that is true, but I must say in my defence that I had only read Hello's translation. And the latter was possessed by a mania for pruning, sweetening and tidying up the mystics, for fear of offending the pretended modesty of the Catholics. He squeezed dry a work of passion, full of sap, and extracted from it only a cold and colourless juice, tepid in the feeble flame of his style.

That said, if as a translator Hello revealed himself to be a pious old fuss-pot, it is only fair to declare that he was, when he wrote for himself, a wielder of original ideas, a perspicacious exegete and a most impressive analyst. He was even, among the writers of his ilk, the only thinker. I came to d'Aurevilly's aid in promoting the work of such an uneven but fascinating man, and
Against Nature
has I believe contributed towards the success that his best book,
L'Homme
, has had since his death.

The conclusion of this chapter on modern Church literature was that among the geldings of religious art there was only one stallion, Barbey d'Aurevilly; and this estimation remains unshakeably correct. This man was the only artist, in the pure sense of the word, produced by the Catholicism of the period; he was a great prose writer, an admirable novelist whose audacity made all the prudes bray in exasperation at the explosive vehemence of his expressions.

Finally, if ever a chapter may be considered the starting-point of other books, it is the chapter on plain-song on which I have subsequently elaborated in all of my books, in
En Route
and especially in
L'Oblat
.

After this brief examination of each of the specialities displayed in the windows of
Against Nature
, the only conclusion is this: the book was the beginning of all of my Catholic work, which may be found there entire in its embryonic form.

And the incomprehension and stupidity of a few dumb-witted and over-excited priests yet again appears unfathomable to me. For years they called for the destruction of this work which, incidentally, is not my property, without even realizing that the mystical books which followed it are incomprehensible without it, because it is, I repeat, the
source from which they spring. Besides, how can one appreciate the work of a writer as a whole if one does not take it from its beginning and trace it step by step; most importantly, how can one follow the progress of Grace in a soul if one suppresses the traces of its passage, if one wipes out its first prints?

What is in any case true is that
Against Nature
broke with what preceded it, with
Les Soeurs Vatard
,
En Ménage
,
A Vau-l'Eau
, and that the book put me on a road whose destination I had no idea of.

Zola, shrewder than the Catholics, sensed this. I remember going to spend a few days in Mèdan after the publication of
Against Nature
. One afternoon as the two of us were walking in the countryside he suddenly stopped, his brow darkened and he reproached me for having written the book, saying that I had dealt a terrible blow to Naturalism, that I was leading the school astray, that I was in fact burning my boats with such a novel, for no literature could come from a genre exhausted in a single volume, and he urged me – in a friendly way, for he was a very kind man – to return to the beaten track, to harness myself to a study of manners.

I listened, thinking that he was both right and wrong, – right to accuse me of undermining Naturalism and barring any future path, – wrong in the sense that the novel as he conceived it seemed to me moribund, worn out with repetition, and, whether he liked it or not, of no interest to me.

There were many things that Zola could not understand; first of all, my need to open windows, to escape from an atmosphere which was stifling; then, the urge which possessed me to shake prejudices, break the limits of the novel, to bring art, science, history into it; in short, no longer to use the novel form except as a frame in which to set more serious work. For me, that was what struck me most at the time, the need to suppress the traditional plot, to abolish even love, womankind, to concentrate the spotlight on a single character – at all costs to do something new.

Zola did not reply to these arguments with which I was trying to persuade him, but went on repeating the same declaration: ‘I cannot accept that people cast aside their style and their beliefs; I cannot accept that people reject what they once adored.'

But see here! Did he himself not once play the part of the good Sicambrian? If he did not indeed modify his technique of composition and writing, he at least varied his way of conceiving humanity and explaining life. After the dark pessimism of his first books, have we not been given, under the guise of Socialism, the smug optimism of his last works?

It has to be admitted that no one understood the human soul less than the Naturalists who took it upon themselves to observe it. They saw existence only as a single entity; they only accepted it as conditioned by what is believable, and I have since learned by experience that the unbelievable is not always the exception in this world, that the adventures of Rocambole are sometimes as truthful as those of Gervaise and Coupeau.

But the idea that Des Esseintes could be as true to life as one of his own characters threw Zola off balance, it almost angered him.

I must admit that the clear and obvious Catholic direction
Against Nature
takes remains a mystery to me.

I did not go to a religious school but to a
lycée
; I was never pious in my youth, and the element of childhood memory, of first communion, of religious education, which so often plays a prominent part in religious conversion, played none in mine. And what further complicates the problem and confuses my analysis is that, while I was writing
Against Nature
, I did not set foot in a church, I knew no practising Catholics, and no priests; I sensed no Divine influence guiding me towards the Church, I lived quietly in my trough; it seemed perfectly natural to satisfy the whims of my senses, and the thought that such self-indulgence were prohibited never occurred to me.

Against Nature
appeared in 1884 and I entered a Trappist monastery to be converted in 1892; nearly eight years passed before the seeds sown in this book germinated; let us say two years, three even, for the muffled, obstinate, sometimes palpable work of Grace to go forward. That would still leave five years during which I cannot remember having the slightest inclination towards Catholicism, any remorse for the life I was leading or any desire to change it. Why and how was I switched on to a track that was at the time lost to me in the night? I absolutely cannot say: apart from the influence of the convent and the cloister and the prayers of a Dutch family of fervent believers, which I hardly knew anyway, nothing will explain the complete unconsciousness of that last cry, the religious call, on the last page of
Against Nature
.

Yes, I am aware that there are determined characters who draw up plans, who plot in advance the course of their existence and who follow
it; it is even accepted, if I am not mistaken, that with will power one can achieve anything. I am prepared to believe it, but I must confess that for my part I have never been a determined man or a crafty writer. My life and my writing have a strong element of passivity, of unawareness, and of forces outside myself.

Providence showed me pity and the Virgin Mary was kind. I limited myself to not thwarting them when they revealed their intentions; I simply obeyed; I was led by what are known as ‘mysterious ways'; if there is anyone who can be certain of the emptiness he would be without God's help, then it is I.

Those without Faith will object that with ideas like these one is not far from fatalism and the denial of all psychology.

Not so, for Faith in our Lord is not fatalism. Free will remains unaffected. If I so wished I could continue to yield to lustful excitements and remain in Paris and not go and suffer in a Trappist monastery. I am sure God would not have insisted; but despite insisting that free will remains intact, it has to be admitted that the Lord is heavily involved, that he harasses you, tracks you down, that he ‘grills' you, to use a colourful term from rough policemen; but the fact remains that one can, if one wishes and at one's own risk, tell Him to mind his own business.

As for psychology, that is another matter. If we see it, as I do, from the perspective of conversion, then in its initial stages it is impossible to disentangle; certain areas of it might be clear, but others not; the subterranean workings of the soul remain out of our sight. There was undoubtedly, as I was writing
Against Nature
, a land-shift, the earth was being mined to lay foundations of which I was unaware. God was digging to set his fuses and he worked only in the darkness of the soul, in the night. Nothing could be seen; it was only years later that the sparks began to run along the wires. I felt my soul moving to these shocks; it was at the time neither especially painful nor especially clear: the liturgy, mysticism, art were its vehicles or its means; this generally happened in churches, in Saint-Séverin especially, which I would visit out of curiosity, out of boredom, when I had nothing to do. During the ceremonies I felt nothing more than an inner trepidation, a trembling that one feels when one sees or hears or reads a beautiful work of art, but there was no precise warning to get me ready to make up my mind.

I was simply emerging, little by little, from the shell of my moral impurity; I was beginning to be disgusted with myself, but still I balked at the articles of faith. The objections I placed in my path seemed irresistible to me; and one morning, when I awoke, they were resolved,
how I have never known. I prayed for the first time and the explosion happened.
¹

To people who do not believe in God, all this seems mad. For those who have felt his work, no surprise is possible; and, if there were surprise, it would only be during the incubation period, when one sees and perceives nothing, the time of clearing the way for the foundations which we had no idea of were being laid.

To sum up, I can understand up to a point what happened in the years 1891 – 5, between
Là-Bas
and
En Route
, but I understand nothing about the years 1884 – 91, between
Against Nature
and
Là-Bas
.

If I myself did not understand, it was no wonder that others could not understand what drove Des Esseintes. Thus,
Against Nature
fell like a meteorite into the literary fairground and there was astonishment and fury; the press was thrown into confusion; never had it raved and roared in so many articles; after having called me an impressionistic misanthrope and called Des Esseintes a complicated imbecile and maniac products of the Ecole normale supérieure like M. Lemaître were indignant that I had not eulogized Virgil, and declared in a peremptory tone that the Latin writers of the Decadence were no more than ‘drivellers and cretins'. Other critical entrepreneurs took it upon themselves to advise me to take cold showers in a thermal prison; then it was the turn of the academics to get involved. In the Salle des Capucines, that arbiter of taste Sarcey, stunned, cried out: ‘I'll be hanged if I can understand a single word of this novel.' Eventually, to cap it all, serious reviews such as in the
Revue des deux mondes
dispatched their leader M. Brunetière to compare the book with the vaudeville farces of Waflard and Fulgence.

In all this hubbub, only one writer saw clearly, Barbey d'Aurevilly, who moreover did not know me. In an article in the
Constitutionnel
dated 28 July 1884, which has since been published in his book,
Le Roman contemporain
, he wrote: ‘After such a book, the only choice left open to the author is between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross.'

The choice is made.