The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (8 page)

If the ride is exhilarating, it can also be rough. At times you will surge and soar, but you will also be bumped about and struck by absurdities: “Children, said the old marquess, as he took
all three of them by the hand
.” You will have to swallow a ration of indigestible, insipid or silly images: “She was more than a woman, she was a masterpiece!” “Socrates, the pearl of mankind.” Sometimes, however, the tastelessness is relieved by grotesquerie: “The Countess’s breasts, which were lightly veiled by a translucid gauze, were devoured by the charmed eyes of the young man, who could, in the silence of the night, hear the murmur of these ivory globes.” (In fact, women’s breasts seem to have fed some of Balzac’s oddest inspirations. Elsewhere, he describes the visual impact produced by a middle-aged woman’s “low-cut dress”: “Mlle. Cormon’s treasures were violently thrust out of their jewel-cases.”) In some passages the gap that usually separates literature from cheap sentimental fiction is boldly bridged, for instance in this description of a loose actress falling passionately in love with a handsome young poet:

Yet even popular women’s magazines have their editorial standards, and one doubts if they would ever have been willing to publish the passage in which Lucien is in his loge and Coralie is on stage, behind the curtain which is still down, and “suddenly the amorous light flowing from her eyes
pierced the curtain
and flooded into Lucien’s gaze.” These quotations (which I have translated directly from the French)[
2
] all come from Balzac’s mature masterpieces. If an aspiring writer were to show such samples of his prose to a competent critic, publisher or editor, the only sensible advice that could be given him
would be to renounce forever any literary ambition, never again to touch a pen; any activity would be preferable—instead of writing fiction, let him start a pineapple farm or go into the grocery business, sell manure, import railway sleepers from the Ukraine, dredge the Tiber for lost Roman antiquities or dig for gold in Brazil. In fact, these were some of the many enterprises that Balzac seriously contemplated; had he achieved a measure of success in any of them, he himself believed that he would have devoted his creative imagination entirely to business, and that he would have forsaken all literary endeavours. Or would he?

In his hugely entertaining new biography of Balzac (certainly the best of all those I have read), Graham Robb does not directly address the central paradox of Balzac’s prodigious achievement: How was it possible that the greatest monument of European fiction was built by a man singularly devoid of literary taste? Although Robb takes a purely biographical and non-literary approach (the novels are not analysed but merely mentioned, as chronological stages in Balzac’s career), he eventually provides most of the clues that may help to solve this riddle.

Balzac’s mother was a cold and frivolous woman, who denied him her affection. This childhood wound never healed. He himself was later to say: “All my misfortune came from my mother: she destroyed me purposefully, for the fun of it.” Georges Simenon—the poor man’s Balzac of our time—recognised here his own predicament and commented:

Balzac’s first mistress, who considerably contributed to the refinement of his sensibility, was a few years older than his mother, and subsequently all the women who mattered in his life were, to some extent, substitute mothers. In an early letter, he wrote: “I have only two passions: love and glory”—and the purpose of the latter was to secure the former. He confessed that the primary motivation of his writing was to win the love of women, and in this he succeeded remarkably well: after his death, more than 10,000 letters from female admirers were found among his papers.

Countess Hanska was to become his last and greatest love—greatest, because it was essentially imaginary and literary, and was conducted for sixteen years mostly by correspondence. When they finally succeeded in getting back together and marrying, Balzac was a dying man. She had first entered Balzac’s life as an anonymous correspondent; her passion was originally aroused simply by reading his novels in the backwoods of the Ukraine.

The seduction exerted by the great novelist’s prose was so powerful that it could work even by proxy: it was once rumoured that “several men had obtained the favours of respectable women at the Opera ball by pretending to be Balzac.” This might have seemed fairly easy, since he was short and fat, with common and vulgar looks, like a Daumier shopkeeper or butcher. But it would also have been difficult: his enormous head, beautiful and blazing eyes, generous laughter and boisterous spirits set him apart from the crowd. Perhaps Rodin caught best his paradoxical appearance: a sort of gigantic dwarf, a coiled-up spring of pure energy. By a cruel contradiction, however, if he wrote novels to win women, he also had to forsake women in order to write novels: he firmly believed that every man had at birth a finite store of vital fluid and that the secret of creative life was to hoard one’s energy. Sperm was for him an emission of pure cerebral substance—once, having spent the night with an enchanting creature, he turned up at the house of a friend, crying: “I just lost a book!”[
4
]

Another central experience of Balzac’s childhood was his exile to a Spartan boarding school at the tender age of eight. The brutalities of boarding school can routinely maim sensitive children for life; occasionally they may also breed a genius. Numbed by sorrow and fear, the
child Balzac fell into a stupor; his teachers, unable to draw any intelligent response out of their lethargic pupil, bombarded him with punishments. Detention meant being locked for hours or even days on end in a tiny cell, and the little boy ended up spending up to four days a week in the solitary gloom of the school prison. To escape from this desolation, mere dreaming was not enough: he had to invent for himself another world, more real than this unbearable environment. Relying on his memory, he began to recreate in his mind scenes he had read about in books; he developed a visionary imagination that enabled him to conjure entire worlds, with near-hallucinatory power.

Later in life, he explained: “Whenever I like, I draw a veil over my eyes. Suddenly I go back into myself, and there I find a dark room in which all the accidents of Nature reproduce themselves in a form far purer than the form in which they appeared to my outer senses.” He had learned to cultivate visions which fed not on fantasy but on truth, the truth of his own memory and observation, which he could summon up and modify at will.[
5
] Balzac would constantly resort to these “wilful hallucinations,” not only to find material for his books but also as a refuge against unhappiness, or as an emergency escape whenever he found himself cornered by reality.

Of course, when the frontier between the mind’s vision and reality becomes blurred, one may reach the edge of madness, but Balzac believed that this danger could be overcome if the vision was transformed into knowledge through the mediation of writing. His faith in the power of the written word to become objective truth was repeatedly confirmed by eerie experiences: his fiction contained startling premonitions. At times, events unfolded in his life as if they had already been mapped out in his writing; the printed word was producing reality instead of reflecting it. In his case, as Robb puts it, “The experience came
after
the writing.” There was a complete inversion of roles between invention and reality, which culminated on his deathbed when he deliriously called for Dr. Bianchon, the fictional doctor of
La Comédie humaine
, who alone, he believed, would be able to save him. (The anecdote may be mythical but myths can hint at a deeper truth.)

The story of Balzac’s literary beginnings is amazing; his must be the only example of a man who successfully willed himself into genius without any apparent talent at the start. At the age of sixteen, Robb tells us, he firmly set his mind on becoming Great and Famous; at twenty, he decided that literature should be the field where he would reap glory, love and wealth. The next ten years were dismal: he virtually chained himself to his desk, producing a long series of ridiculous tragedies and unreadable novels (for some of which he wrote no fewer than sixteen different beginnings). As Baudelaire described it:

Finally, when he was thirty-one, he had a breakthrough with his first accomplished work,
La Peau de chagrin
, which was also an immediate commercial success. For the next twenty years—until he died, in fact—his great creations were to follow at a breathtaking pace (though even in his purest masterpieces, he never entirely succeeded in pruning his style of its original clumsiness). Literary success, however, proved to be a curse: in order to create, he virtually renounced living—it was as if, to inject life into
La Comédie humaine
, he had to die. Quite literally, his writing killed him.

At first, writing was for him a sort of asceticism. A passage in
La Muse du département
could be read as a manifesto for his method:

Soon, however, the discipline turned into an all-consuming obsession. Although he wore a monk’s robe when writing, his frantic work had little in common with the quiet and regular pace of cloister life: it became an addiction, an orgy in reverse. At times he only slept two hours a night. He ate no solid food, fearing that digestion might slow down his mind, and sustained himself only with gallons of strong coffee. On finishing a novel, he would collapse, sleep continuously for some twenty hours, and then gorge himself like a camel arriving at an oasis. He had originally a powerful constitution, but with such a regimen he already began to have alarming symptoms of physical decay in his late thirties; since he never eased the pace of his demented activity his health continued to deteriorate. He turned into a premature invalid, and died at fifty-one.

It was not simply in order to meet publishers’ deadlines that Balzac worked in such a suicidal fashion. His life was a long and desperate race to keep one step ahead of a pack of creditors. From an early age, he had gone heavily into debt; later on, the more money he earned (his novels achieved considerable commercial success, some even sold out the very day they appeared) the worse his financial situation became. His megalomaniacal appetites, wastefulness and recklessness cannot alone explain his state of chronic bankruptcy. (His basic theory was that spending money was the best way of paying off debts: when the tailor presents his bill, instead of paying, one should immediately order another dozen waistcoats.) Balzac was widely thought to be afflicted with acute financial ineptitude, but Robb shows that the reality was much more complex: “The schemes he came up with can be divided into two categories: practical ideas, which he never seriously thought of putting into practice, and impractical ones, which he did.” In pursuing the impractical schemes he ensured his own ruin; but he allotted the practical ones to some of his characters, thus making plausible their fabulous fortunes. Robb writes:

There is no escaping the radical difference between the capacity for conception and that for execution: imagination and action are often at opposite poles. That is why novelists usually do not become millionaires, whereas millionaires do not even read novels. Serious people involved in weighty affairs have no time for the puerile games of artistic creation. A man who is entirely “adult” and totally healthy (the latter state, as Sterne warned us, is a most abnormal condition, one that should warrant constant caution) would certainly never contemplate playing the flute all day long, or telling idle tales, or acting and singing on a stage, or playing with clay, paints and brushes. “Genius,” Baudelaire said, “is childhood recalled at will.”