The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  In March 1898, M. George Clemenceau gave me a letter of introduction to Émile Zola, who at once consented to receive me ‘at any time after nine o’clock in the evening’. It was but a few weeks after his condemnation to a year’s imprisonment, consequent upon his letter, ‘J’accuse’ published in L’Aurore of 13th January 1898 …

  Zola bade me take a seat on a sofa, while he moved a chair opposite to me, and scrutinising me very attentively, sat down. He bent forward, so that his head was close to mine, and asked me to begin with my questions.

  ‘The subjects that always interested me most,’ asks Max Beer, ‘were Socialism and the Jewish question. It is, therefore, natural that I should look upon the author of Germinal and the defender of Dreyfus with deep admiration. But cher maître, I cannot conceal the fact that your Rougon-Macquart series and Trois Villes do not contain a single Jewish character worthy of our sympathy.’

  Zola: ‘Yes that’s true. All my Jewish characters have so far been quite despicable. They are, however, such as I saw them.’

  ‘Exactly. I do not impugn your power of observation. It is, as all the world knows, very comprehensive; and your studies are painstaking, sincere and scientifically correct. You will, however, permit me to say that your observation of Jewish life did not go far enough. You had no opportunity of seeing the whole of it.’

  Zola: ‘During these last few months of anguish I thought a good deal of the Jewish question. And I had good reason for it, too. As you know, I was for a long time under the influence of the historical theories of Hippolyte Taine, who laid so much stress on the racial factor in human development. My novels might surely give the impression that I regarded the Jew chiefly as a money-mongering and luxury-loving human being. My recent struggle, however, taught me that there are many Jews who belong to quite another category. There are in human history some factors more potent than race or religion.’

  ‘Economic ones!’

  Zola: ‘Precisely. You see, the rich Jews and Jewesses hate me as much as the Nationalists and the Catholic bigots do. A few days ago a Jewish lady positively insulted M. Anatole France, our greatest critic and essayist, for having signed the petition for revision of the Dreyfus trial. But I am glad to say that the Jewish intellectuals are on our side.’

  ‘And the Jewish proletariat too. One object of my coming to you is to express to you the respectful thanks of many thousands of Jewish workmen in New York for your defence of social justice.’

  Zola: ‘I am deeply touched by this sign of recognition on the part of Jewish labour. I have seen their poverty, their wretchedness, and their toil when I was in London in 1893. I went round Whitechapel to convince myself of the evils of the sweating system.’

  ‘The anti-semites see only the few Jewish millionaires, and shut their eyes to the misery of the toiling Jewish masses in Russia, in Austria, in England and in America. There is no Jewish question at all, but there is a struggle between the owners of the means of production and the owners of labour-power. This struggle knows neither race nor religion. It is a struggle going on, consciously or unconsciously, in the whole civilised world. Abolish this antagonism and Dreyfus trials will be no more.’

  Zola: ‘You are, of course, pointing to socialism.’

  ‘Yes, cher maître. The final chapter of Germinal expresses the advent of socialism in words so powerful that it would be exceedingly presumptuous on my part to deal in your presence with this subject. Although you do not belong to any socialist organisation, all socialists look upon you as one of their great leaders.’

  Zola: ‘I am not a leader in socialist thought, yet I sincerely wish to have all socialists as my friends. You see, only Jaurès and his friends are supporting me. Some Guesdists are standing aloof; some of them are behaving badly. They do not see that I am not fighting for a certain individual, but for the liberty of our great and noble France and against a conspiracy of mighty foes, militarism and the Catholic Church. I need all sympathy, all assistance I can get.

  ‘It is, therefore, painful to see socialists taking no interest in the stormy events which are convulsing the French nation. They think I entered into a deadly struggle for a rich Jewish captain. He is for me only a symbol, a victim of terrible forgeries, a witness of the degradation of our Republic, which inscribed on its portals the democratic trinity: Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality … But, after all, truth is almighty. It will prevail.’

  Zola was speaking passionately and with great fluency. He was easily accessible, eager to impart knowledge and imbued with a modesty as sincere and deep as his love of truth. He actually thanked me for the trouble I had taken in calling upon him. At the conclusion of the interview he enquired again about the position of the millions of Jewish workingmen, about their aspirations and ideas. He also asked a good deal about England, and regretted that he was no linguist. ‘Je suis du Midi,’ he remarked smilingly; ‘mon cerveau n’est pas organisé pour des langues.’ (‘I am from the South: my brain is not organised for languages.’)

  After a hearty handshake, I left the little house in the Rue de Bruxelles, having spent one of the happiest hours of my life. It is, perhaps, an echo of that interview, when Zola in his last novel, Truth, now in course of publication, says:

  ‘And at the sight of that paradise acquired by Jew wealth, at the thought of the splendid fortune amassed by Nathan the Jew money monger, Marc instinctively recalled the Rue du Trou and the dismal hovel without air or sunshine, where Lehmann, that other Jew, had been plying his needle for thirty years and earning only enough to provide himself with bread, And ah! how many other Jews there were, yet more wretched than he – Jews who starve in filthy dens.

  ‘They were the immense majority and their existence demonstrated the idiotic falsity of anti-semitism, that proscription en masse of a race which was charged with the monopolisation of all wealth, when it numbered so many poor working folk, so many victims, crushed down by the almightiness of money, whether it were Jew, or Catholic, or Protestant. There were really no Jew questions – at all; there was only a Capitalist question – a question of money heaped up in the hands of a certain number of gluttons and thereby poisoning and rotting the world.’

  This passage is probably the most socialistic in all Zola’s writings.

  Max Beer’s testimony is amongst other things a reminder that Zola had a readership that saw and relished the links between his fiction – especially Germinal and Vérité (Truth), the third of his Gospels – and his public political stance. He also suggests here that thousands of ‘Jewish workmen’ had discovered Zola and Zola suggests that he had discovered them. Is there any evidence in the press in Britain that reflected this? Jewish working-class papers in Britain and elsewhere were written in Yiddish, using Hebrew letters. They were read mostly in London’s East End, and in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow. The newspapers tended to appear, disappear and re-appear and there are no complete runs of them in libraries. Through these, it’s possible even so to build up a picture of how Zola was being viewed by this group at the time of his stay in England. In July 1898, the Yiddisher Express reported how Zola had lost his second trial and then, a fortnight later, how there was a ‘new sensation’ in the Dreyfus case: Under the heading, ‘Where is Zola now?’ the paper said that this was a question that ‘everyone’ was asking. ‘It remains a mystery. No one knows where he is …’ The article suggested that the Dreyfus campaign had lost its leader: ‘The army has been left without its general.’ In that sense then, the paper saw Zola’s role as pivotal. But, it goes on:

  the government thought that with Zola’s departure, the campaign would fall apart, but in this case they were mistaken as the campaign pushes forward with or without Zola. It seems that a new general will be elected to lead the fight against the government.

  So – pivotal but not indispensable.

  We catch another glimpse of how this turmoil was being viewed from a leaflet sent by the East London Jewish branch of the Social Democratic Federation in support of the Repu
blican James Connolly who stood for election in Dublin in 1902. (On a personal note, my great-grandfather was a member of this branch of the SDF.) Written in Yiddish, the leaflet called on Jews in Dublin to support Connolly, who was standing for the Irish Socialist Republican Party. It warned readers not to vote for the Home Rule candidate because Home Rulers ‘speak out against the English capitalists and the English landlords because they want to seize their places so that they themselves can oppress and exploit the people’. Home Rulers were part of the same class of people who ‘provoke hatred of the Jew and seek to throw the blame for everything upon the Jew in order to deceive the people and conceal its sins against its own people’.

  The writer of the leaflet, the Secretary of the East London branch, Boris Kahan went on:

  The Socialists are the only ones who stand always and everywhere against every national oppression. It is the Socialists who went out onto the streets of Paris against the wild band of anti-semites at the time of the Dreyfus case. In Austria and Germany they conduct a steady struggle against anti-semitism. And in England, too, the Socialists fight against the reactionary elements who want to shut the doors of England against the poorer Jews who were driven to seek refuge in a strange land by the Russian government’s brutality and despotism.

  The point here is that the campaign against the imprisonment of Dreyfus, and Zola’s part in it, were helping to create a new kind of politics. This new politics was combining ideas that were internationalist, against poverty, against injustice and against what we now call racial discrimination – four ideas that hadn’t always sat together in one worldview. Zola had been approached by the Dreyfusards to support their campaign because, much to the surprise of many in his milieu, he had written several impassioned articles against the rise of anti-semitism. At that precise moment, he was a lone non-Jewish public figure saying these things. The anti-semites in France forced the battleground to include the question of race. For them, an army officer who was a Jew was a contradiction in terms because a Jew could not be loyal or honourable. This then encouraged socialists like Jaurès to find a response to racism, drawing on what Zola had written and the stand he had taken.

  Zola mentioned to Alexandrine that Jaurès had come to see him and Jaurès himself wrote up his meeting with Zola too. He talked of Zola’s ‘glorious’ exile near Crystal Palace: on a table were the sheets from Fécondité that he hadn’t quite finished yet; Zola spoke to him with an ‘admirable serenity’ about the comfort and joy he found in work. He reported Zola as saying to him:

  Ah! how this crisis has done me good! How it’s made me forget the self-glorifying vanity to which I – like many others – become attached! And how it’s opened up my life, along with problems and profundities that I didn’t ever suspect! I want to devote all my efforts to the liberation of man. I wish that we could all put ourselves up for the test that our group of humanity might come out of this being braver and more fraternal …

  As for me, I read, I do research, not in order to imagine a new system … but in order to extract from socialist works those ideas that chime most with my sense of life, with my love of activity, good health, abundance and joy.

  A friend lent me Fourier; I’m reading this at the moment and I’m stunned by it. I don’t know yet what’s going to come of this research, but I want to celebrate work, and through that, get people who curse it, are slaves to it, or who disfigure it with ugliness and misery, to end up respecting it.

  As Zola was finishing off Fécondité he was thinking ahead to the second of his four Évangiles – Travail (Work). As Jaurès notes, one of the inspirations for this novel was the work of Charles Fourier (1772–1837). As Zola sat during his last days in the Queen’s Hotel he was conjuring up a new kind of hero, an enthusiast for Fourier’s work. This young engineer, Luc Froment, would take from Fourier the idea of the phalanstery, a harmonious utopian community of 1,600 or so people, cultivating some 5,000 acres of land, where capital, talent and labour would join forces for the collective good. The book, begun in England but finished in France, brought this utopian vision to life: next to modern industrial plants, a new kind of city grows up: a community of single-family houses, each with gardens watered by fresh streams. At the centre of the city, there are communal buildings: an assembly hall, a library, public baths. Religion fades away, co-educational schools transmit knowledge, boys and girls learn partnership. Over time, even the social hierarchy (the class system) fades away too.

  When Work appeared, Jaurès reviewed it and this review appeared in the Social-Democrat. He pointed out that Zola’s utopia could not be reached in the way that Zola had showed it being achieved; it had to be reached through organisation and the struggle of the working class. Even so, Jaurès writes,

  Read and re-read the last pages. Luke and Jordan have finished their work, they are talking for the last time at sunset. They see the old familiar landscape. Luke looks for the last time at the Communist city, joyful and fraternal, which has risen from the co-operative seed which he sowed long ago; Jordan rejoices at having captured the sun’s heat for the science of man.

  This appears to me finer than anything I know of in fiction or verse. In the old days the poets exalted gods, but now it is man who, older than any god, is the poet’s hero.

  In Zola social revolution has at last found its poet.

  H. M. Hyndman replied in the same issue. He enjoyed the powerful descriptions of the coal and iron men on strike, and the hunger and misery experienced by the families; similarly, the scene when the old foreman of the smelting furnace commits suicide on seeing the new electric smelters, or the ‘terrible death struggle’ when the head of the great iron works burns down his house so that his selfish wife should die in the fire.

  (A thought in passing on this aspect of Zola’s interests during his time in Britain: if he had been more fluent in English, he might have been interested in the news coming out of South Wales while he was in London. After a bitter six-month dispute between the coal-miners and the owners had ended in defeat and poverty for the miners, they formed the South Wales Miners’ Federation in October 1898. The following year they affiliated to the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. Over the next ninety years, some of the most powerful advocates of the kind of political ideas that interested Zola would come from this source.)

  Overall, Hyndman thought that Zola had lost his capacity for that ‘close and continuous analysis of the situation which compels the reader to follow him …’ When it came to the utopian passages, Hyndman read against the spirit and mood of the novel, sympathising with the anarchist who complained of the monotony of the utopia! Hyndman said that the founder of the enterprise would ‘never have had a ghost of a chance of success against the organised forces of progressive capitalism’. He went on to describe how the ‘powerful Trustifiers’ would have ripped into the co-operators of the novel and destroyed the enterprise. The ‘pretty little bubble’ that Zola had created would be ‘pricked into nothingness’. But why should a great writer like Zola, Hyndman asked, ‘condescend to such unthought-out and crude imaginings’? He doesn’t answer the question but suggested that the book was dangerous because it would ‘divert the minds of the mass of the people’ from understanding the ‘stupendous developments’ in capitalism going on around them. He closed by warning socialists against thinking that they could compete on a large scale with these newer developments. The results of ‘such misplaced energy will be nothing better than disappointment and regret’.

  On this plane of highly politicised left-wing literary criticism: the Fabian group, credited with being the nursery (or university) for moderate socialist intellectuals, also had Zola on their agenda around this time. The June 1898 edition of Fabian News announced that their next meeting at Clifford’s Inn, Fleet Street, 8 p.m. Friday 10 June, would feature a talk ‘Émile Zola as Artist and as Doctrinaire’ by Sydney Olivier, CMG. The magazine laid out the ‘Syllabus’ for the evening, which would include: ‘The Zola Bogey. Zola’s Doctrine. Limitation
s of both: throwing back the tremendous force of the man into practical revolt against institutions.’ Coincidentally, the Fabians were on Zola’s patch in another way too: the following talk, a fortnight later, was from a neo-Malthusian – in other words diametrically opposed to the views that Zola was expressing in Fécondité at that very moment. The ‘Syllabus’ here included: ‘Poverty and Population. Socialism and the Birth Rate. The Real Population Problem’.

  In the following month’s issue, there was the write-up of Sydney Olivier’s talk. He had opened by discussing the common accusation against Zola’s writing that it was full of ‘nastiness, indecency, and dreariness’. He dismissed this as superficial and irrelevant. He was interested in what he called ‘connecting intentions’ across Zola’s twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle. He thought these were: the scientific study of heredity and determinism in human life and society, and an anatomy of the characteristics of middle- and working-class life in France under the Second Empire. This second intention was, he said, closely bound up with Zola’s own ruling passion, ‘his real democratic feeling and his hatred and contempt of all that he typified in the Second Empire’. He was now becoming more and more an accuser of the established order from the point of view of utopian socialism, and in his greater works, such as Germinal, his accusation spoke through powerful artistic methods.

  Olivier was much less keen on the turn Zola had taken in his last book in the cycle, Doctor Pascal, and the Three Cities series that followed. He thought Zola was working under the illusion that ‘his works represent a body of scientific truth’, and that the scenes in these books represented ‘the promise of a re-created society and a wholesome future for France’. He thought that Zola’s ideas of the essentials of such a society were ones that most Socialists would applaud, but his ‘denunciatory method’, albeit with a moral purpose, marred the literary effect. Now, though, Zola’s passion and power and fearlessness and enormous industry had forced him into action in revolt against injustice (in other words, the Dreyfus case). This experience could not fail to affect his writing, Olivier thought. He hoped that this would have a better outcome in his fiction.