The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  Fabians reading about Zola in their magazine at that time would have found him alongside a review, ‘Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant’, of Bernard Shaw’s works, including Mrs Warren’s Profession, a play about prostitution which some have thought owed something to the literary, social and political opportunities that Zola’s writing had opened up. And in the June issue there was a write-up of a talk on ‘The Social Teaching of Thomas Hardy’, whose last two novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, owed a good deal to Zola. While Zola was turning up in places like Weybridge and Upper Norwood, his works were also arriving on the bookshelves of Britain’s liberal left.

  10

  ‘Grossest bad taste’

  Two events at the Queen’s Hotel give us a glimpse of how Zola’s books were seen in Britain at the time of his exile: a major dispute with Vizetelly over his translation of Fécondité and the visit to the hotel of the Irish novelist George Moore.

  The dispute with Vizetelly had its roots in the scandals surrounding Zola’s work in the years prior to Zola’s visit to England in 1893. Between April 1884 and May 1888, Vizetelly and Co. had published eighteen Zola translations, seventeen novels and one collection of short stories, some of them in cheap, illustrated editions.

  The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead, founded an organisation called the National Vigilance Association (NVA), which set up a Literary Sub-Committee to keep an eye on immoral writing. The NVA brought prosecutions against Henry Vizetelly for publishing Zola’s novels, some of which had prefaces written by George Moore.

  The anxieties expressed by the NVA were partly alerted by the rise of new readerships created by the 1870 Education Act. Worrying for guardians of decency was that working women were reading books which were thought to ‘pander’ to them. Others, from the Social Purity Alliance, said that ‘there never was a time when greater efforts were made to poison the minds of the young’.

  A battle was on. 1879 saw the publication of Pioneer, a ‘Magazine Written to counteract the Effect of Pernicious Literature Amongst Youths’. The Pure Literature Society supplied ‘sound and healthy reading’; the National Home Reading Union was founded in order to ‘check the spread of pernicious literature among the young’. In 1885, the Criminal Law Amendment Act raised the female age of consent to sixteen, and the NVA vowed to enforce the ‘social purity’ of this law, along with a promise to suppress the publication and sale of indecent or obscene books, papers, prints and pictures. The Literary Sub-Committee of the NVA promised to target indecencies that were ‘obviously subversive of the best interests of the growing generation and opposed to the ideals of a true citizenship’. In 1886, it successfully brought prosecutions against an individual who sold ‘art photographs’ of nudes and a newspaper for printing details of a divorce case. In 1888, it brought a case against a street-seller of photographs from Paris. Significantly and ominously, they wrote, ‘Every clerk and shopboy knows enough French to pick out obscenity, and it is sometimes difficult in these days to distinguish between high class French fiction and mere pornography.’

  And that was the core of the problem. Was Zola high art or smut? Though consumers of high art – presumably readers of a high enough class – were safe from corruption, low-class readers were not. If unexpurgated Zola was available through cheap publications coming out of the Vizetelly house, then this line could not be held. The Contemporary Review of 1884 placed Zola as part of the ‘photographic school’ of literature and said he was notable for his ‘odious indecency’, adding with a sneer, ‘this is how we are told clever writers think it worthwhile to write’.

  Via a planted letter on its letters pages, the NVA warned readers of the Pall Mall Gazette in December 1887 that La Terre, ‘too vile to be published in either France or Austria, is being brought out here with impunity in English’. They lured Henry Vizetelly into boasting how his ‘unabridged translation’ of Nana had sold over 100,000 copies. He wasn’t afraid of talking up his publications: his advert for Alphonse Daudet’s Sapho said that it was ‘A glowing picture of Parisian life, with all its special immorality … with numerous French engravings …’

  On 8 May 1888 matters reached the House of Commons when the MP for Flintshire, Samuel Smith, proposed a motion that deplored the ‘rapid spread of demoralising literature’ and that the law against obscene publications should be vigorously enforced. His concern was that ‘low bookstalls’ were carrying an endless supply of English translations of French novels. He named Vizetelly as the chief culprit, particularly as he claimed ‘artistic grounds’ for books that were ‘only fit for swine’. This all constituted a ‘gigantic national danger’, it ‘corroded the human character’ and ‘sapped the vitality of the nation’. He asked the government whether it was content ‘to wait till the deadly poison spread itself over English soil and killed the life of this great and noble people’.

  The NVA rushed out 120,000 copies of Smith’s speech as a pamphlet and, by October 1888, Vizetelly was on trial for issuing translations of the ‘three most immoral books ever published’, Zola’s La Terre, Nana and Pot-Bouille. The trial began with the prosecution reading an extract from La Terre in which the young farm-girl Françoise assists – with her hand – a bull to mate with a cow. Vizetelly pleaded guilty and was fined £100 and bound over not to publish the novels in their present form.

  In May 1889 he was back in court, for his editions of Maupassant and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and on the issue of whether he had sufficiently expurgated La Terre. He hadn’t. He pleaded guilty again, was fined £200 and sentenced to three months’ jail with hard labour, despite his defence’s pleas that at seventy he was too frail and had been punished enough. Simultaneously, the NVA was bringing charges against a publisher of an English translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Again, the case was that, though the Italian text couldn’t be objected to, the English versions could be found on sale in the ‘filth-market of our large towns’.

  Literary critics struggled with this wave of prudish hostility. In the Contemporary Review, one Percy Bunting argued that the Decameron and Zola were ‘literature’, and could ‘plead the privilege of art’ albeit ‘feebly’. The NVA was now in a strong enough position to warn ‘writers of what is called the realistic school’ that they would not allow Britain to be ‘flooded with foreign filth, and our youth polluted by having the most revolting and hideous descriptions of French vice thrust upon their attention.’

  George Moore organised a petition on behalf of Vizetelly and managed to hook in atheist and campaigner Charles Bradlaugh, drama critic William Archer, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, writers Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, A. W. Pinero, Edmund Gosse, Frank Harris, Olive Schreiner, John Addington Symonds, Max O’Rell, the actor Sir Henry Irving, and the chief librarian for W. H. Smith, William Faux, but the petition failed in securing Vizetelly’s release. The liberal counter-attack wasn’t strong enough yet.

  Around this time novelists who dared write about sex started to be accused of ‘Zolaism’. Zola was the yardstick by which the level of filth could be measured. George Gissing’s novel The Nether World was reviewed by the Glasgow Herald, which found ‘the horrible brutality, the crime, the filth and squalor, the very language are reproduced with a fidelity which Zola himself might commend’. The Contemporary Review noted that it lacked the ‘leprous naturalism that disgusts every honourable reader in the works of Zola and his school’.

  George Moore’s Esther Waters of 1894 (previously serialised in the Pall Mall Gazette) was banned from the circulating libraries of W. H. Smith by the same William Faux who had signed the petition, complaining that readers were ‘not used to detailed descriptions of a lying-in hospital’. The act of birth seems to have outraged critics of this school easily as much as the act of sex. The Gazette criticised Esther Waters, the book it had itself published, for being ‘hampered by the trammels of Zolaism’. Writers need approval to survive and Gissing, amongst others, was made nervous by the outcry against smut and switched his focu
s from the society of the street to the safer environs of the middle class. The one true victim of the battle, though, remained Henry Vizetelly, who served his time in Pentonville jail, was forced to close down the publishing house, and died some three years later in January 1894, with son Ernest always blaming his time in prison for having finished him off.

  On 27 March 1899 Ernest Vizetelly wrote to Zola agreeing with him that Fécondité was a moral work which stigmatised the vices and processes that it described. On the other hand, if he (Vizetelly) had to think about publishing the book in English in Britain, it was in his opinion impossible. To do so would lead to six months’ imprisonment for whoever dared to publish it. Vizetelly deeply regretted having to tell Zola this. What’s more, making cuts in the work was impossible too. Looking at the ten chapters he had in front of him, there wasn’t one of them that he wouldn’t have to cut by a third or perhaps a half, the reason being that in a cheap book, distributed to the general public, the descriptions just wouldn’t be tolerated. There would be some who would say that the book would corrupt people, the clergy would rise up en masse, and the whole thing would be a repetition of what had happened to Vizetelly’s father after he published La Terre.

  Vizetelly proposed telling Chatto the situation: if they wanted to publish, he would do the translation. He insisted that this had nothing to do with his own personal feelings about the book. The problem was the prejudice of the British and Americans and the laws being so severe in the two countries.

  Vizetelly would go on to make these misgivings public in The Athenaeum in October 1899, adding that he felt he could not ‘fight, or help to fight, the battle which the publication of a faithful rendering of Fécondité would, in my estimation, entail’. Yet, Chatto & Windus convinced him that a much cut version could be published and it did appear in May 1900, after Zola had returned to France, with a preface from Vizetelly himself. Even though he had indeed heavily reduced the novel, this preface shows signs of him still being nervous that the book would be condemned. The novel, he writes, is a ‘tract’ in relation to ‘certain grievous evils’. By writing the book, Zola was ‘discharging a patriotic duty … absolute freedom of speech exists in France which is not the case in this country’. He, Vizetelly, had been of the opinion that publication in England would be impossible but that view became ‘modified’, because the book’s ‘high moral purpose’ was recognised by several of its ‘most bitter detractors’. (He meant recognised by those who had read the original French version.) Vizetelly then mustered forces in his defence: among the reviewers were two well-known lady writers(!), Madame Darmesteter (formerly Miss Mary Robinson), and Miss Hannah Lynch. The first had said how ‘honest’, ‘moral’, ‘human’ and ‘comely’ the book was, and the second, how ‘eminently, pugnaciously virtuous’ it was. Vizetelly added, ‘nothing in any degree offensive to delicate susceptibilities will be found in this present version …’ and reassured readers that in the book, ‘the punishment of the guilty is awful’.

  He could have added in here The Times reviewer who had said that it wasn’t

  easy to explain completely to an Anglo-Saxon audience the full signification of M. Zola’s remarkable work. Naturally such a theme carries him amidst scandalous habits and customs. But side by side with these terrible scenes he describes for us almost romantically, and in pages which are among the most eloquent he has ever penned … the book itself is a series of contrasts, at one time full of beauty, and another reeking with monstrous suggestion.

  The point is, Vizetelly was a worried man. In a letter to the publisher Macmillan he filled in the details behind his concerns:

  … scene follows scene of women at midwives’ establishments, of operations of all sorts performed on them, of some of them dying from the effects thereof in lakes of blood, of others being unsexed by surgical operations, of others taking every precaution to prevent childbirth so boldly, so vividly, at such length, in such detail that neither British nor American hypocrisy could for one moment tolerate such a recital. [All underlinings his.]

  In fact, large parts of Fécondité have never been translated into English. And it is disturbing. This passage describes what can only be termed as infanticide. Madame Rouche, a backstreet abortionist, relates what she has seen:

  ‘And what do I find in one of the two beds? The wretched girl, legs splayed, in a pool of blood, hands twisted, still tight around the neck of the infant they had strangled, when it had barely made the journey out; and she dead herself, Monsieur, dead from a ghastly haemorrhage, the flood bursting through the mattress and bedstead, to seep onto the floor. But the extraordinary thing was that the other woman, the cook, who had been asleep no more than two metres away, had heard absolutely nothing, not a cry, not a whisper. She only became aware of all this upon waking … Can you picture the poor child, compounding her pain, swallowing back her cries, expecting the infant only to suffocate it with her own feverish hands? And then can you picture her, with no strength left after that final exertion, letting all the blood drain from her veins, and drifting off into death with that tiny being, but never releasing her grip?’

  Remembering the consequence of his father’s publication of Zola, Vizetelly reminded Macmillan that his father was ‘imprisoned, ruined & hounded to death for his pains’.

  This was true but it doesn’t tell the whole picture. The situation had not been uniform. Whilst Vizetelly senior was indeed being hounded, a group of editors, critics and writers in Britain slowly emerged to fight back against the onslaught. They had either taken Zola seriously from the start, evolved into admirers, or let ‘Zolaism’ into their writing, so that, by the time of his exile, Zola’s influence was felt across a good part of the literary world. The list of names on George Moore’s petition tell part of the story: but we can add (with significant caveats) the names of Arthur Symons, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Quiller-Couch and the institutions of the Independent Theatre Society, the Lutetian Society and journals like the Westminster Review.

  Chronology may not do full justice to how this sphere of influence grew and spread but it gives an indication all the same. Back in 1880, Henry James reviewed Nana and, though he complained about its ‘monstrous uncleanness’, he conceded that the English novel was constricted by its need to be wholesome for ‘virgins and boys’. ‘Half of a life is a sealed book to young unmarried ladies,’ he wrote, ‘and how can a novel be worth anything that deals only with half of life?’

  In 1884 James wrote an essay on ‘The Art of Fiction’ and seemed to hold back from condemning Zola. By 1903, though he was still struggling with Zola’s ‘indecency’, he produced one of the first full-length, serious reviews of Zola. In private, through the ’80s and ’90s, and presumably in conversation with friends, he had been taking Zola’s writing seriously.

  Much more in the open, George Moore was a conscious and public champion of Zola, though never unafraid of being highly critical of his work. According to his own account, Confessions of a Young Man, his conversion to Zola happened in 1879 when he read Zola’s manifesto for Naturalism in Le Roman Experimental (The Experimental Novel). Moore was astonished ‘at the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition’. Moore was one of the few English-language writers who consciously and publicly made an effort to imitate Zola’s Naturalism. As mentioned, his Esther Waters appeared in 1894.

  The work and critical reception of the era’s greatest novelist, Thomas Hardy, was intertwined with the Zola effect. In 1890, Hardy produced the essay ‘Candour in Fiction’ and in 1891 another, ‘The Science of Fiction’. Beneath the surface in these essays and over several decades, Hardy’s attitude to Zola flip-flopped between uneasiness, contempt, envy, pretended ignorance and admiration. In France, Hardy knew well that Zola had precisely the freedom to write about love and sex in ways that he, Hardy, yearned for. In a letter to a woman friend, he wrote, ‘I think him no artist & too material.’ He conceded in ‘The Science of Fiction’ that Zola was a ‘romanc
er’ but later condemned him for not being an ‘artist, but at bottom a man of affairs, who would just as soon have written twenty volumes of, say, the statistics of crime, or commerce, as of fiction – a passionate reformer, who has latterly found his vocation’.

  This last comment can be taken as a sneer at Zola’s involvement in the Dreyfus case. Hardy had refused to comment on the Affair, having stated his position on writers and politics a few years earlier with ‘The pursuit of what people are pleased to call Art so as to win unbiassed attention to it as such, absolutely forbids political action [my italics].’

  Though Hardy told Edmund Gosse that he barely knew Zola’s work, claiming to be ‘read in Zola very little’, behind closed doors he collected Zola’s books in both French and English. He penned notes on some of these (including Germinal) and hand-copied extracts from the books into his notebooks.

  In his dealings with editors and the press, Hardy worked in the shadow of the NVA’s campaign, and its successful use of Zola as its test case. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) both had a rocky road in their production and reception. They were seen to be touched by the presence of Zola, if only for such scenes as Jude’s encounter with the pig’s ‘pizzle’, which some think is reminiscent of the cattle-mating scene in La Terre. The review of Tess in the Manchester Guardian said that it was ‘coloured throughout with Zolaism’. Zola himself (as mentioned in an earlier chapter) hoped in 1893 that Tess would be published soon in France. A close reading of Zola’s La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret in relation to Hardy’s novels shows Hardy working through some of Zola’s ways of writing. While Zola had had a free ride in France, Hardy spent years wrestling with publishers: literary magazines turned down versions of Tess in serial form, so for them, he self-censored – resentfully – the rape of Tess, along with the birth and death of the illegitimate child and he spent a good deal of effort in negotiation with his publishers over what could or could not be allowed. With Jude, Hardy had to negotiate with Harper’s New Monthly Magazine so that it could fit in with their demand that he avoid material that ‘could not be read aloud in any family circle’. The two novels can be read in part for their sub-textual commentaries on the NVA and its effect on people’s sexual behaviour. When Jude appeared, the Pall Mall Gazette, dubbed it ‘Jude the Obscene’ and Hardy retreated from writing fiction from then on.