The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  Meanwhile, in 1891, the poet and critic John Addington Symonds praised Zola as an ‘idealist of the purest water’ and celebrated La Bête Humaine as ‘the poem of the railway’. These flourishes may seem like hyperbole now but in the context of the struggle over Zola, they were weapons.

  We can get a sense of the stream that Zola’s works were swimming in at this point from the fact that, in the same year, a dramatised version of Thérèse Raquin played at the Royalty Theatre for the Independent Theatre Society. This was a private theatre club, more responsible than any other institution at the time for bringing the works of Ibsen to Britain, along with premières of Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses and plays by Maeterlinck. A Zola adaptation had been seen before on the London stage: in 1879, a version of L’Assommoir had played at the Princess’s Theatre, with the Gentleman’s Magazine regretting that it was a toned-down version of the novel! A ‘melodramatic-burlesque’ adaptation of the play followed soon after and in 1885 a suitably watered-down version of Nana had played at the Theatre Royal, Wigan, with a brief showing in London. In the 1880s, British drama critics in Paris went to see Zola adaptations, filling their reviews in the Britain newspapers with the usual health warnings: ‘tiresome, loathsome and repulsive in the extreme’. The Independent Theatre Society production was a different matter. The society had to be private in order to avoid the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain; its members included Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, George Moore and Arthur Conan Doyle, with Oscar Wilde, Shaw and James coming to see the Zola play. The Daily Telegraph critic, Clement Scott, thought the incidents of the play needed to be in the ‘hands of Euripides, or Sophocles, or Shakespeare’ as they ‘required to be lifted … out of their squalid atmosphere’. Not much rehabilitation of Zola there.

  The Morning Post review, though, showed the kind of ambivalence that was starting to creep into mainstream attitudes to Zola. ‘Happily for visitors of refined tastes, Ibsen’s “Ghosts” no longer exhibited their hideous shadows upon the stage, but the morbid revelations of “Thérèse Raquin”, by M. Émile Zola, were quite strong enough for ordinary nerves.’ Having laid out the usual warnings to readers who, after all, would not even be able to see the show, lower down in his article the reviewer sneaked in a smidgeon of admiration for the play: ‘powerful situations … the fate that eventually overtakes the guilty couple is in harmony with poetic justice … the sombre drama affords scope for vigorous acting’. And a comment you could take either way – though Zola would have thought of it as a compliment – the play was ‘rather a story such as the police court reveals’.

  The Standard of the same day offered the same mixed fare: first the reviewer pointed out that the Lord Chamberlain had licensed this production. Then it acknowledged that Zola had his ‘devotees’ and ‘credit must be given … to M. Zola’s imagination’, though of course this came with the usual proviso about Zola trespassing ‘far beyond’ the ‘legitimate bounds of art’. A major bother for the reviewer was the ‘grossest bad taste’ of showing a young girl helping Thérèse dress and wash – if the Lord Chamberlain had licensed this then he had been ‘unduly lenient’. After outlining these drawbacks, the review approved of the last scene which ‘in its own horrible and exceedingly painful way’ was ‘certainly effective’. ‘There is something terrible in this silent witness [the speechless mother] of the hell which the guilty pair have made for themselves.’

  Frederick Wedmore in the Academy found it ‘original and fearless’ and an old champion of Zola, William Archer, was ‘enthusiastic’. When the French version of the story ran in Paris in 1892, The Times reviewer reported back to British readers that Zola had ‘undoubtedly made out his case …’

  In his essay, ‘The Tyranny of the Novel’ (1892), the literary critic Edmund Gosse offered real and serious praise of Zola as the ‘one novelist’ who had written ‘a large, competent, profound review of the movement of life’. In the same year, Zola’s The Attack on the Mill and other sketches of war (L’Attaque du Moulin) became the first Zola fiction to be published by a traditional publishing house – Heinemann – and it was the first to appear without the customary flamboyant and alluring cover image. Gosse wrote the preface saying, ‘Whenever M. Zola writes of war, he writes seriously and well.’ This same year, La Débâcle was reviewed in Harper’s Monthly and described as ‘a work of genius and immense power’.

  1893 was a really good year for Zola in England. A literary biography appeared, written by the journalist Robert Sherard, which brought to English-speaking readers a solid survey of Zola’s life and work that trod carefully around the pitfalls of whether Zola was smut or not. On La Terre for example, Sherard writes:

  It is … the book about which Zola has been most blamed for deliberate pornography, and it is certainly a matter of fact that there are many passages in it which never can be approved by Anglo-Saxon readers. But it happens that Zola does not write for Anglo-Saxon readers … And it must be remembered that the delight in a certain kind of coarseness is a trait of French character, just as in England under Elizabeth.

  Criticism like this, I suspect, was just as likely to attract the curiosity of some Anglo-Saxon readers, as repel others.

  In 1892 and 1893, the Westminster Review took up a good deal of space with discussions on Zola’s influence on Thomas Hardy. ‘The coarseness of Zola’s “L’Assommoir” cannot blind us to its wonderful vividness of description, its harrowing presentation of the miseries and vices of the scum of the Parisian population, its pitiless but faithful, portraiture of life’s bitter realities. So with “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”.’ The influential critic V. Lee gave Zola that Victorian seal of approval by dubbing him ‘moral’. (One sidenote here is that V. Lee was in fact Violet Paget, who used the pen-name because she had herself run into similar trouble to Zola because of her frank discussions of sexuality.) Zola-like she wrote in her diary, ‘I will show, fight, argue, prove that I am in the right, that the restrictions placed upon the novel in England are absurd, that my novel [Miss Brown] is legitimate and praiseworthy.’ In her essay ‘Moral Teaching of Zola’, Lee said that she ‘aim[ed] to suggest the moral lessons Zola may bring to his worthier readers’; ‘Zola exposes the sort of misery and wickedness the world contains’. Then September of that year saw Zola’s hugely successful visit to England, though some at the time spotted the contradictions between the acclaim he received coming so soon after his books were banned.

  In 1894, Zola’s L’Attaque du Moulin (music by Bruneau) played at Covent Garden and the Independent Theatre Society had a second stab at Zola with a production of Les Héritiers Rabourdin at the Opera Comique. This was a complete flop, not for the usual reason of disgusting its critics, but because the comedy wasn’t funny. In the history of Zola’s reputation in Britain, the attempt to put it on is more significant than the outcome. Prompted by the death of Henry Vizetelly, the Daily Chronicle hosted a passionate debate on ‘Literary Freedom’, including strong defences of Zola and Hardy.

  In 1894–5, a private male literary circle took up Zola’s cause: the Lutetian Society published uncensored editions of Germinal (translated by Havelock Ellis), L’Assommoir (Arthur Symons), Nana (Victor Plarr), La Curée (Texeira de Mattos), La Terre (Ernest Dowson) and Pot-Bouille (Percy Pinkerton), each edition circulating 300 copies in two volumes, all printed ‘for Private Distribution’ amongst Lutetian Society members, on handmade paper at a cost of £25 per book. Though these editions were for the private consumption of wealthy men, the translations made serious attempts to do justice to all aspects of Zola’s work that the NVA and others found so objectionable: primarily the many sex and childbirth scenes – both human and animal – along with the slang, curses and so-called obscenities. One small example of hundreds, this one from La Terre: Zola wrote: ‘Tu peux te la foutre au cul, ta soupe! Je vas dormir.’* The Lutetian edition translated that as: ‘Shove your soup up your bloody arse! I’m going to sleep’, while Vizetelly translated it as: ‘“Stick your soup behind!” shout
ed the old man, turning round to her. “I’m going to bed.”’

  In 1895 the Westminster Review published ‘Towards the Appreciation of Émile Zola’ by E. C. Townshend. Townshend tried to save Zola from the accusation that he was a socialist; if his books preached socialism it was because he turned the unconventional insight of the true artist on modern life, on the hollowness of its shams, the cruelty of its contrasts. As with much of the Zola criticism of the time, this had a double-edged quality: the dangers or drawbacks in Zola’s work drift into being its delights and insights.

  The next year, Havelock Ellis followed up his translation of Germinal with an essay on Zola in the Savoy magazine, which some see as the first truly modern English-language critique. Ellis was perhaps the first critic to explain and justify Zola’s exploration of working-class life and language: ‘The main thing was to give literary place and prestige to words and phrases which had fallen so low in general esteem, in spite of their admirable expressiveness, that only a writer of the first rank and of unequalled audacity could venture to lift them from the mire.’ He put Zola in the company of Rabelais, Chaucer and Shakespeare in his expression of the ‘sexual and digestive functions’.

  All the forces of Nature, it seems to him [Zola], are raging in the fury of generative desire or reposing in the fullness of swelling maturity. The very earth itself, in the impressive pages with which ‘Germinal’ closes, is impregnated with men, germinating beneath the soil, one day to burst through the furrows and renew the old world’s failing life. In this conception of the natural energies of the world – as manifested in men and animals, in machines in every form of matter – perpetually conceiving and generating, Zola reaches his most impressive effects, though these effects are woven together of elements that are separately of no very exquisite beauty, or subtle insight, or radical novelty.

  Ellis grasped here that Naturalism was not realist; it used the details of natural phenomena, culled from modern scientific sources, as the basis for metaphors and symbols. Ellis also pointed out how Zola had rendered a ‘service’ to his fellow artists by giving proof that they too could write about the ‘rough, neglected details of life’:

  It has henceforth become possible for other novelists to find inspiration where before they could never have turned, to touch life with a vigour and audacity of phrase which, without Zola’s example, they would have trembled to use, while they still remain free to bring to their work the simplicity, precision, and inner experience which he has never possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of the novel.

  With that phrase, ‘enlarged the field of the novel’, Ellis signposted the full significance of Zola in the literary world.

  Further defences and celebrations of Zola appeared in the Fortnightly Review (R. E. S. Hart) and from the poet Arthur Symons.

  Several questions raised by all this are about the movement of opinion. Between, say, 1880 and 1900 were these members of literary groupings changing their attitude to the depiction of love, sex and class in literature? Did enthusiasts of Zola convince those who disapproved? Was Zola’s work the catalyst for change – a process that runs through, perhaps, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, all the way to the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960?

  I suspect that it was all these, with many nuanced variations in between. Apart from anything else, there was no one single ‘Zola’, there were censored and uncensored works, and there were novels that people could say to themselves were more ‘moral’ than others. And reading is social. Readers are people who talk to each other about what they read and this often leads them to range across several authors who they see as belonging together. It wasn’t only the NVA who lumped Zola into a Paris or French school; the Lutetians named themselves after the Latin name for Paris; Zola’s British publisher upped his sales by hinting at forbidden delights from across the Channel while literary critics spotted the tide flowing from Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola to Hardy, Shaw and James. Things were moving.

  None of these issues stand on their own; they are linked to the question of the social order. Those who were opposed to Zola’s fiction felt that he undermined that order, the implication being that fiction has or should have a role in sustaining the status quo and he was betraying that role. They had a problem: the status quo wasn’t very ‘status’ – society was changing. The old certainties of church, state and power – ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’ – were under pressure from new political organisations, new organisations for working people and for women (many of whom, I hasten to add, were now part of what we mean by that phrase ‘working people’), new technologies, new ways of moving over the earth’s surface, new ideas about the structure of matter, the nature of time and what a human being is. People on both sides of the Zolaism wars recognised that Zola pictured the change.

  What is odd is to think of Zola virtually alone in Norwood at the very point that a new ‘republic of letters’ (his words from 1893) was taking shape. I can’t help thinking that it’s a great shame that Zola wasn’t able on occasions to gather up his papers, stroll out of the Queen’s Hotel, turn left, walk up the road to Crystal Palace Station, take the train up to town to give a talk at the Authors’ Society to follow up his speech from 1893, give a reading and have a discussion with the Lutetians, the Fabians, the members of the Independent Theatre Society, the readers of the Westminster Review or the Social-Democrat.

  After all, waxworks don’t talk.

  * Standard French is ‘Je vais’ but Zola represented local dialect with ‘Je vas’.

  11

  ‘Cheque delayed. Invoice received.’

  By 16 March Zola and Jeanne were figuring out how she and the children could come to England again, and how she should keep it secret from the authorities. The children had to stay patient, their bicycles would be bought when he got back. Any other place to meet was impossible: ‘It’ll be difficult to find a country where I won’t be recognised and where we’ll be able to live in peace, without the whole world on my back.’

  On 20 March Zola and Alexandrine were back to struggling with their situation: Zola received this:

  This day, the 17th, the holiday, is, in spite of your kind thoughts, a real day of mourning; I can put it amongst the days which, in these last years have been the most sad, because, through these thirty-five years together, I have to subtract a frightful ordeal [‘calvaire’] of ten, which will only come to an end when my life ends. Today, living alone as I am, this flood of past sadness rose up inside me and a suffering so bitter that I’ve spent this day in the midst of flowers that I haven’t arranged yet. When we reached thirty-four years together, on 28 December, I was by your side and neither of us spoke of it; I returned home, once more crying desperately. I was looking forward to the days when we’ll be old and once again I couldn’t understand how the happiness I used to dream of could have escaped me like a flash of lightning.

  ps You again wish me happiness in your letter but where do you want me to find it? Isn’t my life finished for ever?

  Zola responded, ‘I thought sending you the flowers would make you happy for a moment, and I see that all I’ve done is give you grief …’

  On the other hand, on 23 March, with a tone of delight, Zola wrote to Jeanne: ‘Dear beloved wife, it’s been decided, pack your bags and come … This happiness isn’t given to us very often, so I mustn’t let it escape. This is going to make for a delicious Easter holiday …’

  Plans were made for Jeanne and the children to come out on 29 March and go back on 11 April. He told Jeanne that Vizetelly would be at Victoria Station to meet them. He wasn’t so cheerful about Jacques: he wasn’t working hard enough. ‘It’s disastrous that we have a little Jacques who can’t do well and, because of his casualness and inattention, can hardly get on.’

  On the same day he wrote to Denise conjuring up a picture of the four of them riding bikes in Verneuil and going off to buy cakes. They would look so lovely that everyone would stop to look at them.

  As planned, th
e family arrived on 29 March and spent the Easter holidays under the name of ‘Roger’, at the Crystal Palace Royal Hotel, listed as being ‘near to Beulah Spa, with six acres of Pleasure Ground attached’, where the manager was W. C. E. Francatelli.

  Denise remembered that there was:

  a valet at the hotel who stole my brother’s watch, then pretended to find it again when my mother threatened him by telling him that the watch had never left our room. This caused inconsolable unhappiness for several days in our intimate circumstances …

  On Sunday, to our great astonishment, the Salvation Army, stopped in the middle of the street, very solemnly sang hymns, handed out their leaflets and preached to passers-by …

  At Crystal Palace, there were two poor people, ‘Daddy’s poor people’ Jacques called them. One was an old beggar who swept the pavement and road and cleared a way through the mud and snow ‘for the ladies’. The other drew pictures on the pavement, and my brother and I were full of admiration for his pastel pictures with their garish colours that he sold. Every day, Zola gave a little money to the artist and the sweeper.