19th century French fiction crammed into one post

What happens next?  The French novel, French fiction as we know it, finally comes to life in a blast of coffee-fueled energy.  Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, Hugo, then Dumas, Flaubert, Verne, and then Zola and Maupassant, just to stick to the most famous, lots of terrific books that are still widely read and have all kinds of continuity with the French fiction written today.

I’ll blast through them myself, just making a few notes about reading them in French.  Heaven knows if you want to know what I think about Flaubert, that is easy enough to find.  Much of this is familiar to anyone who has taken advanced French.  These are familiar writers, familiar texts.

1.  Almost all of these writers are ideally suited for the punishing or educating of French schoolchildren.  They have written texts of a variety of lengths and difficulties allowing all sorts of clever paths connecting this book to that.

Start Balzac with one of his many short stories or novellas, with Colonel Chabert, move up to Eugénie Grandet, end with Père Goriot.  Maybe put that one on the Bac.  I read one of the possibilities in French, “The Elixir of Long Life” (1831), my fortieth work in the Human Comedy, and the first and only in French.  It is a Don Juan story that otherwise goes pretty much where you would guess from the title.

This year, the big 19th century novel on the Bac is Stendhal, The Red and Black.  The standard shorter Stendhal is Vanina Vanini, which I have not read.  Italian stuff.  For Sand, it’s La Marquise (1832), where the title woman is in charge, pursuing the actor she desires, not a masterpiece but an antidote to the masculinity of a lot of French fiction.  For Flaubert, it’s the Trois Contes (1877), or maybe just the first and easiest story, “A Simple Heart.”  What a triumph, when I finished it – I had read Flaubert in French.  And my French was not that good.

2.  So what do we do with Hugo?  His novels are monsters.

First, there is “Claude Gueux” (1834), a heart-wrenching story about a prisoner, friendship, cruelty, the death penalty – distilled Hugo, champion of the powerless.  As art, if that matters, I thought it was better than the propagandistic novella Diary of a Condemned Man (1829).

Second, French pedagogists have carved up Les Misérables (1862) into many books, not just into abridged editions of a variety of lengths, but more curiously into rearrangements of the novel, often focused on specific characters, so that there is Cosette’s Les Misérables and Gavroche’s Les Misérables.  There is a book titled Jean Valjean (A Journey around some Misérables), like it is a city or a park.  One can imagine an entire Hugo-based curriculum.

There is at least one of these for Balzac, too, The Novel of Vautrin, pulling together scenes featuring Balzac’s great proto-superhero character from many novels.

I don’t know that I approve of this butchery, but I am amazed that it exists.  It is an interesting idea, taking a novel like Les Misérables and returning to it from different directions.  I don’t know that any French teacher is really doing this, but the books exist, and are in print right now.

3.  Zola’s short story “Le grand Michu” (1870) surprised me because of its multiple connections to later French fiction, the whole line of French schoolboy stories, and also to Jean Vigo’s 1933 anarchic masterpiece Zéro de conduite.  The riot at the end of Zola’s story is enacted by Vigo and his little maniacs.  No idea if this is in English.

4.  I discovered that I have more to say, or can babble at greater length, about Guy de Maupassant than I had realized, so let’s cut all that and write more about Maupassant some other time.  He is obviously perfect for infliction upon schoolchildren and French language learners.  His French, at least in his newspaper stories, is pretty darn easy.

The big good poets of French Romanticism - finally I make use of my French - for all of the good it does me

I have in front of me The Oxford Book of French Verse, first published in 1907, “Chosen by St. John Lucas,” a 500 page collection of French poems in French, with only the introduction and notes in English.  Just about half of the book covers the 19th century, and half of that is just four poets: Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset.  Those are the poets I want to linger over here.  You may note that I have skipped the Revolution and the “little bad poets of the Empire,” as the saint calls them (p. xxx).  I was going to say something dismissive, but not that cruel.  For whatever reason, Bonaparte was not good for French literature.

It roared back to life in the 1820s, first with the poets, then the theatre, and then the novel and its variants, but that will be more in the 1830s.  It began with The Poetic Meditations (1820) of Lamartine, and for him that is almost where it ended, since he used his fame to go into politics.  Inventing French Romanticism was only one of his accomplishments.

I am not entirely sure what French Romanticism is.  It is in large part an argument with French Classicism, and I am not so sure what that is.  I am reading an old school edition of Hugo’s Les feuillles d’automnes (Autumn Leaves, 1831) which includes notes about Hugo’s many violation of Classical rules, such as when he uses feminine rhymes inappropriately or puts the caesura in the wrong place.  If you say so, I think.  An advanced topic in French prosody.  Anyway, these poets are doing it wrong, however subtly, which was once pretty exciting.

My memory of the relevant English translations:

There’s a pretty good translation of Lamartine’s Meditations.

There is a functional but dull translation of Musset’s complete poems.

Given his stature, there is not much Hugo in English.

There is close to no Vigny in English.  No idea why.

A short selected Musset and selected Vigny would be valuable additions to English literature, hint hint, poetic translators.  Vigny and Musset have plays available in good English.  See Vigny’s Chatterton (1835) for some intense French Romanticism as reflected in an imaginary version of an actual misunderstood, doomed teenage poet.

I read that one in French while reading Vigny’s complete poems, now that I could.  I have also been filling in some Hugo, a tiny fraction of his thousands of pages of poems.  That would be a feat, reading Hugo’s complete poems.

Vigny wrote narrative poems, mostly in rhyming couplets.  Stories about Roland, Jesus, “The Anger of Samson,” (the death of) “Moses,” “The Death of the Wolf” – how the French love stories about wolves.  I could not believe how many children’s books there are about wolves, both funny and scary.  The hunter in the poem kills the wolf, but learns that wolves are better than people, or no worse.

Early Hugo has been a surprise and just what I expected.  He was immediately Hugolian, from the poems written when he was 18, hugely skilled, confident or a blowhard depending on one’s taste.  His first few little books, collected in Odes and Ballads (1828), are all political, legitimist, about the great fallen heroes who fought the Revolution.  I certainly learned the word for “executioner,” since it appears in every poem.  This is not the Hugo who is the champion of the powerless.  The primary victim of capital punishment he has in mind is Louis XVI.

Hugo changed quickly.  Maybe the poor are the subjects of the last half of Odes et Ballades.  I only read the first half.  Hugo exhausted me.

I have one complaint, which I can at this point make about Vigny and Hugo: they were not great rhymers.  They use lots of conventional rhymes, and there is clearly no penalty for repeating them in poem after poem – ombre / sombre (shadow / dark) , orage / nuage or orage / ombrage (storm / snow, shady), essor / trésor (flight / treasure) – that last one is the worst, since it is so phony.  The poets of a couple of a generation later wouldn’t allow this.  Paul Verlaine put an end to it.

He saw a countryside without cholera or revolution, but he found it sad - how, Giono asks, should a man live?

But did they know what he had turned to in the meantime?  Victor Hugo – no more, no less.  (Ch. 13, 396)

It had been niggling at me, as I read The Horseman on the Roof, that original as the novel was it did, in places, sound a lot like someone.  Its imagery was a blend of a long French tradition, from Flaubert through the Surrealists, and its hero was straight out of The Charterhouse of Parma, but – well, see above.  In the penultimate chapter, Angelo and Pauline, on the edge of the cholera outbreak, are caught in a rain storm, and accept the hospitality of a doctor, a theorizing loudmouth.  Our hero and heroine, stupefied by a fire, and wine, and good food, collapse – “[Angelo] could well imagine how with a little stew at the right moment all the heroes and heroines of Ariosto could be brought down to earth and reality” (394) – and just let the doctor talk, on and on.  Artistically, the chapter seems like the novel's one dud.

But it confirmed my idea that Giono had been thinking about Hugo.

In short, it was a depressing meal for both of them, but not for their host, who kept quoting Victor Hugo on the slightest pretext.  (398)

It is in effect the only digressive chapter in the novel, the only time Giono allows a detached voice to take over, even if the voice is nominally that of a character.  I wonder what the character has been reading.  If the time of the story is 1832, Hugo is famous enough as the author of Notre-Dame de Paris, Hernani, and several books of poems, but for Giono’s readers the name must invoke later novels directly relevant to this novel, like the man-against-nature Toilers of the Sea or Les Misérables.  Cholera-stricken Provence is full of miserables, and Angelo is something of a Jean Valjean figure, trying to find a way to turn his impulse for heroism, his ethics of heroism, into something that is actually useful.

The Hugo-spouting doctor is the last of a series of role models that Angelo encounters.  The first was also a doctor, the “little Frenchman” who sacrifices himself in a hopeless search for the one victim who can be saved.  The most dramatic is a gigantic nun who wanders Manosque, cleaning corpses, restoring dignity.  Angelo joins her, unsure if there is any value at all to the activity, but at least it is action.  (The most charming role model is the cat who joins Angelo during his exile on the roofs of Manosque).

It is as if Giono needs a role model of his own, for his fiction, a writer for whom Angelo’s struggles with heroism would make sense, even if the non-naturalistic way that Angelo debates himself often sounds more – surely is – the product of Giono’s time.

“Does the freedom of one’s country,” he asked himself, “count less than honor, for example, or all the trouble I’ve taken to keep alive?”

He saw a countryside without cholera or revolution, but he found it sad.  (Ch. 11, 300)

The Horseman on the Roof is an easy book to recommend, artful and exciting, and probably not just for tourists going to Provence, although they need it more than anyone.

This is how it happened - Les Misérables makes Tolstoy's thoughts swarm

From the “Chronology” of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (2002):

1863, February 23: reads Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – “Powerful”; “I went through my papers – a swarm of thought and a return, or an attempt to return to lyricism.  Lyricism is good.” (p. 10)

Leo Tolstoy was planning – actively writing – a historical epic about, eventually, the Napoleonic Wars that is meant to demonstrate an argument about the functioning of history.  Along comes a model by the “best nineteenth-century writer” (p. 31, quotation is a paraphrase of Tolstoy by the editor) that shows you can just plop your essays into the middle of the story.  The digressions account for maybe a third of the novel?  That’s fine.

I saw a strong “influence” of Les Misérables on War and Peace, but what do I mean by that?  (certainly not “lyricism”).  After all, “1863, June 2: ‘I’m reading Goethe, and thoughts swarm.’”  When you’re a genius like Tolstoy, that’s what your thoughts do.  Maybe I should be arguing for the influence of Elective Affinities on Tolstoy, too.  Now that I mention it – no, one at a time.  Much later, Tolstoy says that the influence of Hugo’s novel was “Enormous,” but that could mean anything.

I mean two things.  Not anything to do with battles.  Tolstoy had been a great war writer for a decade already.  The first influence is on the use and structure of the essayistic material.  I don’t think Tolstoy is nearly as good with this stuff as Hugo.  The French giant writes as a sage, so everything he writes is an expression of pure Hugoness.  Every aspect of the novel is suffused with hugolité.  Tolstoy write as if he is trying to invent social history or sociology or some other social science.  He struggles in the didactic sections.  Hugo does not.

If I remembered the arguments better – I have already forgotten Tolstoy’s, much less Hugo's – I might be able to see how or if Tolstoy adapts Hugo’s ideas about Napoleon and the chaos of the battlefield and the role of individuals in mass action and so on, but I don’t.  Instead, what felt like Hugo was Tolstoy’s use of epic similes as argument, such as the comparison of burned, looted, empty Moscow to a beehive (XI.11.) with a dead queen, a comparison that is clear immediately but goes on for a couple of pages, developing its own characters.

What really caught my attention, though, were moments in the narrative, not the essays, that sounded so much like Hugo, places where Tolstoy adapted Hugo’s signature devices, like the chapter-ending revelations of identity: “This man was registered under the number 9430, and his name was Jean Valjean” (Hugo, III.3.).  Even the long, essayistic Waterloo section ends with one of these.  In Tolstoy:

That night another wounded man was driven down to Povarskaya…  Mavra Kuzminichna concluded that he was a very important man…  He was conveyed… [Etc.]

This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski.  (XI.8.)

Another example: simple transitional sentences, like Tolstoy is telling the story: “This is how it happened” (XI.9.).

Another is the use of a series of blunt, single-sentence paragraphs.

Yet another is the transformation of Pierre Bezukhov into Jean Valjean, including his superhuman strength, in the section where Pierre is out in Moscow rescuing little girls from fires.  “Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and his strength increased tenfold” (XI.16.) – then he goes to prison!

Why are all of these quotations from Book XI?  Not just because that is where I started to write them down.  No, I think much of the Hugo flavor is concentrated in this book, which contains the evacuation, occupation, and destruction of Moscow.  No battles as such, no parties, no ordinary daily life, but rather nothing but extraordinary events, one after another.  It is the most melodramatic part of War and Peace, the most ordinarily novelistic, where Pierre’s thread becomes something of an adventure story.  Thus it is here that Tolstoy turns to a great master of this kind of novel, to the example that has been on his mind for a number of reasons.

That is my guess.  The problem points to the solution.  It is interesting to witness.

Tomorrow, 100% Tolstoy.

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled - the best books of 1866

The best book of 1866 is so obvious that it is barely worth disagreeing, but as Raskolnikov says himself, “The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!” (VI.7, tr. Oliver Ready).  My favorite book of 1866 is not Crime and Punishment but Victor Hugo’s staggering and preposterous man-against-nature – man-against-hurricane – man-against-octopus – epic The Toilers of the Sea, illustrated above.  The steamboat pictured is about to get stuck on a strange rock formation, and the hero will spend most of the novel fighting everything Hugo can throw at him to get it moving again.  “Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: ‘Fooled you!’”  That’s right, he is insulting the clouds, defying the cosmos, as one does in a Victor Hugo book.

Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler this year, too, alongside Crime and Punishment, under contractual conditions that would have crushed most writers.  Now there is some kind of heroism.  I would like to read a Victor Hugo novel about Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.

Henrik Ibsen’s Brand is from 1866, as well, about another defier of the cosmos.  Brand, Raskolnikov, and Hugo’s hero – big characters in big stories.

I do not believe I have read any English-language novels from the year.  Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, just barely unfinished, would be likely candidates for the Booker Prize, if there had been such a thing.  Gaskell had never won the prize, beat by Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope, so I think she picks this one up posthumously.  I am just making this up.  Like I care about prizes.

It was a broadly interesting year for poetry.  Paul Verlaine published his first book, Poèmes saturniens, which I have only read in part, and of course in English.  The French looks like this, from “Chansons d’automne,” one of Verlaine’s best-known poems:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
     De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
     Monotone.

Lip-smacking French verse.  Those first three lines, those vowels, those nasalizations.  Maybe the poem also means something.

Algernon Swinburne’s first books of lyrics, Poems and Ballads, appeared, ruining English poetry for decades until austere, brutal Modernists dynamited and carted off his lush, sweet gibberish:

from Hymn to Proserpine

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

It is like The Toilers of the Sea turned into English verse.  Swinburne was Hugo’s greatest English champion.

Christina Rossetti’s second book, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems seemed like a paler version of her brilliant first book, but I’ll note it, at least.

In the United States, Herman Melville published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his debut as a poet and his first book in a decade, the first of all too few volumes of poetry.  Even more surprising somehow is James Greenleaf Whittier’s nostalgic, ironic “Snow-Bound,” surprising because Whittier was generally such a bad poet, but one who occasionally wrote a great poem.  Whether the torments inflicted by the poem on several generations of schoolchildren are to the demerit of Whittier I leave to the conscience of the individual reader.  Those days are long past.

Blind man who thinks \ He reads, fool who thinks he knows! - Victor Hugo's God

And the luminosity said: silence!  Blind man who thinks
He reads, fool who thinks he knows!  I tell you:
For all eternity does the wondrous emerge from the mysterious!  (God, The Ocean of the Heights, IX, ll. 314-6, p. 133)

The End of Satan (1886) has the advantage of familiar stories.  Hugo makes them less familiar, sometimes, but I have a baseline.  I know where the story has to go, whatever ornamentation Hugo piles on.

But Dieu (1891), God, Hugo’s other big posthumous semi-unfinished epic, it’s a tough one.  More philosophical.  More abstract.  It is a series of encounters between a Hugoish narrator, who has become a winged ghost (“because Man becomes wingèd when he muses”), flying upward in a kind of inverted abyss, and a variety of voices and semi-allegorical figures, most of them also winged figures, who deliver a monologue full of anti-wisdom, a perspective to be rejected.  I think.  For example, The Bat, which is atheism (Hugo says so), who declaims:

And all of Creation, with Man,
With what the eye sees and what the voice names,
Its worlds, its suns, its rare currents,
Its dazzling, streaking, mead meteors,
With its golden globes like great domes,
With its eternal passage of phantoms, waters,
Swarms, birds, the lily that we believe blessed,
Is only a vomiting of darkness into the Infinite!  (The Ocean of the Heights, I – The Bat, ll. 92-9, p. 91)

A hundred and thirty lines of this black spew, in the original in rhyming couplets.  Thank goodness the translator, R. G. Skinner, did not try to reproduce the rhyming couplets.  They don’t sound ridiculous in French, but in English ruin the poem.

However, the translator does omit most of the animals, so I have no idea what the owl or eagle are supposed to represent.  The griffin, included is Christianity, progress, human thought moving in the right direction, but still, to Hugo a now unnecessary mediation between himself and a direct encounter with God.  I guess.

Oh wait, I see that the eagle is Judaism.  “You hail from Sinai, but I come from Golgotha,” says the griffin to the eagle.

It is all a bit like a compressed, misty Divine Comedy, with the spirit ascending towards a direct encounter with God, and thus with death.  As programmatic as the scheme of the poem is, even in this abridgment, the end, what I take as Hugo’s death, or his preparation for his death, has power.

Listen – Up to now you have seen only dreams,
Only vague glimmers floating on falsehoods,
Merely the muddled appearances which pass in the winds
Or tremble in the night for you living creatures. (Epilogue, ll. 1-4, p. 135)

Hugo demands his encounter with God, knowing that it means death – “Yes! – I shouted. / And I felt that creation trembled like a fabric.” 

Specter, you misled me, I still know nothing.

     (God is infinite.  He keeps withdrawing perpetually –
         No transformation of life ever reaches
            him. – One only advances into the
            light.)   (Epilogue, p. 137)

Some kind of gnosticism is where Hugo is going.  I don’t know why I am worrying about the poem’s ideas, rarely a great strength with Hugo, rather than the imagery to be found within the monologues of the bat and griffin and so on.  I suppose because I understand the poem so poorly that I have to work on the structure first, just to see what it is.  The quotation up top, that is pretty funny.

Hugo plunges into chaos and writes in the margins of the abyss - the end of The End of Satan and also the middle

Victor Hugo, in The End of Satan (1886), is describing the Gospels and their authors (“four simple men”):

This story seems added by them to God,
As if they wrote on the margins of the abyss;
Their entire book resembles a shaft of light from a summit;
Each page thrills there under the sacred shudder;
And that is why the earth said: I shall read it!  (The Gibbet, Jesus Christ, VI – After Passover, ll. 200-5, p. 261)

A big part of the translation covers Christ’s death and resurrection.  This passage is a perfect Hugolian blend of devout Christianity and outright heresy.  It also serves as a good self-description.  Then a bit more modestly, a good description of creativity, of art.  Written on the margins of the abyss – a rich metaphor.

The section with the crucifixion is titled “Le Gibet,” “The Gibbet,” for didactic reasons.  Hugo is continuing his lifelong argument against capital punishment.  Christ as Everyprisoner.  His death is shocking; the world takes on a Gothic tinge:

Tombs, suddenly opened wide,
Revealed their caverns where the moles dug up
Fragments of skeletons lying in shrouds;
The ghastly dead, having emerged from their graves,
Were seen by several of those who dwelled in the city.”  (The Gibbet, The Crucifix, ll. 105-9, p. 293)

Those skeletons return after a lecture on the death penalty, now prisoners – former prisoners, I guess – in the Bastille. 

… it is here that men’s steps tremble,
Here that their dark hair turns white.  (The Prison, The Skeletons, ll. 29-30, p. 395)

What is really curious is that the skeletons are a digression in the middle of a long Browning-like monologue by Satan in which he is a prisoner in a dungeon, or thinks of himself as such.  If he is a prisoner, he is owed a great deal of sympathy, and the monologue is a brilliant mix of sincere yearning and ironic self-pity (a Browning specialty).

I love him! – Night, sepulchral cell, living death,
Darkness that my sombrous sob frightens, [Skinner is squeezing in the word “ombre”]
Solitudes of evil where flees the great punished one,
Measureless glaciers of infinite winter,
O torrents of dark chaos which saw me banished,
Despair whose cowardly peal of laughter I hear,
Void where Being, Time, Place, vanish,
Deep chasms, hells, abysses!  I love God.
I love him.  That is all.  (Beyond the Earth III, Satan in the Night, I, ll. 1-9, p. 309)

But Satan can hardly remain in that last state.  He cycles through every injury done to him, vowing revenge, before collapsing back into the condition we see here.  Hugo’s vision of hell, of Satan’s punishment, is an endless loop of self-inflicted anger and despair.  But the poem ends, or almost ends, with a section titled “Satan Forgiven,” in which God, or Hugo, calls on him to “arise out of the darkness with the dawn on your brow” – “you need only say: I shall live!” (p. 409)

Hugo does not give Satan’s answer.  Perhaps God’s offer is another part of the endless cycle.  Instead, Hugo presents a vision of his death, of his own afterlife, in which he joins “[t]he plungers into chaos, the sounders of disaster,” like Moses, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare, “[a]ll the other shepherds of somber humanities,” who gather to “burst forth their thoughts which become / Stars.”

These comets are those we sometimes see passing
Though the heavens with an immense brilliance,
Stretching across the silent aether,
Formidable, amidst the eternal shadow,
Tongues of fire from off their crowns taking wing.  (p. 415)  

I already have dragons, I have no wish for men - Victor Hugo's The End of Satan

Victor Hugo is a giant in French poetry.  Why we do not have, in English, some kind of collected edition of his poems (in many volumes) I do not understand, except that almost no one wants to read poetry, even fewer old poetry, even fewer translated old poetry, etc.  Other than all of those reasons, I don’t understand it.

But last year translator R. G. Skinner and Swan Isle Press filled approximately half of a major gap in that imaginary shelf of books with the release of God and the End of Satan – Dieu et La Fin de Satan: Selections: In a Bilingual Edition, which contains – what a title – about half of each of Hugo’s two huge unfinished posthumous poems, The End of Satan (1886) and God (1891), the latter somehow the most Hugolian of all possible titles.  Victor Hugo thought big.

Today, Dieu is often considered Hugo’s single finest achievement.  There is nothing quite like it in our language.  Its first English readers compared it to the strange late poems of Blake; and that is possibly still the closest analogy.  (Foreword, p. xi, E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, themselves translators of Hugo’s poems)

Exactly how often, I would like to ask.  I will also note that the “first English readers” were Algernon Swinburne and his circle, the poets and critics who had rediscovered Blake’s cosmic poems.  I am not sure the fit with Blake is that good.  But then we are left with nothing.

The End of Satan is about the fall of Lucifer and – hey, wait a minute, maybe we do have something like this in English!  It is pretty strange reading this episode in an English so flat, even though as a translation it is fine.  But it’s not Milton:

The fall of the damned one began once again – Terrifying,
Overcast, and pierced with luminous holes like a sieve,
The sky full of suns vanished, the light
Trembled, and into the night this giant plummeted headlong,
Naked , sinister, and dragged down by the weight of his crimes;
And like a wedge, his head opened the abyss.  (Beyond the Earth I, And Then There Was Night, II, ll.29 – 34, p. 165)

No complaints about the imagery, or Hugo’s sense of scale, especially his conceit that Satan’s fall is in some way part of creation, that he creates the abyss and hell as he falls.

The original is in rhyming couplets, which, to my poor understanding, sound dignified and suitable for declaiming by a good actor:

Nu, sinistre, et tiré par le poids de son crime,
Tombait, et, comme un coin, sa tête ouvrait l’abîme.

Hugo works his way through the Bible, how thoroughly I do not know.  The abridgment includes the story of Noah but omits Adam and Eve, for example.  It includes a long part of Christ’s crucifixion, but how much of his earlier life I cannot say.  Noah is included, I assume, because the imagery is so strong:

And since Man had filled his squalid soul
With abysses, God could say to the abyss: Fill the world.

The urn of the abyss tilted, day fled;
And all that lived and walked became night,
While lifeless Eve trembled in her deep grave.  (The first page I, The Entry into Darkness, I, ll. 49-53, p. 185)

The world  is deluged not with rain, but something worse, whatever dark matter fills the abyss Satan created.  Hugo is doing something new, bringing his own coherence and imagery to the old stories, which is a bit like Blake.  Later Chaos and The Flood argue about the meaning of the destruction of mankind.  “I already have dragons,” says Chaos.  “I have no wish for men.”  In this big, mythic setting Hugo does not always sound like Hugo to me, but that sure does.

Swinburne dries out - the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type and other edifying subjects

Let’s check in with Algernon Swinburne, the fourth of six volumes of his Letters (1960, ed. Cecil Lang), covering 1877 through 1882.  I have run into a selfish problem.  With two volumes of letters to go, I fear that the bulk of the best ones might be behind me.

Swinburne begins the book as an out of control alcoholic, constantly ill, on the verge of death either from internal complaints or a drunken accident.  His friends and mother conspire against him to move him into the house of his lawyer, agent, nurse, and number one fan Theodore Watts, in order to not just dry Swinburne out but to keep him away from bottles.  A seven month gap in the letters is the only indication of the difficulty of the task of keeping Swinburne alive.  His friends succeed, and Swinburne lives, and writes, for another thirty years.

Afterwards, though, Swinburne is not quite as interesting in his letters.  But he is a lot more interesting than if he were dead.

Some highlights:

Swinburne’s repeated attacks on “that brute beast” Zola’s L’assommoir, a “damnable dunghill of a book” (letter 866, June 8, 1877), “the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type” (942, July 11, 1879).  He singles out not the novel’s alcoholism, which would be too ironic, but the child abuse and filth.  Later (1020, July 3, 1880), Swinburne declares Humphrey Clinker “all but utterly unreadable to me” because of its scatology, at which point I find myself baffled by Swinburne’s Victorian fastidiousness.  All of this from the great champion of Sade’s Justine! “[D]e Sade at his foulest was to Zola at his purest ‘as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine’ in the faculty of horrifying and nauseating the human stomach and the human soul” (942).  Some of this must be class, the aristocrat clubbing the bourgeois upstart with a Marquis.

Celebrity sightings, several before the fact, such as a letter from an 1882 letter by a young Oscar Wilde on behalf of an old Walt Whitman.  Wilde, at this point, had published a single book of poems and was touring America as a celebrity aesthete.  Writes Swinburne, “I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody, and had no notion he was the sort of man to play the mountebank as he seems to have been doing” (1132, Aug. 4, 1882).

And here is John Davidson, at this point a pale aesthete in training, a decade from writing good poetry, declaring Swinburne “the greatest poet since Shakespere” (912, March 28, 1878).  Impressive how Davidson was eventually able to purge all trace of this early worship from his poems.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Swinburne gets into a pointless feud with Robert Browning, the figurehead president of the New Shakespeare Society, over an insult from another member of that organization.  More snobbery: “no person who remains in any way or in any degree associated with the writer of that pamphlet is fit to hold any intercourse or keep up any acquaintance with me” (1065, Feb. 20, 1881).  Good riddance, Browning must have thought, sitting on his balcony in Florence.

Near the end of the book, Swinburne finally meets his hero Victor Hugo.  The episode is a triumph – a triumph of staying alive.  The breathless letter describing the encounter (1193, Nov. 26, 1882) is, charmingly, to his mother.

His white hair is as thick as his dark eyebrows, and his eyes are as bright and clear as a little child’s.  After dinner, he drank my health with a little speech, of which – tho’ I sat just opposite him – my accursed deafness prevented my hearing a single word.

During these years, Swinburne wrote numerous articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica, a verse play, and enough poetry for an astonishing four books – three published in 1880 alone.  There are two great poems in that mass, two I know of.  Tomorrow for those.

A scary ghost story from Thackeray - HE, I promise you, won't stand any nonsense

I almost forgot to do my Halloween reading, but then I remembered, so tonight’s text is “The Notch on the Ax” by William Makepeace Thackeray, published in 1863 the Cornhill Magazine.  In two parts, I guess, since this is in the dead center of the story:

At this moment the clock (after its previous convulsions) sounded TWELVE.  And as the new Editor of the Cornhill Magazine--and HE, I promise you, won't stand any nonsense--will only allow seven pages, I am obliged to leave off at THE VERY MOST INTERESTING POINT OF THE STORY.

Can you imagine the suspense of the original readers?  I have not said anything about the story, so I suppose not.

This story has everything:  ghosts, Freemasons, mesmerism, Bluebeard, table-rapping, Mary Queen of Scots, artificial limbs, silly accents, a guillotine, a woman named Blanche de Bechamel.  On second thought, there is a lot it does not have.  Thackeray meets an ancient man who tells him a ghost story.  That is the action, more or less.  I read the story in a collection archived at Gutenberg.org which had a prefatory note telling me that “the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is delightfully imitated.”  The sensation novel had been invented only three years earlier by Wilkie Collins, so this sounded like fun, although I wondered if Collins had a strong enough style for me to recognize a parody, much less that of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, much much less that of some voguish bestseller whose name I do not know.

Who is the writer, for example, who always disguises the names of the “real” characters with dashes – “(of course I don't mention family names)”?  As in

'Captain Brown,' I said 'who could see Miss Sm-th without loving her?'

Or

As he said "Ha!" there came three quiet little taps on the table--it is the middle table in the "Gray's-Inn  Coffee House," under the bust of the late Duke of W-ll-ngt-n. 

Even going so far as to disguise the exact relationship between people:

As I live, he here mentioned dear gr-nny's MAIDEN name.  Her maiden name was ----.  Her honored married name was ----.

"She married your great-gr-ndf-th-r the year Poseidon won the Newmarket Plate," Mr. Pinto dryly remarked.

Maybe this is not meant to be anyone in particular and is just a good gag.

Later, as the part of the story related to the title finally got moving (i.e., why does the little guillotine have a notch in its blade, why does the headless ghost seem so upset with the old man), to my surprise I did recognize the parody.  A fugitive is hiding in a convent in Paris – a clue right there – and is forced (by hypnotism) to leave it.  Lists begin to appear, and paragraphs composed of single sentences, short ones.  Some puzzling precision intrudes.

"And he came to No. 29 in the Rue Picpus--a house which then stood  between a court and garden--

"That is, there was a building of one story, with a great coach door.

"Then there was a court, around which were stables, coach-houses, offices.

"Then there was a house--a two-storied house, with a perron in front.

"Behind the house was a garden--a garden of two hundred and fifty French feet in length.

"And as one hundred feet of France equal one hundred and six feet of England, this garden, my friend, equaled exactly two hundred and sixty-five feet of British measure.

"In the center of the garden was a fountain and a statue--or, to speak more correctly, two statues.  One was recumbent,--a man.  Over him, saber in hand, stood a Woman.

"The man was Olofernes.  The woman was Judith.  From the head, from the trunk, the water gushed.  It was the taste of the doctor:--was it not a droll of taste?

I stop here because this is where I finally figured it out – this is V-ct-r H-g-!  Thackeray is having fun with Les Misérables, which had been both published and heroically translated into English only the year before.  I had not thought of Les Misérables as a sensation novel, but in the English context of course it is.  “If the fashion for sensation novels goes on, I tell you I will write one in fifty volumes” Thackeray promises at the end of the story, but sadly he died later that year.

For somewhat scarier public domain stories, see the Little Professor’s Halloween Horde of Horrible Happenings.  She has been blogging as the Little Professor for ten years now, longer than I have been alive.

The Best Books of 1862 - And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.

Emily Dickinson was in the middle of a creative rush that had lasted several years and would last many more.  Or so it looks now – she was having doubts.  In 1862 she sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had just published an article in The Atlantic giving advice to new writers about publishing their work.  Dickinson asked “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”  He said it was, yet Dickinson did not try to publish.

The hidden and lost works of the past, the ones that survive by chance and magic, make for such interesting stories.  But this is not the story of the Best Books of 1862.  1862 was the Year of the Best-seller.

The big bookish events in France were 1) the publication of Victor Hugo’s massive Les Misérables, his first novel in thirty years, and 2) controversial upstart Gustave Flaubert’s followup to Madame Bovary, the gory and insane Salammbô.  Flaubert was understandably nervous that he would be crushed by Hugo, but both novels were hits.  Hugo’s audience was broader, a genuine mass readership, and much more international.  Salammbô has never had much luck outside of France.

Another international hit, albeit with a much smaller audience than Hugo’s, was Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.  I believe this was the novel that really introduced Russian literature to Europe.  It also began within Russian literature a chain of attacks and responses that is unlike anything I know in any other literature, but that story has to wait until 1863.  One of the participants was Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose House of the Dead is from 1862.

Meanwhile the new craze in English fiction was the Sensation Novel: Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, No Name by Wilkie Collins, and even Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope.  The latter two could easily have been titled Lady _____’s Secret, and in the case of the Trollope should have been, since Orley Farm is a crummy title.  Trollope was only a half-hearted Sensationalist, divulging the secret about halfway through the novel, but at least he tried.

Lady Audley’s Secret was a dead book for a while, but scholars interested in women writers and so-called genre fiction resurrected it.  I just finished it and may write about it a bit after the holiday.

If the Collins and Trollope novels feel a bit second-tier compared to their best-known books, as does George Eliot’s Romola (which began serialization in 1862), English poetry was anything but.  Lucky Victorian poetry readers enjoyed, amidst the mound of poetry that now looks tediously unreadable,  George Meredith’s Modern Love, posthumous collections by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough, and the almost shockingly assured debut of Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems.  Here is one of the others, the first half of “Song”:

When I am dead my dearest,
    Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
    Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
    With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
    And if thou wilt, forget.

Édouard Manet’s 1862 “Music in the Tuileries” is in the London National Gallery.

Tumult and silence combined - a Hugolian miscellany

As usual, while playing around with The Toilers of the Sea I have paid little mind to the characters and plot and ethical conundrums and that sort of thing.  The story I have mentioned, at least.  There is a long stretch in which Hugo relates every single little thing that has struck him as unusual about Guernsey:

On all the walls of Guernsey is displayed a huge picture of a man, six feet tall, holding a bell an sounding the alarm to call attention to an advertisement.  Guernsey has more posters than the whole of France.   This publicity promotes life; frequently the life of the mind, with unexpected results, leveling the population by the habit of reading, which produces dignity of manner.   (33)

Sometimes Hugo writes the oddest things.

But then comes the heist plots, zip zip zip, and then Gilliatt and the shipwreck and the storm and the octopus, most of which is amazing, and then a romantic plot, a Romantic romantic plot to round out the book.  Most of the best writing is in the long sea-related section.

The hero is another of Hugo’s super-strong characters.  I have read three Hugo novels, and all three star strongmen, Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, and now Gilliatt.  They are also super-resourceful and super-agile.  The latter two are super-knowledgeable.  They are Batman, basically, as is the Count of Monte Cristo and Balzac’s super-criminal Vautrin.  The hero of Flaubert’s Salammbô is also superhumanly strong, although that character is certainly not like Batman, but is rather a forefather of Conan the Barbarian.  This is a peculiar feature of 19th century French fiction.  I have no explanation.  Victor Hugo was a sort of superhero himself, but his powers were super-energy and super-imagination.

And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

Now this is the narrator of Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity (2008, p. 5) behaving in a typically Hugolian manner.  Hugo should be a deity to the postmodernists, the Pynchon and Wallace readers, the information overload crowd.  Is he?  I have doubts.

I also recommend The Toilers of the Sea in particular to the readers of W. G. Sebald, who was clearly a powerful influence on Hugo.  Hugo is always careful to tell me what I can still see, what is left from the time of the story, forty years in the past.  Can I see Gilliatt’s house, for example?  No, it is gone, as is the land on which it rested.

… the island of Guernsey is in course of demolition.  The granite is good: who wants it?  All its cliffs are up for auction.  The inhabitants are selling the island by retail… (52)

Guernsey is being systematically blasted apart and shipped to London.  But the story is more complex than predatory man versus helpless nature.  English is replacing French.  Can we find the boarding house in St. Malo I mentioned a couple of days ago?  No, “[i]t no longer exists, having been caught up in improvements to the town”  (162).  Can I see the rock towers that trapped the shipwreck, the Douvres, the setting of most of the novel?  Well, the tallest tower is gone:  “on October 26, 1859, a violent equinoctial gale overthrew one of them” (186).

Man versus nature, man versus man, nature versus nature.  Perhaps Henry Adams is the relevant precursor.  Hugo’s endlessly energetic and profligate novel is a classic of entropy, of the passing of all things.

The solitudes of the ocean are melancholy: tumult and silence combined.  What happens there no longer concerns the human race.  Its use or value is unknown.  Such a place is the Douvres.  All around, as far as the eye can see, is nothing but the immense turbulence of the waves.  (186-7)

The octopus attacks - Hugo's uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources

Among the fine features of the recent Modern Library paperback of The Toilers of the Sea, the edition I read, are a selection of Victor Hugo’s watercolors, the ones which were illustrations not for the published book but for Hugo’s manuscript.  He pasted them in himself.  The friendly fellow on the left is acknowledging his creator with the V and H he is creating with his tentacles.  If that is hard to see, please visit the much larger version at 50 Watts, from whom I borrowed the picture.

  When God so wills it, He excels in the creation of the execrable.  Why He should have such a will is a question that troubles religious thinkers.  (II.4.ii, 349)

The chapter title is “The Monster,” the subject of which is described at length, and width and depth, too.  As impressive as the description is (“It looks like a rag of cloth, like a rolled-up umbrella without a handle”) Hugo has not convinced me that religious thinkers, pondering the existence of evil, have actually given all that much thought to the jolly, squashy octopus.  But in Toilers it is a physical embodiment of the evil of nature.  What an odd idea.

These creatures almost cause her [Philosophy] concern about the Creator.  They are hideous surprises.  They are the killjoys of the contemplator:  he observes them in dismay.  They are deliberately created forms of evil.  In face of these blasphemies of creation against itself what can be done?  Who can be blamed for them?  (354)

This is hardly Hugo’s only idea about the force or purposefulness of nature, though.  He has plenty of  ideas.  The novel’s hero, Gilliatt, once he has survived, through heroic effort, the great storm I mentioned a couple of days ago, insults nature:

Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: “Fooled you!”

… Gilliatt felt the immemorial need to insult an enemy that goes back to the heroes of Homer.  (343)

Hugo is clear enough about the tradition he wants to join.  Achilles merely battles and defeats a river in the Iliad; Hugo’s champion defeats the sea.

Hugo’s profligacy, of ideas, of images, and of himself, of his own massive personality, is fascinating but also maddening.  André Gide writes in his journal, developing a complaint about my nemesis Richard Strauss:

And same causes of shortcomings: lack of discretion of the means and monotony of the effects, annoying insistency, flagrant insincerity; uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources.  Likewise Hugo, likewise Wagner, when metaphors come to mind to express an idea, does not choose, does not spare us a single one.  Fundamental lack of artistry in all this.  (Journals, Volume I: 1889-1913, tr. Justin O’Brien, May 22, 1907, p. 213)

The octopus is a rag and an umbrella, a wheel and a harpoon, “spiderlike” and “chameleon-like,” a disease.  In a passage that approaches self-parody, Hugo lists every animal the octopus is not like:  “The whale is enormous, the devilfish is small; the hippopotamus is armor-plated, the devilfish is naked,” and on to the howler monkey, the vampire bat, the lammergeyer, and many more.  Inartistic, sometimes, yes, but it is still thrilling to watch Hugo perform his feats of superhuman literary endurance and strength, however preposterous.  Who else could have done them?

Visual Hugo - imagining goffered seaweed and skull-like houses

The Toilers of the Sea is an intensely visual novel.  But do I “see” what Hugo wants me too?  He is describing an abandoned hilltop house, perhaps haunted, certainly used by smugglers:

The house turns its back on the sea.  The side facing the ocean is a blank wall; but if you look closely you can see a window that has been walled up. ..  On the first floor – and this is what strikes you most as you approach the house – are two open windows; but the walled-up windows are less disturbing than these.  They have lost their glass, and even the frames are missing.  They open on the darkness within.  They are like the empty sockets of two eyes that have been torn out.  (I.5.iv., 148)

Even with my omissions, I say the answer to my own question is yes.  Where is that walled-in window, to the right or left if I am facing the back wall?  Who cares?  Put it somewhere.  The empty windows in front, where do they go?  The final metaphor is not so original in and of itself, but I read it and know instantly where Hugo wants me to see those holes in the wall.

The skull that is suggested actually links the scene to another skull we will discover two hundred pages later, but that is a different kind of novelistic effect, not necessarily a visual one.

Let me try another one.  A ship has wrecked against a reef, and a subsequent storm has actually lifted the ship out of the sea, wedging it between two rock towers.

The two Douvres, raising the dead Durande above the waves, had an air of triumph.  It was like two monstrous arms emerging from the abyss and displaying to the storms this corpse of a ship.  It was like a murderer boasting of his achievement.  (II.1.i, 241)

These rocks, the Douvres, have already been described several times by Hugo – “two black columns… their roots were in underwater mountains.”  I think I see them.  Or, even though I have never seen a shipwreck suspended between two pillars, I can imagine it at a certain level of abstraction.  “The huge capital H formed by the two Douvres linked by the crossbar of the Durande stood out against the horizon in a kind of crepuscular majesty.”

The hero of the novel will clamber all over this reef.  He will scale the towers, store equipment on ledges, and construct a forge in a cave inside one of them.  My mental picture has to shift now.  The letter H is pitted with holes big enough for a man to walk into.  One of the columns is in fact is close to hollow.  Five pages is given to describing the cavern within the tower.

A luxuriant growth of moss in every shade of olive concealed and enlarged the protuberances in the granite.  From every projection hung slender goffered ribbons of varech, a seaweed used by fishermen as a form of barometer, their glistening strands swaying in the mysterious breathing of the cavern.  (II.1.xiii, 277)

I cannot imagine every shade of olive – hardly any, in fact.  I replace Hugo’s specific seaweed with my generic one.

A film would solve all of these visual problems for me.  A set designer would choose one plastic seaweed out of all of the possibilities at hand, spray it with some sort of oil, and hide an intern behind it to make it sway.  There it is; I see it now.  And he would discard the goffered ribbons and crepuscular majesty and empty sockets.

A dilapidated old novel and a witch are not unlike each other - like the tongue of a trigonocephalus - Hugo and getting on with it

The pacing of The Toilers of the Sea is strange.  Perhaps even stranger than Les Misérables, although the scale of the book is more manageable.  Hugo does not have as much space to linger on the Waterloo battlefield or its aquatic equivalent.

Still, his basic method is to constantly break his own momentum.  A hurricane approaches; our hero’s efforts – and mine, since I read about them for 100 pages – will likely be destroyed. “The abyss was making up its mind to do battle.”  How does Hugo kill time waiting for the storm, which we can see in the distance, “a small unwholesome-looking stain,” what does he do while the hero and I are waiting?  He tells me about storms for five chapters and twelve pages.  Winds and clouds around the world.  Science (“winds that construct circumcumuli, and those that construct circumstrati”) and metaphor (“[winds] that shake out of their clouds, like the tongue of a trigonocephalus, the fearful forked lightning”).  I am wandering around Part II, Book III, waiting for the storm.  Then it hits, in a single eighteen page chapter.  This is Hugolian pacing.  Frustrating, tense, profoundly satisfying.  I am half convinced that, born a century later, he would have been a film director.

During the heist plot, a character arranges to buy a contraband gun.  I have witnessed this scene before, more than once, although never in the setting in which Hugo puts it, in a sort of tenement rooming house in Saint-Malo that “no longer exists, having been caught up in improvements to the town.”  The house and its occupants are described in some detail over five or six pages with sentences like this:

A dilapidated old novel and a witch are not unlike each other.*

This is the rubbish heap of souls, piled up in the corner and swept from time to time by the broom that is called a police raid.

This is the spittle of society rather than its vomit.

We should not, out of hand, value a Louvre highly or despise a prison.

Hugo writes interesting sentences.  At this point, I do not actually know about the revolver and have no idea why Hugo is telling me about this place.  The house has a courtyard with a well in the center.

Beyond the feet, in the semidarkness of the shed, your eye might distinguish bodies, forms, sleeping heads, figures lying inert, rags of both sexes, the promiscuity of the dunghill, a strange and sinister deposit of humanity.  This sleeping chamber was open to anyone and everyone.  The occupants paid two sous a week,  Their feet touched the well.  On stormy nights rain fell on those feet; on winter nights it snowed on those bodies…  The order of society is complicated by such human debris.  (I.5.vi., 164)

Ah, I don’t want to stop.  “The rags and tatters seeded the rubble” (166).  That’s something, right?  “The multitude of spiders provided some reassurance against the immediate collapse of the building.”  Why does Hugo give so much space to this house; why do I?  The book is about the sea, and after the next chapter we never return here.  But Hugo’s imagination created the space and then got tangled up in it.  Once he saw the alley, he saw the house; the house gave him the well; the well gave him the feet, and the rags, and the spiders.  Get on with it Hugo!  But he is – “it” is everything, characters and stories but also clouds and poverty and Sri Lankan vipers.

*  Hugo's word is actually "hovel," not "novel."

The Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo's amazing heist \ engineering \ sea novel

The Toilers of the Sea (1866) is Victor Hugo’s fifth novel, and his third masterpiece in a row.  I should note that I have not read the first two, Hans of Iceland and Bug-Jargal, despite their immensely appealing titles.  Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) followed those two, and Les Misérables (1862) came thirty-one years later.  The number of novelists with a gap that long between their two best novels must be few.  Admittedly Les Misérables is long enough for four or five ordinary novels, if one can say that anything about Hugo is ordinary.

In the meantime, in that gap, in those thirty-one years, Hugo had also written and published a body of poetry that should have made him the greatest French poet, as for a time it did, but gnawing worms named Baudelaire and Flaubert and Les Fleurs du Mal and Madame Bovary were at that moment undermining the firmament; these writers were well known to Hugo but not understood by him, or actually strongly misunderstood as followers of, who else, Victor Hugo.  If I had a copy of the letters of Baudelaire with me I could give his exact response to being congratulated by Hugo on writing poems for the struggling People.  I can paraphrase Baudelaire, though: “I hate the People!”

How Hugo loved the People; how they loved him.

The Toilers of the Sea, despite the first word of the title, is not about the People.  It is not a political novel at all, even though it was written during Hugo’s exile from France.  Unless – oh no, how awful – it is an allegory, and the shipwreck is France, and the octopus is Louis Napoleon.  The novel is very much about the Sea, though.  Hugo claims, in a Preface, that Notre-Dame de Paris is a denunciation of dogmas, Les Misérables is about laws, and Toilers is about things, the elements.  All three are about “the fatality within [man]… the human heart.”  Ah, how sad!  This is why Hugo lost his readers.

That and the lack of actual story.  The Toilers of the Sea has a ratio of story to non-story that may approach a 19th century novelistic record.  In much of the story that the novel does tell, a man tries to salvage a ship in a superhuman feat of engineering.  A rare genre:  the novel of engineering.

The floor of the engine room was framed between the eight cables from the hoists, four on one side and four on the other.  The sixteen openings in the deck and under the hull through which the cables passed had been linked with one another by sawing.  The planking…  (plenty more of this in II.3.vi, p. 300)

The other story is what may be – what must be – the greatest heist film of the century.  Not a film, I guess.  But there’s a hundred page stretch that bangs along like an Elmore Leonard novel.  A Leonard novel that spends a surprising amount of time describing rocks.

In a Hugo novel, you get everything.  Whether you want it or not.

Early on in Toilers, I was worried that Hugo was getting a bit stiff.  He loosens up.  The novel has some passages that approach unbelievability (not the one sampled above, not exactly).  I could write about the book all week.  I will.

I read the 2002 Modern Library / James Hogarth translation, an excellent edition all round. I read Les Misérables in the revised Wilbour version which goes back to 1862, and the Quasimodo novel in (I think) the Walter Cobb version from the 1960s.  My tribute to all three translators: their books all sound and feel like they were written by the same writer.

Perhaps the purest ramble I have ever posted - travel plans, reading plans, bad plans

I have to disappear for a few more days – back Thursday.  I had planned to write a book review-like post today, but that’s bad planning, isn’t it?  Nearly a week with some random book review topping Wuthering Expectations.  I should instead feature something that strengthens the brand.  If only I knew what that something was.

The book was Demolishing Nisard (2006) by Eric Chevillard, a short novel full of goofy vitriol and revenge.  The narrator hates a particular critic and blames him for everything wrong in literature, and life – the critic’s life, all life.  Traffic accidents, crime, you name it.  “He uses his phone on trains” (55).  That the critic, Désiré Nisard, has been dead for 120 years, is a minor detail for the narrator.

The best reason not to review the book is that Trevor Mookse Gripes did such a fine job in April, so what is the point.  What does he say – “one of the funniest books I’ve read” – I don’t go that far, but parts are awfully funny.  Vitriolic Thomas Bernhard is funnier.  “The book’s existential conundrum: in hating Nisard, the narrator brings on his own Nisardification” – now that is just right.

The only real point I want to make here is directed at the PR person at Dalkey Archive:  because of Trevor’s review I bought a copy of Demolishing Nisard with my own money, so keep sending him books.  He has generated at least one sale.

The Chevillard novel was part of the recent Frenchification of my reading.  I am going to France in July so I am reading about France, even though the books have nothing to do with where I am going.  Not only am I not going to Jersey, the setting of Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea, but I am going about as far from it as I can get and still be in France.  And strictly, even loosely, speaking, Jersey is not even in France.  So why I am reading the novel?  General cultural seepage, I guess.  Also, it is awesome, although people uninterested in unusual parts of the world should skip the long introduction, and then also skip much of the rest.

The Francis Steegmuller book Flaubert and Madame Bovary is outstanding but mostly set in Normandy.  I am working up to a Madame Bovary festival.  Flaubert is a sort of household god at Wuthering Expectations, so it should be fun to explain what I mean by that.  Has everyone read Prof. Maitzen’s Flaubert posts?  The second one, Bovary vs. Middlemarch is especially idea-rich.

The Janet Lewis novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, is set near my destination, so it qualifies as more direct research.  Now there’s an idea – I should end with an open-ended question, allowing thoughtful strangers to do my research for me.  I have read that blog posts should end with questions.  How about this one:

What do you recommend I do in Languedoc-Rousillon, which is where I will be?  Eat cassoulet?  Yes.  What else?  And what should I read?

The Hugo Objects at the Maison de Victor Hugo

My suspicion of the concept of the value of the writer’s house museum does not stop me from visiting them whenever I can.  The grounds for suspicion are obvious, I assume* – the attempt to squeeze meaning out of seeing the pen with which the author wrote his masterpiece, the chair on which he sat, the fainting couch on which he reclined, the chamber pot which he hurled at a yowling cat that had interrupted his concentration, and so on.  In a painter’s house, we do what the artist did, we look carefully at interesting objects; in the writer’s house we look carefully at the contents of someone’s attic.

So I dunno.  The literary boosters of Grenoble are currently renovating and assembling a Maison Stendhal in the house of the author’s grandfather.  They have one great advantage – the local university curates the Stendhal archives, including his manuscripts – that may or may not overcome the endless obstacles to an interesting museum visit:  Stendhal hated Grenoble, left it as soon as he could, and so on.  He went to school over there; this plaza is featured in The Life of Henry Brulard; the vines on this trellis could be the ones planted  by his grandfather, but most likely are not.  All of this should be ready in – well, several years from now.

I am imagining, here, that the visitor is genuinely interested in the writer and has read some sample of his works.  Picture, instead, the poor sap who is dragged into one of these museums with no knowledge or interest.  Luckily for him, writer museums are typically small.

The Maison de Victor Hugo, on the charming Place des Vosges in Paris, has the enormous advantage of featuring the enormous Victor Hugo, not just a writer but a celebrity.  A floor of the house is currently devoted to an extraordinary display of Hugo objects, the Hugobjets, a bewildering selection of Hugo kitsch:  the Hugo fan could drink Hugo beer and gamble with Hugo playing cards; the aspiring sage could write with Hugo pens and Hugo ink.  Trademark laws being what they were, none of this was generated by Hugo himself – there was no Hugo, Inc. – but by anyone who hoped that Hugo’s aura would help move his merchandise.  A visit to Google Images should give an idea of the variety of stuff.

The ordinary objects with Hugo’s face pasted on them were most amusing to me, but the volume of commemorative plates, fans, cards, and busts, pictured above, were perhaps more instructive.  Everyone wanted a relic of Saint Victor of Notre Dame.  The Hugobjets date, mostly, from 1870 or later, near the end of Hugo’s life, when his popularity and stature somehow metastasized into a Hugo craze that continued for a decade or two after his death.  He was no longer just the greatest French writer, peer of Shakespeare and Goethe, but something much larger, and sillier.

The Hugobjets exhibit was enormously instructive.  It became obvious why writers like Verlaine and Corbière and Gide had to ignore or mock or reject Hugo, whether or not he was the greatest poet in the language, even if they had to jettison the poetry along with the plates and busts and playing cards.  What a burden; what a monster.

* See, please, April Bernard on the topic.

Great minds are importunate; it is judicious to restrain them a little

Victor Hugo, writing William Shakespeare, fails to follow his own advice, which is only offered in jest.  He is another importunate genius, like

Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, - excessive.  They bring with them a style of art wild, howling, flaming, disheveled like the lion and the comet.  Oh, shocking!  (II.3.V.)

Who would want Hugo to restrain himself?  A literary diet of nothing but howling comets and flaming lions would be exhausting, unhealthy, even ruinous.  Hugo is to be imbibed in modest doses of no more  than 400 pages at a time.

Do I read Hugo simply to marvel at his vast range of extraordinary grimaces and poses?  No, no, he is, in fact, a substantive, if diffuse and discursive, writer.  I mean, his arguments take some wild, howling leaps of their own.  The ideas are intuitive, rhetorical, emotional.  Bullying, sometimes.

The heart of the book comes near the end, in a section titled “The Mind and the Masses” (II.5.) which I understand has been published separately (although surely not as this three page version?).  Hugo argues that art should be the foundation of civilization, and great artists the guides.  He pushes Shelley another step – poets should be the acknowledged legislators of the world, although not the actual legislators, or at least not that I can tell, although Hugo was himself an actual legislator before and after his exile.  He grazes against the idea that art could replace religion as a source of transcendent meaning, but looks away.  Hugo’s artists are concerned with earthly things:

Literature secretes civilization, poetry secretes the ideal [yuck!].  That is why literature is one of the wants of societies; that is why poetry is a hunger of the soul.

That is why poets are the first instructors of the people.

That is why Shakespeare must be translated in France…

That is why there must be a vast public literary domain.

That is why all the poets, all the philosophers, all the thinkers, all the producers of nobility of soul must be translated, commented on, published, printed, reprinted, stereotyped, distributed, hawked about, explained, recited, spread abroad, given to all, given cheaply, given at cost price, given for nothing. (II.5.ii.)

Hugo’s confusion becomes evident.  He follows this passage with an invocation of Ezekiel eating a book, which tastes like honey (Ezekiel 3:1-3), reinforcing Hugo’s “hunger” metaphor, presumably, but then leaps to a discussion of literacy and crime rates, of democracy and socialism and capital punishment.  Poets help with these problems by “permeating civilization with light” (II.5.iv.), which is just a little bit nebulous.

I see that Hugo’s problem is that he is fighting on too many fronts.  Or, his achievement is that he is able to take on so many opponents.  Napoleon Bonaparte, Robespierre, “art for art’s sake” (a phrase Hugo claims he coined), Thomas Carlyle, copyright laws  - Hugo is Porthos, fencing with five opponents at once.  Small wonder that his swordsmanship is sometimes inelegant.

The fact that his book titled William Shakespeare is entirely useless on the subject of William Shakespeare is a first-rate irony that is reinforced, in the edition I read, by the translator’s footnotes, reminding the English reader that Hugo always quotes from memory, and therefore misquotes, and that his French is often a little peculiar.  We are about two turns of the conceptual screw from Pale Fire, except Hugo, for better or worse, is sincere.

I shall gaze at the ocean. - Victor Hugo's William Shakespeare

Jean Cocteau’s line was “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”  André Gide had another good one.  Asked to identify the greatest French poet, he replied “Victor Hugo, alas!”   This is all hearsay, by the way, quite possibly apocryphal.  But these jibes give a good sense of Hugo’s stature, even after his death.   They suggest that Hugo was not simply a writer, or an influence, but a problem for other writers.

If I got the gist of the joke, I had never read a book that quite justified it, not even the massively discursive Les Misérables.   Now, I have. Victor Hugo’s William Shakespeare (1864) begins:

A dozen years ago, on an island near the coast of France, a house, at every season of forbidding aspect, was growing especially gloomy by reason of the approach of winter.  The west wind, which has full sweep there, was piling thick upon this dwelling those enveloping fogs November interposes between sun and earth.  In autumn, night falls early; the narrow windows made the days still briefer within, and deepened the sombre twilight of the house.

The description of this house, and its environs, and the French exiles who reside within, goes on like this for four pages.  The island is Jersey; the exiles are Victor Hugo and his family, washed ashore in Great Britain, although as close to France as they can physically be.  One might wonder what this has to do with William Shakespeare.

Let’s advance to the end of that first chapter, where we find the father and son, “silent, like shipwrecked persons who meditate.”

Without, it rained, the wind blew the house was as if deafened by the outer roaring.  Both went on thinking, absorbed, perhaps, by thoughts of this coincidence between the beginning of winter and the beginning of exile.

Suddenly the son raised his voice and asked the father, -

“What think you of this exile?”

“That it will be long.”

“How do you intend to employ it?”

The father answered, “I shall gaze at the ocean.”

There was a silence. The father was the first to speak: -

“And you?”

“I,” said the son, “I shall translate Shakespeare.”

Hugo’s exile would last nineteen years.  During that time he finished Les Misérables as well as two more novels, published some of the greatest French poetry of the century, and wrote an introduction for his son’s Shakespeare translations, a piece which somehow expanded into a 400 page essay on creativity and genius that is hardly about Shakespeare at all, but is very much about its author, Victor Hugo.

I want to be absolutely clear:  William Shakespeare is only rarely written like the above passages.  A long Shakespeare book written like that, what an accomplishment!  The book is rambling, wild, windy, crackpot, brilliant, boisterous, by turns, or all at once, 400 pages of uninterrupted Hugolian outpouring.   It is hilariously inaccurate, as the outstanding, exasperated 1887 translator, Melville B. Anderson, points out again and again.   It is the purest concentration of the essence of Victor Hugo I have ever encountered, or hope to.  Great book.  Bad book.  Beyond categories.

Maybe just one more day on William Shakespeare’s Victor Hugo.  Oops, I mean Victor Hugo’s Victor Hugo.   No, hang on -