Against Nature (28 page)

– So, I said, getting to the heart of the matter, you must be pleased with the literary success of
Against Nature
?

– Yes, the book exploded into the midst of literary youth like a grenade. I thought I had been writing for ten people, crafting a kind of hermetic book, locked to idiots. To my great surprise, it happened that a few thousand people scattered around the globe were in a state of mind analogous to mine, sickened by the ignominious roguishness of this century, hungry also for works of art that had been more or less well executed, but which had at least been honestly put together, and without that despicable rush to get into print that runs so rife in France at present…

– And if I asked you about Naturalism, since after all you are taken to be one of its most out-and-out adherents?

– I would simply answer that I write what I see, what I live, what I feel, and that I write the least badly I can. If that is Naturalism, so much the better. When it comes down to it, there are writers with talent and writers without talent, regardless of whether they are Naturalists, Romantics, Decadents, take your pick, I don't care! To my mind, it's a matter of having talent, and that's all there is to it!…

All in all, my first impression was borne out: Huysmans is definitely the sour misanthrope, the anaemic nerve-bundle of his books, which I shall briefly consider here.

It is not until
Les Soeurs Vatard
that we discover the bizarre temperament of this writer, a puzzling mix of refined Parisian and Dutch painter. It is from this fusion, to which one could add a pinch of black humour and rough English comedy, that gives these books their distinctive imprint.

Les Soeurs Vatard
has some fine pages; it appeared in 1879, and introduces for the first time into modern literature remarkably painstaking descriptions of railways and locomotives. It is a slice of life, of the lives of the women who bind books, earthy and lewd and true to life, straight from the brush of old Steen, but wielded by an alert and supple Parisian hand, but I personally prefer
En Ménage
, which remains my favourite among the books we owe to this author.

This is because the book gives insights into melancholy and explores particular stricken and feeble souls. It is the anthem of Nihilism! An anthem made even darker by outbursts of ominous light-heartedness and the language of a ferocious mind… But in
Against Nature
furious rage emerges, the apathetic mask cracks, denunciations of life blaze in every line; we are far from the quiescent and disappointed philosophy of the two books that precede it. It is madness, foaming at the mouth; I do not think that hatred and contempt for a century has ever been so passionately expressed as in this strange novel, which falls so far outside all contemporary literature.

One of the great faults of M. Huysmans' books is, in my opinion, that it is the
same character
who pulls the strings in each of his works.
Cyprien Tibaille
and
André Folantin
are, after all, no more than one and the same person, transported into different settings. And this person is quite obviously M. Huysmans, one can feel it; we are a long way from the flawless artistry of Flaubert, who concealed himself behind his work and created such marvellously diverse characters. M. Huysmans is quite incapable of such self-restraint. His sardonic face appears, lying in wait, on every page, and the constant intrusion of a personality, however interesting it may be, in my opinion diminishes
the quality of a work, and eventually wearies with its predictability.

I will not deal here with his style. It has all been said in a judicious article by M. Hennequin. Certain of his pages are of unequalled splendour, especially in
Against Nature
, in which a chapter on
Gustave Moreau
, to mention but one, is and will rightly remain famous. But there is another element which critics have generally pretended not to notice. I mean the psychological analysis of his characters – or rather his character, for as I have said, there is only one: a weak-willed character, troubled, self-tormenting, rational, and far-sighted enough to explain himself the direction in which his illness was taking him and to describe it in fluent and precise language. One of the original features of this author lies in his analysis of character, an originality equal, in my view, to that of his style. Read
La Crise juponnière
, in
En Ménage
, and reflect that none of this tiny corner of the soul had ever been glimpsed before him. How authentic is this examination of the crisis, and with what skilful clarity the author reveals it to us! Or read the splendid chapter in
Against Nature
, the chapter devoted to childhood memories and to artfully narrated theological convolutions, and decide if these explorations of the deep vaults of the spirit are not wholly profound and wholly new!

Over and above his works, M. Huysmans has published a volume of
Croquis parisiens
, where, following Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire, he tried to fashion prose poetry. To some extent he renewed and reinvigorated the genre, using strange conceits, blank verse as refrains, and beginning and ending his poems with strange, repeated rhythmic lines, even adding a kind of separate ritournelle or
‘envoi'
, as in the ballads of Villon and Deschamps. There are also writings on art, collected in his book
L'Art moderne
, the first book seriously to explain the work of the Impressionists and to give Degas the high position he will occupy in the future. M. Huysmans was also the first to champion Raffaëlli, at the time when no one paid any attention to the painter; and he was the first to interpret and launch the work of Odilon Redon. What modern art critic has such gifts of unerring taste and understanding of art in all its most diverse forms?

In short, if there is any justice, M. Huysmans, once so despised by vulgar folk, will receive his share of acclaim. At the moment I must admit that, as far as I am concerned, I share very few of his beliefs. Personally, I believe in a healthier literature, in a less showy style perhaps, but also less complicated. I also believe in a more expansive and general and less rarefied psychological analysis. From this point of view, Balzac seems to me the master – he so carefully dissected the great and universal passions of human beings, fatherly love, greed.
However high I place M. Huysmans among the true writers of a century that has so few of them, I cannot help considering him an exception, a bizarre and morbid writer, jerky and showy, an artist to his fingertips. In the words of another strange writer of contorted and luxuriant epithets, with disconcerting and remote ideas, Léon Bloy, ‘dragging the image by the hair or by the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax'. But all that, however much we may admire him, does not seem to me to add up to the beautiful healthiness of conception and style of which undoubted and absolute masterpieces are made.

This is pure and simple collapse.

Moral society, like the intellectual world, is founded on a framework of prejudices, conventions and reciprocal back-scratching, etc., which only stays upright by some miracle of balance. The social wheels only keep turning because of the speed and because no one has, until now, dared put a stick into the spokes and blow up the whole machine. Some, like M. Huysmans, sap the foundations, attack the base directly, show you that these great blocks, seemingly so solid, are just pale cardboard boxes, perfect imitations of stone but in reality full of wind.

That is why a book like
Against Nature
is a book to put in a corner of one's library, within reach, because it is a formidable pickaxe-blow to the pale cardboard of social and literary conventions, and comes from a wholehearted atheist, a robust pessimist – complete, absolute, and at peace with himself.

It's as if we barely hear the blow of the pickaxe as it demolishes the
edifice, so seduced are we by the stunning erudition that overflows from these pages, so blinded by the silkiness of this precious language, so refined and yet so nervous and muscular and full-blooded.

His despairing conclusion nonetheless leaves a faint hope, since his hero Des Esseintes, instead of taking refuge in suicide, agrees on doctor's orders to return to the world he so despised…

Read this majestically hopeless book, then bury your impossible illusions, drink fresh water, and start loving – anything, even a dog.

…When [Des Esseintes] is not a scoundrel he is a coward… He has ridiculous and idiotic inventions. Remember the story of the tortoise whose shell he has gold-plated and in which he has jewels incrusted! Remember the books in his library whose spirit the bindings are meant to translate! Remember those flowers which are supposed to kill natural flowers! remember the alchemy of his scents, madly sought in combinations of well-known perfumes! and tell me if these fantasies are not absurd! I can quite understand that the vulgarities of life offend a proud and elevated spirit, but in order to escape and to replace them one must not stoop to these piffling trifles… And M. Huysmans' Des Esseintes, who plays the Titan face to face with life, shows himself to be a stupid Tom Thumb when it comes to changing it.

…This is the punishment of such a book, one of the most decadent we can number among the decadent books of this century of decadence… Undertaken in despair, the book ends with a despair that is greater than that with which it began. At the end of all the unbelievable follies he has dared, this author has felt the shattering sorrow of disappointment. A mortal anguish pervades his book. The miserable little castle of cards – his little cardboard Babel – built against God and
the world, collapses on top of him […] The Revolutionary has felt his own nothingness…

‘After
Les Fleurs du mal'
, I once told Baudelaire, ‘you have only to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross.' Baudelaire chose the foot of the cross.

Will the author of
Against Nature
choose it also?

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of
argot
and archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of
Symbolistes
. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.