Books: Popular Pessimist

EMILE ZOLA (148 pp.]—Angus Wilson —Morrow ($3).

“I do not expect justice,” said Emile Zola in 1897, at the height of his fame. “I know that I must disappear.” So far as his literary popularity was concerned, the forecast was sound. After his death in 1902, his readers began dropping away. Between 1932 and 1952 not a single book about Zola was published in English. In the U.S., thanks to Actor Paul Muni’s performance in a movie version of his life, Zola is stereotyped as an angry old Frenchman in a plug hat.

It is against this background that British Author Angus Wilson moves for a “deserved re-estimation” in his short, sharp critical study, Emile Zola. Wilson’s summary: Zola was “one of the great cumbrous, magnificent pithecanthropi of 19th century literature . . . the close companion of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, a little less than them . . . but having … a strange clarity of direct vision which their great fusions of the dream kingdom and the waking world obliterate.”

Swallow & Spit. The early haunt of the pithecanthropus was in the south of France, at Aix. He was something of a sluggard in class, but after school he roamed through the rugged Provencal landscape with a youngster whose nature was as strong and perhaps even deeper than his own—Paul Cézanne.

At 18, Zola was sent to school in Paris. He hid his provincial manners with an abrasive gruffness, but he could scarcely hide his provincial ignorance. In his final exam he declared that Charlemagne died in the 16th century, was forthwith flunked for being off by some 700 years. Apparently unconcerned, he plunged into a Bohemian life, took a tart for a mistress, and during one starved winter dressed in blankets because he had pawned even his last pair of pants to keep her. He wrote a trilogy of epic poems, notably bad and terribly long. His family, through a friend, got him a job before he could write a fourth.

The job, as a clerk at the publisher Hachette’s, started Zola off on the main track of his career. He ran a literary gossip column for a scandal sheet, hacked out newspaper serials, and even managed to publish a couple of poor books.

At 28, he took a hard look at his cheap-jackery, and resolved to do better. He calmly decided, as he said, to “swallow” his time and spit it out again in a series of 20 long novels about the Rougon-Macquart, in which all the main characters were the legitimate and illegitimate descendants of one oversexed farm wench. For his series he invented a new ism, based on close, pessimistic observation of mankind, and called it Naturalism. But Zola no more believed in Naturalism than he did in God, Wilson concludes. The important thing was this: “I, I alone will be Naturalism.”

The amazing thing was that some of the novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle proved, unarguably, to be masterpieces: L’Assommoir, a tragedy of poverty, Germinal, a tale of striking workmen, and La Terre, a brutal epic of farm life. For 25 years, as his books peddled the “black poetry” of pessimism and garbled heredity under the name of hard fact, men of state and men of letters rose to protest—but not to much avail—that Zola was lying. Millions read Zola’s books.

Rare Sight. The “pig of Médan,” they called him, and in fact he had become a puffy little gourmandizer who would go 14 courses and seven wines at a sitting. He loaded his country mansion and city apartment with tons of bric-a-brac and garish chinoiserie. Yet at the same time he was the “professor of energy” who wrote ten hours a day without fail; and he was that rarest of Frenchmen, a faithful husband to the middle-class girl he eventually married. Cézanne groaned:”He had become a damned bourgeois.”

Then, as suddenly as he had dropped Bohemia 25 years before, Zola changed his life again. He reduced 50 pounds in three months, took a mistress and, a while after, plunged into the Dreyfus Affair with a series of open letters including his famous “J’Accuse.” For two years his polemics on behalf of the convicted officer kept France in an uproar—and much of the uproar was directed against Zola himself. He was sued for libel, stripped of his fortune, forced to run for his life from a mob, chased into exile in England. Yet he stood to his charges, and at last Dreyfus was vindicated. The world had witnessed one of the rarest sights in history: a man of letters had intervened directly in the highest affairs of state, and had decisively altered the course of his country’s politics.

After the Dreyfus Affair, Zola wrote nothing of real importance. His death, at 62, was a thoroughgoing piece of Naturalism: accidental asphyxiation caused by a bad flue in his bedroom. Thousands came to the funeral.