Books |
Honore de Balzac
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Fiction
As has often been the case, Saul Bellow wised me up. “You can’t know life or human relations, you don’t understand society, if you haven’t read Balzac,” warns a character in Bellow’s novel “More Die of Heartbreak”. At the time I read those words — a dozen or so years ago — I knew Balzac only as a big name in the lit game. And I knew there was a Rodin sculpture of Balzac on the Bouelvard Raspail in Paris and at MoMA, too. But that was pretty much it.
So I picked up Père Goriot — in English, alas. I read the opening pages — and my mood began to shift: Suddenly the world seemed vastly more interesting because it was briefly captured in a work of art. That shift in mood has lasted for more than a decade.
“Père Goriot” begins with an astonishingly effective evocation of a dump of a Parisian boarding house in the crumbling Latin Quarter in the early part of the 19th century. We learn who lived in the place, how they got their money, the landlady’s finances, why the food spoiled, the color and physical condition of the wallpaper, how the plumbing worked — and didn’t work. Everything. All told with breathtaking confidence and expansiveness by a genius who held all of French society in his head. As V.S. Pritchett puts it, Balzac “becomes Paris itself because he talks for it.”
"Goriot" gives a taste of Balzac’s range. Early on in the novel, we follow one of the residents of the boarding house, a striving student from the provinces, as he enters an elite Parisian salon for the first time. Which is to say we go almost literally from the gutter to heights of French society. And speaking of the gutter, one of the other “guests” at the crumbling boarding house is an escaped convict, Vautrin, the crime kingpin of all of Paris, a Godfather-like creature with a homoerotic interest in the aforementioned striving provincial. There’s also Père Goriot himself, a sort of a reverse Lear figure whose tragedy arises from an excess of generosity towards his upwardly mobile daughters, one of whom is married to the most powerful banker in Paris — and will soon commence an affair with our friend the student.
In Balzac’s semi-autobiographical "Louis Lambert", the narrator describes “that color of truth without which nothing can be done in art.” And all of Balzac’s own art exhibits that compulsion to tell the truth about society. While he was writing the interconnected series of novels that he came to call “The Human Comedy”, Balzac was also inventing the French novel, which, at the time, was thought to be a genre best appreciated by chambermaids. Flaubert’s idea of the novel as an aesthetically perfect object had not yet been conceived. So Balzac can be messy and (delightfully) digressive. Sometimes Balzac over-explains, tells instead of shows, telegraphs his effects, and then congratulates himself on his achievements. Which to me only adds to the reader’s pleasure.
Balzac’s characters, who are sometimes outsized monsters, always feel fully alive. Oscar Wilde famously described the depth of his feelings for the hero of Balzac’s Lost Illusions and its sequel, A Harlot High and Low. “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré,” Wilde observed. “It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”
So how to begin with Balzac — or remind yourself of his genius if you read him years ago?
For me, the best way is to dive in is with the great masterpieces: “Père Goriot” followed by “Lost Illusions” and “A Harlot High and Low”, a melodramatic police story wherein Lucien is mentored by the master criminal Vautrin. Next, I’d try the superb The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau, which tells the story of a naïve perfume merchant and entrepreneur who squanders his savings on social climbing, remodeling his home, and ill-conceived investments — a man who, like many of us, “mistook the summit” of his career “for the starting-point.”
At this point, you’ll doubtless want more Balzac, and I’d suggest Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons. You should read these novels for a very practical reason. A character in Bellow’s “More Die of Heartbreak” explains it this way: “As for people who haven’t read ‘Cousin Pons’ and ‘Cousin Bette’, I don’t see what kind of guidance system they can have when somebody gives them the business, they can’t interpret how they’re being shafted.”
These novels — like most of Balzac’s major works — take place during the “July Monarchy” of Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois king” whose reign lasted from l830 through l848. Balzac lamented what he saw as this money-grubbing era, but it’s a society that feels entirely familiar to contemporary readers. In fact, “Lost Illusions” and “A Harlot High and Low” can be read as primers for anyone trying to hustle a living in the arts today — and the novel makes a perfect gift for any young person in need of wising up. “Lost Illusions” includes this lesson: “In society, nobody is interested in suffering or misfortune, everything is talk.” And in “Harlot”, the young reader will encounter this grim warning, spoken by a cynical journalist: “You grow used to seeing evil done, to letting it go; you begin by not minding, you end by doing it yourself. In the end, your soul, spotted daily by shameful transactions always going on, shrinks, the spring of noble thoughts rusts, the hinges of small talk wear loose and swing unaided.…talent degenerates, the belief in works of beauty evaporates.”
If this all seems daunting, and you want a quick taste of Balzac before sitting down for full meal, pick up Colonel Chabert: if you’re not hooked by this beautiful novella, then Balzac’s not for you — right now. Which only means you should try again later.
— Guest Butler Ronald Fried is the author, most recently, of the addictively readable novel, Christmas in Paris, 2002.
To buy “Pere Goriot” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Lost Illusions” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “A Harlot High and Low” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Cousin Bette” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Cousin Pons” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Colonel Chabert” from Amazon.com, click here.
