Portrait of A Novel (24 page)

As we have seen, James had come to Paris in November 1875, determined to settle in Europe at last. He found a two-bedroom flat in the rue de Luxembourg, a residential street in the center of the Right Bank’s opulent charms, with the Tuileries to one side and the Madeleine to the other. (Now renamed the rue Cambon, it’s best known as the site of Coco Chanel’s first boutique; her house there is today a museum.) The Opéra, the Louvre, the Palais Royal and the Comédie Française—all of them were within a short walk, a world whose splendor seemed to increase by the week. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 lay but a few years in the past. The civil conflict of the Paris Commune was even more recent, when in the aftermath of that war a popular uprising had been viciously suppressed, with thousands put before the firing squads. Yet to James the city appeared to have recovered so quickly that it looked “
as if her sky
had never known a cloud.” The shops offered anything one might desire, and the confectionery seemed as delicate as the work of a Renaissance goldsmith. In the
Portrait of a Lady
, James would send Isabel to Paris during the winter of 1872, just a few months after the Commune was put down; but really the majestic city of her visit belongs to the year of his own residence.

He soon began a second major novel,
The American
, and gave it a Parisian setting, but much of his effort during his early months in the city went into his series of biweekly letters for the
New York Tribune
. He wrote about theater and art and the reactionary impulses of the American colony, who wanted another emperor or king, anything but a republican government. He wrote about Chartres and the death of George Sand. Yet James barely touched on what was to become the most important consequence of his time in France, even more important than his friendship with Paul Zhukovsky: his meetings with French writers and his sustained encounter with French fiction. He had called upon Turgenev soon after his arrival, and in mid-December he went, at the Russian’s invitation, to Flaubert’s. Writing to Quincy Street, he was almost blasé about the meeting. The French writer seemed much kinder than his books had made James expect, and “
rather embarrassed
at having a stranger presented to him.” Two other visitors also looked worth noting. Edmond de Goncourt had begun his career by collaborating on everything, fiction and diary alike, with his now-dead brother Jules; for a while they even shared a mistress. Only a few of their novels are now much read, but the many volumes of their pungent journal remain an inexhaustible mine of gossip and bile. As for Émile Zola, who in books like
Nana
and
Germinal
would have an incalculable effect on the future of the novel . . . well, at that point James thought him a bit common.

In the room that day were five men who either were or would become great writers; Maupassant makes a sixth, and Alphonse Daudet brings the number to seven. Peter Brooks has given us our richest account of what the American learned in France, writing in
Henry James Goes to Paris
of the lessons that finishing school taught him: lessons that on the one hand stressed the importance of formal rigor and conscious design, and on the other showed how unflinching a novelist might be in dealing with sexual passion. James would not fully draw upon that education until the early years of the twentieth century, in books like
The Golden Bowl
and
The Ambassadors
, novels about adultery that offer as well a minute account of consciousness itself, of how one knows what one knows. That knowledge, in his late fiction, always turns on the question of sex, but in the 1870s he simply didn’t have the right background. Not even his long stays in Italy, let alone his years in Cambridge, had gotten him ready for something like Maupassant’s little tale.

Still, he was at least prepared to register the great difference between his own world and the one he was now entering. One might hear anything at Flaubert’s, and James enjoyed setting down just enough of it to shock one of his correspondents back home. Writing to Howells in February 1876, he told him of a subject for a novel that, as “
editor of the austere
Atlantic
,
” he would never have to consider. Goncourt was at work on a book called
La Fille Elisa
and had “got upon an episode that greatly interested him, and into which he was going very far.
Flaubert
: “What is it?”
E. de G
: “A whore-house
de province
.” Nor was James the only one there with open ears. Goncourt later claimed that Zola had stolen his research, and in “La Maison Tellier,” Maupassant would write one of his greatest tales on precisely that subject. Howells, meanwhile, replied that he thanked God he wasn’t a Frenchman. He would have been even more appalled by the bits of conversation James
didn’t
record. For Goncourt’s account of the day skips over his own work-in-progress in order to concentrate on Daudet’s minute description of his venereal symptoms.

Their host spent much of the year at his family home in Normandy, in the old house along the Seine in which he had grown up. Paris was Flaubert’s winter retreat, and his apartment there was a modest one, up five full flights of stairs. On Sundays his one servant was out; he opened the door himself, and James remembered the flat as sparsely furnished. The American was shy and had as yet published little of importance; he never became an integral part of the
cenacle
, and some of its regulars never quite caught his name. But a few times he managed to be the first to arrive, and then he had Flaubert to himself for an hour; once he called on a weekday, and the older man recited from memory some poems by his dead friend Théophile Gautier. At larger gatherings the room was always clouded with smoke and much of the conversation turned on questions of artistic form. By English standards the apartment was full of aesthetic radicals, men who all denied that a book had any business in trying to teach a lesson. Art to them had no more to do with morality than it did “
with astronomy
or embryology,” and any attempt to bring them together was the mark of a primitive mind. “The only duty of a novel was to be well-written,” as James wrote in an 1884 essay on the death of Turgenev, and a few years later Oscar Wilde would echo those words in his preface to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.

Flaubert’s own books, with their obsessive search for the right word, the right rhythm, might seem to stress formal concerns above all. Yet in bracketing off moral issues, his aesthetic allowed a space for other kinds of freedom, and one his disciples were quick to explore. No subject matter could be excluded, every aspect of human life had a legitimate place upon the page, and for James the test of those principles lay in the work of Zola. In the spring of 1876 the French writer’s first unequivocal masterpiece,
L’Assommoir
, had just started its serialization in a popular left-wing newspaper. James had some sympathy with the idea that art and morality were fundamentally different things, and that the problems of art were above all those of execution. But he never doubted that fiction should depict the moral life of its characters, their awareness of the complexities of the world around them and of the choices they make about living in it. Zola did—he questioned the very idea of the moral life itself. His characters are the creatures of heredity and environment, and their individual efforts have virtually nothing to do with their fates. They are instead the victims or beneficiaries of the impersonal forces around them, a vision of the world that goes by the name of “naturalism.” But the term means something more than that, and Zola also provided an unflinching account of his characters lives. He reproduced their speech exactly, he recorded their enslavement to drink and to sex, and he described their work in precise and often painful detail.
L’Assommoir
is the story of the washerwoman Gervaise Coupeau, who lives with her family near the Gare du Nord. The title refers to the ever-bubbling still in the local pub, the source of the family’s downfall, and at the end of the book Gervaise’s young daughter is already on the streets, a girl who will return as the courtesan title-figure of
Nana
. Zola hoped that the book would make his fortune and was at first devastated by the news that
Le Bien Public
would stop running it after just six weekly installments. The French reading public may not have had Mudie’s to guard it, but many of the newspaper’s readers had still complained, criticizing both the story’s indecency and its unsparing portrait of the working class.

The news was all anyone talked about at Flaubert’s one Sunday that May, when “
the subscriber
, as a type of human imbecility, received a wonderful dressing.” James himself had just been asked to stretch
The American
from nine monthly installments to twelve, and when he met Zola on the stairs, there was a certain irony in the American’s greeting. In the end, however, the suspension of the serial did Zola a favor. Another newspaper picked it up, the whiff of censorship sparked the public interest, and the novel became the bestseller he had hoped for. Writing in 1903, a year after the French writer’s death, James suggested that no one had ever created a “
more totally
represented
world.” Zola’s method and mind and, above all, his material may have been utterly different than James’s own, but the American nevertheless thought that
Germinal
had the full scope of an epic, a book that “never shrinks nor flows thin . . . nothing for an instant drops, dips, or catches.” None of his contemporaries ever received higher praise.

Still, he always wondered why Zola’s imagination was so frequently drawn to scenes of “
misery, vice
, and uncleanness,” and if the older writer admired
L’Assommoir
almost beyond measure, the young one had found it “prodigiously disagreeable.” Art and morality might have nothing to do with one another, and James did recognize the realist’s need to take in all aspects of human life. Yet surely the picture should not be so unrelieved? James learned enough in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to attempt to disguise his prejudices, but he still had an Anglo-American suspicion of French subject matter. In his criticism he granted each writer what he called his
donnée
, his choice of material and his view of the world. He criticized only the execution—or so he claimed, for his aesthetic objections often took an ethical twist. So in his review of
Nana
, written just before he began work on
The Portrait of a Lady
, he protested against a view of “
nature . . . as a combination
of the cesspoool and the house of prostitution,” a view that made nature itself seem in need of washing. In 1902 he even criticized Flaubert’s conception of Emma Bovary, whose “
poverty of . . . consciousness
” made her less fully “illustrational” than she might have been. Her world may not have offered her much, but to James she herself did not have so very much to give.

James disliked the bitter partisanship of French intellectual life; at home in Quincy Street he had enjoyed many books that members of the
cenacle
felt themselves obliged to hate. Nevertheless, he valued the clarity with which his Parisian world thought about the purpose and the capabilities of fiction. Zola might be excessive, but English taste was too often insipid. Such masters as Dickens might have worked with their eyes on the young, but as James wrote in his piece on
Nana
, there was some justice in the French belief that no serious book could be written under such restrictions; the “
English system
was good for virgins and boys, and a bad thing for the novel itself.” Each year made his Parisian experience seem more valuable, and after an 1884 reunion with Goncourt and Zola among others, he wrote to Howells that nothing more interested him now “
than the effort
& experiment of this little group. . . . They do the only kind of work, today, that I respect; & in spite of their ferocious pessimism & their handling of unclean things, they are at least serious and honest.” James thought, in fact, that Howells had the chance to become an American Zola, though he doubted that his friend would ever go far enough. And indeed by that time Howells himself had so conquered his own Francophobia as to read everything of Zola’s that he could find; only “
I have to hide
the books from the children!”

That appreciation lay still in the future. Early in
Nana
there appears a sentence that no English writer of its time would have allowed him or herself to write. The girl is appearing on stage in a revue called “Blonde Venus,” wearing nothing but a veil of gauze. Zola describes her hips and thighs and even the rosy tips of her nipples, and then writes that “
when Nana raised
her arms, the golden hairs in her arm-pits could be seen in the glare of the footlights.” Statues have breasts, but those little hairs make us realize that Nana has a body, as none of her contemporaries across the Channel ever really do. Of course, James didn’t notice that detail in his review. He writes of the book’s “
foulness
,” but says almost nothing about what it actually contains. He doesn’t tell his readers that
Nana
is about a teenaged actress who drains the purses of her lovers, sleeping her way from success to success in an ever-unsatisfied frenzy; who seems happy only in a lesbian affair, and who late in the novel is startled to find herself pregnant, having so used “
her sexual parts
. . . for other purposes” that she has forgotten they can still make babies. James writes about none of that. Even as a critic he can’t help but observe the distinction between that which he knows and that which he can admit that he knows.

F
rench novels circulated freely in England—in French. Translations were a different matter, and James must have been dismayed to find his words about
Nana
used in an 1884 ad for a translation of the novel by the publisher
Henry Viztelly
. The listing quoted James’s statement about “virgins and boys” and suggested that Zola was instead the real thing, strong stuff for an audience of adult males. Viztelly’s translations were lightly expurgated and published in cheap editions—they started at 2s.—in order to circumvent the circulating libraries. Even so, they got him convicted of obscenity in both 1888 and 1889, and the second time he spent three months in jail. Reading Zola in French was, for an Englishman, a mark of an educated taste; reading him in English showed only a taste for the gutter. For Viztelly the risk must have been worth it; in France, after all,
Nana
had sold 45,000 copies on the day of its publication. And the publisher himself, as we will later see, would have an important role in changing the terms of the Victorian book business.