What do you think?
Rate this book
The Life of J.-K. Huysmans
Like Froude's biography of Carlyle, Holroyd's Shaw, and Ellmann's Joyce, Robert Baldick's Life of J.-K. Huysmans has become not just a standard reference work, to be consulted as regularly as the writing of the author whose life it chronicles, but a work of literature in its own right. First published fifty years ago, Baldick's classic biography presents a compelling narrative of Huysmans' life and work in all its various phases - from the Naturalism of the 1870s to the Decadence of the 1880s, and from the occult vogue of the 1890s to the Catholic Revival of the turn of the century - and it is written with such impeccable scholarship that it is still relied on today as regards matters of fact and detail. For this new edition - the first time the biography has been reprinted in English -Baldick's notes have been extensively revised and updated by Brendan King to take account of new developments and publications in the field of Huysmansian studies.
592 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2006
3 people are currently reading
131 people want to read
About the author
Robert Baldick
77 books7 followersRobert Baldick was an English scholar of French literature, writer, joint editor of the Penguin Classics series with Betty Radice, and a well-known translator. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
He wrote eight books including biographies of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Frederick Le Maitre and Henry Murger and a history of the Siege of Paris.
In addition, Baldick edited and translated The Goncourt Journals and a number of the classics of French literature including works by Gustave Flaubert, Chateaubriand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jules Verne, and Henri Barbusse, as well as a number of novels by Georges Simenon.
He wrote eight books including biographies of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Frederick Le Maitre and Henry Murger and a history of the Siege of Paris.
In addition, Baldick edited and translated The Goncourt Journals and a number of the classics of French literature including works by Gustave Flaubert, Chateaubriand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jules Verne, and Henri Barbusse, as well as a number of novels by Georges Simenon.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 25, 2019
Though over sixty years old this is still the definitive English language biography of Huysmans and is the perfect model of how to take a persons life and make it interesting, via discriminating use of the material and a concise, but beautifully considered, style.
Nowadays it would appear that biographies have to 'exhaustive'; the family tree traced back to some sort of protozoa, every acquaintance (however minor) worthy of a footnote (thanks internet!), every lunch itemized. Baldick shows this need not be the case and it is gratifying that Huysmans birth, schooling, first job, and child, are all dealt with in the first eighteen pages.
This is not to say that Baldick skimps; yes, he certainly assumes that you know who Flaubert, Zola, the Concourts etc are but then gives wonderful relevant anecdotes and little touches of information quoted from letters and other documents that bring these characters to life (or movingly relates to their deaths). He is particularly interesting in the section on La Bas where he gives extensive background detail of who is who in the novel and indicates how they will play a part in Huysmans life years after his conversion to Catholicism- for example in relation to his housekeeper.
Baldick does not shy away from Huysmans failings, his misogyny, general bitterness (probably born out of fear) and proselytising nature. That said, he does appear to have been something of what my wife would term 'a freak magnet' and this, together with some notable blind spots in his choice of friends, might account for a portion of these attitudes.
All his major works are discussed and placed into context but Baldicks main thesis is that Huysmans output largely concerned itself with suffering and, post conversion, specifically the Catholic doctrine of 'mystical substitution' in which the suffering of one person could alleviate the sins and sufferings of others. This idea (epitomized by Huysmans hagiography of Lydwine of Schiedam in which "for the milk-and-water of the average hagiography he substituted a compound of blood-and-pus") now seems to be fully accepted as gospel and Huysmans certainly appeared to apply this to his own life and the account of his death is both harrowing and moving.
If you have any interest in Huysmans you need this book. I have returned to it numerous times over the years and it is a pleasure to do so again. The cause of this re-reading being my finally being able to get a lovely copy of the first edition.
Nowadays it would appear that biographies have to 'exhaustive'; the family tree traced back to some sort of protozoa, every acquaintance (however minor) worthy of a footnote (thanks internet!), every lunch itemized. Baldick shows this need not be the case and it is gratifying that Huysmans birth, schooling, first job, and child, are all dealt with in the first eighteen pages.
This is not to say that Baldick skimps; yes, he certainly assumes that you know who Flaubert, Zola, the Concourts etc are but then gives wonderful relevant anecdotes and little touches of information quoted from letters and other documents that bring these characters to life (or movingly relates to their deaths). He is particularly interesting in the section on La Bas where he gives extensive background detail of who is who in the novel and indicates how they will play a part in Huysmans life years after his conversion to Catholicism- for example in relation to his housekeeper.
Baldick does not shy away from Huysmans failings, his misogyny, general bitterness (probably born out of fear) and proselytising nature. That said, he does appear to have been something of what my wife would term 'a freak magnet' and this, together with some notable blind spots in his choice of friends, might account for a portion of these attitudes.
All his major works are discussed and placed into context but Baldicks main thesis is that Huysmans output largely concerned itself with suffering and, post conversion, specifically the Catholic doctrine of 'mystical substitution' in which the suffering of one person could alleviate the sins and sufferings of others. This idea (epitomized by Huysmans hagiography of Lydwine of Schiedam in which "for the milk-and-water of the average hagiography he substituted a compound of blood-and-pus") now seems to be fully accepted as gospel and Huysmans certainly appeared to apply this to his own life and the account of his death is both harrowing and moving.
If you have any interest in Huysmans you need this book. I have returned to it numerous times over the years and it is a pleasure to do so again. The cause of this re-reading being my finally being able to get a lovely copy of the first edition.
December 30, 2020
This has a sterling reputation as one of the great literary biographies, and as Huysmans is one of my favorites, and one of the true greats, I was looking forward to reading it. Alas, it’s as dull as 19th century dishwater. It provides only a surface look at Huysmans’ life: on this day Huysmans and Theodore Hannon went to a whorehouse in Brussels, on this day Huysmans had dinner with Zola, Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt, on this day Huysmans and Mallarme visit Villiers’ sick bed, on this day Huysmans attends a seance with Joseph-Antoine Boullan, on this day Huysmans visits Chartres, on this day Huysmans is depressed at Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. The biography completely lacks any psychological insight into the quirky author of the Grand Masterpiece of Decadent Weirdness, A Rebours. Particularly disappointing is how little attention is paid to Huysmans three decades long career as a government clerk. Please, this guy was a brilliant writer, and for thirty years he had to shuffle papers at a boring and soul-crushing job, and we get almost no information on this part of his life, and more importantly, what effect it had on his writing. Only the ten or so pages that recount Huysmans’ agonizing death from mouth/jaw cancer have any life. The rest of this book falls far short of its acclaim.
March 22, 2019
The novels of Huysmans are so autobiographical that there hardly seems need for an actual biography. Nonetheless, Baldick colours the patches of Huysmans' life between the novels admirably relying largely on letters sent and received to/from friends and fellow novelists, artists, critics, lovers, clergy, and confessors. Amazing that the Catholic church could never accept him fully, or perhaps he never completely lost himself in his faith, busy instead meticulously documenting his transformation from sinner to penitent to frustrated oblate. As always Huysmans' thoughts on doctrinal issues and the more esoteric or medieval sects of the church are fascinating. Baldick does a super job giving the reader the right balance of detail.
February 2, 2014
A surprisingly readable biography about an exasperatingly miserable man. Baldick stays focused on his subject's personal narrative, providing historical context without devolving into tedious details. My biggest criticism of a lot of biographies is that the author ends up writing around and around their subject in a way that feels like they are trying to pad out their book. Or perhaps, after years of researching their subject, they become obsessed with minutiae in a way the average reader would not be. Baldick, much to his credit, does not bore us with the tedious details of Huysman's financial situation (I do not care precisely how many francs he spent on a particular day), nor does he end up writing the biographies of Huysmans's parents or his second-cousin or his next-door neighbour. Baldick does dwell on the distressingly visceral details of Huysmans's final illness, but, given the fact that Huysmans wrote a hagiography of the grossly sick St. Lydwine, this felt appropriate.
Generally, Huysmans comes across as an immensely unlikeable person, obsessively neurotic about women, food, and suffering. But he did have an admirable aesthetic sense (as evidenced by his intense appreciation of Gustave Moreau), and both his novels and his letters contain the occasional startling and intriguing turn of phrase (he was an acutely sensitive observer, and his descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells can be quite wonderful).
Generally, Huysmans comes across as an immensely unlikeable person, obsessively neurotic about women, food, and suffering. But he did have an admirable aesthetic sense (as evidenced by his intense appreciation of Gustave Moreau), and both his novels and his letters contain the occasional startling and intriguing turn of phrase (he was an acutely sensitive observer, and his descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells can be quite wonderful).
April 20, 2013
My all-time favorite biography.
April 28, 2015
Amazing...
Read
May 21, 2018Originally published in 1955, the updated 2006 edition is still regarded as the standard work of reference on the life and work of J-K Huysmans. It is published by Dedalus, who also publish many of Huysmans' novels. I first discovered Huysmans' work via his novel 'La-Bas' which I borrowed from the library. In 1991, when I read the 'sequel' to that book, 'En Route', I made this note in my diary: "The only man who can make Catholicism sound as dangerous as Satanism. His writing is beautiful, mystical, alluring."
Born in 1847 to a Dutch father and a French mother, his was an unhappy childhood. In 1856 his father died, and his mother remarried a year later. A 'pale, delicate boy', at school he was bullied. After school he joined the civil service, and lived for a while with an actress. All his life he was to struggle to find a meaningful way of existing. His relationship with the actress - who became pregnant by another man - left him disenchanted and cynical.
He wanted to be a writer, but struggled to find a publisher. One, who turned down a collection of prose poems, told Huysmans "that he had no talent whatsoever, that he never would have any talent'.
His early works were deeply pessimistic in nature. He wrote to Zola that, 'if you aren't a pessimist, you can only be a Christian or an anarchist; you must be one of the three.'
In 1884 he published 'A Rebours' ['Against Nature']. Baldick describes its central character, des Esseintes, as 'the repository of Huysmans' secret tastes and untold dreams, and that in their sickly sensibility, their yearning for solitude, their abhorrence of human mediocrity, and their thirst for new and complex sensations, author and character were one.' My own reaction to the novel comes from a 1991 journal entry: "The story of a man apart; a gorgeous, sickly anti-hero hermetically sealed from the common herd by an uncommon intellect. There is no plot as such, the book is a catalogue of things worth caring about (?): literature, art, beautiful things, jewels, perfumes. But where are all the people? Where is love? It's all very rarefied: Latin poets, Salomé, the black dinner, jewelled tortoises: all thrown into this golden baroque stew. Peter Greenaway could make a brilliant film from this."
'A Rebours' was a significant departure from his earlier, Naturalist, works. However, in spite of the decadence of the subject matter, it was significant that des Esseintes finally turns to God to help him find meaning in life. In a letter to Huysmans, his friend Leon Bloy notes that he told Baudelaire 'After Les Fleurs du Mal...it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the Cross.' In his letter he wonders if Huysmans (who admired Baudelaire's work greatly) will make the same choice.
For a while, this seemed unlikely. Huysmans, always searching for 'spiritual satisfaction which life, love, and literature had all failed to afford him', became interested in the occult. 'La-Bas', first published in 1891, was written in a new style - 'spiritual naturalism' - and included material on Gilles de Rais [see previous entry in this journal] in a novel that he hoped would examine satanism in both the contemporary and medieval worlds. The novel includes a famous Black Mass scene, but it is not known whether Huysmans himself ever attended such an event. The book's central character, Durtal, also appeared in three later novels, in which Huysmans recorded Durtal's search for spiritual meaning in his life.
Although Huysmans was to turn his back on satanism, he didn't regret this period of his life. In Baldick's words, 'It had taught him to fear and respect things supernatural'. Christian art and mysticism were the means by which Huysmans made his gradual journey towards Catholicism. He had problems accepting Christian dogma and - 'accustomed to a life of sexual indulgence' - the journey was never going to be easy.
In 1892 he went on a spiritual retreat to a Trappist monastery. The literary product of this phase of his spiritual journal was 'En Route', published in 1895. In it, Huysmans intended to 'trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all that admirable art which the Church has created.' In a 1995 diary entry, made after reading 'En Route', I wrote: "Durtal has a basic faith, but insists on his religion of choice being aesthetically pleasing - and yet, this is a dense, beautiful book, a hymn to the beauty of words and to the necessity for beauty."
The next book, 'The Cathedral', was to be a study of Durtal's soul 'as it underwent the permeating influence of medieval architecture and art.' Following his retirement from the Civil Service, he finally became - in 1901 - a Benedictine oblate (a layperson dedicated to religious life). This period of life he dealt with in 'L'Oblat', published in 1903. His lifelong misogyny was finally resolved - thanks to his devotion to the Virgin, he came to view women no longer as demonic temptresses but as 'an instrument of salvation.'
Huysmans never found true happiness - to the end of his life he retained the feeling that his life had 'been a failure'. Often he'd envied ordinary people, who seemed content with their marriages and families, but he knew he wasn't cut out for that kind of life. His one great hope - that he could finally find happiness in a monastic environment - failed him. Nevertheless, from his experiences he learnt the lesson that was to resign him to life, and find meaning in his own unhappiness - 'the belief that escape from life's misery is impossible and that one should accept sorrow and suffering with good grace, for the expiation of one's sins and the sins of others.' A non-Catholic finds little consolation in this view of life, but Huysmans had at least stayed true to his earlier stated belief, that one can only be a pessimist, an anarchist, or a Christian. Diagnosed with cancer, he bore his own suffering with a great deal of dignity and grace, dying in 1907 at the age of fifty-nine.
[December 2006]
Born in 1847 to a Dutch father and a French mother, his was an unhappy childhood. In 1856 his father died, and his mother remarried a year later. A 'pale, delicate boy', at school he was bullied. After school he joined the civil service, and lived for a while with an actress. All his life he was to struggle to find a meaningful way of existing. His relationship with the actress - who became pregnant by another man - left him disenchanted and cynical.
He wanted to be a writer, but struggled to find a publisher. One, who turned down a collection of prose poems, told Huysmans "that he had no talent whatsoever, that he never would have any talent'.
His early works were deeply pessimistic in nature. He wrote to Zola that, 'if you aren't a pessimist, you can only be a Christian or an anarchist; you must be one of the three.'
In 1884 he published 'A Rebours' ['Against Nature']. Baldick describes its central character, des Esseintes, as 'the repository of Huysmans' secret tastes and untold dreams, and that in their sickly sensibility, their yearning for solitude, their abhorrence of human mediocrity, and their thirst for new and complex sensations, author and character were one.' My own reaction to the novel comes from a 1991 journal entry: "The story of a man apart; a gorgeous, sickly anti-hero hermetically sealed from the common herd by an uncommon intellect. There is no plot as such, the book is a catalogue of things worth caring about (?): literature, art, beautiful things, jewels, perfumes. But where are all the people? Where is love? It's all very rarefied: Latin poets, Salomé, the black dinner, jewelled tortoises: all thrown into this golden baroque stew. Peter Greenaway could make a brilliant film from this."
'A Rebours' was a significant departure from his earlier, Naturalist, works. However, in spite of the decadence of the subject matter, it was significant that des Esseintes finally turns to God to help him find meaning in life. In a letter to Huysmans, his friend Leon Bloy notes that he told Baudelaire 'After Les Fleurs du Mal...it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the Cross.' In his letter he wonders if Huysmans (who admired Baudelaire's work greatly) will make the same choice.
For a while, this seemed unlikely. Huysmans, always searching for 'spiritual satisfaction which life, love, and literature had all failed to afford him', became interested in the occult. 'La-Bas', first published in 1891, was written in a new style - 'spiritual naturalism' - and included material on Gilles de Rais [see previous entry in this journal] in a novel that he hoped would examine satanism in both the contemporary and medieval worlds. The novel includes a famous Black Mass scene, but it is not known whether Huysmans himself ever attended such an event. The book's central character, Durtal, also appeared in three later novels, in which Huysmans recorded Durtal's search for spiritual meaning in his life.
Although Huysmans was to turn his back on satanism, he didn't regret this period of his life. In Baldick's words, 'It had taught him to fear and respect things supernatural'. Christian art and mysticism were the means by which Huysmans made his gradual journey towards Catholicism. He had problems accepting Christian dogma and - 'accustomed to a life of sexual indulgence' - the journey was never going to be easy.
In 1892 he went on a spiritual retreat to a Trappist monastery. The literary product of this phase of his spiritual journal was 'En Route', published in 1895. In it, Huysmans intended to 'trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all that admirable art which the Church has created.' In a 1995 diary entry, made after reading 'En Route', I wrote: "Durtal has a basic faith, but insists on his religion of choice being aesthetically pleasing - and yet, this is a dense, beautiful book, a hymn to the beauty of words and to the necessity for beauty."
The next book, 'The Cathedral', was to be a study of Durtal's soul 'as it underwent the permeating influence of medieval architecture and art.' Following his retirement from the Civil Service, he finally became - in 1901 - a Benedictine oblate (a layperson dedicated to religious life). This period of life he dealt with in 'L'Oblat', published in 1903. His lifelong misogyny was finally resolved - thanks to his devotion to the Virgin, he came to view women no longer as demonic temptresses but as 'an instrument of salvation.'
Huysmans never found true happiness - to the end of his life he retained the feeling that his life had 'been a failure'. Often he'd envied ordinary people, who seemed content with their marriages and families, but he knew he wasn't cut out for that kind of life. His one great hope - that he could finally find happiness in a monastic environment - failed him. Nevertheless, from his experiences he learnt the lesson that was to resign him to life, and find meaning in his own unhappiness - 'the belief that escape from life's misery is impossible and that one should accept sorrow and suffering with good grace, for the expiation of one's sins and the sins of others.' A non-Catholic finds little consolation in this view of life, but Huysmans had at least stayed true to his earlier stated belief, that one can only be a pessimist, an anarchist, or a Christian. Diagnosed with cancer, he bore his own suffering with a great deal of dignity and grace, dying in 1907 at the age of fifty-nine.
[December 2006]
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews