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Zola and His Time: the History of His Martial Career in Letters
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First published June 1, 1969
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 28, 2011
This review goes out to a guy I don't know named Ted.
Having recently started to read Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, I thought it a good idea to get an idea of who this Zola dude is before I get too far along in his writing. I never know if one should read the bios before or after spending a lot period of time with one author, but in this case (since he wrote so effing much in his life) I felt it was right to do it early on, so I have an idea where he was coming from when he wrote all that stuff.
No joke, that guy was a little messed up.
Zola was inspired mostly by Honoré de Balzac who was best known for his magnum opus, La Comédie humaine. But what Zola wanted to do was not write entirely about manners as Balzac had done, but he wanted his stories to revolve around science and nature, primarily heredity.
Zola immersed himself in his writing, doing extensive research, traveling, conversing, etc. before writing each book. He has some 90 volumes of manuscripts and journals that his wife donated to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. 90 volumes!! It's overwhelming and amazing to think about. (Someone buy me the kind of life that allows me to go to Paris to read all 90 volumes without having to worry about work and stuff. Also buy me the kind of life that allows me to read 90 volumes in the original French. My pathetic knowledge of the language would barely get me in the front door.)
In his immersion he became quite obsessed. Obsession, I believe, is what makes any good author great. But with obsession tends to come neuroses - he was at different times in his life rather a hypochondriac; he was fascinated by numbers, and knew which ones were good and which ones were bad. And he had trouble sleeping. Not your run-of-the-mill insomnia, either:
What really kept him up at night was the fear that he would die before he finished his series. That's dedication! No pressure!
This biography is pretty extensive, including details from Zola's life as a boy in Aix-en-Provence during which time his BFF was Paul Cezanne who later went on to paint him. It covers his young manhood years, his middle aged years, the years where he was a douchebag to his wife, the years involving the Dreyfus Affair, his subsequent exile from France, and (most importantly to me) his work. What I especially appreciated from this biography were all the details about how Zola wrote, as well as why. The craft of writing is what interests me the most about authors, especially the ones I enjoy reading. This biography includes at the end an entire section of transcriptions from Zola's journals at the time he wrote L'assommoir. The man was nothing if not a perfectionist. His outlines are the things of beauty. It's truly inspiring. (Unless you have no interest in literature or writing, in which case you probably shouldn't even be reading this review. Don't you have a video game to play or sumthin?)
It's clear that the author of this biography was a super-duper fan of Zola's. I'm not going to say it was unbiased in any way; Josephson was on a mission to clear Zola's name in an effort to encourage more people to read Zola's works, to keep his memory alive. I dig it. He pulled his information from primary sources, either those belonging to Zola or those of his friends who were there through most of his life, so hopefully at least the information is reliable and not just a whole bunch of made-up bullshit. Thadda make-a me angry.
I'm interested in reading a more modern biography of Zola. I'm sure since Josephson wrote this book in 1928 there have been other biographies written, perhaps with new information and likely with a less biased point-of-view. This book included a handful of black-and-white photographs, but I want more. Because that's how I roll. Instant gratification, gimme more!
And for those of you keeping up with me regarding in which order to read the Rougon-Macquart books, this biography includes a little suggestion of its own:
Way to get me all frustrated again, Josephson.
For those poor souls out there who read this entire review (thanks), caring absolutely nothing for Zola but wanting to know who the hell Ted is that I referenced in my "dedication" - as I mentioned in my review of The Fortune of the Rougons I spent a good chunk of time in 2010 looking for that damn book. While my boyfriend and I were in Baltimore hitting up every bookstore we could find, there was one I remembered somewhere downtown near that one place around the corner from that other thingy. We did find it (after only a few wrong turns, illegal U-turns, and a few curses), and in case you're in the area and are curious to check it out, it was The Book Escape at 10 N. Calvert Street. We parked illegally in front, jumped out... only to find the door locked. But someone was still working at the front counter! They had just closed! It was our last stop before heading home, I still hadn't found the first book in the series, and I felt like this store had it and it was being kept from me. (They didn't and it wasn't.) But we knocked. Loudly. Tenaciously. And the guy told us in a nice way that we were dumb.
BUT... he let us in anyway. He took pity on our dumb-ass out-of-town looks and let us in. I made a beeline for the Z's but didn't find the book I wanted. I did, however, find this biography that I've spent an embarrassingly long time reviewing tonight. And I couldn't in good conscience leave empty-handed after the nice guy let us in after closing hours (and, as a result, may have lost his job or gotten written up or something - I mean really, we could have had guns or something). So I bought it. On the receipt it says the cashier's name was Ted.
So. Ted. Thank you. Thank you for taking a chance on a couple wild-eyed jag-offs from Pittsburgh, and encouraging my crazy behavior in my efforts to find the Rougon-Macquart books, and especially for humoring me when clearly you had never even heard the name Zola in your entire life. I'm glad I could at least give your establishment $5.30, though in reality you probably hated that I bought something because it would have thrown off your books for the night and you probably had to start the whole process over again. I hope you were able to get home eventually. We'll try to stop back to see you (as if you still work there) this year, and we'll even try to stop back during normal business hours.
You now rank high up on my list of people I'll probably never see again who made an impression on me (but I wouldn't likely recognize if they bit me on the ass). Like that guy in Savannah, GA working at the ice cream shop wearing that Droopy Dog T-shirt. And that guy named Sam in Memphis, TN who drove the shuttle to the main attractions and refused to let me be stranded at Graceland even though I didn't realize he wasn't going back downtown that evening. (He gets a special shout-out for driving me back to my dad's office in his own car for free and not raping me and stuff.) You're one of them, Ted. You're in good company.
Having recently started to read Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, I thought it a good idea to get an idea of who this Zola dude is before I get too far along in his writing. I never know if one should read the bios before or after spending a lot period of time with one author, but in this case (since he wrote so effing much in his life) I felt it was right to do it early on, so I have an idea where he was coming from when he wrote all that stuff.
No joke, that guy was a little messed up.
Zola was inspired mostly by Honoré de Balzac who was best known for his magnum opus, La Comédie humaine. But what Zola wanted to do was not write entirely about manners as Balzac had done, but he wanted his stories to revolve around science and nature, primarily heredity.
To resume my work in a sentence: I wish to paint, at the beginning of a century of truth and liberty, a family which throws itself toward the immediate good, and which is overcome by its own elan, by the fatal convulsions of a new world in travail.
Thus, two elements: 1) the purely human and physiological element, with its relationships and its fatal descent; 2) effect of the modern day on such a family, its derangement by the fevers of the time, the social and physical action of the milieux. (Zola, p145)
Zola immersed himself in his writing, doing extensive research, traveling, conversing, etc. before writing each book. He has some 90 volumes of manuscripts and journals that his wife donated to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. 90 volumes!! It's overwhelming and amazing to think about. (Someone buy me the kind of life that allows me to go to Paris to read all 90 volumes without having to worry about work and stuff. Also buy me the kind of life that allows me to read 90 volumes in the original French. My pathetic knowledge of the language would barely get me in the front door.)
In his immersion he became quite obsessed. Obsession, I believe, is what makes any good author great. But with obsession tends to come neuroses - he was at different times in his life rather a hypochondriac; he was fascinated by numbers, and knew which ones were good and which ones were bad. And he had trouble sleeping. Not your run-of-the-mill insomnia, either:
He also had an obsession that he was going to die during the night. Sometimes he would wake up with a cry, a piercing pain in his heart, and a feeling of strangulation in his throat. At others he could not fall asleep because of the obsession that his heart had moved into his armpit - that he could hear it there! - or into his hip or his knee. (p281)
What really kept him up at night was the fear that he would die before he finished his series. That's dedication! No pressure!
This biography is pretty extensive, including details from Zola's life as a boy in Aix-en-Provence during which time his BFF was Paul Cezanne who later went on to paint him. It covers his young manhood years, his middle aged years, the years where he was a douchebag to his wife, the years involving the Dreyfus Affair, his subsequent exile from France, and (most importantly to me) his work. What I especially appreciated from this biography were all the details about how Zola wrote, as well as why. The craft of writing is what interests me the most about authors, especially the ones I enjoy reading. This biography includes at the end an entire section of transcriptions from Zola's journals at the time he wrote L'assommoir. The man was nothing if not a perfectionist. His outlines are the things of beauty. It's truly inspiring. (Unless you have no interest in literature or writing, in which case you probably shouldn't even be reading this review. Don't you have a video game to play or sumthin?)
It's clear that the author of this biography was a super-duper fan of Zola's. I'm not going to say it was unbiased in any way; Josephson was on a mission to clear Zola's name in an effort to encourage more people to read Zola's works, to keep his memory alive. I dig it. He pulled his information from primary sources, either those belonging to Zola or those of his friends who were there through most of his life, so hopefully at least the information is reliable and not just a whole bunch of made-up bullshit. Thadda make-a me angry.
I'm interested in reading a more modern biography of Zola. I'm sure since Josephson wrote this book in 1928 there have been other biographies written, perhaps with new information and likely with a less biased point-of-view. This book included a handful of black-and-white photographs, but I want more. Because that's how I roll. Instant gratification, gimme more!
And for those of you keeping up with me regarding in which order to read the Rougon-Macquart books, this biography includes a little suggestion of its own:
It was truly an epic, although the twenty volumes are not integrally bound together, for the conception of a huge family, spilling into every level of social life forms but the loosest relationship. Nor need the novels be read in order, nor need all of them be read. Ignoring even the half-dozen which were "written by rote", or with lesser convictions, (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, Une page d'amour, The Ladies' Paradise, The Masterpiece, The Dream, L'argent), the effect is still of an immense fresco, or perhaps better a series of vigorous and large mural panels dealing with a common period of history, a common Nemesis or Destiny. (p369-70)
Way to get me all frustrated again, Josephson.
For those poor souls out there who read this entire review (thanks), caring absolutely nothing for Zola but wanting to know who the hell Ted is that I referenced in my "dedication" - as I mentioned in my review of The Fortune of the Rougons I spent a good chunk of time in 2010 looking for that damn book. While my boyfriend and I were in Baltimore hitting up every bookstore we could find, there was one I remembered somewhere downtown near that one place around the corner from that other thingy. We did find it (after only a few wrong turns, illegal U-turns, and a few curses), and in case you're in the area and are curious to check it out, it was The Book Escape at 10 N. Calvert Street. We parked illegally in front, jumped out... only to find the door locked. But someone was still working at the front counter! They had just closed! It was our last stop before heading home, I still hadn't found the first book in the series, and I felt like this store had it and it was being kept from me. (They didn't and it wasn't.) But we knocked. Loudly. Tenaciously. And the guy told us in a nice way that we were dumb.
BUT... he let us in anyway. He took pity on our dumb-ass out-of-town looks and let us in. I made a beeline for the Z's but didn't find the book I wanted. I did, however, find this biography that I've spent an embarrassingly long time reviewing tonight. And I couldn't in good conscience leave empty-handed after the nice guy let us in after closing hours (and, as a result, may have lost his job or gotten written up or something - I mean really, we could have had guns or something). So I bought it. On the receipt it says the cashier's name was Ted.
So. Ted. Thank you. Thank you for taking a chance on a couple wild-eyed jag-offs from Pittsburgh, and encouraging my crazy behavior in my efforts to find the Rougon-Macquart books, and especially for humoring me when clearly you had never even heard the name Zola in your entire life. I'm glad I could at least give your establishment $5.30, though in reality you probably hated that I bought something because it would have thrown off your books for the night and you probably had to start the whole process over again. I hope you were able to get home eventually. We'll try to stop back to see you (as if you still work there) this year, and we'll even try to stop back during normal business hours.
You now rank high up on my list of people I'll probably never see again who made an impression on me (but I wouldn't likely recognize if they bit me on the ass). Like that guy in Savannah, GA working at the ice cream shop wearing that Droopy Dog T-shirt. And that guy named Sam in Memphis, TN who drove the shuttle to the main attractions and refused to let me be stranded at Graceland even though I didn't realize he wasn't going back downtown that evening. (He gets a special shout-out for driving me back to my dad's office in his own car for free and not raping me and stuff.) You're one of them, Ted. You're in good company.
December 31, 2017
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2939232.html
I found it very interesting, particularly as I have just read a book about Ulysses, to see the connection between Zola's radical political activity and beliefs, and (what was more important to him) his breaking the conventions of novel-writing. I may even try some of his books some day - Germinal, Nana, Thérèse Raquin And his autobiographical first novel La confession de Claude all sound promising.
A lot of what's in the film is invented - the quarrel with Cézanne didn't really happen like that, Nana was not his first successful novel (not even his first successful novel about Nana), he was not dragged into the Dreyfus case by the tears of Lucie Dreyfus, he wasn't offered membership of the Academy in 1897 (but kept begging for it), he died in his bedroom with his wife rather than alone in his study, and Dreyfus was not exonerated until several years after Zola’s death. These are necessary edits of the truth to make a good movie, I suppose. On the other hand, the real-life attempted assassination of Dreyfus in 1908, while he was attending the ceremony of Zola's interment in the Pantheon, is a dramatic end to the book that is skipped in the film. The anti-Semitism inherent to the Dreyfus case is made absolutely clear, though I’m sure that the full facts will have been even worse.
The part of Zola's life almost completely omitted from the film is of course his love-life. As a student in a garret in his late teens and early twenties, he lived with an unnamed girlfriend who then drops out of the narrative completely. (Wikipedia quotes Henri Mitterand to the effect that her first name was Berthe.) As well as his wife Alexandrine (with whom he had no children), he had a long-term lover, Jeanne Rozerot, who bore him a son and a daughter. When he died he left all of his estate to his wife and nothing to his children or their mother. (I'm glad to say that his widow acknowledged and adopted the children, who in turn adopted the surname Emile-Zola.) Josephson conveys this as part of Zola's general passion for life in general, and is rather critical of his wife for being too dramatic about the situation. I think Josephson could have found a bit more sympathy for Alexandrine, and Zola's treatment of his children does not speak well of him.
It's rather an old-fashioned biography, but a cracking good read, and it's particularly impressive the Josephson was able to boil down vast amounts of archival research in French for an American audience. It's also copiously illustrated with cartoons and copies of manuscripts.
I found it very interesting, particularly as I have just read a book about Ulysses, to see the connection between Zola's radical political activity and beliefs, and (what was more important to him) his breaking the conventions of novel-writing. I may even try some of his books some day - Germinal, Nana, Thérèse Raquin And his autobiographical first novel La confession de Claude all sound promising.
A lot of what's in the film is invented - the quarrel with Cézanne didn't really happen like that, Nana was not his first successful novel (not even his first successful novel about Nana), he was not dragged into the Dreyfus case by the tears of Lucie Dreyfus, he wasn't offered membership of the Academy in 1897 (but kept begging for it), he died in his bedroom with his wife rather than alone in his study, and Dreyfus was not exonerated until several years after Zola’s death. These are necessary edits of the truth to make a good movie, I suppose. On the other hand, the real-life attempted assassination of Dreyfus in 1908, while he was attending the ceremony of Zola's interment in the Pantheon, is a dramatic end to the book that is skipped in the film. The anti-Semitism inherent to the Dreyfus case is made absolutely clear, though I’m sure that the full facts will have been even worse.
The part of Zola's life almost completely omitted from the film is of course his love-life. As a student in a garret in his late teens and early twenties, he lived with an unnamed girlfriend who then drops out of the narrative completely. (Wikipedia quotes Henri Mitterand to the effect that her first name was Berthe.) As well as his wife Alexandrine (with whom he had no children), he had a long-term lover, Jeanne Rozerot, who bore him a son and a daughter. When he died he left all of his estate to his wife and nothing to his children or their mother. (I'm glad to say that his widow acknowledged and adopted the children, who in turn adopted the surname Emile-Zola.) Josephson conveys this as part of Zola's general passion for life in general, and is rather critical of his wife for being too dramatic about the situation. I think Josephson could have found a bit more sympathy for Alexandrine, and Zola's treatment of his children does not speak well of him.
It's rather an old-fashioned biography, but a cracking good read, and it's particularly impressive the Josephson was able to boil down vast amounts of archival research in French for an American audience. It's also copiously illustrated with cartoons and copies of manuscripts.
March 12, 2022
There were sections of this book that I found frustrating. I felt the author’s style was a bit over the top. Nevertheless the story of Emile Zola is compelling enough to overcome the author’s style.
April 18, 2014
So important! So fascinating! A great job telling the story of Zola's life, with details about his boyhood, his novels, his author buddies, his dalliance, his mind, his methods, and, of course, his standing up for truth in the Dreyfus Affair, inspired by my boy Voltaire, I might add. Sure, I happen to be particularly interested in: literature, the 19th century, 19th-century literature, France, French literature, revolution, revolutionary literature, French revolutionary literature, etc., but I think anyone who fancies him/herself a writer should be required to read this.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews