On Huysmans' Tomb: Critical reviews of J.-K. Huysmans and À Rebours, En Rade, and Là-Bas

by Léon Bloy, Richard Robinson (Translator)

On Huysmansʼ Tomb (Sur la tombe de Huysmans originally) is a collection of critical essays written by Léon Bloy about his erstwhile friend, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Written between 1884 and 1893, and published in book form in 1913, six years after Huysmansʼ death, it is an appraisal of Huysmans himself and his most important work at that time: À Rebours, En Rade, Là-Bas, – as nobody other than Léon Bloy could have written, with keen psychological insight into Huysmansʼ mind and personality, and providing first-hand information about the inception of those works, particularly Là-Bas, that satanic masterpiece of Huysmansʼ that originally was intended to look up (Là-Haut), rather than down.

“The intensity of a writer like Huysmans is, principally, in his contempt... The well-known author of À Rebours has not at all the ignivomitous allures of an imprecator, and the torrential flux of green bile is, in him, merely the literary illusion of some prickly vanity... Huysmans had finally divested himself of the pedagogic reminiscences of his art education, in order to enter upon certain originality,... The synoptic pessimism of des Esseintes appeared to many as a stopping place or as a refuge, and the agonizing future of that anchorite of analysis excited the emulation of a large group of dreamers...”

“En Rade does not appear to be a work fated to modify the destiny of that reprobate [des Esseintes]. The pessimism of À Rebours has merely been strengthened and consolidated... No counterweight, from now on, to the deep despondency of souls. No pale brightness, no wan glimmer of the skies... Never has hope been so positively dismissed...”

The appendix includes a review by Jules Barbey dʼAurevilly on À Rebours.

69 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau, pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier. After an agnostic and unhappy youth in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching, his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d'Aurevilly, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion.

Bloy's works reflect a deepening devotion to the Catholic Church and most generally a tremendous craving for the Absolute. His devotion to religion resulted in a complete dependence on charity; he acquired his nickname ("the ungrateful beggar") as a result of the many letters requesting financial aid from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all the while carrying on with his literary work, in which his eight-volume Diary takes an important place.

Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault, and the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Roman Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper; and his first novel, Le Désespéré, a fierce attack on rationalism and those he believed to be in league with it, made him fall out with the literary community of his time and even many of his old friends. Soon, Bloy could count such prestigious authors as Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, Alphonse Daudet, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget and Anatole France as his enemies.

In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died in Bourg-la-Reine.

Reviews

[Richard Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book blurb really says it all. Good stuff!

[Side Real Press · Rating 2 out of 5]

Three reviews of Huysmans novels (À Rebours, En Rade, and Là-Bas) by his friend (and later very much ex-friend) Leon Bloy, originally published in French as ‘Sur Le Tomb de Huysmans’, with the extra of Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly’s famous review of À Rebours in which he said that Huysmans (like Baudelaire) either the end of a pistol or the foot of the cross”.

Huysmans ultimately turned to Catholicism but Bloy was there already and a zealous one to boot. He was also a person who could seemingly start a fight in an empty room so when he fell out with Huysmans his reviews became vindictive and rambling. This bitter style is either something you will love or hate (I tended towards the latter) but his arguments are couched in such language as to make them hard to follow. There were certainly some words to stretch my vocabulary; ‘silique’, ‘andouille’, ‘glaireous’ (these three words on pages 11/12). These (and similar) plus the convoluted sentence structure made it hard for me to even read, while some poor proofing addled things still further. It’s all a bit of a mess for me.

But I got the gist of these reviews which have some good observations within them but really add little to my knowledge of Huysmans, although did add to my, admittedly meagre, knowledge of Bloy.

This is really a book for the Huysmans completists. Most folks (and I now include myself in this) could probably live without it.

[Richard Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those who cannot read French, there is now an English-language translation of this book published: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...