Drifting a Vau-L'eau (Dedalus European Classics) Read online

  The Author

  J.-K. Huysmans (1847-1907) began writing as a naturalist in the style of Zola. He went from being an obscure author to one of the most famous writers of his day with the publication of À rebours (Against Nature).

  Dedalus has made all of J.-K. Huysmans’ major work available in English translations.

  The Translator

  Brendan King is a freelance writer, reviewer and translator with a special interest in late nineteenth-century French fiction. His PhD was on the life and work of J.-K. Huysmans.

  Brendan King has translated eight books by J.-K. Huysmans into English for Dedalus: Marthe, Stranded, The Vatard Sisters, Against Nature, Là-Bas, The Cathedral, Parisian Sketches and Drifting, as well as editing The Life of J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Baldick.

  He has also published a biography of Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means.

  Contents

  Title

  The Author

  The Translator

  Translator’s Note

  Introduction

  Bibliography

  Drifting (À vau-l’eau)

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Men of Today (Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui)

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  Finding an appropriate and accurate title in English for À vaul’eau is as difficult a task as it is for most of J.-K. Huysmans’ novels. In general terms the phrase means to go along in the direction of a flow of water, and is used both literally and metaphorically. The first English translation, published by Pascal Covici in 1927, adopted the title Downstream, which was taken up by Robert Baldick’s translation published by the Fortune Press in 1957. As a title, however, Downstream suffers from the fact that it refers more to a location than an action. Andrew Brown’s chosen title, With the Flow (Hesperus Books, 2003) accurately expresses the literal movement implicit in the original, but is slightly less effective in conveying its existential sense.

  For this reason I have chosen to translate the title as Drifting, which seems to encapsulate both the literal and metaphorical senses of the phrase. I have used the text of the first edition of À vau-l’eau, which has small but significant differences to that of the second edition of 1894. Up to the present, previous English translations have relied on the slightly bowdlerized second edition. I have restored the passage that was cut from the original text.

  Introduction

  On its first appearance in 1882, many contemporary reviewers not unnaturally compared J.-K. Huysmans’ À vau-l’eau (Drifting) with the novel that had preceded it a year before, En ménage (Living Together). Noting the similarity in themes between the two books – the issue of women and marriage, the advantages and disadvantages of a bachelor existence, and the relentless petty trials inflicted by life – critics tended to view the novella simply as one more addition to Huysmans’ catalogue of unsavoury, and faintly immoral, Naturalist works. Superficially, at least, they had a point; from a distance Huysmans’ novels seemed to be all of a piece, covering the same disreputable low-life subject matter that the Naturalists had made their own. His debut novel of 1876, Marthe, histoire d’une fille (Marthe, the story of a whore), recounted the life and death of a prostitute, while his second, Les Soeurs Vatard (The Vatard Sisters) of 1879, revolved around the love lives of two young working-class girls. As for his third, En ménage of 1880, that opened with a scene of adultery captured in flagrante delicto, and then went on to explore its leading character’s attempt to find an alternative living arrangement that might assuage his sexual needs, whether in the form of visits to a brothel, casual encounters with prostitutes, or living in sin with his mistress.

  So given what had gone before, it is understandable why critics were so quick to see in the bleak and sordid narrative of À vau-l’eau nothing more than business as usual. But what Huysmans’ literary contemporaries couldn’t have foreseen was what he would write next: the genre-defining À rebours (Against Nature) of 1884, which almost single-handedly sparked off the Decadent movement. With the advantage of hindsight, À vau-l’eau, with its radical blend of dark irony and idiosyncratic subjectivity, seems less an addendum to Huysmans’ earlier Naturalist work, and more a precursor to what would follow.

  In this respect, À vau-l’eau belongs to a significant phase in the development of Huysmans’ writing, and despite the apparent ordinariness of its central character – the curmudgeonly Monsieur Folantin is a humble clerk at the Ministry of the Interior, as was Huysmans in real life – the novella anticipates many of the wider existential and philosophical concerns that would be subsequently articulated in his infamous novel.

  Huysmans himself was aware of this connection, and in a preface written to mark the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of À rebours, he described the conceptual similarities between the two works:

  It [À rebours] first came to me, like a passing daydream, in the form of a bizarre story; I saw in it a kind of counterpart to À vau-l’eau transferred to another world; I imagined a Monsieur Folantin who was richer, more literate, more refined, someone who had discovered in artifice a diversion from the disgust inspired by the problems of life and the Americanised manners of his time.

  (J.-K. Huysmans, ‘Preface’, À rebours, 1904)

  In the light of Huysmans’ subsequent reconversion to Catholicism in the 1890s, Folantin’s philosophical musings, his yearning for the comforts and consolations offered by Catholic belief, take on a similarly anticipatory character. Folantin may have lauded Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, and even found some temporary comfort in it, but it is clear that he hankers after more substantial spiritual sustenance. Like des Esseintes in À rebours – and like Huysmans himself at this period – Folantin feels a strong attraction to the Catholic Church, though he regrets his intellectual inability to accept its dogmas.

  But such spiritual longings, conditioned as they may seem to be by an individual’s particular life experience or personality, are never politically or socially neutral. This was especially the case in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Folantin’s drift towards Catholicism can be seen as part of a general reactionary movement that flowed through French society at the time, and which would come to be known as the “Catholic revival”.

  It hardly needs to be said that this socially and politically reactionary movement, in which various right-wing elements such as the army and those seeking to overthrow the Third Republic and restore the monarchy found common cause, ran counter to the broadly materialist, anti-clerical and pro-Republican views of the Naturalists, of which Émile Zola was the de facto head and Huysmans one of its most controversial members. The fact that Huysmans could express the view, albeit obliquely through the character of Folantin, that it was only the mysteries of Catholicism that could “heal” the existential “wounds” that tormented him – with all the political significance that such a statement implied – would not have escaped Zola’s attention.

  After the publication of À vau-l’eau, Zola wrote to Huysmans to give his verdict, and it is significant that the only scenes he picks out for praise are those which were effectively Naturalist set pieces, as if he was trying to encourage Huysmans to remain true to his own particular conception of Naturalism:

  I’ve read À vau-l’eau […] it’s a very interesting and very intense study […] There is an abominable cruelty in its melancholy. And what jolly scenes, the coachmen eating, the table d’hôte, the discreet chop house at the Croix-Rouge, not to mention the desperate bed scene at the end, which has a tremendous force.

&n
bsp; (Émile Zola to Huysmans, 27 January 1882)

  But there were other aspects of the novella that Zola would have found equally disturbing in the writing of someone who, up until then, he had considered to be a powerful ally in the Naturalist cause. Although those looking from outside might have seen in À vau-l’eau little more than a depiction of the directionless life of an office clerk, a fixation on terrible meals and on the physical discomforts of existence, Zola would have been uneasily aware that Huysmans seemed to be deliberately playing with the tropes of Naturalism, caricaturing them almost to the point of parody. As Malcolm Scott, in his study of the relationship between literary Realism and Catholicism, puts it:

  Huysmans’ disillusionment with the Naturalist prescription is confirmed in À vau-l’eau. At first glance another study in banality, it is turned into a minor masterpiece of humour and gentle self-mockery. But it clearly poses the problem of where Huysmans could turn next for subject matter. Its sheer plotlessness and lack of event suggest that Realism has been pushed to its logical extreme and has paid the price for its distrust of imagination.

  (Malcolm Scott, The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel, p 126.)

  If one wanted a stark example of the differences between Zola and Huysmans in 1882, one has only to look at the books they published that year. While Zola’s novel Pot-Bouille was a dense work running to nearly 500 pages, weaving the life stories of several different families into a sustained indictment of bourgeois values during the Second Empire, À vau-l’eau, a small-format book of only 141 pages, was focussed almost completely on the interior life of a protagonist whose existential angst is comically symbolised by the seeming impossibility of finding a decent meal. While Zola larded his novel with facts gleaned from numerous official documents – many of which, ironically, Huysmans had provided him with in his capacity as Zola’s researcher – Huysmans himself seemed to have abandoned the scientific materialism that underpinned Zola’s conception of the novel, and gave free rein to his leading character’s idiosyncratic foibles and prejudices. It is undoubtedly this that gives À vau-l’eau much of its comic impact, something that is only intensified by the distillation required by the novella’s parable-like form, which lends itself naturally to irony and caricature.

  Huysmans was aware that his novella was unlikely to find favour with Zola, especially given the fact that in the summer of 1881 he’d told him he was working on a novel about the Siege of Paris, an ostensibly sociological work that would have adhered more closely to the conventions of Naturalism. Consequently, after the publication of À vau-l’eau, he gave Zola a highly misleading account of the novella’s conception, as if trying to minimise the impression of a radical break in form, telling him that he’d intended it to be a full-length novel, but had been forced to make it shorter when he realised its similarity in subject matter to En ménage. In fact, as is clear from Huysmans’ letters to the Belgian poet Théodore Hannon during the writing of the book, he had conceived it as a novella and intended it from the very start to be a darkly comical work, rather than a sociological one.

  The writing of À vau-l’eau

  Huysmans began À vau-l’eau in the autumn of 1881, after spending his summer months in the semi-countryside retreat of Fontenay-aux-Roses, on the advice of his doctor. “I’ve moved,” he wrote to Théodore Hannon in August, “and from being a towny, I’m now a country bumpkin, here in order to facilitate the cure of my badly shattered nerves.”

  Huysmans had planned to spend his time working on La Faim (Hunger), a novel set during the Siege of Paris in 1870-71, which he’d begun years before but never completed. However the move to Fontenay was no more successful in curing his neuralgia or his general feeling of malaise, than it was in helping him to write: “My nerves are taking their time to mend,” he confided to Hannon a couple of weeks later, “even though I’m being lazy and barely writing at all in order to give myself a bit of peace.” Things hardly improved over the next month, and though he continued to “chew over” his novel, the result was the same: nothing got done. At the end of September he wrote to another Belgian friend, the writer, poet and art critic, Camille Lemonnier, describing his gloomy state of mind at the prospect of returning to Paris:

  Now it’s almost time to return to Paris, and I’m going to have to go back to work and once again choke down all that adulterated food and all those fumes of asphalt and gas. Disgust is taking hold of me; I’m decidedly old for my age and bruised in spirit, because even Paris begins to disgust me now – me, who deep down has loved nothing else but this sacred city.

  (Huysmans to Camille Lemonnier, 27 September 1881)

  Significantly enough, given that his feelings of world- weariness seem to anticipate those of Monsieur Folantin, it was against this depressing backdrop that the first reference to the genesis of À vau-l’eau appeared, in a letter to Hannon written shortly after Huysmans had settled back in Paris:

  I’m overwhelmed with gloom here. Wading through mud in the storms – it’s frightful! – added to which I haven’t got a maid at the moment, I’m at the mercy of the concierge’s whims, and I’m having to eat in restaurants… so you can see how happy I am! The only thing that consoles me is that this has given me the idea for a novella which it’ll be quite amusing to write, about a solitary man who eats in restaurants – there’s some good things to say about that, so I’m in the process of scratching it out.

  (Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 16 October 1881)

  Three weeks later, he gave Hannon a quick update on his progress:

  I’m in the midst of a book that’s pretty bizarre, and pretty funny – in two very short sections: one enumerating the miseries of celibacy, of restaurants, of chop houses, of cleaning ladies, etc; the other enumerating the miseries of marriage, kids, going through the motions, women’s illnesses. There’ll be nothing for it but to drown oneself after reading this book. If all goes well, it’ll be pretty good.

  (Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 7 November 1881)

  By December, this “curious novella”, as Huysmans described it to Lemonnier, was finished.

  Huysmans had already found a publisher for the book – at this stage entitled M. Folantin after its central character – with Henry Kistemaeckers having agreed to include it in his Édition de Bibliophile series. Kistemaeckers was yet another Belgian, an indication of the extent to which Huysmans’ creative centre of gravity during this period was as much rooted in Brussels as it was in Paris. Huysmans had first met Kistemaeckers in 1876, along with Hannon and Lemonnier, in the course of a trip to Brussels to arrange the publication of his first novel, Marthe, histoire d’une fille. Although Huysmans eventually settled on another Belgian publisher – Jean Gay had experience of smuggling risqué novels such as Marthe into France – he and Kistemaeckers got on well. Their friendship was cemented some time later when Kistemaeckers came across 350 copies of Marthe that had been languishing at the printers, which he then bought and put on sale.

  Alongside his “normal” publishing activities, Kistemaeckers also specialised in more salacious literary works. As Henry Marchand put it in his description of Kistemaeckers in The Erotic History of France (1933): “He cultivated pure pornography. Everything that was at all coarse and offensive, be the contents solid or froth, was meat for Kistemaeckers. His obscene productions were smuggled over the border to provide France with saucy stuff.”

  Huysmans shared Kistemaeckers’ interests in this regard, and in fact the agreement to publish M. Folantin wasn’t the first collaboration between the two men, though it was the first to be publicly acknowledged. The previous year Huysmans had contributed, anonymously, two vaguely pornographic sonnets to Kistemaeckers’ collection Le Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle.

  All seemed to be progressing well with the publication of M. Folantin, and on 31 December 1881 Kistemaeckers announced its forthcoming appearance on the back cover of another book in the Édition de Bibliophile series, Pierre Elzéar’s La Femme de Roland. However, in the mean
time Huysmans had discussed the book with Zola, who expressed dissatisfaction with its title, arguing that it wouldn’t mean anything to potential readers. Huysmans considered the issue and was forced to agree, as he explained in a slightly embarrassed letter to his publisher:

  Zola found the title M. Folantin deplorable, it doesn’t say anything, and moreover, given the novel’s philosophical aspect it isn’t actually about M. Folantin per se, but rather about the solitary, forlorn bachelor. And in truth, from that point of view he’s right; it was an abstract idea that directed my novella. So he is of the opinion – and so is [Henry] Céard – that À vau-l’eau is the only title to give it, for want of a better one, which we’ve all looked for to no avail. So we’ve fixed on À vau-l’eau, however mediocre it might be. There, I’ve given you my opinion for what it’s worth. All this embarrasses me, because I’m afraid these constant changes will cause you a lot of bother and aggravation, what with the announcements you’ve no doubt made under the title M. Folantin. But deep down I think they’re right. M. Folantin doesn’t signify anything, it weakens the idea behind the novella and isn’t any better as a saleable title than À vau-l’eau.

  (Huysmans to Henry Kistemaeckers, 31 December 1881)

  Kistemaeckers accepted the decision “with remarkably good grace”, as Huysmans’ biographer, Robert Baldick, put it, and even at this late stage in production agreed to change the title. Huysmans, who was always interested in every aspect of the publication of his books, down to the typography and the colour of inks used, was pleased with the way the book was shaping up at this stage: “Only Kist knows how to do a book cover properly, only he would have the typographical audacity to put the title in lower case!” (Quoted by Léon Deffoux and Émile Zavie, Le groupe de Médan, 1920.)