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

by J.-K. Huysmans

  By the beginning of January proofs were ready and Huysmans wrote to Kistemaeckers stressing the importance of proofing the book properly: “Let’s try to ensure that there are neither slips nor typos, and that from this point of view our little baby will be without blemish.” (Huysmans to Henry Kistemaeckers, 4 January 1882.) But the speed at which Kistemaeckers was pushing the book through production made Huysmans uneasy, and he confided his doubts to Hannon:

  I’m correcting the proofs of my little book for Kistemaeckers, who is really turning me over with his useless haste in wanting to try and get it out by 15th January. This haste, in a text that I won’t be able to look at again properly in a single proof, will lead to some stupid mistake, an edition that will inevitably be cocked-up for want of time. But enough, that’s the way it is. Kistemaeckers is a young and intelligent bookseller with the very opposite fault of Charpentier: the first wants to go too quickly, while the other marches too slowly.

  (Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 6 January 1882)

  Huysmans’ fears turned out to be justified: when the book was published three weeks later, he discovered a typo in the penultimate paragraph – “une pendule” meaning “a clock”, rather than “un pendule” meaning “a pendulum” – a mistake which he’d corrected twice in the proofs, but which hadn’t been carried out.

  Contemporary critical responses to À vau-l’eau

  On its publication on 26 January, À vau-l‘eau almost immediately sparked off a lively debate, with critics lining up to either praise it or lambast it. Perhaps the most negative attack was an unsigned review by a Belgian advocate, Edmond Picard, in a Brussels-based journal, L’Art moderne. Picard devoted almost a full page to a denunciation of the book’s moral and literary turpitude. After his opening salvo, which warned of Naturalists like Huysmans “turning art into a veritable sewer”, he continued:

  Ridicule has been heaped on novelists of the Idealist school; they are reproached, and often with reason, for disfiguring the Truth by bathing everything in a rosy-tinted hue. This is an accusation that no one would dream of formulating against the literary group we are going to deal with now. But do the Naturalists escape the opposite reproach? Don’t their writings reveal an invincible tendency to consider only the vulgar and the base in nature and in man, a bias that leaves all their noble and elevated aspects in the shade? Is that Naturalism? No, it’s simply the reverse of Idealism. […]

  For J.-K Huysmans and his ilk the world is a pile of filth, which they stir disdainfully with the end of a stick. […] We would like to have expressed a hope that the taste of the public would have swept away such detritus. But alas, the public taste has lost its way, and has long been unable to find its way back. […]

  So who is this M. Folantin whose name falls under our pen? M. Folantin is the sad hero of the most recent book by J.-K. Huysmans – À vau-l’eau – a title that sums up the discouraged and vegetative existence of that lamentable victim of Parisian taverns. Novelists formerly applied themselves to depicting the movements, struggles, and pangs of the heart. Huysmans describes the misfortunes, revolts, and gurglings of the stomach, […] his book should have had for title: Jean Folantin in search of a better restaurant. It is, in effect, an odyssey taken by a bachelor employee, through all the restaurants, taverns, eating houses, wine shops and eateries of the great city. Ulysses, amid the immensity of the sea, was in search of a kingdom, of a homeland. M. Folantin is in search of some soup that doesn’t taste like dishwater.

  A fine gentleman of our acquaintance once gave this picturesque definition of chemistry: Chemistry is everything that smells. This definition is strikingly applicable to the social chemistry undertaken by M. Huysmans.

  (L’Arte moderne, 29 January 1882)

  By now, Huysmans was used to these kinds of attacks in the press, which invariably followed the publication of his books. Indeed, he seemed to actively relish the abuse, aware that such vociferous attacks were often counterproductive, and that the more reviewers emphasised the disreputable elements in his books, the more alluring they made them sound and the more they sold. With something approaching glee, he wrote to Hannon shortly after the attack in L’Art moderne asking him to send any further examples:

  I’m laughing fit to burst in my little shed in the Rue de Sèvres at the moment, because the classy newspapers are in the process of hurling their shit-bombs as fast as they can at À vau-l’eau. It keeps them busy, and me amused. How that book exasperates them! If you see any more stupidities in the Brussels press, collect them for me…

  (Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 15 February 1881)

  But not all the reviewers in the Belgian press were so hostile. In general, reactions tended to be conditioned by a particular paper’s stance as regards Naturalism. More conservative papers tended to object to it as a movement, and therefore criticised the book, framing their arguments more on moral grounds than on purely literary ones. Other journals, such as La Revue littéraire et artistique, a Belgian journal that had a more progressive cultural agenda and had actively promoted contemporary movements such as Naturalism and Impressionism, tended to be more positive about the challenges to conventional mores that Huysmans’ book posed, describing it as “quite simply one the best things modern Naturalism has produced”.

  This judgement was no doubt influenced by the fact that Huysmans was on close terms with some of the paper’s regular contributors, and that he had published several pieces of art criticism in its pages himself. But even where this wasn’t the case, there were at least a few newspapers, such as the provincial L’Opinion d’Anvers, which appreciated À vau-l’eau on its own terms:

  A new novel has just come out in Brussels. Without wanting to take a stand and talk either for or against Naturalism, we are nevertheless obliged to recognise that À vau-l’eau is a vigorous study which reveals the author as an astonishing observer and a writer of rare talent. Next to pages that are a bit too Naturalist to be reproduced in a newspaper, there are some charming pages, instantaneous photographs taken from the life, among which we could cite the scene of people coming out of mass on a Sunday morning, in front of St-Sulpice church in Paris, which is a true masterpiece of realism.

  (L’Opinion d’Anvers, 30 January 1882)

  In Paris, as in Brussels, the book’s initial reception was sharply divided. Gil Blas published a withering review that referred to M. Folantin as “an idiot”, and described Huysmans’ novel as “giving off a smell of rotten cheese that stank to high heaven” (Gil Blas, 1 February, 1881). A week later, the same paper followed this up with an impassioned critique of the book’s philosophy. Its author, Jean Richepin, in his guise as the “poet of the people”, took a hostile stance against Naturalism, seeing its negativity as being contrary to the general world view of the working class, though he began his piece with some fulsome praise about Huysmans’ literary qualities:

  I would like to talk about J.-K. Huysmans and a very remarkable novel he has just published under the significant title À vau-l’eau. This book and its philosophy is worth dwelling on. The story itself, and the artistic manner in which it is told, has already been discussed here. I won’t spend time praising the author’s fine qualities: his style, knowing, curious, lively, altogether precise and precious; the penetration of his analysis, touching the infinitely smallest of the most banal sensations; and the consciousness and patience of his imagery, which calls to mind the minute brush strokes of a Holbein. All this is indisputable and seems to accord with the recognition that of all the writers described as Naturalists, Huysmans is the one whose language is the most supple and has the most opulent resources.

  But of the book itself I want to retain only its conclusion, the philosophical spirit formally expressed in the lines of its final page. […] That philosophy, of a life that is irredeemably desolate, of arms-folded hopelessness, of universal disenchantment, has a name that is known and classified in all the textbooks used in schools: it’s called pessimism. […]

  Now pessimism is a refi
ned, delicate philosophy, fit for the blasé, a kind of epicurianism, its superiority, its haughty detachment, is the result of the abuse of pleasure of all kinds, and so, consequently, is accessible only to the most fortunate in society. It’s the doctrine of the aristocrat and the bourgeois.

  But the common people are not pessimists at all. And the final word on the creed of this century will not be spoken either by the aristocracy or by the bourgeoisie. It will be spoken by the people.

  (Gil Blas, 8 February 1882)

  One of the most significant of the favourable Parisian reviews was that which appeared in La Gaulois, written by Guy de Maupassant. Maupassant used the same allusion to Ulysses and the Odyssey as Edmond Picard had in L’Art moderne, but this time giving it a positive spin, rather than a negative one:

  From Brussels comes a very singular novella from a Naturalist writer, J.-K. Huysmans, entitled À vau-l’eau.

  This short story, which completely seduced me in its banal, heartbreaking sincerity, has a knack of making the hair stand on the head of any connoisseur of feeling. I’ve seen men beside themselves at the very thought of the book, some dejected, others frenetically furious. […] The modest plot alone is enough to exasperate them. It’s the story of a clerk looking for a beefsteak. Nothing more. A poor devil of a man, a functionary at the ministry having only thirty sous to spend on his meals, wandering from eatery to eatery, sickened by the blandness of their gravies, the insipid leatheriness of their cheap meat, the dubious aromas of their skate in black butter sauce, and the bitter taste of their adulterated wines.

  He goes to tables d’hôtes, to wine shops, on the Right Bank, on the Left Bank, returns, discouraged to the same establishments, where he finds the same dishes and always the same taste. This is the lamentable story, told in just a handful of pages, of a humble soul embraced by respectable poverty, poverty in an overcoat. And he is an intelligent man, resigned, rebelling only when faced with clamorous stupidity. This is a Ulysses of the eatery, whose odyssey, limited to voyages from one dish in which gobs of rancid butter surround slices of uneatable meat to another, is heartbreaking, touching and despairing, because it seems to me to be scarily true. […]

  To be moved by a book, I have to find flesh-and-blood humanity in it; the characters have to be my neighbours, to be my equals, to have experienced the joys and sufferings I’ve known, to have a little of myself in them, allowing me to establish, as I read, a kind of constant comparison with them, making my heart shiver at their intimate memories and awaking echoes of my everyday life in every line. And that is why Sentimental Education overwhelms me, and why M. Folantin’s rotten Roquefort brings to mind a taste in my mouth that gives me shudders of recognition.

  (Le Gaulois, 9 March 1882)

  The reaction to À vau-l’eau of one contemporary – and not the least in Huysmans’ eyes – is conspicuous by its absence: that of Edmond de Goncourt. Shortly before the publication of his book, Huysmans wrote what Goncourt later described as “a very admiring” letter, extolling the virtues of Goncourt’s latest novel, La Faustin. Coincidently or not, Huysmans would do the same thing two years later, writing an extravagant letter of praise about Goncourt’s new novel, Chérie, which appeared in April of 1884, just a couple of weeks before his own novel, À rebours, was published. It is hard not to see these flattering letters, addressed to “Mon cher maître”, as deliberate prompts on Huysmans’ part, designed to elicit a response from Goncourt about his work. The ruse was successful in the case of À rebours, with Goncourt writing a profusely complimentary letter to Huysmans about his “beautiful and original book”, but it signally failed with À vau-l’eau. Not only did Goncourt not reply to Huysmans’ letter, he doesn’t even mention the novella in his private journals, leading one to suspect that he may not have read it. Whether he was aware of the novella’s existence or not, Goncourt still managed to pick up on the fact that there was trouble brewing in the Naturalist camp between Zola and some of the younger members of the group, such as Huysmans and Céard. A few months after the publication of À vau-l’eau, Goncourt attended one of Zola’s receptions, at which Huysmans was also present, and noted in his journal that:

  “there’s a stubborn opposition between the master and his pupils, which for the first time I’ve seen rise to the surface”.

  (Journal, 6 April 1882)

  As far as contemporary English-speaking critics were concerned, À vau-l’eau seems to have passed them by completely, with no reviews appearing in the British or American newspapers of the time. The first reference to the book in an English paper would only come a decade later, in a profile written by Arthur Symons, Huysmans’ most faithful supporter in the British literary establishment:

  In À vau-l’eau, a less interesting story which followed En ménage, the daily misery of the respectable M. Folantin, the government employée, consists in the impossible search for a decent restaurant, a satisfactory dinner: for M. Folantin, too, there is only the same counsel of a desperate, an inevitable resignation. Never has the intolerable monotony of small inconveniences been so scrupulously, so unsparingly chronicled, as in these two studies in the heroic degree of the commonplace.

  (Fortnightly Review, March, 1892)

  Subsequent references to À vau-l’eau in the English-speaking world over the next few decades were equally notable in that they lacked any appreciation of Huysmans’ dark sense of humour. Critics as varied as Havelock Ellis, Gabriel Mourey, Algar Thorold, James Hunecker and the Reverend Hugh Blunt, tended to see the book as little more than a dour expression of relentless pessimism. It was really only with the publication of André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour in 1940 – in which the surrealist gave full credit to Huysmans as a comic genius – that English-speaking critics in particular began to grasp the notion that Huysmans’ descriptions of human misery might not be as po-faced as earlier commentators had assumed. Appropriately enough, it was Huysmans who actually coined the term humour noir to describe his work, in an article he wrote about himself in 1885.

  Since the appearance of Breton’s anthology, critics on both sides of the Channel have come to a fuller appreciation of the role of irony and comedy in Huysmans’ writing. As Christopher Lloyd put it, in an essay on Huysmans as a comic author (translated here from the original French):

  The world now recognises (at times begrudgingly) that Huysmans is a comic writer in the broader sense of the term: the use of satirical and caricatural ridicule, the invention of grotesque characters and situations, the playful manipulation of language and of literary conventions, all are an integral part of his work and form a constant that goes beyond shifts in ideological or aesthetic allegiance that are less deeply-rooted. […] Beyond the incontestable linguistic vitality of Huysmans’ comedy […] one also has to recognise its protective function, that it forms a screen between the writer and his successive, and excessive, forays into Naturalism, Pessimism and Dolorism. It is this comedic armour that sustains the essential identity of his writing and prevents it from falling into the neglect that has overtaken so many other writers of his period.

  (‘Huysmans auteur comique’, Huysmans

  à côté et au delà, Vrin, 2001.)

  Select bibliography in English

  Antosh, Ruth. Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J.-K. Huysmans. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986.

  Baldick, Robert. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Revised ed. Dedalus Books 2001.

  Banks, Brian. The Image of Huysmans. New York: AMS Press, 1990.

  Bernheimer, Charles. ‘Huysmans: Writing against (Female) Nature.’ Poetics Today, 6 (1-2), 1985: 311-324.

  Bernheimer, Charles, ‘Huysmans: syphilis, hysteria and sublimation.’ Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-century France, Duke University Press, 1997.

  Kahn, Annette. J.-K. Huysmans: Novelist Poet and Art Critic, UMI Research Press, 1987.

  Kandiyoti, Dalia. ‘Eating Paris: J.-K. Huysmans’ À vau-l’eau.’ Nineteenth-Century French Studie
s 1996-97, 25 (1-2): 167-178.

  Laver, James. The First Decadent, Being the Strange Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Faber & Faber, 1954.

  Lloyd, Christopher. J.-K. Huysmans and the fin-de-siècle Novel, Edinburgh University Press, 1990.

  Rossmann, Edward, ‘The Conflict over Food in the Work of J.-K. Huysmans.’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 1973-1974, 2 (1-2).

  Scott, Malcolm. ‘Huysmans and the art of conversion.’ The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel, Macmillan, 1989.

  Shenton, C. G. ‘À vau-l’eau: A Naturalist Sotie.’ Modern Language Review 72, 1977.

  West, T. G. ‘Schopenhauer, Huysmans and French Naturalism.’ Journal of European Studies, No 1, 1971.

  Winner, A. ‘The indigestible reality: J.-K. Huysmans’ Downstream.’ Virginia Quarterly Review, 1974.

  Ziegler, Robert. ‘Bad bread: À vau-l’eau.’ The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004.

  I

  The waiter put his left hand on his hip, rested his right hand on the back of a chair and swayed on one foot, pursing his lips.

  “Well now… that’s a matter of taste,” he said. “If I was in Monsieur’s place, I’d order some Roquefort.”

  “Alright, bring me the Roquefort.”

  And M. Jean Folantin, sitting at a table cluttered with plates of congealed leftovers and empty wine bottles whose bottoms had left their imprimatur in purple on the cloth, grimaced, certain that he was going to eat a wretched cheese; his expectations were not disappointed: the waiter brought a kind of white lace marbled with indigo, evidently cut from a cake of Marseilles soap.