This, and the fact of the love affair with Adèle Hugo, was what got me thinking about the novel.
Do you ever have to rein in your imagination to avoid deviating from the true story?
Sometimes it’s the opposite—I have to leave out real details because people just wouldn’t believe they were true, even though they are. Real life is always, as the saying goes, much stranger than fiction.
How do you stay true to the record while making the characters your own?
These were real people. They existed. I feel it wouldn’t be fair to make up anything about them. Where there is a voice, as there was with Sainte-Beuve because of his writings, I try to stay true to that voice. Where there is recorded action, I try to stay true to those actions.
Pretty much everything in The Reinvention of Love actually happened, and happened as I wrote it. The only thing that I took liberties with was Sainte-Beuve’s end. In real life, it was a painful and miserable one. I gave him a better ending than he had, but I don’t believe he would have minded.
“Sometimes … I have to leave out real details because people just wouldn’t believe they were true, even though they are.”
How much of a role do your own feelings, positive or negative, about a real person play in your writing about them?
Even with wholly unlikable characters, there must be something that I can sympathize with in order for me to be able to write well about them. I never entirely like or dislike a character, and quite frankly, the more complicated they are, the more interesting it is to write about them.
Probably the character I liked least in The Reinvention of Love was Victor Hugo. He was a tyrant, and it’s hard to like a tyrant; but I did sympathize with his obsessive dedication to his work. I know what it feels like to work hard and be completely wrapped up in it, so I didn’t completely dislike him, although I found his cavalier attitude towards his loved ones reprehensible.
Despite this, are you an admirer of Hugo’s novels and plays?
I’m afraid my opinion of Hugo is much the same as Charles’s opinion. I think that Hugo was a writer very in touch with his time. His mix of politics and romanticism was a heady one, and his passion for writing and rampant productivity was impressive. I understand why he was beloved in his day. It is usually the writers who are most in touch with their time that achieve the best success within it, although their writing may feel dated a hundred years hence. I like some of Hugo’s novels, particularly The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but I don’t care much for his plays or his poetry.
“Victor Hugo’s mix of politics and romanticism was a heady one, and his passion for writing and rampant productivity was impressive.”
Why did you decide to translate some of Sainte-Beuve’s poetry yourself?
I did so, at first, because it was a way to find out more about the love affair between Charles and Adèle. To have access to Sainte-Beuve’s actual voice by way of the poems was fantastic. So I was translating for information, for details of their affair. But quite quickly I got a feel for his voice, and during the six months that I spent translating the poems, I came to really like and understand that voice. In retrospect, I can see it was the perfect way into the novel. It’s as though translating the poems was a rehearsal for writing the prose.
Do you find it satisfying to bring to life on the page historical individuals that most readers wouldn’t otherwise know much about?
One of the reasons I wanted to write about this love affair is that it has been buried and discounted in an effort to protect the reputation of Victor Hugo. History favours great men, not women, and not a man like Sainte-Beuve, whom many did not consider to be a “real” man. I wanted to take the affair—and the persons of Charles and Adèle—out from under the shadow of Victor Hugo. I wanted to deal with their love affair on their terms, not his, and from their experience, not his. I wanted to examine their motives, their words, their deeds, their feelings. I wanted the light that still shines on Victor Hugo to shift over, just for a moment, and shine on them.
“History favours great men, not women, and not a man like Sainte-Beuve.”
You wrote with sensitivity about Charles’s hermaphroditism and dressing as a woman, subjects that could have tipped into sensationalism or humour. How did you achieve the right tone?
I stayed as close as possible to Charles’s own voice—the voice I found in his poems and essays and diaries. I felt I had an understanding of him, of how he would behave in most situations, and I wrote from that understanding. It was challenging, but that made it more interesting to do, and I liked the stretch of imagination that it required.
In a review of The Reinvention of Love, Donna Bailey Nurse of The Globe and Mail wrote of you that “there was never a novelist so averse to inhabiting the space between her characters and her readers.” How conscious of this are you as you write?
When I write as a character I try to disappear into that character, to make my actual self invisible, and I suppose that is what the reviewer means. This is how I write, how I can make the story real to myself so that it appears real to my readers. I don’t know how to write any other way.
What do you think your readers would find most surprising about a writer’s life?
How boring it is, I think. I need routine in order to create, to delve into my imagination. I need things to be as stable and consistent as possible. This translates into days of very low-key activities, such as walking the dog and reading, in order to fully sink into my work.
“When I write as a character I try to disappear into that character, to make my actual self invisible.”
What aspects of creating a novel and sharing it with readers do you find most challenging? What do you find most appealing?
Increasingly, I find being away from home difficult. An author tour seems like a nice thing—staying in hotels, visiting different cities—but it is oddly dislocating and, for an introvert such as myself, exhausting. I like readings and meeting my readers, but I probably prefer the research and writing end of things. It’s exciting to follow an idea, to chase information down, to write in the heat of creating a new story.
Tell us what we can expect next from Helen Humphreys.
My memoir about the death of my brother, Nocturne, is coming out in the spring of 2013. And I’m at work on a new novel.
The Poetic Voice of Charles Sainte-Beuve
An Essay by Helen Humphreys
Charles Sainte-Beuve wanted to be a great poet, but despite his best efforts, this dream never properly materialized. The little volume that he wrote about his affair with Adèle Hugo, Livre d’amour, became moderately famous after it was published because of the scandal attached to his writing so boldly about the affair, not because of the literary merits of the poems themselves.
This book was the starting point for thinking about my own novel. I was lucky enough to find an unread copy—pages still uncut—through a Parisian bookseller, and I spent a winter reading the poems and loosely translating them into English. Even with my rather weak French, I was able to get a real feel for Sainte-Beuve’s voice, and it was this voice that propelled me forward into my novel.
“I was lucky enough to find an unread copy—pages still uncut—through a Parisian bookseller, and I spent a winter reading the poems.”
Charles Sainte-Beuve was a man of devotion rather than a man of action, and this character trait made him look to the past instead of to the future. His poetry was in service to other, older poetry that he admired, and this is one of the reasons, I think, why he did not achieve the popularity he so desperately wanted. Many of his contemporaries were embracing new subjects and forms in their poetry, while he was aligning his work with what already existed. While his passion for literature inspired younger writers such as Matthew Arnold, his poems were discounted, both in his own lifetime and in ours, as being old-fashioned.
But what I like about Sainte-Beuve’s poems is the voice of the man—–a voice that is emotional and mockingly self-aware. I find this voice to be more contem
porary than those of some of his peers who were a great deal more famous in their time, including Victor Hugo himself. Sainte-Beuve was at his best when he was in service to a higher purpose—to his love for Adèle, or to the great writers who had come before him. When he was in an attitude of devotion, he could keep his troublesome boastfulness in check, and his wit and honesty could take centre stage.
“Sainte-Beuve was at his best when he was in service to a higher purpose—to his love for Adèle, or to the great writers who had come before him.”
The following is my favourite among the poems I translated, even though it came with the fussy instruction “To be read while listening to the music of Gluck” (in particular the score of the opera Orphée et Eurydice). I like the sentiment and the refrain, and Sainte-Beuve’s way of looking at human despair through identification with the natural world. It is not a bad poem at all, and in some ways, like much of Sainte-Beuve’s writing, I think it is better in our time than his. He benefits from being read by people who didn’t know him personally and who weren’t judging him harshly for his affair with Adèle Hugo or his compunction to write about it afterwards.
Leave me! All has fled. The spring starts again.
The summer becomes animated, and desire has found me.
The furrows and the hearts agitate their seed.
Leave me! All has fled.
Leave me! In our fields, the solitary rocks,
The thick wood calls to my troubles.
I want, at the edge of the lake, to contemplate its mystery,
And how all has fled me.
Let me be lost with the city crowd.
I love these people and their delighted noise;
It doubles the sadness of my exiled heart,
And for which all has fled.
Leave me! Midday reigns, and the sun without
Relief has dazzled my eye.
Leave me! It is the evening, and the hour of the stars:
What hope? All has fled.
Oh! Leave me, without comfort, to tend my wounds,
I like my suffering and want its company.
That in which I believed, that which tasted of me …
Leave me! All has fled!
Sainte-Beuve’s Paris
An Essay by Helen Humphreys
One of the most exciting parts of researching The Reinvention of Love was travelling to Paris to see where Charles Sainte-Beuve had lived and worked and loved. Because Paris hadn’t been bombed during the Second World War, not only was everything still standing, but also some of the buildings were more or less in the same state that they had been in almost two hundred years earlier. In fact, the hotel where Charles and Adèle used to meet to have sex is still the same kind of cheap hotel it was in 1836.
I stayed around the corner from where Sainte-Beuve had lived on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I walked his routes, timing how long it took to get to his various locales: the Luxembourg Gardens, the church where he would rendezvous with Adèle, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Victor Hugo’s house, the Magny restaurant. I spent a week on the Left Bank and then a week on the Right Bank visiting Victor Hugo’s apartment in Place des Vosges, the Comédie-Française, and Sainte-Beuve’s quarters in the Hôtel de Rouen.
“I stayed around the corner from where Sainte-Beuve had lived. I walked his routes, timing how long it took to get to his various locales.”
Some things, of course, were a great deal changed. Paris is much larger in the twenty-first century than it was in the nineteenth. And it has cars, which change everything about the way a city is used. Sainte-Beuve’s Paris had a labyrinth of twisty alleys, sewage running in the streets, plagues, and riots; but it also had more greenery, birds other than sparrows, silence, and true darkness. Even though many of the buildings were original to Sainte-Beuve’s time, what surrounded them had altered utterly, and I had to use all of my powers of imagination when I stood in front of Sainte-Beuve’s house on rue de Montparnasse to try and block out the car exhaust, the constant traffic noise, the drone of the planes overhead, and to think of him living there, sitting at his desk quietly upstairs above a lush and fragrant garden humming with bees.
“I could stand at the window, looking down into Place des Vosges … and imagine Adèle leaning her forehead against the glass.”
The past is not unreachable, but real glimpses of it are almost impossible. I came closest in Victor Hugo’s apartment in Place des Vosges, where the interior had been preserved from the days when Victor and Adèle resided there. I could wander through the rooms, over the worn wooden floors, and imagine Victor striding across them, his energy barely contained within his brisk movements. I could stand at the window, looking down onto Place des Vosges, itself very little changed since Hugo’s time, and imagine Adèle leaning her forehead against the glass, gazing down onto the same square of grass and trees, the same strict lines of brick apartment fronts and roads. Because the people I was writing about were real, it helped to be where they had been, to occupy, even for a few days, the geography of their lives.
The last place I went to visit in Paris was the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Sainte-Beuve is buried. There is a sculpture on his grave, atop a large plinth. The sculpture is of his head, and his dead stone face is twisted and ugly. (There is a much gentler, more pleasing study of his head in the Luxembourg Gardens.) There are many famous Parisians (and others) buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Émile Durkheim, Jean Seberg, Susan Sontag, Chaim Soutine—and their graves are covered with admirers’ mementos and flowers.
There was nothing on Sainte-Beuve’s grave. I took some photographs. I left him some roses.
“There was nothing on Sainte-Beuve’s grave.”
Book Club Questions
In what ways did Charles and Adèle “reinvent” love?
How were Charles and Adèle each constrained by gender or sexuality? In what ways might each have seemed to the other to be the one with more freedom?
What scenes do you feel most vividly capture the sensuality of their relationship?
How did the various settings in this novel—Paris, the Channel Islands, and Halifax—contribute to the story?
Charles’s and Victor’s interactions—as friends, colleagues, and lovers of the same woman—were complex and surprising. Can you imagine a similar scenario between two men today?
In the end, is the story of Charles and Adèle a great love story or a great tragedy?
With which of the main characters in The Reinvention of Love would you most like to sit down and chat?
Read On: Suggested Reading and Listening
Volupté: The Sensual Man by Charles Sainte-Beuve, translated by Marilyn Gaddis Rose
Sainte-Beuve’s controversial novel is about his affair with Adèle Hugo.
Adèle Hugo: La Misérable by Leslie Smith Dow
This book tells the tragic story of Adèle (Dédé), daughter of Victor and Adèle Hugo, who travelled to Halifax and then to Barbados in pursuit of a sailor who did not return her love.
Sainte-Beuve by Harold Nicolson
The best biography of Sainte-Beuve, in my opinion. This is an excellent examination of the man’s life and work.
“Sainte-Beuve” by Augustine Birrell: readbookonline.net/readOnLine/62554/
In this great essay, Birrell talks about Sainte-Beuve’s criticism and also describes his writing methods.
The Baroness by Sarah Slean (CD released March 11, 2008, on the WEA label)
Slean, a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and occasional actress, composed these songs when she was living in Paris, and I listened to this disc almost exclusively while writing the first draft of The Reinvention of Love. (I also listened to a lot of Chopin.)
Web Detective
www.victorhugo.gg
All about Victor Hugo’s time on Guernsey, this website features excellent images of Hauteville House and a history of the Hugos’ time on the Channel Islands.
www.pariscemeteries.com/pagemap/
montparmap.html
On this map of Montparnasse Cemetery, you’ll find the location of the graves of various famous authors, musicians, and artists.
www.historywalksparis.com/19_walk.html
History Walks Paris features self-guided walking tours of the old city, with detailed maps and guides.
www.halifaxpubliclibraries.ca/research/topics/local-history-genealogy/literary-walking-tour/tour-stop-15.html
This Halifax walking tour includes the story of Adèle and Victor’s daughter Adèle (Dédé), and it points out the hotel where she lived while she was in pursuit of Albert Pinson.
www.archive.org/stream/Hernani/hernani_djvu.txt
On this site, read an English translation of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani.
Copyright
The Reinvention of Love
Copyright © 2011 by Helen Humphreys.
P.S. section © 2012 by Helen Humphreys.
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EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-40917-9
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
in a hardcover edition: 2011
This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2012
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