The Vatard Sisters

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  I’m wading through printer’s proofs at the moment and I’m unspeakably disgusted with my book. The job of stitching it up I’m doing at the moment sickens me—I’m straightening club-footed phrases, I’m putting plasters over the hernias of my sentences, amputating repetitions—ah, as I said to Hannon, repetitions are the real syphilis—you plaster over them in one place and they spring up somewhere else!

  (Letter from Huysmans to Émle Zola, 10 September 1878)

  To Hannon himself, Huysmans made his usual complaints about how dissatisfied he was with his finished work:

  I can see from the proofs that The Vatard Sisters is a long bloody way from being a masterpiece. It’s full of clumsy, halting sentences that it’s now too late to fix, and that depresses me greatly. In essence, I haven’t made it what I could have made it…

  (Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 12 October 1878)

  Although Huysmans completed the proofs in November or December, there was still no imminent movement on the part of Charpentier to publish the book. This unsatisfactory situation dragged on and in February Huysmans was once again complaining loudly to Hannon:

  I am more and more depressed about The Vatard Sisters. The book is ready, bound and heaped up in magnificent piles at the publisher’s. All the employees at Charpentier’s are ecstatically enthusiastic, and are having great fun reading passages out loud. Yes, but if I have the whole firm counting on the book’s success, I have one thing against me: Madame Charpentier. She fears its effect on her salon…she fears the roasting it’ll get from the press! Certainly there’s no doubt that Madame Charpentier would stifle the book if she could, she’d prefer a flop to a riotous success.

  (Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 10 February 1879)

  However, not even the publisher’s wife could delay the book forever and on 25 February Huysmans was telling Hannon that the book would appear the next day, though he expected to be pilloried for it: “They’re going to shoot me down in flames!” There was nothing to be done now but await a response from the critics, the public and even his own relatives: “I’m going to be a disgrace to those fine upstanding bourgeois!”

  Critical response

  The Vatard Sisters was finally published on the 26 February 1879. The book was reviewed more extensively than its predecessor and though it attracted a lot of negative press, this did not seem to harm its sales: a second edition was issued after just two days, and between 1879 and 1880 the book went through five editions. Although such sales represented only a small fraction of those that Émile Zola’s novels achieved—by way of comparison Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) sold 50,000 copies in its first month—it was nevertheless an unprecedented success in terms of Huysmans’ career as a writer so far.

  One of the first notices of the book was by its dedicatee, though Zola’s polemical article wasn’t so much a review as a critical defense of Naturalist ideals that used Huysmans’ novel to illustrate his own thesis:

  I wish those fabricators of novels and inane melodramas about the common people would take a notion to read The Vatard Sisters by J.-K. Huysmans. There, they would see the common people as they really are. No doubt they would cry “what filth!”, they would affect expressions of disgust, they would talk about having to turn the pages at arm’s length. But this little show of hypocrisy is always amusing. It’s a general rule that literary hacks always insult proper writers. I’d even be very upset if they didn’t insult M. Huysmans. Deep down, I’m not worried: they will insult him.

  Nothing is more simple than this book. Its subject isn’t even a news item, because a news item requires drama. They are two sisters, Céline and Désirée, two workers in a bindery, who live with their dropsical mother and their armchair philosopher father. Céline “lives it up”. Désirée, who is keeping herself for her future husband, has a chaste relationship with a young worker, then she breaks up with him at the end and marries someone else; and that’s it, that’s the book. This bareness of plot is typical. Our contemporary novel is simplifying itself, out of a hatred of plots that are over-complicated and which don’t ring true…A page of human life: that’s enough to hold one’s interest, to present deep and lasting emotions. The most trivial record of human experience grabs you by the guts more forcefully than any contrivance of the imagination. It’ll end up giving us simple studies, without sudden plot twists or denouements, the account of a year in someone’s life, the story of a love affair, the biography of a character, notes taken from life and arranged in order.

  Here, we see the power of the record of human experience. M. Huysmans has scorned all picturesque arrangement. There is no straining of the imagination: scenes of working class life and Parisian landscapes are tied together by the most ordinary story in the world. And yet, the novel has an intense life, it grabs you and impassions you, it raises provoking questions, it is hot with struggle and triumph. Where does this flame come from? From the truth of its representations and the personality of its style, nothing more. All modern art is here.

  (Le Voltaire, 4 March 1879)

  Zola’s influence on the contemporary reception of The Vatard Sisters was significant. Up to this point in his career as a writer, Huysmans was still relatively unknown outside a small, specialised readership (a number of reviewers had difficulty with his name, referring to him variously as J.-R. Huysmans, Huismans, and Huysmanns), so the association with Zola brought a great deal more publicity and attention to the book than it would otherwise have received. However, Zola’s efforts to praise the novel as an embodiment of the Naturalist method inevitably did as much harm as good in certain quarters, and a large proportion of those who reviewed the book used the opportunity to attack Zola and Naturalism in the process. Louis Ulbach, for example, who had violently attacked Zola’s Thérèse Raquin when it appeared in 1868, made an explicit reference to Zola’s comments, using them as a launchpad to attack the Naturalists in general and Huysmans in particular:

  With a formidable irony Zola wishes that M. Huysmans, the author of The Vatard Sisters, be “dragged through the gutters of criticism, that he be denounced to the police by his colleagues, and hear the mob of the envious and the impotent screaming at his heels. It’ll be then that he’ll feel his power.”

  Zola flatters his disciple too much and compromises him by dedicating him to martyrdom…As for the gutters of criticism, the author of L’Assommoir evidently seems to believe they’re neither very clean nor very healthy. If they are infected, it is not by critics, but by Naturalists.

  (Revue Politique et Littéraire, 8 March 1879)

  Ulbach rejected Zola’s description of the book as a simple story about two girls. For him it was nothing more than “a transcript of their physical needs. When they’ve had their fill, the author closes his book, loads it onto the rubbish cart, and that is that.” Ulbach then countered Zola’s claim that “All modern art is here” by noting that Charpentier had published a string of writers, such as Théophile Gautier, Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Saint-Beuve, who represented a considerable section of modern art, and that The Vatard Sisters had no relationship to them whatsoever.

  The reviewer in Le Siècle also used Zola as a kind of critical yardstick, mostly in order to make Huysmans’ novel seem even more extravagant and crude by comparison:

  M. Huysmans is a wild representative of the Naturalist school; it is difficult to push infatuation and advocacy of it any further. From M. Zola, M. Huysmans has copied only the minor part, the mean, vulgar part. Wide open horizons scare him. In reading The Vatard Sisters one asks oneself if the author hasn’t wanted to make a caricature of the genre. L’Assommoir is pale and colourless beside the crudity of language in The Vatard Sisters. The opening chapter, which introduces us to a book bindery workshop is a masterpiece of the genre. Good God, what language! And what a literature! It makes you shudder. Which won’t stop The Vatard Sisters from selling a considerable number of copies. On the contrary!

  (Le Siècle, 9 March 1879)

  In
his commentary on The Vatard Sisters, Zola had stressed the role of reality, as opposed to that of the imagination, as the primary factor in the Naturalist creative process: “If we spurn the imagination, in the sense of something invented that is added on to reality, we put all our creative forces into presenting real life truthfully…” (Le Voltaire, 4 March 1879). Unsurprisingly, given the hostility to Naturalism in the conservative press, this nuanced view was caricatured by a number of reviewers of Huysmans’ novel, mostly notably by Albert Wolff, a conservative journalist who had already made a name for himself with a series of ferocious criticisms of the Impressionists. Wolff deliberately distorted Zola’s words and mocked Huysmans’ novel for its lack of imagination:

  The present situation is summed up in a word with regard to a novel by a young man, M. Huysmans; it is called The Vatard Sisters and paints without any effort of imagination, in unbridled realistic terms, an episode in the life of two female workers. It is apropos of this obstreperous book that Émile Zola, the male wet-nurse of the whole school, cried with such pride:

  —This book is our triumph. There’s no imagination at all in the whole thing!

  No imagination, that’s to say no illusions, no poetry, nothing but a completely arid life, with all its desolations, its sadnesses and its abominations. Man is a biped like any other animal, who has descended from the apes in order to become a worm.

  (Le Figaro, 17 March 1879)

  A similar technique was used by the reviewer in La Jeune France:

  After La Dévouée [a novel by Huysmans’ friend and fellow Naturalist, Léon Hennique], here comes The Vatard Sisters. And after The Vatard Sisters…? Honestly, is all this really serious? They tell us that there is talent in this book, we would like it better if there weren’t. M. Zola himself has summed up his literary theory: “No imagination”. Books like this one show that M Zola is being obeyed—even more perhaps than he would like.

  (La Jeune France, 1 April 1879)

  As well as using Zola’s ideas as a means of attacking Huysmans’ book, another approach was to compare it to L’Assommoir, which had itself caused an outrage on grounds of indecency. Gaston de Saint-Valry in La Patrie, described the novel as “a second dilution of L’Assommoir”, which was not intended as a compliment, before summing it up in the following terms:

  In short, nothing is more vulgar, more banal, nothing demands less talent, originality or invention.

  (La Patrie, 11 March 1879)

  Likewise, the critic of Le Soir was similarly offended by the general tone and subject matter of the book and compared it to the worst aspects of L’Assommoir, though he at least acknowledged that Huysmans had some good qualities as a writer:

  Why don’t we tell M. Huysmans the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? He has within him a germ of a bold, virile talent; he has a faculty of intense observation, a physiological and psychological eye that is fairly good and broad, so that one can tell him quite plainly that his book is nothing but a poor copy of M. Zola’s and he is mightily mistaken if he imagines that it is sufficient, in order to obtain a success similar to that which L’Assommoir had the good fortune to achieve, to write a book which a sterner reader than ourselves would say was nothing but the portrayal of unspeakable morals…

  By retaining only the infected parts from M Zola’s only too infamous book, M Huismans [sic]has written a novel which nothing can excuse…

  (Le Soir, 19 March 1879)

  Aurélien Scholl, a journalist renowned for his cutting, ironic manner (which had led to him frequently being called out for duels as a result), also used comparisons with L’Assommoir to Huysmans’ detriment, arguing that at least Zola had other tools in his literary armoury:

  The Vatard Sisters has its admirers, so much the better for M. Huysmans and M. Charpentier. As for me, although I’m aware the author has a very real talent, I’ll wait for a different novel than this one to make a judgment.

  There is in The Vatard Sisters a desperate monotony of description. The atmosphere always smells bad; every ten pages a heavy stench obliges one of his characters to “open the fanlight”.

  Every time the author mentions a pair of boots they’re oozing and stinking; of a gathering of the fair sex M. Huysmans tells us about the women’s sweat, adding that there was “a strong smell like that of goats that had gambolled in the sun,” and he concludes by saying that these odours “mingled with the putrid emanations of cold meat and wine, acrid cat’s piss, and the nauseous stench of the toilets.”

  Well that may be true, but I prefer other things.

  It’s Naturalism, so they tell me.

  But excuse me. When a certain number of female workers, even those in the bookbinding trade, get together, there are other things than smells. There are physical appearances, different characters, various emotions. However, I swear to you that after finishing the book I’d be hard put to it to say what Céline or Désirée looked like.

  (L’Événement, 23 March 1879)

  Firmin Boissin, a Catholic journalist and writer who went on to slate a number of Huysmans’ subsequent books, including À rebours and Là-bas, fulminated in typical fashion against the crudities of Naturalism he felt the book contained:

  M. Émile Zola has created a school, and the disciples of this master, who can’t equal him in talent, have far surpassed him in filthy extravagances, in Naturalistic stupidity. Here is a Belgian, M. J. K. Huysmans, whose debauched pen doesn’t recoil from the description of anything, not even what occurs in certain houses of ill-repute. Marthe, the first novel by this shameless writer, is the cynical and brutal history of a prostitute. It would show a lack of respect to our readers to analyse this obscene production. And from the same author we have The Vatard Sisters, which isn’t much better, but whose subject one can at least talk about.

  From time to time, the author tries to introduce poetry into his disgusting descriptions, a poetry which murmurs its song, in the evening, in deserted streets, through the immortal mouthpiece of “a softly gurgling urinal, its entrance bubbling with a froth of chlorine.” Enough, it’s too much.

  (Polybiblion Revue Bibliographique, October 1880)

  Interestingly, most of the reviewers who took such an outraged stance at the “filth” and the “obscenities” they affected to find in the book, seemed to have no qualms about reproducing the most offensive passages in the columns of their paper. Huysmans was not unaware of the likely reaction to his novel, indeed he was even looking forward to it: “I hope we’ll create a fine stir,” he wrote to Hannon in September 1878, a few months before the book’s publication. To Lemonnier, he was even more explicit: “I know that with the enormous mass of books which are published these days you have to strike hard in order to be heard, you even need to cause a scandal.”

  Although Huysmans complained about the torrent of bad press The Vatard Sisters had received, there were financial compensations:

  With the exception of Zola’s notice and a favourable remark in Le Gaulois, I’ve received nothing but insults: which makes me happy, as nothing is better for a book’s sales.

  (Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon, 17 March 1879)

  There were some genuinely sympathetic reviews, however. Jules Christophe gave a long and studied account of the novel, setting it in the context of the rest of Huysmans’ work, which he was obviously familiar with.

  What do they reproach the novel for? Above all for its lack of imagination, for showing nothing but common people meeting each day, for describing places and things familiar to everyone; objections endlessly reprinted by obstinate idealists. To which the author could reply: “Yes, I scorn imagination in the novel as I would a lie in real life, I describe and I explain what I see and what I know. Make of that what you will!”

  M. Huysmans having had the occasion to see a bindery at close hand, he has quite naturally given himself up to describing a few of the workers, both male and female, he recounts what he has seen and set the action in locales he has scoured, in both sen
ses of the word; such is his crime, but isn’t it that of all writers who are enamoured with the truth? Now what if his characters in this story are badly dressed, lacking in education, spouting bad ideas? The author fashions them as he has seen them, he has a duty neither to embellish them nor to uglify them. One sees things through one’s own particular temperament: now M. Huysmans sees like a Dutch or a Flemish painter, and the present novel is like Parisian modern life as painted by Teniers.

  (Le Coup d’Oeil, 17 April 1879)

  Christophe praised the book’s “lively comic feeling”, singling out the scene where the Testons arrive at the Vatards during a rainstorm as a particularly fine piece of comic writing. His only real reservation was about Huysmans’ literary style, and he advised him to use a simpler vocabulary, less obscure expressions, and fewer archaisms and neologisms.

  Another positive review came from Huysmans’ friend, Théodore Hannon. Like Zola, Hannon also used the occasion to promote his own aesthetic views. Hannon was a supporter of Naturalism, but more in a Baudelairean sense, as an attempt to capture Modernity through the distinctively individual temperament of the artist. Whereas Zola praised the book’s “human simplicity” and criticised Huysmans for “over-using rare words which sometimes makes his best analyses less realistic,” Hannon vaunted the novel as the work “of a gourmet”, of a “refined man”, and enthusiastically described its “bizarre perfume”, its “nervous style”, its “jewel-like adjectives and adverbs”: