In 1883 Turgenev had an operation in Paris for the removal of a neuroma in the lower abdomen. The doctors gave him ether rather than chloroform, and he was conscious throughout the intervention. Afterwards, he was visited by his friend Alphonse Daudet, with whom he had often dined in the company of Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Zola and others. ‘During the operation,’ Turgenev told him, ‘I thought about our dinners and tried to find the right words to convey exactly the sense of the steel slicing through my skin and entering my body…It was like a knife cutting into a banana.’ Goncourt, recording this anecdote, commented, ‘Our old friend Turgenev is a true man of letters.’
How is it best to write about illness, and dying, and death? Despite Turgenev’s impeccable example, pain is normally the enemy of the descriptive powers. When it became his turn to suffer, Daudet discovered that pain, like passion, drives out language. Words come ‘only when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful.’ The prospect of dying may, or may not, concentrate the mind and encourage a final truthfulness; may or may not include the useful aide-mémoire of your life passing before your eyes; but it is unlikely to make you a better writer. Modest or jaunty, wise or vainglorious, literary or journalistic, you will write no better, no worse. And your literary temperament may, or may not, prove suited to this new thematic challenge. When Harold Brodkey’s heroic – and, it seemed, heroically self-deceiving – account of his own dying was published in the New Yorker, I congratulated the magazine’s editor for ‘leaving it all in’, by which I meant the evidence of Brodkey’s impressive egomania. ‘You should have seen what we took out,’ she replied wryly.
Alphonse Daudet (1840–97) is a substantially forgotten writer nowadays. Novelist, playwright, journalist, he is viewed as a sunny humorist and clear stylist, creator in Lettres de mon moulin and Tartarin de Tarascon of an agreeable if partial Provence. He is offered to students of French as a nursery slope or climbing wall: practise on this. But in his day he was not only highly successful (and very rich); he also ate at the top literary table. Dickens called him ‘my little brother in France’; Henry James, who translated Daudet’s novel Port-Tarascon, called him ‘a great little novelist’; Goncourt ‘mon petit Daudet’. As may be deduced, he was short of stature. He was also kind, generous and sociable, a passionate observer and an unstoppable talker. These qualities transfer into his fiction. He was, in various descriptions (all of them from Henry James), ‘the happiest novelist of his day’, ‘beyond comparison the most charming story-teller of the day’, ‘an observer not perhaps of the deepest things of life, but of the whole realm of the immediate, the expressive, the actual’. As these assessments, laudatory yet limiting, imply, Daudet was the sort of writer – hard-working, honourable, popular – whose fame and relevance are largely used up in his own lifetime. The twenty-volume collected edition of 1929–32 seemed to have said (more than) it all. In Anglo-Saxon countries the surname Daudet nowadays refers as often to Alphonse’s elder son Léon, the highly gifted polemicist who followed an intransigent path to ultranationalism, royalism and anti-semitism; who was cofounder, with Charles Maurras, of L’Action française.
If Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also a member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French club: that of literary syphilitics. Here again, he is somewhat overshadowed: the Big Three were Baudelaire, Flaubert and Maupassant. Daudet probably ranks fourth, equal with Jules de Goncourt, Edmond’s younger brother. He could at least claim that the syphilis he acquired, shortly after his arrival in Paris at the age of seventeen, came from a classier, indeed more literary, source than theirs. He caught it from a lectrice de la cour, a woman employed to read aloud at the Imperial court. She was, he assured Goncourt, a lady ‘from the top drawer’.
After its initial declaration, and treatment with mercury, the disease lay dormant; Daudet worked, published, became famous, married (in 1867), had three children. He also continued an active, carefree, careless sex life. From the time he lost his virginity at the age of twelve, he had always been ‘a real villain’ in matters of sex, he once confessed; he slept with many of his friends’ mistresses; about ten times a year he felt the need for the sort of ‘ordure’ he could not ask his wife to permit. Drink for him led inevitably to debauchery (and contrition, and forgiveness); but then so did many other things. In 1884 he had an operation for a hydrocele. Having a grossly swollen testicle painfully drained (and then drained again when the first operation didn’t work) would probably make most men sleep in their trousers for weeks; Daudet’s reaction was to go straight out in search of sex. In 1889 he reported to Edmond de Goncourt a dream in which he was caught up in the Last Judgement and defending himself against a sentence of 3,500 years in hell for ‘the crime of sensuality’.
When his syphilis reached the tertiary stage, it initially reasserted itself as ‘rheumatism’, severe fatigue and haemorrhages. By the early 1880s, however, it became increasingly clear that Daudet was suffering from the form of neurosyphilis known as tabes dorsalis: literally, wasting of the back. Its chief manifestations in his case were locomotor ataxia (the progressive inability to control one’s movements) and, eventually, paralysis. In 1885 J-M Charcot, the greatest neurologist of the day, declared him ‘lost’; Daudet was to live another twelve years, in increasing pain and debility, after hearing this death sentence. He saw the finest specialists, who sent him to the finest thermal establishments, where he took the waters and mud-baths. He tried all the latest treatments, no matter how violent and outlandish. Charcot recommended the Seyre suspension, in which the patient was hung up, some of the time by the jaw alone, for several minutes. It caused excruciating pain and did little good. David Gruby, doctor to the artistic (whose client list included Chopin, Liszt, George Sand, Dumas père et fils and Heine), suggested an esoteric diet. The day began with a soup made from a large variety of grains and vegetables; its visceral consequences were so volcanic that Daudet said death was preferable. In his last years he tried the Brown-Séquard treatment, a course of extremely painful injections with an elixir extracted from guinea pigs (one day the injector told Daudet that they had run out of guinea pigs, and were using extract of bulls’ testicles instead). At first the treatment – which Zola also took, in an attempt to increase his sexual powers – seemed beneficial, even miraculous; then, swiftly, it didn’t.
None of these doctors was a quack (Charles Edward Brown-Séquard, for instance, was professor of physiology and neuropathology at Harvard, and the first to show that epilepsy could be produced experimentally in guinea pigs); each was trying to outwit a then invincible disease. Daudet, like many other sufferers, came to rely on large quantities of palliative drugs: in particular chloral, bromide and morphine. At different times his wife, son Léon and father-in-law were all giving him morphine injections. In March 1887 Léon gave him two injections in a row but refused a third; so Daudet went to his father-in-law who gave him two more. (The father-in-law was also a morphine addict; the son preferred laudanum.) Increasingly, he injected himself, no easy task when you are both ataxic and extremely myopic. In June 1891 he reported giving himself five injections in a row; this despite the fact that the previous October he had been unable to find any place left on his body to inject.
His response, both personal and literary, to his condition was admirable. ‘Courage…means not scaring others,’ Larkin wrote. Numerous witnesses attest to Daudet’s exemplary behaviour. His last secretary, André Ebner, remembered Daudet sitting with a friend one morning, eyes closed, barely able to speak, martyred by pain. The door-knob gently turned, but before Mme Daudet could enter, her husband was on his feet, the colour back in his cheeks, laughter in his eye, his voice filled with reassurance about his condition. When the door closed again, Daudet collapsed back into his chair. ‘Suffering is nothing,’ he murmured. ‘It’s all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering.’ This is a difficult, correct (and nowadays unfashionable) position. It led Daudet to familiarity with all the ironies and paradoxes of long-term illness. Surrounded by those you love, and unwilling to inflict pain on them, you deliberately talk down your suffering, and thus deprive yourself of the comfort you crave. Next, you discover that your pain, while always new to you, quickly becomes repetitive and banal to your intimates: you fear becoming a symptoms bore. Meanwhile, the anticipation of indignities to come – and the terror of disgusting those you love – makes suicide not just tempting but logical; the catch is that those you love have already insisted that you live, if only for them.
Daudet’s other response to his suffering was to write about it. He began taking notes, but the book he had in mind presented all kinds of problems. It shouldn’t be a novel, it should be an honest confession; but how could he write an honest confession – which would include the ‘sexual desires and longings for death that illness provokes’ – when he was a married man? By 1888 he thinks he has solved the question of form. Autobiography is still ruled out, even if published posthumously: he doesn’t want to leave ‘a testament of complaint against my family’. But: ‘Listen,’ he tells Goncourt, ‘it begins like this. The terrace of the hotel at Lamalou. Someone says, “He’s dead!” Then a character sketch of myself, done by myself. Then the dead man’s servant slips his notebook into my hand. You see, like that, it’s not me. I’m not even married in the book, and that will give me a chapter to make the comparison between suffering in the midst of a family and suffering alone. This notebook allows me a fragmented form, so that I can talk about everything, without the need for transition.’ There is special pleading, even desperation, in this proposed solution. In any case, Mme Daudet persuaded her husband of the project’s unfeasibility. Her argument, according to their son Lucien, was that such a work would inevitably appear to be the concluding act of a literary career, and might well prevent Daudet from writing anything thereafter. Such reasoning was either genuine or exceedingly clever.
There is no evidence that Daudet ever started serious work on his book about Pain. But he continued taking notes, talked about the project, and even answered journalists’ questions about its progress (this not long before his death). One thing he always knew was what he was going to call it: La Doulou, the Provençal word for douleur, pain. Goncourt thought the title ‘abominable’, but expected the result to be ‘superb’ because Daudet would have lived the book, even ‘lived it too much’. What was eventually published as La Doulou in 1930 consists of fifty or so pages of notes on his symptoms and sufferings, his fears and reflections, and on the strange social life of patients at shower-bath and spa. But they are superb, and Daudet was right to feel himself well suited to this subject. He was ‘a true man of letters’ in the Turgenev sense. He always had been. When he was sixteen, his brother Henri had died, at which moment their father gave vent to a great howl of ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ Daudet was aware, he wrote later, of his own bifurcated response to the scene: ‘My first Me was in tears, but my second Me was thinking, “What a terrific cry! It would be really good in the theatre!” ‘ From that point on he was ‘homo duplex, homo duplex!’ ‘I’ve often thought about this dreadful duality. This terrible second Me is always there, sitting in a chair watching, while the first Me stands up, performs actions, lives, suffers, struggles away. This second Me that I’ve never been able to get drunk, or make cry, or put to sleep. And how much he sees into things! And how he mocks!’
‘The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature,’ Flaubert wrote. Daudet certainly feels monstrous to himself in these lines, almost revolted by the condition of being a writer. Some writers succeed in putting the second Me to sleep, or getting it drunk; others are less constantly aware of its presence; still others have an active and effective second Me, yet an unworthy or tedious first one. Graham Greene’s line about the writer needing a chip of ice in the heart is true; but if there’s too much ice, or the chip cools down the heart, the second Me has nothing – or nothing interesting – to observe.
Daudet had the cold eye and the warm, suffering heart. He also had a sense of the ordinary. What happens around illness may be dramatic, even heroic; but illness itself is ordinary, day-to-day, boring. Turgenev compared himself to a banana; Daudet, when caught in a frenzied bout of locomotor ataxia, his leg hopelessly out of control, reminded himself of a knife-grinder. (The comparison may be lost on some modern readers: until a few decades ago itinerant knife-grinders would trundle the streets with circular stones mounted on wheeled carriers; to make his stone revolve at a speed sufficient to sharpen your knives and shears, the grinder would pump frantically up and down on a pedal.) The image is exact, unheroic, and taken from daily life.
La Doulou, though organized, and with a certain inevitable plot-progression, remains a collection of notes; but this isn’t necessarily a disadvantage. Notes seem an appropriate form in which to deal with one’s dying. They imply the time, and the suffering, which elapses between each being made: here is a decade or so of torment reduced to fifty pages. Notes minimize the danger of Brodkeyism; also, the temptation to disguise, to make too much art of it all. Daudet was a realist who frequently wrote close to his own life. Here – in what Léon Daudet called a ‘terrible and implacable breviary’ – he is writing close to his own death.
He had no illusions about immortality. He and Goncourt had discussed the matter in 1891. Goncourt outlined his own beliefs: that death means complete annihilation, that we are mere ephemeral gatherings of matter, and that even if there were a God, expecting Him to provide a second existence for every single one of us would be laying far too great a bookkeeping job on Him. Daudet agreed with all this, and then recounted to Goncourt a dream he had once had, in which he was walking through a field of broom. All around him there was the soft background noise of seed-pods exploding. Our lives, he had concluded, amount to no more than this: just a quiet crackle of popping pods.
Julian Barnes