Before setting off to interview Nicholson Baker—who, in U and I, had devoted a whole book to the subject—Martin Amis reminds us that writers’ lives “are all anxiety and ambition.” Among many other things, the Goncourts’ journals are a vast archive of anxiety and thwarted ambition. The brothers, Edmond and Jules, began keeping a journal on what was, for them, a momentous occasion: the publication, on December 2, 1851, of their first novel. Unfortunately, it was also a momentous day for France: Napoleon III seized power in a coup d’état. With the city under martial law, their eagerly anticipated debut made almost no impact. So the journals became a repository of all the woes and disappointed hopes suffered in their “hard and horrible struggle against anonymity”: critical indignities, lack of sales, the perfidy of reviewers, the unmerited success of friends (some of whom, like Zola, were celebrated for techniques the Goncourts claimed to have pioneered). As happens, lack of success only increased the brothers’ sense of neglected worth. “It is impossible to read a page by them,” André Gide confided in his journal, “where that good opinion they have of themselves does not burst out from between the lines.” He was referring to their novels (now almost entirely forgotten), but this sense of wounded self-esteem greatly increases the pleasure of the journals for which they are remembered: “Oh, if one of Dostoevsky’s novels, whose black melancholy is regarded with such indulgent admiration, were signed with the name of Goncourt, what a slating it would get all along the line.” That’s in 1888; by 1890 the tone is of comic resignation (there is much comedy in these pages) as Edmond realizes that he has devoted the whole of his life “to a special sort of literature: the sort that brings one trouble.”
It’s not just the brothers themselves; their friends are constantly sniping about each other’s success or bemoaning the lack of their own. Zola, “whose name echoes round the world,” is particularly “hard to please.” Permanently “dissatisfied with the enormity of his good fortune,” he is “unhappier than the most abject of failures.” (This also finds an echo in Amis: specifically, his shocked realization that Norman Mailer, the “much-televised headline-grabber, suffers from a piercing sense of neglect.”)
Forgive the name-dropping—in this context it is inevitable and appropriate; an abundance of famous names renders the most banal entries compelling: “A ring at the door. It was Flaubert.” “Baudelaire was at the table next to ours.” Even people who make only a cameo appearance are fixed with a precision to match that of the recently invented camera. The glimpse of Baudelaire continues: “He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were going to be guillotined.” Unlike photographs, these verbal pictures develop and change over time, according to fluctuations in the fortunes and health of the people concerned and their shifting relationships with the authors of the journals. Part of the ambition behind the project was to show the Goncourts’ acquaintances—many of whom happened to be the great writers of the age—“as they really are, in a dressing-gown and slippers.” At one point a fellow guest is shocked by Flaubert’s “gross, intemperate unbuttoning of his nature,” but the reader is grateful that the Goncourts were on hand to witness such things, even when (especially when) the conversation among these men of letters becomes—as it often did—“filthy and depraved.” Among all the talk of fornication, hookers, venereal disease, and drunkenness, there is some literary discussion too—and not just about “the special aptitude of writers suffering from constipation and diarrhea.” The journals are shot through with observations that cut to the critical quick. On first hearing Flaubert read from Salammbô the brothers are disappointed to discover that he “sees the Orient, and what is more the Orient of antiquity, in the guise of an Algerian bazaar. Some of his effects are childish, others ridiculous.… [T]here is nothing more wearisome than the everlasting descriptions, the button-by-button portrayal of the characters, the miniature-like representation of every costume.” The brothers are often vehement participants in debate—blasphemously insisting that “Hugo has more talent than Homer”—but much of the time they are eager flies on a wall, conscious of the privilege of witnessing a master like Flaubert as he illuminates what, to him, is truly shocking about the author of Justine: “there isn’t a single tree in Sade, or a single animal.”
By the time they meet the author of Madame Bovary, he is already a celebrated writer, already “Flaubert.” Others, like the “strange painter Degas,” enter inconspicuously with none of the aura subsequently bestowed upon them by fame. When they first encounter their “admirer and pupil Zola,” he strikes them as a “worn-out Normalien, at once sturdy and puny” but with “a vibrant note of pungent determination and furious energy.” (Another, more recent echo: Christopher Isherwood records how, in April 1948, a “young man” called Gore Vidal introduces himself; he reminds Isherwood “sometimes of a Teddy bear, sometimes of a duck,” but is obviously “a shrewd operator” with a good deal of courage and “a desire for self-advertisement.”)
Many people come strolling through the journals, but one young man who went on to distinguish himself in the world of letters does not merit so much as a mention (in this selection at least). When Henry James met Edmond (“and his dirty little companions”) in 1885 he was struck by “something perverse & disagreeable” about him. Expanding on this in an interminable review of the journals, James is baffled by the way that the “weakness” of these “furious névrosés” “appears to them a source of glory or even of dolorous general interest.” The fact that they do not appear anything like so sickly or neurotic to us is proof of a sort that the Goncourts were right: their malaise was indeed proof of their modernity. The self-styled “John-the-Baptists of modern neurosis” prided themselves on being “the first to write about the nerves.” The “shameless vanity” of this claim irks Roberto Calasso—who, in The Ruin of Kasch, insists that “nerves and the modern find definitive voice” in Baudelaire—but the Goncourts certainly played their part in articulating an emergent feeling of unease and anxiety that will become a staple of twentieth-century literature. (“We are the future!” Jules yells at Sainte-Beuve.) The sickliness that so repelled James was what, according to Susan Sontag, gave later writers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Kafka their authority: “Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.” To a table that would soon be groaning beneath the weight of accumulated anguish, the Goncourts brought their signature note of affected disaffection: “There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hallmark of quality in modern men.” Again, this is a note sounded repeatedly by such quintessentially modern masters as Fernando Pessoa (in The Book of Disquiet), E. M. Cioran, and Roland Barthes (who brings together the twin themes of sickness and ennui by wondering if boredom might be his form of hysteria).
The atmosphere of metaphysical sickness is clearly related to the dark shadow cast by actual physical illness. In 1861 the death of their friend Henri Murger had prompted an agonized reflection on mortality:
the orgies of work at night, the periods of poverty followed by periods of junketing, the neglected cases of pox, the ups and downs of an existence without a home, the suppers instead of dinners, and the glasses of absinthe bringing consolation after a visit to the pawnshop; everything which wears a man out, burns him up, and finally kills him; a life opposed to all the principles of physical and spiritual hygiene, which results in a man dying in shreds at the age of forty-two, without enough strength in him to suffer, and complaining of only one thing, the smell of rotten meat in his bedroom—the smell of his own body.
Once again, this is a passage whose resonance extends well beyond the date and circumstances of its composition. Alter the odd detail and the Goncourts’ elegy for “the death of Bohemia” in mid-nineteenth-century Paris can be read as a catalog essay for Nan Goldin’s photographs of the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 1980s.
The unnamed illness that kills Murger was mysterious and rare; syphilis was so pervasive that in 1877 Maupassant, initially, was “proud” to have caught “the magnificent pox. At last!” By then Edmond had had seven years to mourn the utterly unmagnificent death, also from syphilis, of his beloved brother. Jules’s passing made Edmond “curse and abominate literature” to such an extent that, after describing with clinical precision and agonizing detail the gradual collapse of his brother’s physical and mental capacities, he decided to abandon the journals.
The habit of daily transcription was not so easy to break, however, and Edmond soon returned to the task. With the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the Commune, history comes crashing in on the daily accounts of visits, incidental observations, and reflections. The entries from the post-Jules period are as varied, fascinating, compelling, and odd as anything that has gone before. (I am particularly fond of the passage describing “the mania for fighting” that so takes hold of Drumont that “Nature is nothing for him now but a setting for affairs of honor. When he took the lease on his house at Soisy, he exclaimed: ‘Ah, now there’s a real garden for a pistol duel.’”) But these later sections are interesting in two additional and complicating ways.
As early as 1867 the brothers had reflected on the transience of all pleasures: “Everything is unique, nothing happens more than once in a lifetime. The physical pleasure which a certain woman gave you at a certain moment, the exquisite dish which you ate on a certain day—you will never meet either again. Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled.” Naturally, this affirmation of the unrepeatable uniqueness of all experience—especially once his brother is no longer there to share, record, and analyze it with Edmond—encourages recollection and reverie. As Edmond ages, so he becomes more and more absorbed by memory. While his responsiveness to what is going on around him is in no way dimmed, it is all the time having to compete for attention with events from the past. At one point he recalls seducing a sixteen-year-old virgin: “She was a strange creature, that girl, with the ecstatic pallor of her face when we made love together, the inert passivity of her body, in which nothing was alive but the pounding of her heart, and the expression in her big blue eyes.” Later she becomes the mistress of one of Edmond’s friends; later still, as part of a “wish to degrade her,” he arranges for her to sleep with Jules: “My brother, after making frenzied love to her for several weeks, decided that she was too melancholy, and even rather frightening, with the sort of lethargy into which love-making plunged her, and with the far-away look which came into her great blue eyes; and he dropped her.” The journals are full of notes on atmosphere, details of psychology and gesture—the kind of raw material that, once processed, finds its way into fiction; they are also full of off-the-cuff misogyny. Here, it is as if the ghost of a novel, a darkly erotic bildungsroman, at once repressed and in the process of formation, begins to emerge, unbidden, from the pages of the journals.
The second factor in the distinctive quality of the latter parts of the journals derives from the fact that in 1886–87, after much reluctance, Edmond begins publishing them. As a consequence, the journals from that date onward have to come to terms with how the earlier ones have been received—both by the critics and by the people mentioned, described, or quoted in them. The journal, in other words, starts being about itself. (At the risk of making the journals seem modish in an old-fashioned way, it’s worth recalling that in a 1967 essay—“French Letters: Theories of the New Novel”—Gore Vidal writes that he was struck by the way that “the writers whom Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute most resemble” are “the presently unfashionable brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.”)
Plenty of people felt embarrassed, upset, outraged, or betrayed by the Goncourts’ record of things they had said or had said about them. As indicated earlier, this is part of the journals’ charm and value. Christopher Isherwood, when he finished reading them, on July 5, 1940, was in no doubt as to their importance in this regard: “Here, gossip achieves the epigrammatic significance of poetry. To keep such a diary is to render a real service to the future.” This realization may well have been an incentive to persist with his diaries, which have since acquired a similar value of their own. Or, to put it another way, it is as if the journals, which caused people to discuss—and thereby add to—their content, continue to prompt the same reaction and so, in a sense, are still being incrementally extended by a constantly expanding cast of characters, readers, and contributors, from the nineteenth century to Gide, Isherwood, Vidal, and beyond.
Obviously, the Goncourts’ journals have been a wonderful resource for historians and biographers alike, but not everyone has concurred with the verdict of Proust’s narrator in Time Regained: “[Edmond] Goncourt knew how to listen, just as he knew how to see.” Coming as it does from a work in which fiction and fact are famously and intimately entwined, this character reference is itself unreliable and inadmissible. Certainly it is contested by a conversation recorded by Gide in a journal entry from January 1902: “‘According to what I have been able to verify,’ says Jacques Blanche, ‘nothing is less true than their journals.’” Claiming to remember perfectly certain conversations that the Goncourts had falsified, Blanche flatly contradicts Proust: “I assure you, Gide, that they didn’t know how to listen.”
Blanche rants on, furnishing more and more examples, only to have the rug pulled from beneath his feet by the author of The Counterfeiters: “‘But,’ I say, ‘the words that he puts into the mouths of various people, however false they may be according to you, are almost never uninteresting. Watch out, for the more you reduce his stature as a stenographer, the greater you make him as a writer, as a creator.’”
We only have Gide’s word that he had the last word in this exchange, but it reminds us that what we are dealing with here is not simply a resource but a compendious work of literature. “A book is never a masterpiece,” the brothers declare in 1864. “It becomes one.” The process of becoming is inevitably more awkward for a journal, which did not even set out to be a book; its imperfections and indiscretions, its lack of artistic and thematic organization—all the things, in fact, that make it a pleasure to read—militate against its ever becoming one. But while Sainte-Beuve—a major player in these pages—believed his notebooks to be “the lowest drawer of the writing desk,” the Goncourts’ journals have come to deserve a place in the highest.
2007