Blow David - Seraphita: and Louis Lambert & The Exiles

Balzac: man, machine or trademark? Or, alternatively: demi-God, dupe or egomaniac? With Balzac, there are all sorts of choices to be made. Was he really the very type of the restless romantic genius, at odds with the world and only truly at home in his art? Or was Balzac just a boastful, immoderate producer of assembly-line fiction (littrature industrielle was Sainte-Beuves pointed term), a wild, compulsive hack who could never say no to pen, paper and the prospect of profit? Did he really have to create, did art make him write, or did he just have to see his name in print? Maker and shaper or product of circumstances? Assessments of the man and his work are so varied that sometimes they sound like they are about entirely different people. Is your Balzac mine? Is there room for disagreement? To Baudelaire and Gautier, to name but two, he was a visionary. Victor Hugo thought that he was a revolutionarty writer. Thodore de Banville believed that he was nothing less than a modern Homer, or a Homer for modern times. Zola discovered a kindred soul. To him, Balzac was a proto-Naturalist, committed, as Zola was, to telling it as it was. But he earned his fair share of critical emnity and his emergence as a literary classic was slow. Sainte-Beuve, in his own time an influential shaper of opinions, found Balzac lacking in style, without good taste and wanting in sound aesthetic judgement. In his view, Balzacs most original characteristic, his chief claim to fame, was the fact that he would invariably be thinking about thirty novels when he was writing one. In other words, his mind was always elsewhere. This profligacy, this outrageous rate of production would furnish many critics with an easy, slow-moving target. Balzac was proud of his invention of recurring characters, of peopling his novels with folk who come and go, but his detractors noted that it merely enabled him to publish unfinished novels.

Add to the fact of his slippery fortunes, in his life and afterwards, the further fact of when he lived, and the business of deciding exactly what he was is further complicated. In Balzacs case the mundane co-ordinates of time and place he was born in Tours in 1799 and died in Paris in 1850 do something more than define or isolate a lifetime. The man has grown larger than his life and seeped into the substance of history. His life and its products span the second quarter of a hectic century that saw the growth of the culture and institutions of modern France. It is in part due to the celebrated detail and the ambitious architecture of his novels that so much of that formative historical process, at least as it applies to Paris, seems comprehensible on a human scale. The brute abstractions of industrialisation and urbanisation are brought down to size and fleshed-out with human consequences. Like Kafkas Prague or Dickens London, Balzacs Paris provides a special kind of urban and social history. In 1842 Balzac explained that French society is the real historian, and I have merely tried to guide its pen. And in 1845 he was gratified to learn that People are beginning to realise that I am much more of a historian than a novelist. Later, Engels would write: I have learnt more from Balzac than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.

For what would turn out to be the last fifteen years of his life, by which time he had achieved fame and notoriety, Balzac set himself the task of compiling a Western Arabian Nights. The project would lend form and overall purpose to his lifes work. Gently parodying Dante, it would be a resolutely Human Comedy, the history of the human heart traced thread by thread. The plan was to fashion a spacious prose panorama depicting modern urban life. Bored with greenery and tired of pastoral, The Human Comedy would be played out on the stone fields and in the brick built gulleys of early nineteenth-century Paris. It is a cold disenchanted scene, full of folly and misery. Some critics would pillory Balzac for his pessimism. Others would celebrate his brave realism and unflinching eye.

It is not surprising that The Human Comedy proved to be a severe taskmaster. To the elusive end of seeing it through to completion (it was only half finished at his death), Balzac wrote hundreds of books and many thousands of letters, articles and reviews. He exiled himself to his fiction, to a world bounded by the edge of a page. It is, quite literally, exhausting to contemplate how much he wrote, and how he wrote it. Fuelled by black coffee, drived by ambition and battling against the constant undertow of debt, he laboured long into the night, night after night, for months on end, methodically folding his life into art. He became, on his own admission, a Mind Factory. As all around him the means of production were being transformed by industry and technology, Balzac cranked out unit after unit of fiction. He consumed acres of paper and lakes of ink. Gradually, episode by episode, character by character (there are 2,472 named characters in The Human Comedy), Balzac fashioned a version of the society and culture in which he moved. His vast correspondence is full of weary accounts like this:

I go to bed at six or seven in the evening, like the hens. I am called at one in the morning and work until eight. At eight I go to sleep again for an hour and a half; then I have something very light, a cup of pure coffee, and harness myself to my cab until four. At four I receive visitors, have a bath or go out. After dinner I go to bed.

Routines like this made him susceptible to illness and he constantly complained about aches and pains. This is a particularly strange example: Sometimes it seems to me as if my brain were on fire and as if I were fated to die on the ruins of my mind. Caffeine poisoning and exhaustion would seem a likely cause of that sensation.

In the end his heart, weakened by work and weight, failed him. Balzac died a self-made literary celebrity, drained by the high cost of his way of living, and the higher price of art. In a famous speech at his graveside, Victor Hugo remarked: His life was short but it was full. It was richer in works than in days. With the growth of Balzacs reputation towards the end of the nineteenth century, due in large part to Zolas advocacy, The Human Comedy came to be viewed as a landmark in the making of literary realism. Balzac achieved only posthumously the stature of a classic. By the beginning of the twentieth century he ranked alongside Molire in the pantheon of French literary genius. But go back to the mid-eighteenth century, to pre-Revolutionary France, and Balzacs ancestors are, literally, peasants scratching a precarious living from the land.

Balzacs father was born in 1746 in the small village of La Nougayri and he was the last of eleven children. He escaped these circumstances by the usual route of learning to read and write. In 1765 he left for Paris and once there changed his name from Balssa to Balzac. Like many capable young men on the make he did well out of the revolutionary years and by 1793 his peasant origins were well behind him. He was employed as a civil servant and later by the bankers Daniel Doumerc where he met his wife, Anne Charlotte Laure Sallambier. In 1798 the Balzac family moved to Tours and on May 20, 1799, Honor Balzac was born (the first of four children). It is well known that his mother made his childhood and youth miserable. She described him as the fruit of duty and chance. Balzac himself would later write: I never had a mother. He suffered the most dreadful childhood ever fallen to the lot of any man. In the year of Balzacs birth Napoleon Bonaparte was elected Consul and in 1804 he was crowned Emperor. Later in life Balzac would keep a bust of the Emperor on his mantlepiece with a label attached to the base: What he began with the sword, I shall consumate with the pen.