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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
As an aspiring writer, I was always too scared to read Balzac's cautionary tale of a young poet in 1820s Paris. With my first novel coming out, I was finally ready to take it on.
Aug 8, 2005 | Ways to praise a book include quoting favorite lines, leaving it by your bedside, and pressing it on your friends. Other books you cherish by rereading them. I'm not much of a rereader (still too much to read for the first time), but I usually return to "The Great Gatsby" every year. And then there are a few books that you honor by your refusal to read them, by your postponement of the encounter -- because you suspect them of being too dazzling, too good or too close to the bone.
My failure to read Balzac's "Lost Illusions" had been a tribute exacted on the basis of fear. I arrived in New York one winter with an internship at a magazine and a fearfully simple ambition: to be a writer. And, in spite of worrying more or less constantly that my ambition would turn out to exceed my talent and discipline, I hoped that in a few years' time I wouldn't be the only person to think of myself as one. In particular I wanted to vindicate myself in the eyes of my parents back in Eagle, Colo., where I grew up. For some reason it felt important to supply proof of my gifts to precisely the people who'd never doubted them.
I'd heard enough about "Lost Illusions" that when I came to New York it naturally occurred to me to read the book. I understood that this was a novel -- the novel -- about a provincial young man who shows up in the cultural capital of his day with the notion of making it as a writer. And, well, evidently he loses some illusions. Having read "Phre Goriot," I imagined that in this novel, too, corruption might supply the main theme. Balzac, you learn right away, is a novelist of money -- in "Phre Goriot," Rastignac, the ambitious young man of that book, thinks of money as "the world's final authority" -- and it may be that in the New York of the late '90s I felt I didn't need money brought to my attention any more than it already was. Also, perhaps I didn't want to compare Balzac's caffeinated productivity (92 novels!) with my similarly caffeinated lack thereof. Most of all, I think, I was afraid of compounding my anxieties about literary and personal failure with too apt a cautionary tale. Besides, the book is 700 pages long.
This summer, after half a dozen years in New York, I was curious to find out whether my fears had been justified.
One way to describe Lucien, the literary young man of the novel, would be to say he has tremendous good looks, enormous talent, two last names, little money and no character. In the provincial town of Angouljme, a married aristocrat with literary interests makes him her pet. Their close but chaste relations cause a local scandal, and force Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien to flee to Paris, where they imagine their love will flourish and the young poet will win his fame. There is also the possibility that literary glory and social success will encourage the king to grant Lucien a patent of nobility, so that he can trade in his father's plebeian surname for his mother's aristocratic one. These are the illusions with which Lucien Chardon, aspiring to be Lucien de Rupembri, leaves his hometown, along with some seed money given him by his devoted sister and best friend. The sister and friend have recently married, and are also allied in their goodness of heart and their fond hopes for "the poet," as Balzac calls him with mounting irony. Lucien will practically forget about Eve and David while he's in Paris, but the reader should remember them.
As he was in "Phre Goriot," Balzac is categorical on the need to possess at least one good suit. And no sooner has Lucien arrived in Paris than his high-born sponsor drops him essentially because he has the wrong clothes; a provincial dandy is a coarse hick in the city. Mme. de Bargeton refuses to see Lucien, and leaves him to his cold garret and his fate -- this, the woman who had claimed to love him. There's one illusion down. And the summary coldness with which Lucien is abandoned offers a sort of key to Balzac's world, where people think of one another mostly in terms of utility and convenience.
Balzac taxes Lucien with a "deplorable instability of ... character, that would as easily precipitate him into an evil way of life as into a good," and it's easy to be reminded of yourself (or myself) at 23 or 24. On the side of the good are ranged a group of young intellectuals resigned to poverty and obscurity and dedicated to the patient realization of their genius. "If you have not determination in your heart," one tells Lucien, "if you have not the patience of an angel, if, no matter how far the freaks of fortune have placed you from your goal, you are not prepared to find the way to your infinite, as turtles, wherever they may be, will make their way back to the ocean, you may as well give up at once." I'm sure I would have copied this speech into my journal had I read it in my first days in New York.
As for evil, Balzac's name for it is "journalism." Newspapers in 1822 are a growth industry if ever there was one, and churning out columns is a way to make money, which in turn is a way to support a beautiful mistress, eat out every night, and hire a carriage from which you might look down upon the titled people who snubbed you when you first arrived. Lucien's new journalist friends mock his old genius friends. Genius? "I would rather have a glass of sherry!" comes the unanswerable reply.
