a self-formed bower

Zofloya, like – all, I think: all? – the other British books I've read from the same period, regards each house as if it is a solidly established and perpetual fact of life no matter what role it plays in the story. It might function as a prison, a nice home, a place of refuge, whatever; but there they are, these immobile and effective containment objects with the human pellets flying to or from their confines. The house is empirical yet unconscious and the pellets struggle with their own agency. Richardson's Clarissa is the story of people changing houses. Charlotte Dacre's Victoria, escaping from an emprisoning house, seeks a city. Being "firm-minded" she is able to spend one night in the woods when she finds a room-substitute, "a self-formed bower," growing from a wall-substitute, a hedge. I notice this because the Oliver house in Hamsun's Pump is affected by whims. There is the question of whether it might be taken away from the family at any moment if Lawyer Fredriksen feels like it. Oliver is inspired to blackmail the lawyer, which makes him feel pleased. He has found a practical use for his own cuckolding; it is smart. Any small opportunity to exercise his independence can bolster him. The smallness or perverseness of the opportunity is discovered by Hamsun here as elsewhere; it takes almost nothing to make someone proud or angry, nothing; the forces in the spiritual, emotional, or invisible world and the physical world do not match in his book; and they cannot measure one another. 

This is an idea the author tests again and again throughout his oeuvre: yes, it's true here, yes it's true there as well, and now it's true again: it's outrageous, Hamsun never gets over it – look at this, he says, peeking at you to see if you get it. (I mean that he will tell you about Oliver's triumph as if with a straight face, while you think … yes: as Hamsun must know you do … but you won't catch me saying so, he tells you by implication, sharing the same kind of stupid cunning as his characters -- their pointless evasiveness …)

He wrote endlessly about smallness; he enlarged himself on smallness. Hunger is literally nothing. 

Nowhere do you see the house-uncertainty better than in two of the doors, which are only in Oliver's possession because he is relying on the real door-owner to feel too ashamed to demand his property back from a one-legged man. Oliver sells the doors to someone else; he's called out, he gets them back; he sulks over them; these doors keep flying in and out of the structure.

If you have plans to change yourself, as Fredriksen does, then someone else viewing it from their own angle will observe an opportunity for their cunning. That is what your plans look like to them. (In this respect, a Norwegian Balzacian.)

smiling at the dead ashes of their fires

Little by little the mass of half-dead humanity became so dense, so deaf, so torpid – or perhaps it should be said so happy – that Marshal Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through this forest of men, so as to cross the Beresina with the five thousand heroes whom he was lending to the Emperor. The miserable creatures preferred to be trampled and crushed to death rather than stir from their places, and died without a sound, smiling at the dead ashes of their fires, forgetful of France.

(Honoré de Balzac, Farewell, 1830, tr Ellen Marriage)



In the mean-time, however, he fitted up a room in a cottage near the new building, and by degrees made little improvements in the cottage till it is become so comfortable that though the large house is finished, he has no wish to remove, and seems, indeed, to have no motive, as the Cottage is large enough to accommodate himself and his mother and sister and two or three friends, and as they are all pleased with the snugness and comfort of their present modest dwelling – indeed, he often regrets that he built the larger house …

(Dorothy Wordsworth, Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth: a Selection, 1985, ed. Alan G. Hill; from a letter to Lady Beaumont sent on Thursday, December 28th, 1809)

homage to those who insist on being found

The characters who can see that Andoche Finot is “the evident son of a hat-maker“ don’t need him to know anything about hats. If he had been the son of a shoe-maker then nothing would have had to change in the book besides the word “hat,” and the son of a table-maker or a butcher would have done equally well because the others don’t need him to know about tables or meat. “Son of a perfumer” would have been a problem since there are already people in the book working on perfumes and then Balzac would have had to align him with the existing perfume-universe in some way, which would have been a waste of time, the plot not needing another perfume person. It already has more than the average number of perfumers for a work of fiction. You can also say that it has more than the average number of sons of hat-makers, because most books have none. There is a certain character in the same author's Sarrasine, 1830, who, if he had been able to look “from head to foot” like precisely what he was, would have made it impossible for Balzac to write the story. As I am reading the introduction by Susan Bernofsky and Christine Burgin to the recent translation of Robert Walser’s essays about art I learn that the writer once managed to get himself fired from a secretarial position by sending “highly inappropriate business letters” to clients of the Berliner Secession. Immediately I assume that he found it essential. The displaced and abandoned title character in Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, 1832, does not need people to see that he is Colonel Chabert so much as he needs them to see that he is not someone who would pretend to be Colonel Chabert. There is one person who recognised him flawlessly and against her own desires but she is also unfortunately the human being who most benefits from him not being Colonel Chabert, and so she undermines him, knowing what he is but not wanting anyone else to know. Several theatre-workers in Sarrasine prefer to keep a certain true identity secret too, for their own enrichment -- emotional rather than financial: now that they have caused the sculptor Ernest-Jean Sarrasine to think that he is something that he is not, they are able to laugh and nourish themselves on that fun misapprehension. Chabert’s wife likewise derives satisfaction from her husband not being himself. The knowledge that Finot sends shining out of his appearance is not harmful to him because no one in The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau is going to cripple a man with the information that his father makes hats. But he is not going to benefit from it either. So his ability to look like the son of a hat-maker is not useful to him in any way that the reader can see. The crowd of characters in other Balzac books who travel from the provinces to the city because they want to be successful and envied do not want people to look at them and know that they are the sons of villager individuals. Think that I am the offspring of someone other than my parents: that is their wish and their hope. If Finot had been one of those characters then his skill would have been a liability that he would have had to overcome by being rich. “No one likes to pay homage to those who insist on being found noteworthy,” writes Walser in his essay on Manet’s Olympia, but money is strong, says Balzac, as he makes his characters wrestle the strongman, money. Some of them will lose the fight voluntarily. The author is thrilled by those freaks. César Birotteau himself wants to pay his debts honestly. His wife and daughter are the same way; his impoverishment has made them act out what they are, says Balzac: they are quiet, resolute, strong, upright, attractive, etc. Ferdinand du Tillet, the one who has decided to destroy César by taking away his livelihood, is being true to himself when he behaves cruelly, we are told; he is a destructive, vindictive person. But he is not happy at the end, even though he has been himself. People respect this brave Birotteau. Du Tillet is uneasy. Meanwhile Colonel Chabert realises that he has the opportunity to resume his identity but he is not willing to put up with the personal warfare he will have to go through to get it. He is enraged; he produces a dramatic spasm, he gives up on the possibility of money. His creator is deeply moved by what he has done. Ernest-Jean Sarrasine, seeing that he is thwarted and realising that he is not able to be what he thought he was, threatens to commit murder, and is murdered. Chabert dies, Birotteau dies, Finot leaves the story one way or another; Walser died in the snow. It is safer to be one of the series of ventriloquists that Charles Dickens imagined at subsequent Derby Days in the Epsom article he co-authored for Household Words in 1851.* They had an eternal appearance, “the sickly-looking ventriloquist with an anxious face (and always with a wife in a shawl) teaches the alphabet to the puppet pupil, whom he takes out of his pocket.” He doesn’t have to be the same individual every time, only the same evident self.


* Reprinted in Charles Dickens' Uncollected Writings from Household Words 1850 - 1859, vol. I, 1969, ed. Harry Stone

arms, legs, bones, and other trash

“Furthermore, the mutilated bodies of Jacob Donner, Samuel Shoemaker, Joseph Reinhardt, Antoine, and James Smith were still unburied and scattered around the tents and Tamsen was not of a mind to clear up the mess.”

“Mutilated body parts of arms, legs, bones, and other trash were prevalent in the cabins and on the grounds, but Eddy and Foster had just been through their own tragedy, and refused to clean up the mess.”

Richard F. Kaufman’s Saving the Donner Party: and Forlorn Hope, 2014

Who expected Tamsen Donner to tidy mangled corpses? Who were William Eddy and Charles Foster defying? “Mess” and “_____ up” were both incongruous, as were the words “from head to toe the evident son of a hat-maker” in a sentence from Balzac’s Rise and Fall of César Birotteau, 1837, tr. Katherine Wormeley. “A stout, chubby-faced fellow of medium height, from head to foot the evident son of a hat-maker, with round features whose shrewdness was hidden under a restrained and subdued manner, suddenly appeared,” he says, without telling you what might have made the man look distinctly “from head to toe” like something as totally precise as the son of a hat-maker. The son of a hat-maker is mystical here: what does it do to signal its presence? How does it overcome and supersede the ordinary qualities that Balzac actually lists? He has decided without anything else that this character not only is “Andoche Finot, son of a hat-maker in the Rue du Coq“ but also phenomenally resembles himself. Finot is dazzling, like the sun seen in its idea. All characters could be introduced like that in all books. For a moment the imaginary figure is in his pure form, untouched by story, and it is downhill from here. In Kaufman the people are impurified, they are not what they are, they are as petty as someone who won't pick up their socks; they are detached or split, they are in more than one place. “One does not often see a lamp and an angel united in the same body,” writes Lautreamont, tr. Guy Wernham, Les Chants de Maldoror, 1868, as the lamp in a sentence develops an angel’s wings and torso. Maldoror licks the angel’s face until the skin is gangrenous. The incongruity here is in the word “often.”

wind that flew above the sea

While the tow-boat, in which Christophe now embarked floated, impelled by a light east wind, down the river Loire the famous cardinal de Lorraine, and his brother the second Duc de Guise, one of the greatest warriors of those days, were contemplating, like eagles perched on a rocky summit, their present situation, and looking prudently about them before striking the great blow by which they intended to kill the Reform in France at Amboise – an attempt recorded twelve years later in Paris, August 24, 1572, on the feast of Saint-Bartholemew.

Catherine de' Medici: the Calvinist Martyr, 1828, by Honoré de Balzac, tr. Katharine Prescott Wormeley



Yes, that was what he was looking at, the wind. The wind that had escaped to the sea, an entire shore of wind that flew above the sea.

Yann Andréa Steiner, 1992, by Marguerite Duras, tr. Barbara Bray

ebb and flood

So, say Paolo is allowed to talk, he talks so much he becomes a first person narrator, he feels independent, he doesn't want to be a servant any more, he leaves the country estate where the married couple employs him, those two, Vivaldi and Ellena, the former protagonists whose prominence he has usurped, it's the 1800s, democracy is in the air, he goes to the city, where, in Radcliffe, characters are corrupted, and he is still a Radcliffe character, in spite of this new first-person narration technique, whose seeing eye observes smart-mouthed city-people summing up their fellows in a businesslike and greedy way, they're well-dressed, he's dressed like a clod, he realises that he has spent years being treated like a moron, he remembers himself prancing around with the peasants, shouting, "O giorno felice!" and he is flooded with shame, so much shame that he becomes the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, "I'm a sick man," he says, "a mean man. I think there's something wrong with my liver," but he has never been sick before, living in the countryside of a Radcliffe book where good health is everywhere, and yet now he's in the city, he is suffering, he has joined the stream of human beings from country to city, the movement of the nineteenth century, he roams through Balzac's city, "a terrible desert," he feels thirsty; through Baudelaire's' city "time to get drunk", he buys champagne; through the city of Cesário Verde, "The gas from the streetlamps makes me queasy," he reels, his head swims, the street rolls like a wave; through James Thomson's city, "The mighty river flowing dark and deep, / With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides / Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep, / Is named the River of the Suicides," then plunges into the cold water, is hauled out downstream by Gaffer Hexam, who, looming, bundled in clothes, frisks his pockets and reminds him of a monk, and the monks at home, Paolo recalls, could say anything they liked, due to their habit of gliding (always gliding) up to his old master Vivaldi under a ruined archway and murmuring threats, and there, he muses, is a set of people who knew how to represent themselves verbally with minimum effort, thinking this as the boatman drops him again, he drifts through the mud to the bottom of the river, he is drowned.

with whom we had in idea mingled

Ann Radcliffe's romantic country landscape, crags, cliffs, always "varied" ("the varied landscape, rich with wood," "the varied features of the landscape amused her fancy," "a scenery of varied and romantic beauty," "a sweep of sea and land, so varied," "its varied margin sprinkled with villas") -- convert this into brick and this is an aspect of Balzac's city, his Paris, also varied, cliffed, cragged; and the city's devotees have their romantic aesthetic reaction to its pits and details: it is their sublime, but at the same time it is filthy, "not having one single clean corner." And Radcliffe's landscapes are terrible, large, stern sometimes, and melancholy on occasions.

For the length of the first page in Balzac's History of the Thirteen I thought that the characters in the Thirteen gang, if they switched books, would never manage to be Radcliffe villains, even though they were "versed in guile," "never having trembled before public authority, the public hangman, or even innocence itself" -- which is villainous, but they were too self-controlled, I thought, "endowed with sufficient energy to remain faithful to a single purpose," where her villains are unrestrained; the evil Marquis in The Romance of the Forest has deliberately decided to unrestrain himself. He makes a speech praising lack of restraint; he has probably been reading Rousseau, who died in 1778, two decades before Romance was published. The natural human is free, etc, kills enemies when he likes, etc, think of the wonderful Indians in distant America, etc, and while we're on the subject does La Motte happen to have a vial of poison? La Motte does not. Poison is an expediency he thinks not of. Meanwhile good Clara is resisting her lute. "I am determined not to touch it at all this day. I will prove that I am able to control my inclinations when I see it is necessary so to do." But La Motte has been in the city, he has been gambling, he is weak, he is in debt, he couldn't control his inclinations in front of the card table, now he can't control them in front of the Marquis, who, rich, keeps the impoverished man under his thumb, where he makes readers so angry that they refer to him as Asshole in blue pen on the one hundred and twenty-fifth page of my copy of the book, price, one dollar at the local library bookshop.

I volunteer there regularly, and every time I do I meet the same man, who tells me what his mother said to him before she died, which was, "Don't rush," though last time I was so busy that he never had time to say anything except, "How much are the National Geographics?"

Balzac mentions Radcliffe, he seems to be impressed by her ("Since the death of Napoleon, an accident concerning which the author should still preserve silence, has dissolved the bonds of this life, as secret and curious, as the darkest of the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe"), but the History continues, he disagrees with her ideas about goodness, he doesn't see a point in restraint (turn away from Romance and the fragile idea of the angelic heroine Adeline dissolves, its body was made of the author's steadiness), he is excited when "their long repressed urges had become inescapable" -- the Thirteen really are Radcliffe villains -- and he goes through complicated exasperations over the cherishable Auguste de Maulincour whose grandmother has brought him up with the character of a Radcliffe protagonist, as previously discussed: see older posts below.

At one point, like her, he brings up Ossian, but he is placing that representative of melancholy, myth, mood lighting, etc, in the conversation of a shop assistant who wants a customer to put black feathers in her hat to make it look mysterious. The gang of Thirteen is Gothic in itself, baffling, supernatural, ferocious, but the Gothic is also a tool for an advertisement for there's nothing untouchable in Balzac, even the genre he loves can be violated, he does it himself, thrilled, language rising, really excited when he points out that love "needs gold too" -- this would be pollution in Radcliffe's Forest; she would not have a sense of thrill or humour but he is moved. He is excited by outrage, even his own outrage, he has a character in Father Goriot say that people, for money, will fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot, a sentence quoted on the jacket flap of my copy of Christina Stead's House of all Nations. "Balzac is the one writer that I feel as a man," she wrote to her love William Blake, "every word he wrote seems to be spoken in my ear."

Balzac's point of view is represented by one of Radcliffe's predecessors, another Gothic author, Sophia Lee, in her 1783 book, The Recess.

We were delighted with a playful group of fawns and deer, with whom we longed to frolic, and stole through Mrs Marlow's chamber into the park, by a passage she had pointed out to us the day before. What was our surprize when we saw those with whom we had in idea mingled, were large fierce creatures, and that had they not run from us, we must from them; that every bird feared its natural protector, and that men lived in continual warfare with every living thing in creation, even to his own species!

to admit a view

Ann Radcliffe's calm tone in Romance of the Forest is the voice of the person who can see differences from a distance: she surveys each state clearly with her voice, the villain's badness is evident, the heroine is detectably good, and La Motte enters and exits obvious states of goodness and badness. La Motte's progress through the story is unique, lone twitch, he moves like a coin being flipped. Which side will be facing upwards when the end arrives? The decision to end the book won't be his. It will belong to the characters who move directly. He probably suspects it, powerless man, if characters can suspect anything, which they can't, but it would explain his moodiness if they could. "Why are you like that, La Motte? Why are you sneaky and grouchy and wayward?" "Because I know I have no power in this book, I'm going to be everybody's pet idiot, and readers will write abusive pen notes next to my name when all I'm trying to do is keep myself viable to the end of the chapter." "All right, that makes absolute sense."

If Lucien de Rubempré could separate out his states and foresee the consequences as clearly as Hazlitt, he would be happier.

Lucien would have been happier if he'd stayed home in his village, says Balzac, and Ann Radcliffe agrees, yes, innocence should stay away from the cities. "Here is the village!" indicates an honest servant at the end of Forest. "God bless! It is worth a million such places as Paris." Rustic dances forthwith and the protagonists retire to a chateau. "Here, nature was suffered to sport in all her beautiful luxuriance, except where here, and there, the hand of art formed the foliage to admit a view of the blue waters of the lake, with the white sail that glided by, or of the distant mountains." Adeline the virtuous heroine from Forest appears in Balzac's History of the Thirteen, where he is a man and his name is Auguste de Maulincour. Auguste was raised by his grandmother. "She transmitted all her own delicacy of feeling to him and made a timid man of him and apparently a very stupid one. His sensibility was preserved intact, was not blunted by contact with the world and remained so chaste, so vulnerable that he was acutely offended by actions and maxims to which mundane society attached no importance."

This is Adeline through other eyes, an intact sensitivity, chaste and "acutely offended" in exactly that way.

Misguided, easily outraged, Auguste becomes suspicious of a married woman; he spies on her, he wants to tell; he fills the role of Iago, suggests the translator Herbert J. Hunt in the introduction, he is a suspicion-spreader: Iago guileless. (Graham Robb, in his Balzac: a Biography, says that Hunt is "one of [Balzac's] most scrupulous translators," and they are alike, Robb and Hunt, they are both opinionated, they are both scrupulous, and they both admonish less scrupulous people. Hunt's footnotes and Robb's biography of (even more than the Balzac one) Victor Hugo have a similar rigorous critical tone, which Robb has found a word for, here, where he comments on Hunt: this behaviour is "scrupulous.")

But this Iago's Desdemona's father is a member of the untouchable Thirteen and he attacks Auguste in revenge, with hair-poison. Ann Radcliffe is right, her kind of innocence should stay out of the cities, it will be destroyed there, or impurified, it won't be able to live in the protagonist any more, it will have to migrate. If Adeline-innocence wants to survive then it should put its hands on the steering wheel of its vehicle-human and drive that body away.

And Hazlitt is right, presume: the state of fairy innocence he has described will be ruined too, if he goes backstage, he will have seen "the half-lighted candles stuck against the bare walls" "this insight into secrets I am not bound to know" but I still think, in spite of Lucien, that whatever will replace it might not be worse; in Dickens it is not worse, it gave him the Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby.

But we do not all have the same character, Hazlitt points out to me: I am not Dickens. "The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress," he writes, and he might also (following that idea) have thought that other mysteries should not be penetrated, women's clothing for instance (since he is talking about mistresses and undressing), but nothing is alien to Balzac, and so when he wants to put Madame de Bargaton's intelligence and skill in perspective for us in Lost Illusions he can tell us how quickly she learnt to wear a hat, and how challenging it is, this hat-wearing. "There is an indefinable art in wearing a hat: wear it too far back, and it gives you a bold expression; too far forward, it has a sinister air; too far to the side, it gives you a jaunty look; but well-dressed women can put a hat on just as they like, and yet it will always look right. Mme de Bargaton had instantly mastered that curious problem."

I am not Balzac either, says Hazlitt.

There might have been some compensation for you, I say to him, if you had seen how Cato painted, or how Caesar combed, and you might have written another essay afterwards: "There is an indefinable art in brushing hair. This is how Caesar mastered that curious problem." No, replies Hazlitt. I would not. Now go and pester La Motte, he's used to it.

that ludicrous medley of things

Charles Dickens does not conserve and Balzac does not conserve, they stare, they hunt, they describe, Dickens goes backstage with the actors, Balzac goes backstage in Paris, which city is his stage; and he goes up stairs, into tenements, looks around; he divulges everybody's secrets. "For the devotees," he says in Herbert J. Hunt's translation of History of the Thirteen, "Paris is sad or gay, ugly or beautiful, living or dead; for them Paris is a sentient being; every individual, every bit of a house is a lobe in the cellular tissue of that great harlot whose head, heart and unpredictable behaviour are perfectly familiar to them." It's wonderful to be a devotee and let's go up these stairs where we'll see a poor woman's secret boudoir, "a truly Parisian glory-hole" with a pug dog and a chicken.

Hazlitt pictures a barrier between those things he knows and the things he doesn't, or not a barrier but he sees a pair of different states, and there are conditions he would have to fill to pass from one to the other -- he doesn't want to pass -- he doesn't want to meet the actors in their dressing rooms, he doesn't want to be Lucien de Rubempré in Balzac's Lost Illusions: "At a sign from Lousteau, the doorkeeper of the orchestra took a little key and opened a door, concealed in the thickness of the wall. Lucien followed his friend, and passed suddenly from the brightly lit corridor into the dark hole that, in nearly all theatres, leads from the house to the wings" where he looks at "all that ludicrous medley of things, sordid, dirty, hideous, and gaudy" "the scenery, hideous when seen close up, the actors with their make-up and their extraordinary costumes, made of such coarse material, the scene-shifters in greasy overalls."

The original innocence is precarious, Lucien loses it so simply, by walking through a door after his friend, by being curious, and by being human, by having eyes, he never, like Hazlitt, identifies a state and plans to remain there; Lucien wants to prosper, and Lousteau has promised to introduce him to people -- he had no idea that Hazlitt's two states existed until he had left one and crossed into the other. If you can't see a danger then you can't say no. If you told me that Hazlitt stayed innocent of the backstage area until he died then I would believe you easily. But Lucien never can measure the experiences in front of him, even, in a different area of the book when someone in the know is telling him that they will be terrible. Don't do that, they say, I did it and it was the worst mistake of my life, I'm doing it right now and it's a disaster, whatever you do, don't do that, and he does it.

He wants to prosper, in other words he wants to change, and he changes; every new state sucks him in: love with one kind of woman, love with another kind of woman, friendship with idealists, friendship with cynics, Balzac presents him with a chain of alterations and he goes naturally into each one, foreseeing an advantage every time, in the act of change; the transitional period that Hazlitt fears, lures him on, perhaps it lured Hazlitt too, therefore the fear.

Journalism for example, says one of Lucien's friends: don't go into journalism, it will destroy you, trust me, I've seen that world. Journalism? He goes into journalism. Change is corruption, says the author. Change is always worse, says Balzac. But change excites him, paradox excites him, grotesque pawnbrokers excite him, his language becomes extravagant, he sounds thrilled -- violation excites him, if you have to choose a word -- expectations being violated, or ideals being violated -- everything that makes Lucien's life more difficult, Balzac likes.

But Ann Radcliffe is never excited by anything she has said she is against.

we love him, with a little dash of irony

Christina Stead didn't like Proust. "Dull Proust," she called him in a letter to her lover Bill Blake, who had written to her about some authors that he liked and didn't like, mentioning Joyce, Stendhal, Proust, and Balzac. "Everyone is mad about that dull Proust. Why? Old Balzac I suppose is one of my masters, I think more or less like him (at times -- though in César Birotteau there are some pages so exactly like yourself, when you are not too serious and a bit careless and this is when Balzac is rushing along -- that I open my eyes in amazement, have to laugh. Just exactly like, word for word.)"

"To love Balzac!" wrote Proust, forty years earlier (translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner). "Sainte-Beauve, who was so fond of defining what it meant to love someone, would have had his work cut out for him here. For with the other novelists, one loves them in submitting oneself to them; one receives the truth from a Tolstoi as from someone of greater scope and stature to oneself. With Balzac, we know all his vulgarities, and at first were often repelled by them; then we began to love him, then we smiled at all those sillinesses which are so typical of him; we love him, with a little dash of irony mixed in our affection; we know his aberrations, his shabby little tricks, and because they are so like him we love them."

A character in Anita Brookner's A Start in Life: "Most women are too young for Balzac."