Pages from the Goncourt Journal
“Ever since the world began, the only memoirs of any interest have been written by 'indiscreet individuals,'” Edmond de Goncourt noted. “And my only crime is to be still alive twenty years after they were written.”
He got that half-right. Indiscretion is the secret sauce of memoir. But de Goncourt’s sin was not to be alive to hear the howls of protest from his victims and their allies --- it was that he and his brother Jules savaged their friends and enemies with equal glee. And that’s the first great attraction of this edited edition of one of the greatest journals in all of literature: It's really bitchy.
It's really bitchy in large part because the Goncourt brothers had an extremely high opinion of themselves. In 1851, they published their first novel. Their self-review: “It contains in embryo every aspect of our talent and every colour on our palette.” Alas, their timing was terrible; Bonaparte had just dissolved the National Assembly and declared himself Napoleon III, dictator of France. From their first diary entry: “What a time it [our novel] chose to appear! A symphony of words and ideas in the middle of that scramble for office.”
For social beings, the Goncourts could be profoundly anti-social. They loathed half the world on principle --- “Woman is the animal that lives inside a silk dress” --- and periodically cut themselves off from the Paris literary scene: “We had given away our old evening clothes and had no new ones made, so as to be unable to go anywhere. No women, no pleasures, no amusements: just unceasing toil.” By 1857, they report, “No friends, no connections, every door shut in our face, and all money spent on books.”
Don’t be fooled. They knew everyone: Flaubert, de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Degas, Rodin, Baudelaire, George Sand, Turgenev. There are regular dinners, and, after, the Goncourts go home and scribble.
Flaubert tells them how he lives without a woman: “I just lie face down and during the night…it's infallible.”
Hugo, they write, “had a notebook in which he writes down what he has just said.”
One good thing about their deep skepticism about some of the greatest writers in French literature --- when they’re at their cattiest, they offer unvarnished opinions that take us much closer to understanding the greats than a lot of more reasoned analysis. Here they are, on the subject of the “hidden sides” of their dear friend, Gustave Flaubert: “He quietly pushes himself forward, establishes relations with important people, creates a network of useful acquaintances, all the while pretending to be independent, lazy, and fond of solitude.” And they are just as cutting when they take the long view. Voltaire, they observe, “spent his life taking an interest in something --- himself.”
“Genius is the talent of a dead man,” they said. Not quite. The Goncourts believed they possessed it --- and in abundance. But the unanimity of thought which made theirs such a successful collaboration didn’t pay off. All told, they wrote about 30-odd plays, novels and books of criticism. None has survived them.
The literary immortality of the Goncourt brothers comes, instead, from the writing they threw off easily and without concern for style --- these journals. The extreme realism of their novels had won them no friends and few readers. But the extreme realism --- okay, subjective realism --- of their table talk gives us a picture of Paris in the middle of the 19th century that is fresh, original, acutely observed. Their masterpiece is, in essence, a gossip column.
--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com
