Pariah and Prophet

ZOLA AND HIS TIME--Matthew Josephson--Macaulay ($5).

There was an evening in Paris in the '70s when the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, went backstage at the Varietes. He was led through a gloomy cavern of stained canvas, ropes, flaring lamps. The air was pungent, draughty, filled with the cloying scent of women doused with violent perfumes. The blond prince entered the dressing room of the leading lady, a famed courtesan. She greeted him with coy, voluptuous respect, in tantalizing deshabille. The little dressing room was filled with starchy gentlemen, shouting amid the gay popping of corks. To one side stood a myopic, corpulent, bearded figure. His squinting eyes turned ceaselessly, his nostrils twitched. He was Emile Zola, novelist. He had persuaded Ludovic Halevy, boulevardier & librettist, to bring him there. The Prince stared at the bosom and hips of his hostess. Emile Zola stared also, fixed her image in his mind. Later he would transfer it into words. That night the Prince escorted the actress from the theatre. But Zola returned to the portfolio of notes for his next novel, Nana, a saga of sensuality.

The incident is typical of Zola. For the 20 novels of his Rougon-Macquart series he investigated every form of humanity from gigolo to genius. His notebooks fattened with vicarious experiences. Nana's obscene smiles were for his pages, not for him. Called by the public Dr. Filth, the slimy Giant, he was in reality a clinical analyst of living. His private life was of astounding purity. His livelihood was labor, his distraction more labor.

Emile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, but spent his boyhood in Aix. He was the son of an Italian engineer and a rugged French country maid. His father had a scheme to water the dried-up fountains of Aix. But he died in the midst of this first promising project and his wife and heir were legally deprived of financial reward. Up to Paris went young Zola, his imagination glittering with the romanticism of Alfred de Musset. He lived a Bohemian life, indolent, unspeakably shabby, a starveling writing silly verses. He took a harlot to live with him, thus ending his long virginity which was to be a jibe in later salons. He became a publisher's clerk, worked ten hours a day. Nauseated with romanticism, he wrote a thousand words daily, part of a projected scheme of novels which would neither gild lilies nor avoid dung. Naturalism was being born. Literature should be scientifically aware of inheritance & environment. He would make his mellifluous name resound on the boulevards, the back alleys.

More and more novels. More and more notoriety. More and more money. The Belly of Paris captured the public. Zola grew fatter, became a bluff, boorish figure in cafe & salon life. People revolted at Naturalism but read it. Staunchly its founder proceeded, one thousand words a day.

L'Assomoir (1877) sold 100,000 copies. This drab vignette of lowly Parisian life rooted naturalism in the literary soil. Zola married an intelligent, passionate woman. He met weekly with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgeniev. He was famed, fat crammed with food. He worked incessantly -- news articles, plays, novels. His villa at Medan. outside Paris, grew in bulk and reputation. Its owner was excoriated, saluted, accused, defended. Madame Zola remained childless.

As the Rougon-Macquart series drew to a close, Zola's paunch troubled him. He increased drinking at meals, lost 30 pounds in three weeks. Daudet failed to recognize him on the street. Zola took his handsome dignified servant, Jeanne Rozerot, as a mistress. At the age of 49 he begat a daughter, begat a son a few years later. This belated parenthood altered the man. The steely scientist became messianic. Fecundity and progeny made him regard the future of his children and, relatively, of the race. He wrote books of prophecy and humanistic policy.

Then in a wave of Catholicism and anti-semitism Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason to the French army, was incarcerated on Devil's Island. In the third year of his imprisonment the verdict began to create protest. Out of his happy, latter-day quiet came Zola, white hot with zeal for Dreyfus' acquittal. The army and courts were proudly, rottenly impregnable. Zola publicly diagnosed the case, publicly accused the dignitaries involved, was tried and condemned to prison for a year. The frenzied mob was upon him and his advisors (among them Georges Clemenceau) thought it better for him to leave. He escaped, harried by conscience, to England. Two years later his accusations were proved correct. Suicide was epidemic in the high councils of France. Zola returned. Among all just people he was a public idol.

On the night of Sept. 28, 1902, Zola and his wife retired early, shut their door and all their windows. A fire was dying in the grate. The chimney was stopped up. Through the night the room filled with carbon monoxide. Mme. Zola almost perished. Emile Zola died of asphyxiation.

The Significance. Emile Zola's triumphant career resulted from his need for fame. Failure was unthinkable, not so much for its own sake, but for the restless sense of frustration it caused. Thus he completed 20 naturalistic novels, seven philosophic novels, countless newspaper articles, several plays, considerable juvenilia. In the span of his life Naturalism was initiated, scorned, accepted, apotheosized, suspected, deserted. Naturalism is, of course, only an easy appellation for an attitude. But its result in Zola is not defined by that word. Try as he did to be completely dispassionate, his works are suffused with strong, personal, poetic rhythm and color. Zola is greater than vague Naturalism. He includes it, transcends it with.sharp, savory revelations of life.

The Author. Matthew Josephson has been affiliated with left-wing poetry pamphlets (Broom, Secession, The Little Review). But for the past two years he has lost himself in the pursuit of Zola. His exposition has great dramatic momentum, his documentation is miraculously complete. This is a magnificent biography which relies on a vast harvesting and dynamic marshalling of facts and testimony, rather than the brilliant, suppositious and dubious psychologizing which is at once the glamor and fault of Strachey, Guedalla and Ludwig.