Dave's Book Blog: "The Masterpiece ('L'Oeuvre)" by Emile Zola

Zola's outstanding analysis of the obsessive passion which drives artistic creation.

Claude Lantier is the talented leader of a group of young artists, set on challenging the established order and creating a revolution in art. But his insistence on perfection imperils his marriage, his family, his mental health and his ability to create any finished product.

His career is contrasted with that of his lifelong friend Pierre Sandoz, a novelist who understands the artistic struggle but nevertheless becomes increasingly successful.

Sandoz is transparently a self-portrait of Zola, which Claude is an amalgam of a number of the Impressionists, whom Zola knew intimately: Cezanne, with whom Zola grew up, Manet (Claude's first masterpiece is recognisably Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe) and others.

Claude's artistic credo is: “To see everything, paint everything. ... life as it’s lived in the streets, the life of rich and poor, in market-places, at the races, along the boulevards, and down back streets in the slums; work of every kind in full swing; human emotions revived and brought into the light of day; the peasants, the farmyards and the countryside ... Modern life in all its aspects, that's the subject!” (Ch 2)

Sandoz shares this ambition:

“Wouldn't it be wonderful to devote one's whole life to one work and put everything into it, men, animals, everything under the sun! ... the mighty universal flow of a life in which we should be a mere accident, completed, or explained by a passing dog or a stone on the roadway. The mighty All, in a word, in working order, exactly as it is, not all ups and not all downs, not too dirty and not too clean, but just as it is.” (Ch 2)

Zola's own plan for a series of novels is articulated by Sandoz: “This is the idea: to study man as he really is. not this metaphysical marionette they've made us believe he is, but the physiological human being, determined by his surroundings, motivated by the functioning of his organs. ... what is thought, in God's name, but the product of the entire body? Can they get a brain to think of by itself? What happens to the ‘nobility’ of the brain when its owner has belly-ache? ... I'm going to take a family and study each member of it, one by one, where they come from, what becomes with them, how they react to one another. Humanity in miniature, therefore, the way humanity evolves, the way it behaves.” (Ch 6)

Claude is described as “a painter remarkably gifted, but impeded by sudden, inexplicable fits of impotence.” (Ch 2) His fatal flaw is perfectionism. “He was always starting afresh, spoiling the good in order to do better.” (Ch 9)

Sandoz understands this need to make things as good as they can be. “My books, for example; I can polish and revise them as much as I like, but in the end I always despise myself for their being, in spite of my efforts, so incomplete, so untrue to life.” (Ch 12) “When I bring forth I need forceps, and even then the child always looks to me like a monster. ... From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book's no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I've writing torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very comma's begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it's finished, when it's finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that's nearly broken his back.” (Ch 9)

The difference between the two friends is that Sandoz actually does produce books while Claude (like Leonardo da Vinci) finds it almost impossible to finish a painting.

They dream of success, if not in this life, then in the judgement of history. An older painter, Bongrand, who has tasted fame and acclaim, warns them that even when one has reached the top of the tree, staying there can prove soul-destroying. “The heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point on there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. ... From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all the hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful humiliating results. ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!”

In the end, they wonder whether it was all worth it.

“I wonder ... whether it might not be better to live, and die, unknown? What a cheat for us all if this glory we talk about existed no more than the paradise promised in the catechism and which even children don't believe in nowadays! We’ve stopped believing in God, but not in our own immortality!” (Ch 9)
“Why, then, all this fuss about life if, as a man goes through it, the wind behind him sweeps away all traces of his footsteps? ... The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.” (Ch 11)
“Posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is. We console ourselves for being spurned and rejected by relying on getting a fair deal from the future, just as the faithful put up with abomination on this earth because they firmly believe in another life where everyone should have his deserts. Suppose the artist’s paradise turns out to be as non-existent as the Catholic’s, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one.” (Ch 11)
“When the Earth falls to dust in space like a withered walnut, our works won't even be a speck among the rest!” (Ch 11)

This is presented in the context of what was, for then, hyper-realism. Zola is writing about the whole man, stomach and genitals as well as brains. He tells us how about the schooldays of his heroes, about their love affairs and their pub-crawls. His realism extends to dinner-party menus: “On this occasion they decided to have some ox-tail soup, grilled mullet, undercut of beef with mushrooms, raviolis in the Italian fashion, hazel-hens from Russia, and a salad of truffles, without counting caviare and kilkis as side-dishes, a glace pralinée, and a little emerald-coloured Hungarian cheese, with fruit and pastry. As wine, some old Bordeaux claret in decanters, chambertin with the roast, and sparkling moselle at dessert, in lieu of champagne, which was voted commonplace.” (Ch 10)

The work is marked by Zola's enormous empathy for the Parisian poor, those whom Hugo called Les Miserables. This impoverishment of the creative classes reminded me of New Grub Street by George Gissing

It is both absorbing and seemingly effortless. But what most impressed me is his descriptions of Paris, especially at sunset. These descriptions sound as if Monet is writing notes for a painting, they sound exactly like the perceptions of a visual artist. I can think of no other novelist who can get so inside the mind of a painter, except Mervyn Peake who was a painter.

“What splendid sunsets they beheld during those weekly strolls. The sun accompanied them, as it were, amid the throbbing gaiety of the quays, the river life, the dancing ripples of the currents; amid the attractions of the shops, as warm as conservatories, the flowers sold by the seed merchants, and the noisy cages of the bird fanciers; amid all the din of sound and wealth of colour which ever make a city’s waterside its youthful part. As they proceeded, the ardent blaze of the western sky turned to purple on their left, above the dark line of houses, and the orb of day seemed to wait for them, falling gradually lower, slowly rolling towards the distant roofs when once they had passed the Pont Notre-Dame in front of the widening stream. In no ancient forest, on no mountain road, beyond no grassy plain will there ever be such triumphal sunsets as behind the cupola of the Institute. It is there one sees Paris retiring to rest in all her glory. At each of their walks the aspect of the conflagration changed; fresh furnaces added their glow to the crown of flames. One evening, when a shower had surprised them, the sun, showing behind the downpour, lit up the whole rain cloud, and upon their heads there fell a spray of glowing water, irradiated with pink and azure. On the days when the sky was clear, however, the sun, like a fiery ball, descended majestically in an unruffled sapphire lake; for a moment the black cupola of the Institute seemed to cut away part of it and make it look like the waning moon; then the globe assumed a violet tinge and at last became submerged in the lake, which had turned blood-red. Already, in February, the planet described a wider curve, and fell straight into the Seine, which seemed to seethe on the horizon as at the contact of red-hot iron. However, the grander scenes, the vast fairy pictures of space only blazed on cloudy evenings. Then, according to the whim of the wind, there were seas of sulphur splashing against coral reefs; there were palaces and towers, marvels of architecture, piled upon one another, burning and crumbling, and throwing torrents of lava from their many gaps; or else the orb which had disappeared, hidden by a veil of clouds, suddenly transpierced that veil with such a press of light that shafts of sparks shot forth from one horizon to the other, showing as plainly as a volley of golden arrows. And then the twilight fell, and they said good-bye to each other, while their eyes were still full of the final dazzlement.” (Ch 4)
“Amid the December snows he went and stood for four hours a day behind the heights of Montmartre, at the corner of a patch of waste land: as a background some miserable, low, tumble-down buildings, dominated by factory chimneys, in the foreground, he set a pair of ragged urchins, a boy and a girl, devouring stolen apple in the snow” (Ch 8)
“It was a dazzling sunset, finer than they had ever seen, a slow descent through tiny clouds which gradually turned into a trellis of purple with molten gold pouring through every mesh.” (Ch 8)
“The tilted chess-board of diminutive roof-tops.” (Ch 8)
“The Cité rose up before him, between the two arms of the river, at all hours and in all weather. After a late fall of snow he beheld it wrapped in ermine, standing above mud-coloured water, against a light slatey sky. On the first sunshiny days he saw it cleanse itself of everything that was wintry and put on an aspect of youth, when verdure sprouted from the lofty trees which rose from the ground below the bridge. He saw it, too, on a somewhat misty day recede to a distance and almost evaporate, delicate and quivering, like a fairy palace. Then, again, there were pelting rains, which submerged it, hid it as with a huge curtain drawn from the sky to the earth; storms, with lightning flashes which lent it a tawny hue, the opaque light of some cut-throat place half destroyed by the fall of the huge copper-coloured clouds; and there were winds that swept over it tempestuously, sharpening its angles and making it look hard, bare, and beaten against the pale blue sky. Then, again, when the sunbeams broke into dust amidst the vapours of the Seine, it appeared steeped in diffused brightness, without a shadow about it, lighted up equally on every side, and looking as charmingly delicate as a cut gem set in fine gold. He insisted on beholding it when the sun was rising and transpiercing the morning mists, when the Quai de l’Horloge flushes and the Quai des Orfèvres remains wrapt in gloom; when, up in the pink sky, it is already full of life, with the bright awakening of its towers and spires, while night, similar to a falling cloak, slides slowly from its lower buildings. He beheld it also at noon, when the sunrays fall on it vertically, when a crude glare bites into it, and it becomes discoloured and mute like a dead city, retaining nought but the life of heat, the quiver that darts over its distant housetops. He beheld it, moreover, beneath the setting sun, surrendering itself to the night which was slowly rising from the river, with the salient edges of its buildings still fringed with a glow as of embers, and with final conflagrations rekindling in its windows, from whose panes leapt tongue-like flashes.” (Ch 9)
“It was a winter’s night, with a misty sky of sooty blackness, and was rendered extremely cold by a sharp wind blowing from the west. Paris, lighted up, had gone to sleep, showing no signs of life save such as attached to the gas-jets, those specks which scintillated and grew smaller and smaller in the distance till they seemed but so much starry dust. The quays stretched away showing double rows of those luminous beads whose reverberation glimmered on the nearer frontages. On the left were the houses of the Quai du Louvre, on the right the two wings of the Institute, confused masses of monuments and buildings, which became lost to view in the darkening gloom, studded with sparks. Then between those cordons of burners, extending as far as the eye could reach, the bridges stretched bars of lights, ever slighter and slighter, each formed of a train of spangles, grouped together and seemingly hanging in mid-air. And in the Seine there shone the nocturnal splendour of the animated water of cities; each gas-jet there cast a reflection of its flame, like the nucleus of a comet, extending into a tail. The nearer ones, mingling together, set the current on fire with broad, regular, symmetrical fans of light, glowing like live embers, while the more distant ones, seen under the bridges, were but little motionless sparks of fire. But the large burning tails appeared to be animated, they waggled as they spread out, all black and gold, with a constant twirling of scales, in which one divined the flow of the water. The whole Seine was lighted up by them, as if some fête were being given in its depths—some mysterious, fairy-like entertainment, at which couples were waltzing beneath the river’s red-flashing window-panes. High above those fires, above the starry quays, the sky, in which not a planet was visible, showed a ruddy mass of vapour, that warm, phosphorescent exhalation which every night, above the sleep of the city, seems to set the crater of a volcano.” Ch 11)

Selected quotes:

“The girl herself was already forgotten in the thrill of seeing how the snowy whiteness of her breasts lit up the delicate amber of her shoulders.” (Ch 1)
“She had never seen painting like it, so rugged, so harsh, so violent in its colouring; it shocked her like a burst of foul language bawled out from the steps of a gin-shop.” (Ch 1)
“This was how they had lived from the time they were fourteen, burning with enthusiasm for art and literature, isolated in their remote province amid the dreary philistinism of a small town.” (Ch 2)
“The lilacs she had sent him that morning embalmed the evening air with their perfume, and on the floor flecks of gilt from the picture-frame caught the last of the daylight and shone out like a galaxy of stars.” (Ch 5)
“The urge to create ran away with his fingers, which meant that whenever he was working on one picture his mind was already at work on the next, so that his one remaining desire was to finish the task in hand as quickly as possible, as he felt his original enthusiasm ebbing away.” (Ch 8)
“From a self-centred young man he had become an admirable father, with one great passion burning in his heart, with only one desire: to make his children's life worth living.” (Ch 10)
“Happiness, surely, which some people said was unattainable, meant a few well-tried friendships and a haven of homely affection!” (Ch 11)