Hammering Zola
Zola's reception in the UK was very mixed during the nineteenth century. Known for a frank and explicit form of realism known as Naturalism, he first became famous in France during 1877 for his novel L'Assommoir which describes the lives of a working class family, Gervaise Macquart and her husband, Coupeau in one of the poorer districts of Paris. Although Coupeau rescues Gervaise from an abusive previous relationship, he turns to drink after an accident at work and they both descend into alcoholism and poverty. The title of the book, derives from a verb meaning 'to stun': it's a familiar name for small drinking establishments where workers hang out and 'get hammered'.
Zola would later absorb L'Assommoir into an ambitious project to capture all aspects of social life in nineteenth-century France (the Rougeon-Marquart novels). His writing brings a sociologist's eye to the language and material details of his characters' lives. Although Zola is known as a novelist, as Anthony Cummins tells us, British audiences first encountered his work on the stage: in 1879, Charles Reade adapted L'Assommoir for the stage as Drink.* It seems to have resonated with English-speaking audiences as a cautionary tale and the production toured widely in theatres across the UK.
The problems started when Zola's work began to circulate more widely in Britain in book form. And this is where Moore comes in. He was first introduced to Zola by the painter Edouard Manet in Paris during April 1879 at a costume party held to celebrate an adaptation of L'Assommoir for the French stage. Their relationship did not develop much furthur until a couple of years later, after Moore had abandoned Paris. He wrote in April 1881 to Zola from London, forwarding a copy of an article he had published about the French writer and reminding Zola that they had been introduced previously. In this way Moore seems to have been trying to set himself up as the chief agent for Zola's novels in the UK. His letter closes with a request for Zola's permission to translate L'Assommoir into English.
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| Edouard Manet, Portrait of Zola (1864) |
Around the same time Moore met Henry Vizetelly, who had established a publishing firm in 1880 with a strong interest in publishing works in French translation. Moore's biographer, Adrian Frazier records that it is unclear whether Vizetelly approached Moore or Moore approached Vizetelly about Zola, but the outcome was that Vizetelly published a translation of L'Assommoir in 1884 that seems to have been started by Moore and finished by Vizetelly's son, Ernest.
Unfortunately, where theatre audiences seem to have understood Zola's work as a moral warning about the perils of alcoholism, his work turned out to be less palatable when presented in novel form. Vizetelly's efforts in publishing Zola in translation were rewarded with a hostile response. In 1888, the publisher was denounced in Parliament and prosecuted (twice) for obscenity. Particular ire was directed towards the English translation of Zola's novel La Terre (1887). Conservative English-speaking groups such as the National Vigilance Association worried that Zola's unsparing descriptions of peasant life would corrupt British morals (and a scene from La Terre in which a farm-girl masturbates a bull to obtain sperm didn't help).
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| Walter Sickert, Portrait of George Moore (1897) |
But, as I noted before, the history of Zola's reception in the UK is complex. Despite intense opposition to the circulation of his novels in English, responses to Zola were widely divergent. Only seven years after Vizetelly was sent to prison for publishing his writings in translation, Zola was publicly feted in London during a visit to the UK. Arriving in London from France in September 1893, Zola was invited to speak at the British Institute of Journalists and made guest of honour at the Author's Club. Huge receptions were held, even firework displays.** Zola, as Simon Joyce has noted, was both the object of extreme Francophillia and focal point for British Francophobia.***
So, Moore's relationship to Zola needs to be seen in within this complex contemporary context. And in many ways he helped to shape that context himself - acting as an advocate for Zola's work, promoting and defending it in the early 1880s. His own novels, such as A Mummer's Wife (1884) and Esther Waters (1894) were (and still are) seen as offering an English equivalent to Zola's Naturalist approach. And yet (as discussed previously) Moore also distanced himself from Zola in Confessions hinting that he was strongly attracted to a more recent literary development - Decadence.
* Anthony Cummins, 'Émile Zola's Early Circulation on the late-Victorian Stage', Victorian Review 34:1 (2008), 155-70. Cummins' article 'Émile Zola's Cheap English Dress', Review of English Studies 60 (2008), 108-32 is also fascinating about Vizetelly's role in publishing Zola in translation and offers an excellent account of the public backlash.
** Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s (1992) p. 305.
*** Simon Joyce, Modernism and Naturalism in Modern Irish Fiction (CUP, 2004).
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