Huysmans

In the two previous posts, I discussed George Moore's relationship with Émile Zola, suggesting that Confessions of a Young Man reflected a change from admiration and emulation towards a more qualified, even distanced attitude by Moore towards the French novelist. In this post, I'm going to look at the links between Moore and another contemporary French writer, J-K Huysmans. For there are important parallels to be drawn here. 

Huysmans is now best known for A rebours (1884), which relates the proclivities of a corrupt and ailing aristocrat, Jean Floressas des Esseintes. Forced into early retirement from Parisian social life by ill health, Des Esseintes retires to his Fontainbleau, where he puts his considerable resources to use in order to indulge his every whim and taste. This ranges from his cultivation of an extreme bibliophile (he commissions bound copies of Baudelaire's work for every day of the week), to sexual excesses (he pursues a complicated relationship with a ventriloquist prostitute who makes inanimate objects speak during sex), the corruption of minors (he seeks to provoke a street child into murder) and idiosyncrasies such as his scent organ (which plays perfumes instead of musical notes).

Joris-Karl Huysmans
The poet and critic Arthur Symons described this riot of extravagance as 'the breviary of the decadence', capturing the way that Huysmans' book in form, content and style came to epitomise the decadent movement in France, with its cultivation of highly wrought aesthetic forms and its rejection of conventional morality. But (like Moore) Huysmans' literary roots lay in the Naturalism of Zola. His early works, Marthe: histoire d'une fille (1876) and Les soeurs Vatard (1877) describe the gritty realities of prostitutes and working-class lives in Paris. He belonged to a circle of younger writers (including Paul Alexiswho met regularly at Zola's house in the Medan and even published a collection of short stories, Les soirées de Medan (1880), which was understood to serve as a manifesto of sorts for Naturalism as a movement.

The Medan Group
The Decadent aesthetics of A rebours, his best-known work was understood as a break with Zola and Naturalism. Hence the parallel with Moore. And this is no coincidence: Moore was an early adopter of Huysmans' work amongst English-speakers, reviewing A rebours in dryly sardonic tones as 'a curious book' for the St James Gazette the same year it was published in France. And passages of Confessions suggest a strong debt to Huysmans' too: sumptuous descriptions of the Paris flat leased by Moore's narrator - including a pet python - and his predilection for 'morbid' recent French literature by Baudelaire and Verlaine seem intended to suggest strong parallels between the narrator of Confessions and Huysmans' creation, Des Esseintes.

The drawing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of the ceiling and looped up to give the appearance of a tent; a faun, in terra cotta, laughed in the red gloom, and there were Turkish couches and lamps. In another room you faced an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of the Apollo, and a bust of Shelley. The bedrooms were made unconventual with cushioned seats and rich canopies; and in picturesque corners there were censers, great church candlesticks, and palms; then think of the smell of burning incense and wax and you will have imagined the sentiment of our apartment in Rue de la Tour des Dames. I bought a Persian cat, and a python that made a monthly meal off guinea pigs
                                                               From, Confessions of a Young Man (Chapter 4)

Robert de Montesquiou,
by Giovanni Boldini*
There is, however, an important aspect of this connection between Moore and Huysmans that should not be neglected. The descriptions of Des Esseintes' excesses, his obsessions and his clear moral failings imply the A rebours could equally be taken as a parody or criticism of contemporary Decadence. Huysmans would adopt a pious Catholicism only a few years later and took to describing A rebours as the first step towards his conversion. The important connection with Moore here consists of that equivocal element in Confessions that I have identified in previous posts. For all its interest in Naturalism, Decadence, Impressionism and other contemporary avant-garde movements, Moore's Confessions is slyly ambivalent about affirming or identifying with any of those movements. Ironically, this very ambivalence or sneaking resistance to any one literary affiliation may be what makes Moore's novel most Decadent in character...

* I've included included an image of the author Robert de Montesquiou because it is well-known that Huysmans used this aristocrat dandy and writer as a model for Des Esseintes. He would also provide Marcel Proust with a model for the character of the Baron de Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu (1914-1922)

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