Zola, II: L'Homme de Germinal (1871-1893) (review)

Mitterand, Henri. Zola, II: L'Homme de Germinal (1871-1893). Paris: Fayard, 2001. Pp. 1,198. ISBN 2-213-60831-8

This second volume of Henri Mitterand's still incomplete monumental three-volume biography of Zola covers the nearly two dozen years during which the novelist published Les Rougon-Macquart. Despite the book's imposing length, it is not and does not pretend to be exhaustive. As in Volume I, Mitterand concentrates on what, we may presume, is not only of greatest concern to him, but also most likely to interest the broad French public for which he is writing. (Volume I, published in 1999, has already been awarded a Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris.) But those aspects of his subject that he has chosen to emphasize, he treats with immense insight and precision, as well as exceptional story-telling skill. He does so, furthermore, in extraordinarily rich detail. As we know, Zola was one of the most widely observed as well as, in many, if not all, respects (for he also had his secret side and was adept at wielding masks) the most self-revealing of writers. The number of sources now readily available to his biographers (much of it largely thanks to Mitterand's own labors over the last fifty years) is extremely vast. In this second volume, he has once again taken full advantage of his unrivaled command of this material along with many as yet generally less accessible sources.

On page after page, the book's narrative advances, as in Volume I before it, with the slow, yet compelling flow of a deep, broad river. It affords us a sharper, closer view of Zola at the height of his maturity than any of his many earlier biographies. It chronicles minutely and vividly, occasionally even hour by hour, the myriad events that it recounts. It portrays in vivid detail the France of "La Belle Epoque." It paints with admirable thoroughness and precision an enormous cast of secondary charac-ters - novelists, poets, journalists, painters, musicians, publishers, critics, politicians, relatives, and friends. It explores Zola's on-going sex life and its reflections in not only the preliminary notes and manuscripts of Le Docteur Pascal, but also Nana and other earlier novels. It minutely portrays the myriad places and milieux Zola inhabited or frequented during these years or depicted in Les Rougon-Macquart. It summarizes at some length much of the relevant political, social, and economic history of the period, beginning with the suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871. It takes us back into the Parisian art world. It devotes considerable space to the genesis, plots, and contemporary reception of all twenty Rougon-Macquart novels and of the short stories, plays, and operatic librettos Zola wrote along with them. It points out the differences between the man and the stereotypes attached to his name. It minutely follows his journalistic career during these years and summarizes many of his articles. It goes deeply into his financial affairs and leisure-time activities. It reconstitutes at length his friendships with Cézanne, Manet, Flaubert, Turgeniev, Edmond de Goncourt, Daudet, Mallarmé, Charpentier, Bruneau, and a host of other writers, artists, musicians, and publishers. It dissects better than any other biography I know of the relationships between Zola, his mother, wife, and mistress. Mitterand has, moreover, a gift for bringing out all the drama inherent in his subject-matter: e.g., Zola's first literary triumphs, the premières of his plays, or Alexandrine's fury upon learning, from an anonymous letter, of her husband's infidelity with Jeanne Rozerot.

As a scholar who has also devoted much of his career to studying Zola, I do, of course, have certain minor quarrels with Mitterand's presentation of the man and his works - quarrels rooted in our different interests and approaches. The general public, as well as most scholars, will without doubt quite rightly regard this volume and...