AGAINST the GRAIN (A Rebours)

AGAINST THE GRAIN (A rebours) By J.-K. HUYSMANS (Original Version, 1884) An unabridged republication of the English translation published by Three Sirens Press, New York, in 1931 The introduction by Havelock Ellis has been slightly abridged Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77081802 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY HAVELOCK ELLIS PREFACE BY J.-K. HUYSMANS (1903) AGAINST THE GRAIN (A REBOURS ) INTRODUCTION by Havelock Ellis I IN trying to represent the man who wrote the extraordinary books grouped around A rebours and En route, I find myself carried back to the decline of the Latin world. I recall those restless Africans who were drawn into the vortex of decadent Rome, who absorbed its corruptions with all the barbaric fervor of their race, and then with a more natural impetus of that youthful fervor threw themselves into the young current of Christianity, yet retaining in their flesh the brand of an exotic culture. Tertullian, Augustine, and the rest gained much of their power, as well as their charm, because they incarnated a fantastic mingling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity, of tumul- tuously youthful Christianity. Huysmans, too, incarnates the old and the new, but with a curious, a very vital difference. Today the roles are reversed; it is another culture that is now young, with its aspira- tions after human perfection and social solidarity, while Christianity has exchanged the robust beauty of youth for the subtler beauty of age. “The most perfect analogy to our time which I can find,” wrote Renan to his sister amid the tumults of Paris in 1848, a few weeks after Huysmans had been born in the same city, “is the moment when Christianity and paganism stood face to face.” Huysmans had wandered from ancestral haunts of mediaeval peace into the fore- front of the struggles of our day, bringing the clear, refined percep- tions of old culture to the intensest vision of the modern world yet attained, but never at rest, never once grasping except on the purely aesthetic side of the significance of the new age, always haunted by the memory of the past and perpetually feeling his way back to what seems to him the home of his soul.—The fervent seeker of those early days, indeed, but à rebours! This is scarcely a mere impression; one might be tempted to say that it is strictly the formula of this complex and interesting personality. Coming on the maternal side from an ordinary Parisian bour- geois stock, though there chanced to be a sculptor even along this line, on the paternal side he belongs to an alien aristocracy of art. From father to son his ancestors were painters, of whom at least one, Cornelius Huysmans, still figures honorably in our public gal- leries, while the last of them left Breda to take up his domicile in Paris. Here his son, Joris-Karl, has been the first of the race to use the pen instead of the brush, yet retaining precisely those characters of “veracity of imitation, jewel like richness of color, perfection of finish, emphasis of character,” which their historian finds in the painters of his land from the fourteenth century onwards. Where the Meuse approaches the Rhine valley we find the home of the men who, almost alone in the north, created painting and the arts that are grouped around painting, and evolved religious music. On the side of art the Church had found its chief builders in the men of these valleys, and even on the spiritual side also, for here is the northern home of mysticism. Their latest child has fixed his atten- tion on the feverish activities of Paris with the concentrated gaze of a stranger in a strange land, held by a fascination which is more than half repulsion, always missing something, he scarcely knows what. He has ever been seeking the satisfaction he had missed, sometimes in the aesthetic vision of common things, sometimes in the refined Thebaïd of his own visions, at length more joyfully in the survivals of mediaeval mysticism. Yet as those early Africans still retained their acquired Roman instincts, and that fantastic style which could not be shaken off, so Huysmans will surely retain to the last the tincture of Parisian modernity. Yet we can by no means altogether account for Huysmans by race and environment. Every man of genius is a stranger and a pil- grim on the earth, mirroring the world in his mind as in those con- cave or convex mirrors which elongate or abbreviate absurdly all who approach them. No one ever had a keener sense of the distress- ing absurdity of human affairs than M. Huysmans. The Trocadero is not a beautiful building, but to no one else probably has it ap- peared as an old hag lying on her back and elevating her spindle shanks towards the sky. Such images of men’s works and ways abound in Huysmans’s books, and they express his unaffected vision of life, his disgust for men and things, a shuddering disgust, yet patient, half amused. I can well recall an evening spent some years ago in M. Huysmans’s company. His face, with the sensitive, lumi- nous eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire’s portraits, the face of a re- signed and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity of the Divine order but has no wish to make any improper use of his discovery. He talked in low and even tones, never eagerly, without any emphasis or gesture, not addressing any special person; human imbecility was the burden of nearly all that he said, while a faint twinkle of amused wonderment lit up his eyes. And throughout all his books until almost the last “l’éternelle bêtise de l’humanité” is the ever recurring refrain. Always leading a retired life, and specially abhorring the society and conversation of the average literary man, M. Huysmans has for many years been a government servant—a model official, it is said—at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [Deputy espionage chief]. Here, like our own officials at Whitehall, he serves his country in dignified lei- sure—on the only occasion on which I have seen him in his large and pleasant bureau, he was gazing affectionately at Chéret’s latest affiche, which a lady of his acquaintance had just brought to show him—and such duties of routine, with the close contact with practical affairs they involve, must always be beneficial in preserving the sane equipoise of an imaginative temperament. In this matter Huysmans has been more fortunate than his intimate friend Villiers de L’isle- Adam, who had wandered so far into the world of dreams that he lost touch with the external world and ceased to distinguish them clearly. One is at first a little surprised to hear of the patient tact and diplomacy which the author of A rebours spent round the death bed of the author of Contes cruels to obtain the dying dreamer’s consent to a ceremony of marriage which would legitimate his child. But Huysmans’s sensitive nervous system and extravagant imagination have ever been under the control of a sane and forceful intellect; his very idealism has been nourished by the contemplation of a world which he has seen too vividly ever to ignore. We may read that in the reflective deliberation of his grave and courteous bearing, some- what recalling, as more than one observer has noted, his own favor- ite animal, the cat, whose outward repose of Buddhistic contemplation envelops a highly strung nervous system, while its capacity to enjoy the refinements of human civilization comports a large meas- ure of spiritual freedom and ferocity. Like many another man of letters, Huysmans suffers from neuralgia and dyspepsia; but no novelist has described so persistently and so poignantly the pangs of toothache or the miseries of maux d’estomac, a curious proof of the peculiarly personal character of Huysmans’s work throughout. His sole preoccupation has been with his own impressions. He pos- sessed no native genius for the novel. But with a very sound instinct he set himself, almost at the outset of his career, to describe inti- mately and faithfully the crudest things of life, the things most re- mote from his own esoteric tastes but at that time counted peculiarly “real.” There could be no better discipline for an idealist. Step by step he has left the region of vulgar actualities to attain his proper sphere, but the marvelous and slowly won power of expressing the spiritually impalpable in concrete imagery is the fruit of that labori- ous apprenticeship. He was influenced in his novels at first by Gon- court, afterwards a little by Zola, as he sought to reproduce his own vivid and personal vision of the world. This vision is like that of a man with an intense exaltation of the senses, especially the senses of sight and smell. Essentially Huysmans is less a novelist than a poet, with an instinct to use not verse but prose as his medium. Thus he early fell under the influence of Baudelaire’s prose poems. His small and slight first volume, Le drageoir aux épices, bears witness to this influence, while yet revealing a personality clearly distinct from Baudelaire’s. This personality is already wholly revealed in the quaint audacity of the little prose poem entitled L’extase. Here, at the very outset of Huysmans’s career, we catch an unconscious echo of mediaeval asceticism, the voice, it might be, of Odo of Cluny, who nearly a thousand years before had shrunk with horror from embracing a “sack of dung”; “quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus!” L’extase describes how the lover lies in the wood clasping the hand of the beloved and bathed in a rapture of blissful emotion; “suddenly she rose, disengaged her hand, disap- peared in the bushes, and I heard as it were the rustling of rain on the leaves”; at once the delicious dream fled and the lover awakes to the reality of commonplace human things.

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