I'm not reading anything this week (I'll read and respond to comments next week) but I did finish Prometheus: The Life of Balzac on Friday. I loved every horrible minute; it was one of the most enjoyable biographies I've ever read.



The surprising thing about the Life of Balzac is how sad it isn't. It's sad for other people, to an extent. It's sad for Eve Hanska, who finally marries Honoré a few months before his death, taking on his massive debts just when it's finally dazzlingly clear that they're never going to be paid. It's sad for Louise, the unglamorously faithful housekeeper/mistress whom he throws over callously in order to marry Eve, but then re-hires because who else is going to cook his dinner and wash his sheets in the meantime (she steals Eve's letters and threatens to send them to Eve's daughter; Maurois is disapproving but I say good for her). It's sad for Honoré, too, I guess, to have to understand that his time has run out, and to be only fifty years old and almost helpless in his last months. But it was hard to feel the kind of regret you'd expect to feel when anyone dies at fifty-one, because every single thing in the previous five hundred pages made it inevitable.

Balzac destroyed his health completely in a handful of decades, in all the most avoidable and disgusting ways, and spent a half-dozen fortunes on nothing in particular. He never finished his gargantuan novel cycle, and he only began a gargantuan novel cycle in the first place because he was at least forty thousand francs in debt at all times.

His business sense is the worst, and somehow, despite being able to write about good and bad businessmen with insight, he never seems to realize it. “Why did [Eve] so mistrust his financial planning?" he wonders. "When it came to matters of business he was a hardened veteran and she the merest child!” BALZAC. Maybe because the only “experience” you have in “business” involves losing huge amounts of money? Maybe? Balzac, remember the time you wrote a play and it was produced with all the fanfare, but then you insisted on selling all the tickets for the first three nights yourself, so you could ensure the “right” response from the “right” people? Remember how the producers were like, “balzac no that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard” and “maybe you should leave promotion to the professionals and GET SOME SLEEP instead” but you insisted and they finally caved because you are a Great Writer? Then everyone got fed up with your transparent attempts to drive up prices by pretending tickets were sold out in the first five minutes, so the house was only 1/3 full on opening night? And all that manufactured box-office hype just gave your reviewers an iron-clad excuse to be impatient and annoyed when they finally saw the play and it wasn't the literal beatific vision. Remember? Good times.

His engagement to Eve, his wealthy long-term mistress, is one long horrible black comedy, from his first terrifically tactless letter to her on her husband's death to her reluctance to send for her birth certificate (because it would reveal that she has been six years older all along) to the appalling house he insists on renovating for her in Paris, with her money and against her objections:

She nearly broke his heart when he took her to inspect the house in the Rue Fortunée. He had expected cries of delight, but she criticized everything – too much marquetry, too many bronzes, too much marble, too many cupboards inlaid with tortoiseshell and brass. Why spend a fortune on this 'sinister and comical' place? Was this the reward of so many years' devotion? How could she judge it in any case, when it was smothered in scaffolding and rubble?

I was frustrated with Balzac for most of the book, because he was always so close to having the things he claimed he wanted, and always throwing them away in the next breath, and because he was such a colossal idiot about money -- he never met a dubious speculation he didn't like, and the second he thought he might have money in the future, he immediately began to spend it on jeweled walking sticks and fifty-foot divans and even more dubious speculations. He's such a consummate self-saboteur that it's a relief when he meets a setback that isn't his own damn fault -- like when he finally manages to produce a successful play in 1848, just in time for extensive rioting to keep everyone away from the theatre.

But close to the end, when his death is suddenly inescapably in front of him like one of the Weeping Angels, a kind of peace rolls cloud-like over the whole frantic mess. He could have been different, but he wasn't. He could have paid off his debts, but he didn't. He could have written fewer books and slept more and wasted less time on pointless business trips to fake silver mines and trying to seduce 10 people at once and constantly threatening and then forgetting to go into politics -- but that would have been someone else's life, and who knows what that life would have made? Even the pathos of Balzac returning blind to to his new (hideous, unbelievably expensive) bridal house in Paris, no longer able to read or write, or of Victor Hugo visiting his last night and watching death close over the familiar ugly face, is muted by that enormous white cloud wall of inevitability. You live a thousand lives in one, and one day they go dark. It's sad that it can't be helped, but it can't be helped.

André Maurois' aphoristic ways and his proclamations about greatness verge on self-parody at times, but maybe that makes him the ideal companion for this particular journey. In a way it's the kind of book that I was so impressed with The Horse's Mouth for not being: "genius" as excuse for assholic self-destruction, assholic self-destruction as precondition for (a certain kind of) genius. I don't know why it didn't bother me more. I can't tell you how sad and angry I was with F. Scott Fitzgerald for wasting all that time fretting about how movies had killed the novel and not finishing The Last Tycoon, for example, but somehow I can't be mad at Balzac for mulching up his body into stories and gangrene.

So obviously I have to read one of this asshole's books now, right? The funny thing is, Maurois doesn't succeed in making them sound very appealing, though he's able to make Balzac himself incredibly appealing. But I believe in them anyway. We have Eugénie Grandet at the bookstore, so I'll probably just grab that, but if you have any recommendations, I'd be happy to hear them!