Balzac [Paperback]

One of the major accomplishments of this biography is that it will make you want to go out and read all of Balzac. This is because Mr. Robb has sprinkled a liberal number of excerpts from the novels throughout his text. Balzac was both a keen observer and a tireless researcher, with an interest in, literally, everything. He was also tremendously sensitive. When you put all of these qualities together, you get prose that has great depth....resonating between the internal and the external. Mr. Robb, though a great admirer, is quick to admit that not everything that Balzac wrote was great or even good. He was obsessive....a writing machine churning out thousands of words per day. He was deeply in debt and had to write just about non-stop in an attempt to get himself out of debt. Mr. Robb maintains a nice balance. He obviously has a tremendous fondness for his subject but he doesn't let that blind him to the great man's faults and contradictions. Balzac was very open and childlike- he wore his heart on his sleeve and talked non-stop, rarely censoring himself. On the other hand, he was cunning and manipulative, using all sorts of "dodges" to flee from his numerous creditors. He also took advantage of other writers...creating a sort of writing factory- hiring young, admiring, ambitious writers to write novels on his behalf. He expected these "laborers" to have the same superhuman energy that he possessed and would drive them mercilessly. But, in counterpoint, Balzac never gave up trying to pay off his debts and frequently he did pay people everything he owed them. He also took a genuine interest in the young writers he had working for him...giving them worthwhile advice and he was also financially generous when he was in a position to be able to help. Balzac was a shrewd judge of human nature and was very intelligent. He could size up a person or a situation very quickly. His contemporaries commented that if a person read Balzac's novels and applied the vast amounts of information and wisdom to real life, they could make a fortune. But Balzac could not turn his genius into wealth. He would get himself into one harebrained scheme after another, and he could not control his profligate spending. No matter how hard he worked and how many books he wrote he was always getting himself deeper and deeper in debt. But he was an eternal optimist: the next scheme or best-selling novel was just around the corner, and then everything would be wonderful! Oftimes, once he had an idea for a book he considered it done. Forget the fact that he hadn't written a word. To Balzac, it was a concrete asset- just as good as money in the bank. He was a human dynamo and tremendously hard working. Balzac was of the opinion that he wore himself out and Mr. Robb agrees. No one could maintain that intensity forever. (Balzac was only 51 when he died.) He was a fascinating man, as interesting as any of his characters, and Mr. Robb has done a splendid job depicting him.

"Nothing is insignificant" ... is a line of Balzac's. It is also the opening line of Robb's biography. And one would like to say that Robb's biography is a living example of Balzac's truism. But, if so, it would stretch to innumerable volumes. Alas, the first fourteen years of Balzac's 51 are contained in only the first chapter. That's thirty pages out of 420, or one-fourteenth of a book for two-sevenths of a life. (Later chapters would cover just one year of Balzac's life.) But you know how it is; none of us could describe our own childhoods in detail, let alone that of a then-obscure little love-forgotten boy in some Loire-valley backwater of turn-of-the-century Napoleonic France. And yet, as Robb says, "Balzac too would create an Empire, a fictional world so real that Oscar Wilde would be able to describe him only half-humorously as the inventor of the nineteenth-century." Robb too swiftly covers those vital formative years, but he is good at reading the seminal signs: birth, family origins, boarding-school, and his "first glimpse of society as a process of unnatural selection."

To give him his due, Robb often reminds us how Balzac's loveless childhood later made the man, even to the extent of Balzac's stockpiling of fruit. And Robb is keen too to ensure that the gap between adolescence and greatness is keenly described, when "large parts of it have ... been swept under the carpet by many of Balzac's biographers, impatient to reach the `true' Balzac or perhaps concerned not to tarnish the idol." Idolisation is not Robb's style. Whilst Balzac declared to Vidocq, "So you believe in reality? How charming!", we are equally glad that Robb retains an often critical and sceptical eye about Balzac's own claims about the reality of his life, for example on his garret-like existence in Paris. And Robb often jokes at Balzac's expense, pricking his bubble of self-importance, as at the premier of Hugo's `Hernani' when the classicists pelted the stage in mocking and not-so-mocking outrage: sniggers Robb, "Balzac, always a lightning-conductor for symbolic phenomena, was struck by a cabbage stalk."

But not all is drollery. Robb aims at an honest appraisal of Balzac's merits too, especially within his own field of undoubted expertise, the world of French nineteenth-century literature. Robb is incisively insightful: for example, despite Balzac's novels being praised by Marxists and indeed admired by Marx himself, "The largest gap in his panorama of French society is the urban proletariat, to which he seemed oblivious or indifferent. This is Balzac's clearest surface difference with Dickens ... The working classes and, by extension, the poor and destitute, appear only in glimpses or abstractions."

Robb's own honesty about Balzac's biographical shortcomings makes his praise of Balzac's literary talent all the more sincere. In a chapter headed `Family Planning', Robb recounts how in the entire `Comedie Humaine', "The tiny number of errors - visible only to readers armed with 100,000 filecards ... - prove that Balzac's characters were as real to him as if he were observing them in the real world." In a later chapter he describes Balzac's achievement as "the longest sustained burst of good writing in the history of literature (if there were reliable equations for such things), ..."

Robb is appropriately involved and rightly quizzical about Balzac's personal relationships. He has his theory about his housekeeper Louise, but I was equally curious as to why Balzac would burn his beloved Eveline's letters?

Often, the joy of reading Robb is that he is as eminently quotable as his subject. "Balzac was going to be the best-dressed bankrupt in Paris"; Balzac "called for an international culinary language, a kind of gourmet's periodic table that would allow the same dish to be created anywhere in the world - an idea later exploited to devastating effect by McDonald's." (It is pleasing to note that this reference to McDonald's is indexed.); Balzac's living and writing at the premises of a printing firm "is probably the first recorded instance of a novelist using a word-processor, with human beings and a hydraulic press instead of a microchip and a laser-printer."

Robb's style is not strictly concerned with telling an objective tale; rather, he sits at the reader's side and provides a contradictory narrative to the one that Balzac would have us believe. Sometimes he plays the angel against Balzac's overly self-critical analyses; but more often he is the devil to Balzac's preposterous self-promotion. Taken all together, Robb's is more than a biography; it is an essay on literary life and its valid claim to attention, even if you have never read a word of Balzac. Robb makes for a vivid and memorable journey through one of French literature's more memorable lives. It is a fascinating read.

The book's cover is a pastel version of the famous daguerreotype of 1842, which Robb describes as a "study of a monomaniac, unable to unwilling to escape from his obsessions and habits, struggling against time and illness, and looking to a future carried within himself: the conqueror, the fantasizer, the disappointed child." The book's pages are attractive, the framed headers giving the appearance of a nineteenth-century novel.

There are some minor errors: plate six, for example, is more from the north than the east. Equally, it was only in the penultimate chapter that Robb bothers to tell the reader that in Balzac's Paris debtors could not be arrested between sunset and sunrise.

It is a shame there are no maps to guide us through the geography of his life. But there are appendices on `Balzac after 1850', `La Comedie Humaine', and `Money'. Finally, there are the usual endnotes (43 pages) and select bibliography (15 pages). As well as a general index, there is an index of characters and an index of works.

A superlative biography by Graham Robb, Balzac traces the life and career of the nineteenth-century novelist from his beginnings in the beautiful heart of the Loire Valley to his untimely death in 1850, only months after his marriage to the Polish Countess, Mme Hanska. Robb's portrait of the private man, tormented by debt and romantic frustration, is as compelling as his treatment of the literary genius. The result is an impressive, not to say monumental work that, unusually for a book of real academic integrity, is written in a witty, anecdotal style. This is undoubtedly the best biography of Balzac to appear in English since 1948.