LONELINESS
| I felt no envy for Zola and wished him well in his new position as a writer for L'Evenement. My doubts on the course of his career in the literary world revolved around the idealistic principles he was abandoning, and the price he would pay, eventually, for doing so, and how, in the long run, this would affect his great talent and character. |
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I had the strong feeling that the kind of fame and fortune he wanted was tainted, that in time as the bills came due: the devil's insistence on a quid pro quo, he would be compelled to pay the price. As I thought these things, I realized this kind of moralizing from a person in my position was incongruous because Zola's brilliance against my long succession of failures was dazzling, even unbelievable. It depressed me to see him take giant steps, insult the public, debate with his literary colleagues, show his contempt for the government, and still achieve his objectives. In contrast to Zola's progress, I had accomplished nothing, I had no overall plan for my life, and to all intents and purposes, I was a drifter. My ideas, if they developed, were flawed or incomplete, and invariably seemed to lead to greater complications for me. I felt I was going backward most of the time; and the objectives I had set for myself were more elusive than during those frightening first days in Paris. My faith in establishing guidelines was clouded by emotional instability I could not control, wild flights of fancy, of paranoia, or depression, which left me drained and broken. I prayed for clarity of thought but it eluded me, always beyond reach, always tantalizing and mocking in denying me the chance to bring order into a disordered existence. Knowing Zola had accentuated this deficiency: he was so sure of himself; he knew what he wanted and how to get it. Any doubts in his mind over going all the way to the top in his profession, even during moments of adversity, were always quickly discarded. In contrast, I accepted defeat, sometimes eagerly, because I saw it as a means of escaping the responsibility of facing up to my troubles. I brooded over my frustrations; I hated the problems of my art; I had intermittent thoughts of escaping from the social, psychological, and artistic trap I had set for myself, but I knew that if I did I would suffer the humiliation of such an act; it forced me to go on, a coward taking the least painful choice. I was suspended, out-of-touch, removed completely from any significant associations with other human beings. I had only rare contacts with Zola who was fully preoccupied with his new position at L'Evenement and his growing list of free-lance writing assignments. Most of the information on what was going on in the radical movement was given me by Cestero Y Oller who came up from his flat below me for a chat and a smoke once in a while. Except for these infrequent visits, I was alone, leaving my rooms only for food and a glass of wine each day at the Cafe Deaux-Garcons, just a short distance away. Truthfully, I liked it this way; isolation was a refuge from the embarrassment of daily living. I accepted the loneliness as part of this choice, but the physical disabilities, chronic headaches, listlessness, fevers, my fears of dealing with other people, posed more serious problems. My worst periods came at night when sleep eluded me; at such times, I sat by the window or moved to the iron platform that exited at the back of the flat. From there, I could see the courtyard below, the surrounding structures, and the panorama of Paris stretching out in all directions. The fresh air, the view of the silent city with its blinking lights, cleared my mind. The sense of being suspended above the brilliance, of looking down from heavenly heights, the magic of it, brought on nostalgia for Aix-en-Provence, for trees and fields, clear streams, and a vision of Mont Sainte-Victoire silhouetted against cobalt skies. Inevitably, as I thought of the Midi, my thinking turned to childhood, of the early days with Zola, and the events leading up to the present time. He was obviously a natural for Villemessant who specialized in offbeat articles on sex, murder, political chicanery, and that sort of thing. The publisher was notorious in the newspaper business for printing anything which might bring a decent profit. His general policy was to hire writers on the sensational side, professionals in command of their craft and unafraid to challenge the letter of the law. In the course of time, this brought on confrontations with the police, minor fines, and reprimands from Villessant's colleagues in the publishing trade who considered using smut as an unfair tactic which helped L'Evenement become the major newspaper in Paris. The publisher willingly endured these irritants as a corollary to doing business as long as the public responded by spending their money, and as long as the Council on Censorship of Louis Napoleon kept their hands off the operation. Zola's realism fitted in perfectly with this yellow journalism; his debut, as a writer for L'Evenement, took place on January 28, 1869, with a short story--sexually explicit--based on a prostitute's wish to have respectibility despite the sordidness of her profession. The work apparently titillated Villemessant's more prurient minded readers because many of them wrote in to the offices of L'Evenement for more writing along these lines. The publisher, satisfied that the erotic angle was on target, raised Zola's salary to the handsome level of five-hundred francs a month. Suddenly, Zola was riding high, his insecurity swept away, his setbacks, he believed, a thing of the past. He was convinced that the future held only good things for him. "My enemies in the press and the government," he said, "continue their campaign against my work, but despite this, they and the public they think they are protecting, still read my books!" Zola was exploiting the hypocracy of the people and the State and he believed it was a legitimate way to advance his career as a writer. Attention by his peers was more important to Zola than acceptance; and whether they approved of the things he did was not as important as the recognition that his work demanded an opinion one way or another; that he could not be ignored. I wished for this kind of an appreciation but understood that as things existed, there wasn't the slightest chance of anybody ever seeing my work. Rejection of my canvasses at the Salon d'Automne each year had become a formalized procedure, a monotonous event, one that left me with a dull ache inside and a frightful sense of inferiority. Pissarro's fatherly encouragement after the previous national exhibition, though, had given me a broader perspective about being rejected: I was more philosophical and less emotional; without, however, lessening the pain. I accepted that the academic standards which were used to judge me were an impossible barrier; that nothing short of a miracle would ever change the situation. In this light, when I chose work to be submitted to the Hanging Committee, it was painting which reflected my most experimental ideas: clumsy, technically deficient, with ordinary subject matter. These canvasses demonstrated that everything I believed in was in total contradiction to academic theoretical thinking. I vowed in moments of rare courage to persist in searching for my own mode of expression; that I wouldn't accept the verdict of a bigoted bureaucracy who wouldn't allow me to show my work. "You will find me here every year," I told Monet, as we carted our pictures along the Champs Elysees toward the Barracks and the Palais d'Industrie. "Even if I know I am out before they look at what I have done." He agreed that all dissidents should do the same thing until the aims of all groups outside the academic system, were realized. "The pressure has to be maintained," he said, "for the establishment of basic principles which say that artists cannot be denied entrance to national exhibitions because they theoretically differ from standards as they are taught at the Academie Ecole des Beaux-Arts." Monet, after thinking about this for a moment, added: "The face of the bureaucracy at the Institute is changing; it is inevitable, as the old guard finds its position challenged. The reactionaries, the romantics, the lovers of the antique, are disappearing into history, and a new breed is on the scene. They are conservatives: make no mistake about it, but they are willing to compromise, to acknowledge that no group has the absolute power to arrogate the right or wrong of art to themselves. I see a willingness in their attitudes to adopt new ideas, to apply some of our characteristics, to admit that the real truth for all of us is in nature and will always be in nature ..." |