Volume 29, Number 8 · May 13, 1982
Letters from Zola
By Frederick Brown
Correspondance d'Émile Zola, Volume I: 1858-1867
edited under the direction of B.H. Bakker, edited by Colette Becker
Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, Volume I, 600 pp., $40.00
Correspondance d'Émile Zola, Volume II: 1868-mai 1877
edited under the direction of B.H. Bakker, edited by Colette Becker
Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, Volume II, 648 pp., $48.00
Correspondance d'Émile Zola, Volume III: juin 1877-mai 1880
edited under the direction of B.H. Bakker, edited by Albert J. Salvan, by Alain Pagès
Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, Volume III, 548 pp., $50.00
Thirty years ago, when Angus Wilson published an excellent short book on Émile Zola, Lionel Trilling, who shared his enthusiasm for the Rougon-Macquart novels, wrote a review in which he took issue with Wilson's prediction of a Zola revival. Revivals, he observed, call into play an artist's life as well as his work, and this to such an extent that the new honor conferred upon his work is often the epiphenomenon of a personal legend that the age finds especially congenial. Where Stendhal and Flaubert created legends 'which serve as the ambience in which we read their work and by which we gloss it,' Zola's oeuvre stands aloof from him. He was, wrote Trilling, 'without the ambiguities and ambivalences which we most happily respond to, which we are inclined to believe are the only signs of authentic spiritual and artistic activity.' While Zola may have known adversity at an early age and undergone neurotic ordeals, his neurosis, far from crippling him, was of a kind that reinforced his stolid regime. Three pages a day kept the doctor away.
Review, 2871 words
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