Volume 24, Number 18 · November 10, 1977
The Passions of Emile Zola
By V.S. Pritchett
The Life and Times of Emile Zola
by F.W.J. Hemmings
Scribner's, 192 pp., $10.00
Following an earlier study of Zola's novels, Professor Hemmings has now turned to Zola himself. He sits in his time, the latter half of the French nineteenth century, when the energies of industrialism and social change fermented, a time above all of awakened appetites for power. Zola, as we see him from the outside, is Appetite in person, an enormous consumer. Like some powerful locomotive, he eats up facts and lives as if they were so much coal, choking us with enormous clouds of smoke which were both dream and nightmare. This was what his public, on which he kept a close eye, looked for. Their lives were drab. They were looking for dramas of escape, the satisfactions of desires which had been repressed by the work ethic and, being the children of 'Get Rich' Guizot and his educational reforms, they were new to literacy and a little leisure. The scientific pretensions of Zola's Naturalism, his social concern and his half-poetic violence and melodrama, were exactly their meat.
Review, 2098 words
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