25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Two nasty writers surrounded by genius: the fur flies, December 14, 2006
This review is from: Pages from the Goncourt Journals (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
"Ever since the world began, the only memoirs of any interest have been written by 'indiscreet individuals,'" Edmond de Goncourt noted. "And my only crime is to be still alive twenty years after they were written."
He got that half-right. Indiscretion is the secret sauce of memoir. But de Goncourt's sin was not to be alive to hear the howls of protest from his victims and their allies --- it was that he and his brother Jules savaged their friends and enemies with equal glee. And that's the first great attraction of this edited edition of one of the greatest journals in all of literature: It's really bitchy.
It's really bitchy in large part because the Goncourt brothers had an extremely high opinion of themselves. In 1851, they published their first novel. Their self-review: "It contains in embryo every aspect of our talent and every colour on our palette." Alas, their timing was terrible; Bonaparte had just dissolved the National Assembly and declared himself Napoleon III, dictator of France. From their first diary entry: "What a time it [our novel] chose to appear! A symphony of words and ideas in the middle of that scramble for office."
For social beings, the Goncourts could be profoundly anti-social. They loathed half the world on principle --- "Woman is the animal that lives inside a silk dress" --- and periodically cut themselves off from the Paris literary scene: "We had given away our old evening clothes and had no new ones made, so as to be unable to go anywhere. No women, no pleasures, no amusements: just unceasing toil." By 1857, they report, "No friends, no connections, every door shut in our face, and all money spent on books."
Don't be fooled. They knew everyone: Flaubert, de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Degas, Rodin, Baudelaire, George Sand, Turgenev. There are regular dinners, and, after, the Goncourts go home and scribble.
Flaubert tells them how he lives without a woman: "I just lie face down and during the night...it's infallible."
Hugo, they write, "had a notebook in which he writes down what he has just said."
One good thing about their deep skepticism about some of the greatest writers in French literature --- when they're at their cattiest, they offer unvarnished opinions that take us much closer to understanding the greats than a lot of more reasoned analysis. Here they are, on the subject of the "hidden sides" of their dear friend, Gustave Flaubert: "He quietly pushes himself forward, establishes relations with important people, creates a network of useful acquaintances, all the while pretending to be independent, lazy, and fond of solitude." And they are just as cutting when they take the long view. Voltaire, they observe, "spent his life taking an interest in something --- himself."
"Genius is the talent of a dead man," they said. Not quite. The Goncourts believed they possessed it --- and in abundance. But the unanimity of thought which made theirs such a successful collaboration didn't pay off. All told, they wrote about 30-odd plays, novels and books of criticism. None has survived them.
The literary immortality of the Goncourt brothers comes, instead, from the writing they threw off easily and without concern for style --- these journals. The extreme realism of their novels had won them no friends and few readers. But the extreme realism --- okay, subjective realism --- of their table talk gives us a picture of Paris in the middle of the 19th century that is fresh, original, acutely observed. Their masterpiece is, in essence, a gossip column.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Entertainment Tonight" circa 1880s Paris, January 11, 2007
This review is from: Pages from the Goncourt Journals (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
The Goncourt brothers were quite the pair: they pledged at an early age never to marry (don't worry, they had plenty of mistresses in the proper French form)and dedicated themselves to cultural pursuits of dubious quality and success. Their unquestionable victory, however, is this salacious, gossipy journal.
The Goncourts were anti-Semitic royalists who hung out with most of the cultural elite of the day: Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, and Degas all peopled their vicious circle of decadence and artistic jealousy. Their snippy back-and-forths with Emile Zola over the "ownership" of the literary movement of Naturalism is particularly entertaining. Of course Zola went on to defend the maligned Capt. Dreyfus with his "J'accuse" letter in 1898, so it is certainly possible to read the Goncourt's racism as an underlying factor in that schism.
There are some curious holes in the narrative, though -- this version has absolutely no entry mentioning the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, which was one of the most amazing cultural events in all history and turned Paris into one large carnival of drunkenness and sex for almost an entire week.
If you want to get a glimpse of life in the fin-de-siecle' then this will give it to you, royalist warts and all.
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