← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
707 Emile Zola (with Robert Lethbridge) | Graham Greene's Only Ghost Story | My Last Book with Irina Mashinski
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Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
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Alan Sisto
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Jack Wilson
Ready for big gear and even bigger getaways. The CR V Trail Sport Hybrid. Learn more@honda.com CRV hello today on the podcast, Graham Greene's only ghost story jumps out of the shadows, a conversation with the biographer of French novelist Emile Zola, and a My Last Book with Russian American poet and essayist Irina Mashinsky. Which book will she choose to be the last book she will ever read, and why? That's all coming up today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Bonjour everyone. I've been back for a a month or so from Paris and I still miss it. What a great trip that was from paradise, or at least purgatory, back into the inferno that is Washington, D.C. crazy Town USA. Crazy Town of the world. Crazy town, comma, universe. Send your postcards there. I'm your host, Jack Wilson. I'm glad you're here today. Let's get right to it. A newly unearthed Hard to say. A newly unearthed story written by one of my favorite authors of all time. Maybe the finest British author of the 20th century. He's certainly up there. Graham Greene. If you haven't read him, I recommend the movie the Third man and my favorite novel, the End of the Affair. Those are the two gateway drugs. Depending on your taste for doubt, Catholic doubt in particular, your next choices might vary. Some some would say the Heart of the Matter. Others might prefer the Quiet American or the Power and the Glory. Our man in Havana, Brighton Rock There are many good choices, but the Third man and the End of the Affair are my picks. You can't go wrong with those. I went through a phase where I read absolutely everything that Graham Greene had ever written, it seems like. And it turns out, though, that I missed something. A ghost story of all things that had been hiding from me all this time. Well, hide no longer. Ghost story. You've been outed. The Guardian newspaper picks up the story. Eerie gem. That's in quotes. Eerie gem of an unearthed Graham Greene story published in Strand Magazine. God bless Strand magazine. What a history they have there. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, P.J. wodehouse, and of course, Arthur Conan Doyle. 38 Sherlock Holmes stories, plus the Hound of the Baskervilles were all published in Strand Magazine's pages and they had people lining up outside the office waiting to buy the next Sherlock installment hot off the press. And now this story, an eerie gem as described by analysts, written by the great Graham Greene. And now that I read the article or reread it, I realize that I'm talking about the wrong Strand Magazine. Or I guess I should say I'm only sort of talking about Strand Magazine. I picture Strand Magazine as being based in London. Well, that one went defunct, but it was revived under that name in 1998 and is now apparently a Michigan based literary quarterly that has built a reputation for finding and publishing lost writings of well known authors. And indeed, alongside the story by Graham Greene, in this edition they've printed a little known story by Ian Fleming. So back to Graham Greene. What do we have? In this story, our protagonist recalls his childhood when he read Dracula and other horror stories that traumatized him. He avoids those stories now and he makes it a point not to bring to bed any books that might prove ghostly or violent. Except that he finds himself alone in the bedroom of a strange rented house and there's a storm raging outside. And his only companion is a paperback anthology of these very creepy stories. And in one of the stories, as he's reading within the story, there's some mysterious scratching noises on the glass of the windows. And guess what? At the same time, he hears scratches on his own bedroom windows. What follows is what Strand magazine says is Green's only published foray into the world of the supernatural. Well, that might be true in a certain sense, but in another sense, I would say most of Graham Greene's fiction is at least supernatural adjacent. The growing understanding, or maybe the sudden understanding that we are small, we are not alone. There are mysteries beyond us, that there are rules and patterns and a reality just beyond our grasp, but that we must comprehend or that we're drawn toward. Those are all elements of ghost stories, but they're also elements of Green's quest to understand God and religion and how it all works upon him. It's not a story where someone in a white sheet jumps out and says, boo. Maybe it's, I don't know, Maybe it's someone in a white clerical robe who jumps out and it says booze budget. You can, you can read the story and decide for yourself. And you get the Fleming story as a bonus. That's in the latest edition of Strand magazine, published out of Michigan. Moving on. Emil Zola has been a frequently requested author here at the History of Literature Podcast. Sometimes I have people on my list for a long time until I finally get around to covering them. And sometimes, by happy coincidence, they make their way off my list because I have a chance to talk to a guest who is an expert in a topic that I've long planned to do. That's the case today. Zola was born in Paris in 1840 and died 62 years later in 1902, also in Paris. He was very well known in his day for a number of reasons, including his novels in the School of Naturalism and maybe most famously for his role in the Dreyfus affair, where he wrote the famous essay J' Accuse or I Accuse, a brave front page open letter to the president of France detailing the lack of evidence and due process in the jailing of Dreyfus, one of the most famous newspaper articles of all time. Really? And I could go on, but we would probably be repeating what you're going to hear soon enough because we go into all of this with our guest Robert Lethbridge, who knows much more than I. And after that, after that conversation, we'll hear from Irina Mashinsky, a Russian American poet who's written nine books of poetry herself and six other books too. And she's the co editor. Nine books? Yeah, nine books of poetry, six other books. And she's the co editor of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. We'll talk to her about her last her choice for her last book. All that coming up after this. Foreign.
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Alan Sisto
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Jack Wilson
Only at Dick's, okay? Joining me now is Robert Lethbridge, who is a Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and Emeritus professor of French Language and Literature at the University of London. He is currently Honorary professor at the University of St. Andrews. His previous works include Zola's Painters, and he's here today to discuss his book, Emile A Determined Life, published by Reaction Books. Robert Lethbridge, welcome to the history of literature.
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Robert Lethbridge
Thank you very much. Good to be with you.
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Jack Wilson
So I think I've covered hundreds of authors by now, but I haven't done a full episode on Zola. But I would say he is maybe the most often requested by listeners among all the authors I haven't done. I think it's because he's a fascinating person, so I'm looking forward to talking about his biography with you today. Let's start with the context that he was born into. He was born in 1840. We are now about 50 years or so beyond the French Revolution. What was happening in France, and how did that affect the world of him and his family when he was born?
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Robert Lethbridge
Okay, well, he was born in an age of extraordinary political and social instability. Successive revolutions in 1815, 1830, 1848, and then in 1851, a dictatorship took over, Napoleon III's dictatorship, which lasted for 20 years. It's known as the Second Empire. And that ended in a catastrophe, namely the Franco Prussian War. And it seems to me that Zola's entire life and work are, in a sense, determined by that context. It's also a period of extraordinary social instability. In other words, the Industrial Revolution came late to France, and he was concerned, I think, with the extraordinary conflicts that this engendered between capitalism on the one hand and the working class, which fueled it on the other. So I think that he's tremendously aware of a century that is very unstable and looks forward to the 20th century with some degree of foreboding.
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Jack Wilson
And his father was an Italian engineer. Was he working class? Did they struggle?
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Robert Lethbridge
His father was indeed a civil engineer of an Italian background, although he became naturalized French by serving in the Foreign Legion. But as far as Zola was concerned, the most important event in his life, in a sense, was his father's early death, when Zola was only six years old. And that led to a period of extraordinary impoverishment in his childhood and a determination to escape from it. He was responsible for his mother throughout most of his adult life, and the family were in severe debt as a result of his father's debts. His father was virtually bankrupt when he died. He was a civil engineer whose main work was to provide water for the city of Aix en Provence, where Zola was brought up. He wasn't born there. He was born in Paris. But that catastrophe, if you like, in financial terms, had an enormous influence on Zola's career, I should say, as well as his life, in the sense that he was always looking, in one way or another, for a kind of father figure in his fiction and in his life.
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Jack Wilson
Right. And I understand he didn't care much for school, was he? And I know he failed his baccalaureate examination twice, ending his law career. But I didn't know if that was maybe a deliberate kind of sabotaging of a career he didn't want to have. Was he a promising student?
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Robert Lethbridge
It's not quite that simple. I mean, I think what happened was that his various relatives and uncles tried to persuade him to follow in his father's footsteps. And as you say, he did fail the baccalaureate twice. But in France, there are two streams for the baccalaureate. There's the humanities or arts stream, and there's a science stream. And his relatives persuaded or urged him to take the science stream, and he failed the science stream. And if you fail the baccalaureate in France, that is the end of your education. You can't go on to higher education or university.
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Jack Wilson
But was he as a child, was he showing signs of promise? Was he writing at all? Or was he indistinguished until he became older?
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Robert Lethbridge
At school, he was already winning prizes, interestingly enough, for French composition. But it was the science side of his education which led him down, I think.
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Jack Wilson
Right. And somehow he became childhood friends with Cezanne. Was that. Did they go to the same school, or how did he meet the famous painter?
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Robert Lethbridge
Well, they went to the same school. They were a year apart. Cezanne was one year older, and they shared a pretty nice childhood, if you like, in Provence, until Zola left Paris in 1858 or something like that. But he remained friends with Cezanne for most of the rest of his life, and they're often twinned together as an extraordinary meeting of a famous painter and a famous writer. Yeah, but there have also been extraordinary myths about that relationship, in the sense that it was thought for well over a hundred years that that friendship came to an end when Zola published Love When I Was the Masterpiece, his book about art in Paris, in which the main character who's a failed painter, was seen by contemporaries to be based on Cezanne himself. And in fact, that remained true for decades as an idea, until in 2013, a letter was discovered from Cezanne to Zola suggesting that they had not broken off their friendship as literary history or cultural history would have it, and that there are, in fact, other reasons why their friendship came to an end. One of them was simply that their lives drifted apart. I mean, Zola had a life in Paris, Cezanne stayed in Provence, Cezanne remained unknown and impoverished until the end of the century. Zola rapidly made a reputation for himself and made a lot of money. But the crucial thing, I think, that split them was the Dreyfus affair, in which Zola took the side of Dreyfus and Cezanne took the side of the anti Dreyfusaal. So that ideologically and politically, there was an enormous split at the end of the 1880s, at the beginning of the 1890s.
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Jack Wilson
Right. And I definitely want to ask you more questions about the Dreyfus affair as we get a little further along, but let's go back to when Zola was first Starting out as a professional writer, did he start by writing fiction or was he writing for the newspapers or anything in order to kind of make his way?
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Robert Lethbridge
Yeah, I mean, essentially his. After he moved to Paris and had to find a job, the first job he found was with the publisher Hachette, where he started reviewing books. And from that he started to review in the newspapers. And this then led to a career in journalism. And for his whole life he would always insist that journalism was the great apprenticeship for any writer seeking to understand the modern world. He did start to write fiction towards the end of the 1860s, but before the Rougon Macquart. But it was only after the end of the Second Empire that he really set himself on a career as a writer.
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Jack Wilson
So the descriptions of him as a writer, even from the earliest days, all sound very assertive and contentious. We read that he was an aggressive critic and a boundary smashing autobiographer and a fearless political commentator. What was fueling him? Was he an angry person? Was he upset with what he saw around him? And did this kind of match his personality? Or is this what happened when he picked up his pen?
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Robert Lethbridge
I think that his attitude towards the world and politics and culture was very much influenced by his experience during the Second Empire, the reign of Napoleon iii, during which freedom of expression was severely censored, in which writers and journalists were imprisoned for any kind of opposition to the regime. And I think that it. He then. And he joined various oppositional journals and papers and became a very, very fierce polemical critic of the regime and of his bourgeois society, which he thought was dominated by greed and philistinism. And as a critic, he was very much opposed, if you like, to the kind of saccharine literature of the time. And he is part of that greater movement towards realism in fiction. But he has to overcome extraordinary objections and barriers and challenges placed on him by the prevailing orthodoxy of the times. I don't think he's an angry person. I think he's an extremely committed person. And he actually believes in literature as a way of changing, if you like, society. Later in life he was asked whether he wanted to become a deputy, in other words, a member of parliament. And he said that he felt that journalism and literature were a far more effective way of changing attitudes and values than the machinations of politics.
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Jack Wilson
And he launched this ambitious novel cycle. And I'm wondering if Balzac was an influence. Was he looking at. Balzac was a sort of generation or two before him. I believe he died when zola was about 10. But was he looking to those novels and that project of Balzac's as kind of his example?
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Robert Lethbridge
Without a doubt, he saw Balzac as the great innovator and pioneer of realist literature. And one of the interesting things is precisely that he told his publisher that he wanted to do for the Second Empire what Balzac had done for the July Monarchy and the earlier period. And there's a very interesting set of notes in Zola's manuscripts which is called Differences between Balzac and Myself. And it speaks in a sense of his awareness of working in Balzac's shadow. But those differences between him and Balzac are really quite enormous, starting with the fact that Balzac's enormous work, his Comedie Humen, or Human comedy, was only put together, if you like, ex post facto, when it had been completed, when he put his reappearing characters as part of the same social world. In Zola's case, he said to his publisher from the start that he was going to have a much tighter structure by concentrating on the two branches of a single family, the Rougon on the one hand and the Macquart on the other. And the other thing is that Balzac's analysis of society is still pretty romantic, if you like. And Zola felt that any analysis of contemporary society should be physiologically based and based on the material realities of the contemporary world. So, in other words, he planned his Rue God Marc series as a single novel cycle. Started off with 10 novels was his original plan, which he proposed to his first publisher, and he then expanded it to 20. And his idea was to precisely cover every aspect of modern society. What happens is, he says that he's going to do this. He's going to portray the Second Empire, which lasted from 1851 to 1870. But as he proceeds beyond this, beyond the Second Empire and the Second Empire is left behind, his analysis of society leaves behind the specific frame of the Second Empire and is much more concerned with the modern world. And indeed, one of his books, he talks about how he's going to raise one of the questions which will be Central to the 20th century. So he starts off as a historical novelist, a novelist intending to portray a particular regime which had ended in catastrophe. But as he moves forward, and he starts his first novel in 1871 in this series, but he doesn't finish it till 1893, he leaves behind the specific frame of the Second Empire and is much more concerned with 19th century society, political, cultural and social. In a much more general sense, do.
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Jack Wilson
You think that his aesthetic choice that you just described in his departure from Balzac has made it challenging for readers, especially for modern readers. I know sometimes he's criticized as being pedagogical or too clinical. Are these fair assessments, do you think?
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Robert Lethbridge
I pick up that word pedagogical? I think that's a very important part of his mission. This is an age of increasing literacy, and he is writing, if you like, for a reading public, an increasing reading public, whose horizons are quite limited by what they know of the modern world. And I think there is a sense in which he is writing to explore areas of society which have hitherto been hidden. And he was fiercely opposed. I don't think there's any writer that I can recall who has had such vituperation and hatred directed at him for his writing, because his writing is concerned with the material and physiological determinants of human behavior. He deals with sex, with human appetites, with the working class, with the misery of the proletariat, of the slums, of the terrible conditions under which the working class is working. And all these subjects are seen by contemporary critics as unaesthetic, as not worth describing in fiction. And what he does is he opens up horizons which his reading public is simply not aware of. And, of course, he criticizes the class system of his time, the bourgeois values, the hypocrisy, the political incompetence of his times, and becomes, if you like, a very fierce critic of his own society.
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Jack Wilson
Well, someone like Dickens was doing something similar, but in what sounds like a quite different way. What exactly made people so upset with Zola's writing?
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Robert Lethbridge
I think the big difference is that he is writing in the new age of science, right? I mean, Darwin's books are being translated in France. There was an increasing secularization. There are huge advances in science and in physiology. And one of the things that he seizes on is, of course, theories of heredity, what we now would call genetics. Not that he believes in them totally, but they do provide a structure and a tightness to what he's writing in describing a single family that, if you like, the sins of the fathers are inherited by the children. And I think there is a kind of rigor and a kind of unsparing analysis of human behavior. What he does do, I think, also unlike Balzac and unlike Dickens, he refuses, for the most part, to moralize. I mean, there is a moral position that he's adopting, but hence leaving the reader to infer from his text rather than simply preaching to them. And I think this is what he objected to in Balzac. Balzac has lots of digressions in which he inserts his own views of the monarchy, or whatever it is, whereas Zola is kind of leaving it to the reader. It's different between showing and telling. Zola is showing as opposed to telling.
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Jack Wilson
And what kind of life was he living? I know Henry James described him after meeting him, and his description suggests that Zola was pouring his life into his novels. Or maybe it's better to say that he sacrificed his life for his art. Is he one of literature's monks, would you say?
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Robert Lethbridge
Far from it. I mean, I think that one of the things to remember is that James had met him several times. James had met him in Paris, but he met him. That particular Remark dates from 1893, when James met Zola in London. And the crucial thing about that date is that Zola had just finished the Rougon Macquart and was welcomed to London like a visiting monarch in 1893. And what James did not know about was he did not know about the fact that Zola would go on writing further novels, and he did not know about the Dreyfus affair, obviously. And he did not know about Zola's private life. In other words, that Zola had a very public profile. I mean, to the extent that he. By. Even by 1877, after L' Assommoir, when a foreign correspondent asked for his address, he just replied, just put, Emile Zola, France, and it'll get to me. And one has one. It's difficult to kind of imagine any writer in our time having that degree of prominence and of public profile. So Zola's public profile was international, Basically, when he was welcomed to London, he was welcomed to the Guild hall, to an audience of 2,000 people who all stood when he entered the place, and to accompaniment of heraldic trumpets, and was guided round London like a visiting king. He went to Rome in 1894, thereabouts, and again was treated like a visiting dignitary. I mean, here was a writer who was known internationally as the most important writer of his time, and his views mattered, if you like. So there is, in relation to his private life which we could talk about. But there is a sense in which, until later in life, he does, if you like, pour into his writing many of his preoccupations and intimate fantasies and the rest of it. But you have to understand that he has a life which is quite different, if you like, from his public profile. And one of the key things in Zola's writing and in his Life, if you like, is this distinction between the private and the public. So the public Zola is a familiar figure. He's photographed, interviewed people make paintings of him, etc, but there's a private Zola which he has to, if you like, keep going alongside or beneath or in secret if you like.
- [32:08]
Jack Wilson
Let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Robert Lethbridge. The Starbucks summer berry refresher is officially back. Bold notes of raspberry, blueberry and BlackBerry shaken with ice and poured over raspberry flavored pearls. Try it with lemonade or coconut milk. Available for a limited time. Your summer berry refresher is ready at Starbucks.
- [32:41]
Alan Sisto
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Jack Wilson
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Jack Wilson
Visit mailchimp.com okay, we're back. So Robert, we've talked about the Rogan Mockart series and I think we're at the point where he you mentioned that he had finished it, but let's talk about exactly what it was and what it accomplished. How many novels did he end up writing and were these bestsellers? Were they critically well received? Or how exactly did they turn him into the Zola that we just heard described, who was so lauded throughout Europe?
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Robert Lethbridge
Okay, as I said, he started off with an intention that he would write 10 novels and he planned different areas of society which he would look at. As he progressed, this grew to 20 and they cover virtually every aspect of contemporary life, whether it's the theater or politics or the mining communities of northern France or the slums of Paris. And one of the great novels that he writes is called La Dbacle or the Debacle, which is a study of the Franco Prussian War. And his popularity was quite extraordinary in terms of ordinary readers. He was a tremendous self publicist. He was brilliant at the commercial side of literature. So that when L' Assommoir was published, he sold 40,000 copies in that year of 1877. By the time of Germinal we're talking about 80,000 and by 1956, so I read somewhere, he was selling a million copies a year of his writing, right? So on the other hand, so he's got a popular readership because his books are accessible. They've got tremendously good plots, as well as investigating the social world in which they take place. But the critics absolutely refused to accept. And this disjunction between his commercial popularity and was itself. The commercial popularity was itself a reason why they thought this was not high art. The critics thought this was a debased form of popular literature and would not accept it for a very long time. Towards the end of his career, critics began to recognize that his writing was more than a documentary analysis of his society. It had epic, poetic, fictional qualities which were really magnificent, and that in some ways it was poetic. But for the first. I would say for the first 10 years. And of course, he was dealing with subjects which were seen to be objectionable, whether it be working class misery or prostitution. And traditional critics found these subjects absolutely unacceptable as the proper subject for literary production.
- [36:26]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's talk about the Dreyfus Affair. How far along was it when he published Jacques, and how did that public. What exactly was that, and how did it affect what was happening in that debate?
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Robert Lethbridge
Yeah, well, I mean, it's quite interesting because in a sense, the Dreyfus Affair is what Zola is best remembered for. And his remains were transferred, transferred to the Pantheon, which is the kind of the. Where. Where the great men of France or great men and women of France are interred in 1906. And it's not certain that he would have been, had his remains transferred to the Pantheon had it not been for the Dreyfus affair. As a writer, that might not have been enough. When the Dreyfus affairs started, Zola was almost totally oblivious of what was happening in Paris. And he was, in fact, in Rome when some of the most important early events in the Dregfors affair occurred. And he. First of all, and I think this is clear from letters to his wife, that he first of all saw it as a tremendous subject for a novel, actually, that it's the drama and the conflicts and the plot and the conspiracies. This struck him as ideal for his next novel because, of course, he does, after the Ronka, he write two more novel cycles. His productivity is quite extraordinary. And it was only when people began to question the Dreyfus verdict, you know, that Dreyfus had been found guilty of spying for Germany and transported to Devil's island in a horrific prison camp. When people started to question these, the basis on which he'd been found guilty, then the main advocates of Dreyfus himself approached Zola. And because of his reputation and his profile, he was important Enough, if you like, to get involved in the Dreyfus affair, which he saw as a monstrous miscarriage of justice. And once he'd been persuaded to take to get involved in the Dreyfus affair, then I think this is, if you like, the preface to his writing of Jacuz. Jacuz is an extraordinary document. It was published in on the front page of a pro Dreyfus newspaper run by Georges Clemenceau, who then became Prime Minister of France in due course during the First World War. And it was an absolutely devastating critique of the army which had conspired to find Dredfris guilty. And also the politicians of the time who had been complicit in this cover up. Once that Jacuze had been written and published, on the day it was published they sold 300,000 copies of that newspaper. And this led to him being put on trial, put on trial for defamation of the main figures on the anti draperies side. And from then on he became the subject of the extraordinary attacks by right wing press and anti Semitic partisans. And he was finally, after various judicial postponements, he was found guilty of defamation, sentenced to a year in prison, and on the night of that verdict he then fled to England where he was in exile for the best part of the next year. But from that moment onwards it had an effect, I think, not just on his life. At that time he had a miserable life in England. He hated the food, he hated the climate, he couldn't speak the language. But above all, it had a great influence on the ways in which his writing was seen for the next half century. For the next half century, Zola's writing was eliminated from the academy, from universities, from the French examination system on the grounds that it was too controversial. Because the Dreyfus affair split France in a way that was unprecedented. Families, friends, not just political parties. But it created a tremendous schism, if you like, in French society and French culture, which lasted for generations. You know, even when, at the end of the Second World War, when Charles Maurras was sentenced for collaboration with the Germans, when the verdict was pronounced and he was found guilty of collaboration, his telling remark was this is the revenge of Dreyfus. So that, you know, even 50 years later, the Dreyfus affair has to be understood as absolutely central to French political and cultural thinking.
- [42:03]
Jack Wilson
Right? So the subtitle of your book is A Determined Life. And it made me realize how many different ways we could understand the word determined. What exactly did you mean by choosing that description of his life?
- [42:20]
Robert Lethbridge
Well, I think I'm very pleased that you've picked up its double meaning, at least, because there are two senses, obviously. Determined in the sense of. Influenced by. Because the other thing to remember is that this is the age of determinism. In other words, the main philosophers, writers, thinkers, see history, if you like, and culture and individual behavior determined precisely. It's called positivism. Determined by their race, by their circumstances, by history. They are the products, if you like, of their times. So they're determined in that sense. I'm arguing that his writing and his life are both determined by the age in which he lived, as I said at the beginning, by the cultural, social and political upheavals of the time. But also, if you like, by the circumstances in which he lived as an individual human being. And then, of course, there is the other meaning of determination, which, because it strikes me, you know, I think I kind of got a better sense of this in writing the book, that the man's willpower and determination to succeed are really quite extraordinary. He comes from this humble background, and his complete works are some 20,000 pages. He writes every single day of his life, and at the same time he's writing plays. He keeps up a fantastic production of journalism. And there is a kind of determination to overcome his circumstances and to make writing itself a career and a successful career, it has to be said. So those are the two senses of determined, I think. I don't know whether you thought of any others.
- [44:11]
Jack Wilson
Well, I was wondering about. I guess part of this is just an offshoot of the first sense of determined. And that is whether life is predetermined, if it was foreordained. But it seems like when you look at his willpower, it wasn't necessarily that he was going to be as successful as he was.
- [44:34]
Robert Lethbridge
I think that's right. I think that the point about positive, or determinism, as it's called, is that as a philosophy and as a worldview, its context is the increasing secularization of European society. In other words, it's not predetermined by some divine plan or program. It is actually the historical, material and cultural determinants which determine an individual's life.
- [45:08]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [45:08]
Robert Lethbridge
In other words, on one of his early books, he put as a kind of epigraph, an epigraph from Ippolit ten taine, who was the kind of main advocate of determinism, which says that, you know, vice is a product like sugar or something else. Salt, I think, in other words, that the life is produced by the circumstances, and your destiny is determined by the circumstances. In which you live.
- [45:38]
Jack Wilson
Was he determined to succeed as a writer out of his literary ambition, his love for literature and what he viewed as his role in it? Or was he determined to change society and saw literature as the best way to do that? Was he. What exactly was the goal of his ambition?
- [45:59]
Robert Lethbridge
Well, I think both, if you like. I think that he did actually see that writing was a career. And he has many journalistic articles saying that, you know, a writer lives by his pen. This is not some hobby. And I think he was determined to ensure that writers were rewarded for their work. I mean, he was instrumental, if you like, in ensuring copyright legislation in France to ensure that royalties were paid to writers and not just plagiarized. Secondly, I think that as his writing progresses, and this is particularly in the two novel cycles beyond the Hugo Macar in the 1890s, that he does increasingly see his role as a kind of prophet, as a teacher. I think it's not by chance that one of the heroes of his later novel, Cycles, is actually a teacher. And one of the reasons why people do not admire his later novel Cycles as much as Rourau Macquart is he does take on a much more overt pedagogical stance in trying to suggest remedies, if you like, for the inadequacies and the miseries, if you like, of contemporary life and the conflicts of contemporary life. And this is undoubtedly a product of the Dreyfus affair itself. He saw that the Dreyfus affair was, in a sense, the product of widespread ignorance and lack of education. So he becomes, if you like, a prophet and ultimately utopian in his hope for the future, that education and science will provide for mankind a way forward out of the conflicts and contradictions and hatred of the century through which he lived. Which is why he's always looking forward, if you like, to the 20th century. Now, at one level, this becomes quite tiresome, it has to be said, but on another, it is genuine and sincere that he is looking towards a progressive future. And one of the things about his writing is that Le Rouge aux Marquard are carefully balanced between pessimism in his analysis of contemporary society and optimism that life can be improved. I mean, his most famous novel, perhaps Germinal, its very title is about fertility and growth and the future, as well as looking back to its revolutionary origins as a month of the revolution of Germinal itself. So there is this kind of tension between the positive and the negative in Zola's writing. And as he comes towards the end of his career, he increasingly becomes utopian in his thinking about the future.
- [49:02]
Jack Wilson
So for readers who are looking to get their feet wet in Zola's works, what do you recommend? You mentioned German. There's also Nana. Or is it better to start at the beginning of the, the Rugan Makar series and just, just sign up for reading your way through it from start to finish?
- [49:22]
Robert Lethbridge
No, I think, I mean, many people have tried that, but I think, I think the most, the most pragmatic way forward is to read a couple of books like l' Assommoir and Germinal, and then if you like, go back to others like Nana. But those two books are, if you like, exemplary of his own writing. And most people do think that they are tremendous novels. I mean, l' Assommoir is pretty grim, it should be said. It's pretty sad book. But Jean Renal is really an epic of modern literature and one of the finest novels ever written in France.
- [50:05]
Jack Wilson
And I will put in a plug for another way to approach this, which would be to start with your book Emil A Determined Life, and then head to the fiction after that. Robert Lethbridge, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [50:20]
Robert Lethbridge
Thank you very much.
- [50:25]
Jack Wilson
That was a good one. I learned a lot from Robert. In some breaking news, on Monday, June 2, 2025 French politicians advanced a bill that would put Alfred Dreyfus in line for a promotion from army captain to brigadier general. It's a symbolic act, of course, awarded posthumously, but according to the former prime minister who championed the bill, it's a path toward reparation, a recognition of Dreyfus merits, and a corrective to an act of injustice. Emile Zola is prominent in the discussion. His Jacuz still has some juice, or ja juice, as the case may be. Or maybe not. So much to learn, so much to read. But what would you choose if your time was dwindling and there was only time enough for one last book? Let's let Irina Mashinsky tell us what her pick would be. Foreigning me now is Irina Mashinsky, who is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays and translations, including the Naked World. Irina, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [52:01]
Irina Mashinsky
It's, it's, of course, it's a beautiful question. It's a very important question and one has to be very responsible answering it, of course. But I cannot bet that I would not Change my answer in here. But Today, today, on the 15th of February, 2023, I would say that I will reread, not read. I'm one of those people, and I probably would, because sometimes we ask each other, what would you take to. To Mars, when. When you fly to Mars, right? So you don't. You cannot carry too much. There is immediately an answer in my head. I will carry this little book that I got it at the black market in the 70s, pretty much as a teenager, I went to this black market black book of Moscow to exchange a heap of precious, very rare books that my mother generously gave to me to exchange for just one tiny collection by Pasternak, which I, of course, brought here with many other books. And this is one of the. It's a Soviet. It's not a. It's not a samizdat collection. It's a collection that was published in 1966, but it was based on his selection. It has some poems from Dr. Zhivago, unmarked, of course, and it's a little tiny book that I carried back from that black market in the same bag. It was just dangling there. So probably that would be it. And maybe a book by Mandelstam. So I would probably read Mandelstam's poems and Pasternak's poems, especially his late poems and late Mundustam poems too, because they would bring back the joy of being alive.
- [54:03]
Jack Wilson
And is it because of their use of language or because of their descriptions of love, or just descriptions of reality in the universe, or what is it about them that appeals to you so much?
- [54:17]
Irina Mashinsky
Well, they're different. Mundelstam is deeper in a way, and more complex, but in both there is this magic, absolutely unexplainable feeling that life is magic and that life is joyous despite everything. And this magic, you cannot explain how it happens, because the verse, Posternak's late verse is rather plain, formally, but I start crying each time. Read certain poems that just simply describe a forest. For example, one walks in the spring forest. But there is something in the way they're composed that has this effect on you. And Mundelstamus, in a different way, also brings back the glorious joy of being alive and this great fortune of having been born into this world.
- [55:15]
Jack Wilson
Now I want to read it. Can I get that effect if I read it in translation? Or do you feel like it's something that is sort of reserved for people who can read it in the original?
- [55:26]
Irina Mashinsky
Well, even people who read it in the original. Not everyone has this affinity with this particular test.
- [55:33]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [55:34]
Irina Mashinsky
So, for example, out of my. I have a close group of colleagues and friends, my collaborators, I'm the only fan of Pastor Naku from them, and they're very, very sensitive to language and to poetry. So it's very, of course, subjective. But I think that you would probably get even more so in Mandelstam, believe it or not, because with Pasternak, it's more unexplainable in a way. But of course, it's almost impossible to translate when. And this whole notion of impossibility, possibility. I don't want to go into this rather banal discussion. But of course you would. I'm sure you will. You will be rewarded in many ways. And there are some rather good translations of Undel. I can send you a list.
- [56:23]
Jack Wilson
Okay. And I will share that with our listeners. Irina Mashinsky, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [56:31]
Irina Mashinsky
Thank you so much, Jack.
- [56:39]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Irina Mashinsky for that cameo appearance and to Robert Lethbridge for the main course today, a scintillating discussion on Emil Zola. We have Mike Palindrome coming up. We'll do a little f scotting together. And a look at black American humor is on the horizon. And the Odyssey and Icelandic folk tales and Shakespeare's greatest love. All good stuff for the summer. Oh, and amazing worlds of science fiction and science fact. We'll have that for you on Thursday. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Lee C. Camp here. If you've been enjoying this show, I think you might enjoy my podcast, no Small Endeavor. Produced by Great Feeling Studios and prx, no Small Endeavor explores what it means to live a good life. We sit down with courageous, impassioned people like actor Martin Sheen or civil rights hero James Lawson to ask what it means to live a life worth living. Follow no Small Endeavor Wherever you get your podcasts. Living a good life is no small endeavor. And we would love to help.
- [58:17]
Robert Lethbridge
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Jack Wilson
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Robert Lethbridge
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Jack Wilson
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Robert Lethbridge
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Jack Wilson
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Robert Lethbridge
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