Graham Robb

Balzac is an absolute gift to biographers, with a satisfyingly outrageous life, a complicated financial and sexual history, and politics so ambiguous that everyone from Marx and Engels to hard-line legitimists has been able to claim him as an ally. And a not-inconsiderable gift for sensationalising his own public image. The only downside is that you have to read about forty novels, plus dozens of short stories, novellas, plays, unfinished works, newspaper articles, essays, letters, etc. And show more - since Balzac probably featured in more anecdotes than all his contemporaries put together - endless memoirs of the time by other writers.

Robb seems to have been up for the challenge, and he tries to give us a biography that presents a fair balance between the literary genius and the walking disaster area lurching from one financial crisis or love affair to the next (the two were usually connected: Balzac's various lovers seem to have contributed more to paying off his debts than his literary earnings ever did). The path is strewn with rabbit holes for biographers to disappear into: it must be very tempting to get drawn into working out exactly where all that money disappeared to, or developing theories about the identities of lovers known only by first names, or deciding exactly how many illegitimate children Balzac had. But Robb is very self-disciplined, and generally carries on straight ahead along the path, with only a short digression to tell us what sort of thing there is down that particular hole, and which of his predecessors we will encounter should we choose to descend in quest of white rabbits.

What emerges is a picture of a writer driven along in life as in his work by a fountain of bubbling creative energy. Ideas come out unstoppably, most of them swept aside because something else more interesting has come up, but every now and then something makes him stop and focus and a completed (or almost completed) novel is dashed down on paper in record time, usually in a coffee-fuelled all-night session. In this context Balzac's otherwise rather ludicrous career as a venture capitalist starts to make more sense - Robb classifies the business schemes in two categories: "practical ideas he never seriously thought of putting into practice, and impractical ones, which he did." Robb finds that things like the dairy farm and pineapple plantation at Sèvres could have been made into financial successes with hard work and thorough planning, and so could the silver mines in Sardinia, but that would have been no fun - when he had been through the excitement of getting to Sardinia and it turned out that there were no actual lumps of silver lying around on the ground, Balzac lost interest and moved onto something else. That also helps to explain why the financial advice Balzac gives in his novels is so much sounder than that which he followed in real life...

The most interesting and rewarding part of this biography for me was the part about Balzac's Lucien-like early attempts to make a living as a writer, and Robb goes into some detail about the pseudonymous novels he wrote in those days and the circumstances of their production and promotion.

Robb seems to have been won over by most of the women in Balzac's life, especially Eveline Hanska, whom he defends energetically against the Balzac fans disappointed by her posthumous "unfaithfulness". Even the housekeeper, "Mme de Brugnol", who was accused by Balzac of trying to blackmail him, gets a few good words from Robb (he suspects the blackmail story of being a smokescreen put up to distract Eveline). From the safe perspective of a reader of biographies, it isn't hard to imagine that anyone involved in a relationship with Balzac would come across as a calm island of common-sense in the middle of an ocean of impetuous craziness, though.

Apart from his many and mostly quite well-known affairs with (wealthy) women, there's an obvious and only slightly prurient question to ask about Balzac's sex-life: did the creator of Vautrin, who has a claim to be the first major gay character in mainstream fiction, also have sexual relationships with men? Not surprisingly, there's no conclusive proof, but Robb does find at least circumstantial evidence that might point that way. No-one who has read the description of the two poets in Illusions perdues can doubt that Balzac was aware of the sexual attractiveness of men. Starting with the critic and amateur wallpaper-hanger Latouche, who shared an apartment with Balzac for a while, there was quite a succession of young "secretaries" or "assistants" who played a part in Balzac's life briefly and then parted from him in a huff - it does sound like a familiar pattern... show less

Arthur Rimbaud is one of those writers whose life of mythic proportion influences more people than his writing. The demonic youth who mastered poetic styles like a virtuoso and then invented his own before the age of 21, only to disappear into the searing heat of Africa to seek his fortune as a merchant, seems to have led two disjointed lifetimes. A challenge to any prospective biographer; there have been many. Was there a need for one more when this appeared in 2000?
As Graham Robb writes: show more “Many biographers of Rimbaud obviously preferred the sentimental, schoolboy adventure stories of Rimbaud’s early memorialists to the poet’s own savage cynicism. . . . I have tried at least to allow Rimbaud to grow up” (xvi). To me, he succeeded.
Robb is an excellent writer. Among his strengths are the amount of research he conducts and his skill at creating the overall arc of his account. This is the second of his books that I’ve read. In the first, The Discovery of France, his strength was mitigated by a curious feature of his writing: the logic of the structure of some of his paragraphs is difficult to scan; I had to re-read them to get the sense. While this bothers me less than its opposite, verbosity, this trait slows me down.
There were fewer instances of this quirk in this book than in Discovery, but here’s an example: When Robb writes in the middle of a paragraph “This may not be entirely misleading . . . ” (6), I had to read the paragraph twice to see that “this” was not an explication of what came before, but was the introduction of what was to follow. I grow impatient when my grammar software busts me for what it calls an “unclear antecedent,” now I see what that means.
Here’s a slightly different example, from the introduction (xiv): “Unlike so many privately respectable anti-heroes, Rimbaud led an exemplary life.” When I read it the second time, I realized Robb had subverted the ordinary usage of “exemplary life.” To me, it indicates that Robb is not a sloppy writer; he has a lot to say, and he’s meticulous about what he writes. It sometimes feels, though, as if too many contrasting thoughts are packed into one paragraph.
Robb’s love of antithesis often pays off, however. Here’s an example, describing the school Arthur and his brother began to attend: “If the environment had reflected its pedagogical aims, the Institute Rossat would have been preparing its pupils for a life in prison. It was Arthur’s first taste of freedom . . .” (17). This thought returns hauntingly during Rimbaud’s final years in Abyssinia, where the slave-trade was still rampant in the late nineteenth century, but it is Rimbaud who complains incessantly of being enslaved.
The twin poles of freedom and captivity formed the core of Rimbaud’s personality, so Robb, with his love of paradox and antithesis, in addition to his profound knowledge of French literature, is his ideal biographer. He traces the conflict and compulsion in Rimbaud's nature to his family constellation: the absent father, the demanding mother who withheld love. Some readers may feel this makes the book an exercise in psycho-biography, yet Robb cites contemporaries who observed that, if one knew the mother, it was understandable that Arthur took to the road. Harder to comprehend, perhaps, is how regularly he returned, including in his final illness, after more than a decade in East Africa.
Robb researches his books thoroughly. In this one, he has digested a wealth of primary and secondary literature about an author whose output, in comparison, was minuscule. Robb interacts particularly with Enid Starkie, who wrote eight decades ago what was long the standard biography in English. In some cases, based on evidence, he differs from Starkie; in at least one other case, again based on assiduous research, he defends Starkie on a point on which others have sharply disagreed with her.
The broad outlines of Rimbaud’s bi-polar life—path-breaking poet in his youth, African gun-runner in his maturity—are familiar to any of the millions, such as I, for whom the poet was an intensely private adolescent discovery. Robb convincingly revises the tale of the second half. The conventional view, rooted in Rimbaud’s letters home, written in his chronically discontented and self-condemning manner, is that his time in Abyssinia brought paltry returns. Robb investigates and finds that Rimbaud reaped enormous profits.
Enormous profit of a different kind is what I reaped in reading this masterpiece of biography. show less

This is an unexpected gem - set in the borders of Scotland and England, the author tells the history of the area, while he rides around it on a bicycle in appalling weather!
This is the "borders" made famous by Walter Scott's "historical" novels set in the area. Robb makes clear that this "wild west" period was an aberration, and that the area had a much more interesting story to tell.
The "debatable" land was not debatable in the sense of being contentious - the root of the word "batable" show more meant "fattening" - this was an area for fattening stock. For many centuries, by common agreement, it was used for that purpose. No one lived there, but many used the land as a free agistment paddock.
Then in the 1500s, rivalry between monarchs in London and Edinburgh led to outside stoking of wild behaviour. Think Afghanistan. The wild and lawless period then raged, and only died down in the 1600s. The wildness was later captured in highly inaccurate ballads and poems and immortalised. Thus to Walter Scott.
The author then covers early mapping of the area, and UK generally, and highlights the extraordinary accuracy of maps by Ptolemy almost 2,000 years ago.
And then there is a short but convincing foray into the possibility that the original King Arthur may have fought, and died, in this part of the world. show less

My takeaway from this book is that there is more to France than Paris. As true as that is today, it was even more the case in earlier times, when in vast regions people spoke in Basque, Breton, Catalan, Alsatian, Flemish, and other non-French languages and had no concept of living in a country called France. The land was a quilt of a thousand or more pays.
Graham Robb chronicles this neither with a sense of nostalgia nor of being a collector of the quaint. Before writing this book, he was show more already acclaimed for his biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud. He counted as an expert.
His bicycle tours of the countryside revealed to him much he didn’t know. He supplemented the first-hand knowledge his trips gave him with years of research in many libraries and archives. This combination of first-hand observation and digesting hundreds of old guidebooks, maps, and postcards yields the insight that “the more accurate the map, the more misleading the impression” (p. 6). This sentence is an example of his love of tersely antithetical sentences. Here is another: “Even before it was finished, it was clear that the map of France, with its standardized spellings and consistent symbols, would be considerably more coherent than the country itself” (p. 196).
At times the narrative threatens to become a collection of oddities, but even then, the reader is sustained by the author’s taut, lively prose.
The book is organized more carefully, however, than readily apparent. The first half uncovers a France that has disappeared, the second deals with “forms of life that are more recognizably modern” (p. 138). I especially enjoyed the interlude between parts 1 and 2, on the animal population of France in the 18th and 19th centuries. Merely to conceive of writing such a chapter shows the imagination of the author.
The material Robb integrates into his narrative could have easily bloated to a book twice the size in the hands of a less-disciplined writer. This is a book that repays attentive reading. A very good read. show less