Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, and the writing life: some notes toward an essay

Last night I went to attend the latest meeting of Scott Esposito's Found in Translation reading group at the Booksmith in San Francisco. We discussed Eugénie Grandet, Balzac's 1833 novel about the wages of greed, which was his first bestseller. Normally we read contemporary literature, but if I remember correctly, Scott quizzed the group for suggestions and chose the book after someone mentioned Balzac's other most-famous novel, Père Goriot, and I made an offhand comment that I'd rather read Eugénie Grandet a second time. The reasons I gave must have intrigued him.

Anyway, the novel made for a great discussion, one of the longest we've had at nearly two hours. Early on I volunteered that I had read a half-dozen works or so by Balzac in my early twenties — to the best of my recollection, four or maybe five novels and two novellas — and so I immediately became the second-string Balzac expert in the group. Which was fair enough. Because what I didn't mention, was that I was fairly obsessed with Balzac in those days, less with his work than with the idea of the man and his life and times. Back then I also read the Stephan Zweig biography, the Graham Robb biography, and whatever else I could lay my hands on; it's safe to say that I know way too much about the fat little man who invented the French novel.

It's funny, though; I barely remember anything about the novels themselves even though I read them with such enthusiasm, and my "second" reading of Eugénie Grandet was pretty much my first. All that I really remembered of the book was the stripped-down nature of the whole narrative, the simplicity of the characters, the way it seemed to drive forward like a classical tragedy, and the relative absence of the things I think of as most characteristic of Balzac: a profusion of character, incident, and parallel plots, in a story set in the heart of Paris. I remembered thinking of it as being relatively unlike the other novels of his I had read. Eugénie Grandet is set in the provinces, concerns only about a half-dozen characters, and there's just one plotline: the tyrannical, miserly ways of Eugénie's father end by corrupting and ruining everyone within his influence, an influence that reaches far beyond the grave to set the entire outcome of his daughter's life.

But I had remembered none of this, though I found numerous pencil markings in the margins of my copy. I think I was attracted to Balzac in my late teens and twenties less because of his actual work than because of the way he embodied the best and the worst of the writing life, which I was eager to study.

On the good side, I was drawn to Balzac's notion that the artist belongs to a moral aristocracy of a kind (an idea I reject, by the way); I was drawn to the fact he was a self-made man amidst a world in turmoil; also to his prolific creativity; his vast, all-encompassing chutzpah; his gift for observation; his disciplined working habits.

The worse aspects of his life were equally instructive. There was the fact he labored through his twenties writing stuff so trashy even scholars don't waste their time on it. There was the debt and poverty that plagued him his whole life, because when he had money he would deny himself necessities in order to enjoy sensual luxuries — food, fine clothing, prostitutes — and in broke desperation would resort to get-rich-quick schemes that always, always, always put him further behind. There was his isolation: the closest thing to a romance he enjoyed was an ardent correspondence with a woman who lived in Poland, whom he only married five months before his early death from overwork and massive overindulgence in coffee. It was a lonely life filled with high hopes repeatedly disappointed, which unfortunately is an accurate description of the lives of many writers and artists. There are lessons in all the bad: don't give up, disdain luxury, avoid big gambles, and cherish your friends.

When I was 18, I didn't really know what kind of writer I could actually be, and as far as I knew I could be everything, because I hadn't yet spent a dozen years discovering my strengths and limitations. I think that Balzac's life story and example gave form to the idea of sitting alone in a room every day, writing, and drinking coffee, and writing some more, giving artful and entertaining expression to the world I saw around me.