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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAt 500 pages Zola\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book is certainly an oeuvre, though not a masterpiece. The 14th novel in his Rougon-Macquart series, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the one most closely based on personal experience. His friendship with Paul C\u00c3\u00a9zanne, going back to their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence, gave him an early entr\u00c3\u00a9e to the Paris avant-garde; at 26 he came out fighting on behalf of Manet and co in a series of critiques of the Salon of 1866. L\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Oeuvre, written 20 years later, represents \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Parisian art world as it really was,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d claims Edward Vizetelly, its first translator into English as His Masterpiece. The novel is a roman \u00c3\u00a0 clef with composite characters that don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily fit particular locks. Its doomed painter hero Claude Lantier is a mash-up of C\u00c3\u00a9zanne and Manet, while his best friend the novelist Pierre Sandoz is quite clearly Zola and gets all the best lines, eg: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153How can a man be sufficiently wanting in self-doubt as to believe in himself?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The book is said to have ended their friendship but in fact, apart from the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bluey tinge\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of his palette and his lack of social graces, Lantier hardly resembles C\u00c3\u00a9zanne at all. For a start, Zola makes his hero the illegitimate son of a laundress living on a small allowance from a benefactor who recognised his talent. C\u00c3\u00a9zanne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s background was too bourgeois for Zola\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s purposes: the son of a provincial banker, his friend lived on a family allowance he was so desperate to keep that he hid the existence of his mistress and son from his father, only marrying in 1886, the year of the old man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death. No wonder Hortense looks so sour-faced in pictures. The line in the novel C\u00c3\u00a9zanne was least likely to forgive is put into the mouth not of the painter Lantier but the art critic Jory: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And so we waited for my father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death, and then I married her.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I suspect what C\u00c3\u00a9zanne couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stomach was the melodrama. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A fever stiffened him, he worked on with the blind obstinacy of an artist who dives into his entrails to drag therefrom the fruit that tortures him.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Pur-lease! The mix of metaphors alone would be a turn-off for any painter of apples. And Lantier\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obsession with creating a single masterpiece is ridiculous. What Zola gets right, though, is the dedicated artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essential selfishness; as Lantier confesses to the equally doomed heroine Christine on day one: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153As for me, when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a question of painting, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d kill father and mother you know\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. She couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say she wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t warned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solipsistic selfishness is a constant in the characters of artists in novels. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He is an exceptional man,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Vermeer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s friend van Leeuwenhoek warns the heroine of Tracy Chevalier\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Girl with a Pearl Earring. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153His eyes are worth a room full of gold. But sometimes he sees the world only as he wants it to be, not as it is. He does not understand the consequences to others of his point of view. He thinks only of his work, not of you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clutton, the leader of a gang of young English artists on the loose in Paris in Somerset Maugham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Of Human Bondage, is a chip off the Lantier monomaniac block: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The only reason that one paints is that one can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help it\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 One paints for oneself, otherwise one would commit suicide.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Lantier takes that final option, but Maugham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hero Philip foresees a less dramatic end for Clutton: he saw him \u00e2\u20ac\u0153in twenty years, bitter, lonely, savage and unknown; still in Paris \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 at war with himself and the world, producing little in his increasing passion for a perfection he could not reach: and perhaps sinking at last into drunkenness.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Clutton\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own hero is a chap he met in Brittany who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just off to Tahiti \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a former stockbroker with a wife and family. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHe chucked it all to become a painter.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcAnd what about his wife and family?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 asked Philip. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcOh, he dropped them. He left them to starve on their own account.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcIt sounds a pretty low-down thing to do.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcOh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up being an artist\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No prizes for guessing the identity of this ungentlemanly chap. Gauguin had a fascination for Maugham, who returned to him four years later in The Moon and Sixpence, the story of a London stockbroker who abandons his wife and children to go to Paris and become an artist, ending up in Tahiti. Like Lantier\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, his paintings have a strange power. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They seemed to me ugly, but they suggested without disclosing a secret of momentous significance,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the narrator\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s verdict when he first sees them in Paris. Years later in Tahiti he learns from the local doctor of a climactic cycle of paintings burnt on the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s orders after his death. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What would the real Gauguin would have made of this romantic flim-flam? I suspect he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have liked it even less than C\u00c3\u00a9zanne liked Zola\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s L\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Oeuvre. Gauguin had plenty of pride and contempt, but it was not directed at posterity. He was in fact a rare example of an artist sufficiently wanting in self-doubt to believe in himself. For a reality-check on how artists actually think, novelists could do worse than to read his final memoir, Before and After, written on The Marquesas in 1903. Gauguin was no self-destructive Strickland: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I have worked and spent my life well, intelligently, even courageously, without weeping, without tearing things,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he concludes \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u201c and I have very good teeth.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Nor did he treat his family heartlessly, if you believe \u00c3\u2030mile\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s defence of his father in the preface to the first edition. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It is a good story,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00c3\u2030mile dismisses the Gauguin myth. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It is a pity to contradict it, so many credulous souls have been entertained by it. But alas, it is not true.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many credulous souls are entertained by novels about artists but alas, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not true either. The one exception is The Horse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mouth, whose author Joyce Cary, like Maugham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Philip, studied art in Paris but gave it up when he realised he was third-rate. Cary\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anti-hero Gulley Jimson (illustrated, played by Alec Guinness in Ronald Neame\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1958 film) has the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essential selfishness and ambition to paint masterpieces, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the practicalities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the getting of materials and walls to paint on \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that exercise him. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no diving into entrails for torturous fruits. Jimson is a desperado, not a fruitcake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of all the novels about art and artists, Cary\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s is the only masterpiece. But let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s give the last word to the non-fictional Gauguin: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153As you see, everything is serious and ridiculous also. Some weep, others laugh\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 What is one to do about it? Nothing. All this must be; and, after all, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s of no consequence. The earth still turns round; everyone defecates; only Zola bothers about it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Laura Gascoigne Thank God for books. When shut off from real life, you can see it reflected in novels. But how accurate is the reflection? Does the mirror distort? In month ten of the no-longer-new-abnormal I sat down with a stack of novels about artists. Some I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read before, others were new, chief among them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2596,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions\/2596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}