Outline for a Life of Balzac

Projected in sixty volumes, with innumerable revisions, in the style of its

subject, which is to say (as Gautier said) galley proofs that could be

mistaken for a child's drawing of fireworks

I

Disavowal, in two parts: no pretended memoirs, nor

plan

For fortune to sell the writer dead. No critical

apparatus,

No vamped-over reflections by a literary guerrilla. No

Nothingarians of any stripe whatever. And of the French

Academy, not a word-except to report its verdict:

Negative: "Monsieur Balzac is too large for our

armchairs."

And if he said Abysses have their magnetism, what of it?

And panted up five flights of stairs before any major

Decision, and paid the fortunetelling shark in years,

Whose business was it? There are periods in his life

When he disappears altogether. Period.

Il

Bravado of body: sixty-two or -three inches from floor

To massive crown, a stance of will. My nose is a world

To the sculptor-but never were there eyes like Balzac's,

Gold-streaked black, lion-tamer stare that looked

Through doors and into the hearts of wealthy, literate

Widows. Rings on every finger for the Contessa

And her cousin-they whistled him to their sides,

The peasant paws loosed from labor only for women,

Journeys toward one or from another, and for forays

Into the kingdom of bric-a-brac. Who is not victim

Of his own desires? Robust, swarthy, excessive, and

Kind, his nature was child-like, luminous, consuming!

The massive heart open, atremble . . .

A person who loves me, he wrote

Of one lover to another, always makes me quiver.

Ul

Passion does not compromise, he said, and lived it,

Accepting every sacrifice, the claustral life

Of Work and Cruel Weight, twenty years of monstrous

Labor- "desperate" is the most common adjective

In the biographies. Exactly opposite of Midas,

What he touched turned into debt in multiples

So that often only flight could save him. Unthinkable,

An intellectual disaster, his death at fifty; all

Of thinking France gathered in the rain to think it.

"Shipwrecked in port," George Sand lamented of the

bold,

Resolute mariner, that Gulliver appetite for Beauty.

He left white flannel and cashmere robes, smudged;

Unwritten The Anatomy of Educating Bodies and The

Monograph

Of Virtue. The blade wears out the scabbard.

IV

Were there no limits to his capacity for wishful

Thinking? And what of the design that equipped one

For whom luxury is necessity with the worst head

For figures in all of literature? Triply bankrupt,

Pursued by the hounds of debt, he plotted money

And salvation through long monastic nights; white-

Robed, the bullish neck bent over pages. In 12 hours,

Little Sister, I can put a good deal of black on white:

Seventy novels told and retold in a frenzy of vision

And revision; business ventures schemed on paper-

Cheap editions of the classics, marketed, alas, toward

The democratic hordes. Incessant mongering of idea

And desire, with Fortune just ahead, and certain. . . .

Mornings, he ate one hundred cherries, to save the

heart.

v

Fifty thousand cups of caffeine fueled his toil

At the small midnight window, a black oil

Of Jamaica, Martinique, and Mocha. How many

A Sisyphus of literature has drunk himself to death

On coffee? Nacquart, patron, friend, physician

For fifty fire-charged years, could only shrug:

Balzac, that furnace! Whose head ought to be

Like the stomach of ruminants, for whom everything

Assumed, immediately, inevitably, vast proportions,

The manuscripts thick as his torso, with passion

Amok in the margins. Bathed, he'd take up

The crow quills, jabbing at night's production- All

Must be changed! -the north to south revisions

Crisscrossing lines, ink shooting out from every word,

An Apocalypse of addition and deletion.

VI

Les Jardies. One entered his house outside Paris as if

Being poured into a bottle; his door was in the garret,

Above two unoccupied floors (his art of covering his

tracks,

Defending against creditors and conscription:

passwords

For admittance: "The apple season has begun"; "I'm

bringing

Lace from Belgium"). How his heart clung to carpets

And mahogany chests, superfluous clocks, pieces of

glass,

And enamel, bronze, porcelain, brass, and plaster-

The walls covered with pictures without frames and

frames

Without pictures- priceless finds! For nothing! His

collector

Mania! From the outside, it is true, the place looked

A barn-part of the disguise! -inside: an Oriental

Palace! The boudoir white and pink, a pastel of flowers,

The turquoise-studded walking stick, canes jewel-

encrusted -

The Benedictine of Romance! Powerless over what pleases

vu

Catholicism was poetry, and good sense-but when

Did either suffice a life? Women were, de facto,

His religion, beginning with Mother ("not mad, merely

Malicious," her physician diagnosed) whose stormy

eyes

Were unforgiving. She put him out to nurse three years

In the country. I never had a mother, though his first

Two lovers were old enough, and had her name as well:

Laure.

Marriage he deemed a civil war, and sided with the

ladies

Who, though scheming, dishonest, and brutal, were not

To blame. For thirty years he courted the dream

Of rich widows, generous breasts and a louvre with

estate.

Readymade, well tutored. An early note to the Polish

Countess: Woman has always been my dream and I

Have never opened my arms except to embrace illusions.

VII

The wedding takes place in the chapter called "Death."

See it as foreign and cold, an early morning

Formality in Ukranian March. No guests. The bride's

Lyrical letters in Russian had been signed "The

Unknown"

But her seal was aristocratic as well as exotic-

Irresistible! Take charge of my dreams he responded

To her praise, And make my longings come true. Her castle

Did not disappoint: cornfields from every window, a

phalanx

Of servants and books. And if she hobbled to the altar

And was suspicious, and a black screen swam before his

eyes,

His health a ruin-so be it. After the ceremony he

couldn't

Walk for dropsical swelling. One hundred leeches

Applied to the stomach. Gangrene. The death chamber,

Dr. Nacquart called the bridal boudoir-an ending

Straight out of his fiction, though he didn't write it.

Ix

And then to slog home to Paris through bogholes and

ice,

With crates of cloth and bric-a-brac. The bride

Having just lost Balzac's daughter, in the fifth month,

He panted his assurances into frigid air. Home: ablaze

At every window-but no answer at the door. The

locksmith

Summoned, the newlyweds waited on the steps in the

dark.

Inside, the raving Frangois crouched in a corner

Polishing the silver; poor thing, he'd chosen that

moment

To crack; it took three men to overpower him before

He could be taken to the madhouse. Do your ideas for

books

Come from the heart or the head? asked old ladies

In drawing rooms. From the spleen he said.

x

To die when one has reached the goal! Tantalus!

Breathless, half-blind, alone in the bridal chamber,

The deathbed pastel a lie; the great warrior-monk

Profile was dark, "violet," Victor Hugo said,

Who had left the dinner table to take his leave;

He heard the ominous rattle, touched the damp hand

That reached out for Biachon, the famous Comédie

Humaine physician-pathos? Perhaps. The most serious

Of novelists, opined Mr. James, who found his mass

"Wanting in charm" but grand. Look for that litho

Where he beams like a tenor, or the swaggering Rodin,

Master of lives, passionate visionary, an engine of a

man.