Léon Hennique Novel

Originally published by Octave Mirbeau under the title “Manuel du Savoir Écrire” in
Le Figaro, 11 May 1889.

I was reading the other day a most beautiful book: Un caractère by Monsieur Léon Hennique. It is the story of a gentleman born during the Revolution, dead in our time—a man of proud soul, tender heart, and delicate sensibility who preserves, pure from all modern contamination, the beliefs of his youth and the prejudices of his race. His inner life, troubled and wounded, unfolds pathetically throughout the century. From the depths of the château where grief has imprisoned him, where he is held by the haunting presence of his dead wife—alive in the full bloom of love, living again within him in soul and flesh through the continuous tension of regrets, through the mystical hallucination of memories—from the depths of this château, peopled by him with a thousand riches of vanished times where his devotion quickens and his fidelity strengthens, he watches the century pass by: dynasties, revolutions, fashions, progress, battles, works, men. And all this passes, succeeds itself parallel to him, without his ever mingling with it, without anything coming to distract him from his solitude. It all passes in effacement, in the foreshortening of distant things, of veiled figures, with the almost intangible quality of phantoms.

Such is this most curious book, stripped of its essential episodes, its charming or painful details, its rich artistic dress. It represents a considerable sum of efforts, denotes an uncommon intelligence, the habit of grave thoughts and high spiritualities, the love of what is great, tender, and unknown in life. The style is delicately wrought, lovingly chiselled—not simple, no, but reduced to suggestive expression, to profound utterance—and powerful too in its elegant harmony, evocative in its mystery, sometimes disquieting. A rare work, in short, containing admirable pages, and how few such appear in the course of a year.

Well then, it is most melancholy to say, but this book has passed almost unnoticed, just as last year Pœuf did—that little masterpiece of grace and emotion which will remain, despite critical disdain, one of the most engaging, one of the most exquisite tales of our time. Yet Monsieur Léon Hennique is no longer an unknown whose discovery remains to be made. He is not an anxious, irresolute beginner who searches and walks gropingly in the wake of a school or in the shadow of a master. Freed from the inevitable influences that weigh upon a writer’s beginnings, his talent has emerged. It has grown in free air, put forth robust branches, and flowered with beautiful blooms. Moreover, Monsieur Léon Hennique has passed through the theatre, which creates rapid and universal renown. His La Mort du duc d’Enghien, recently performed at the Théâtre Libre, had even been quite successful. The sober and strong dramatic quality of these living scenes interested and moved the most glacial, the most prejudiced—those who, through set hostility to the artistic attempts of that theatre, disparage in advance all the plays performed there, calling them contraband works. One could therefore hope that Monsieur Léon Hennique had finally emerged from the shadows.

Alas! Barely a few months separate the performance of La Mort du duc d’Enghien from the appearance of Un caractère. And silence has returned. Not complete silence, for this charming work has been treated as incomprehensible by two or three venerable chroniclers, doubtless because it rises above the poor conceptions and ordinary platitudes of the novel. As for the author, he has been judged in a word: they said he was a “fumiste”—a poseur—because one senses in him no other preoccupation than that of satisfying himself, of “pleasing himself,” as Monsieur Barbey d’Aurevilly proudly recommended. I believe the venerable chroniclers have gone rather too far, and this opinion deserves correction. Monsieur Hennique, no more than Monsieur Huysmans, than Monsieur Élémir Bourges, and others of the same breed, is not properly speaking what one calls a “fumiste.” He is at most an ignoramus—I mean that he does not render himself an exact account of what a true writer should be nowadays. He is not in the modern movement, that’s all.

For Monsieur Hennique, a true writer should write; above all, he should expect satisfaction and success only from his books. This is certainly a grave error, one that lags behind the century through excessive candour. We have moved forward, damn it! Literature has become today a very complicated profession, very external, where the force of talent and the quality of production count for nothing, where the special and continuous staging of the author’s life is everything.

It is no longer a matter of creating a beautiful work; one must know how to organise beautiful publicity. And this learned, refined publicity will not bear directly upon books—that would be vulgar and would satisfy no one—it will encompass things foreign to literary work and will spread preferably over the sports that a well-born man is susceptible of practising. I shall permit myself to indicate to Monsieur Léon Hennique, whose naivety distresses me, some of the most usefully employable methods. They all derive from a new operation of the mind that our best psychologists have baptised with this name: “quintuplification.” It is within everyone’s reach when one has much courage and a complete absence of disgust. But first I believe it useful to establish an axiom from which all the philosophy of modern publicity flows:

Ridicule does not exist. Those who, penetrated by this truth, dared to brave it face to face, conquered the world.

To be a true writer, the first condition is not to jealously hide one’s life from public curiosity, but to throw it wide open, to permit entry not only through the door, but through the windows, through the dormer windows, through the air vents, through the cracks in the walls. It is indispensable that your furniture be minutely described every three months, and each time differently. Naturally, these will be only valuable pieces of incomparable antiquity, rare curios, suggestive fabrics, travel souvenirs, gifts that make one dream—all things, moreover, that you do not possess. Your paintings—which are for the most part merely wretched photographs—will be signed Rembrandt, or Mantegna, or Carpaccio, or Fra Lippi, or perhaps Detaille, Bonnat, Henner, with some Claude Monets, some Degas, some Burne-Jones here and there, for one must have all schools and cater to all tastes.

They will also speak of your divans “deep as tombs” and your dear books interleaved with exquisite notes. Ah! so exquisite! Your carpets will be vividly celebrated, and they will tell what your favourite flower is—a very pale flower, dying like a soul in a vase. And among all these beauties will move young men, poets in hope, apprentice literati, who will call you “master” and whom you will direct each evening toward editorial offices, each charged by you to play his little flute air there in your honour.

Each time you travel, you will have this considerable event announced in all the newspapers. It is important that these travels occur at fixed periods, not far removed from one another. In the case where very vulgar affairs would keep you in Paris, you will nonetheless announce your departure for some renowned or dangerous place. According to the season, England will attract you, or perhaps Switzerland. You will even push audacity so far as to explore from time to time—sometimes from your armchair—mysterious islands, from which you will bring back observations such as this: that you strolled in the country’s only landau—a very elegant landau with a very correct coachman—for your personality must be constantly, even in the most extravagant countries, well framed by riches and decorum. During these journeys, you will not only amass documents and write books but accomplish unforeseen and meritorious actions.

Thus, in the Engadine, it will be of the best effect if you have recounted, with anguish, your victories over bears that you kill with shots from your English rifle inlaid with pale gold, whilst echoes never tire of praising the supreme elegance of the smoking-jackets with which you will dazzle, in the evening, the mountain drawing-rooms. Your conversations with celebrated personages whom you have or have not encountered will be extensively commented upon. It goes without saying that the celebrated personages will have been remarkably impressed by the profundity of your knowledge and the originality of your concepts.

You will address your publisher familiarly, for this flatters him, and you will take absolute dominion over him, so that he interests himself only in authors chosen by you and whose competition you do not fear, whilst he stifles, as best you can manage, those whose future promise might inconvenience you.

For a “true writer,” the death of a beloved relative is an excellent windfall. It provides the occasion for brief notices thus conceived: “X…, the eminent novelist, whose latest book is in its sixtieth edition, has just lost his father. This is a bereavement for…”

You will deign, from time to time, to write a newspaper article. You will speak only of yourself.

They will ask you for prefaces to works by beginners. You will speak only of yourself.

It is customary today, when any event occurs, to go and gather at home the opinions of people whom it does not concern and who have no opinion. You will speak only of yourself.

At any hour, in whatever circumstances, before whomever, you will speak only of yourself.

But it is in the grand interview that you will triumph. After having modestly displayed the extent of your connections and the distinction of your friendships, you will expound your artistic doctrine. You will establish that you do not write, but that you vivisect. You vivisect souls, you vivisect landscapes, you vivisect everything. Men, women, children—these are nothing else for you but specimens… specimens of moral anatomy… You will show your pen, which is a scalpel, your inkwell which is a crucible, your work jacket, which is an amphitheatre apron, your study which is a laboratory, your lorgnette which is a microscope. You will say: “Have you read my latest dissection?” Or: “I am working on something that will be, I think, the greatest effort of mental chemistry.” And you will have amiable disdains, affectionate contempt for the poor devils who write as they can, as best they can, with pens that are pens, inkwells that are inkwells.

And you will take care to punctuate the conversation with opportune exclamations that will vary from “Ah! so sweet” to “Ah! so histological.” Then you will reduce all humanity, all nature, all life, all dreams—for you vivisect dreams too—to the sole hero of your latest book; you will make the world pivot on their unique axis. You will thus have prepared the critics’ work, who will be charmed to have, about yourself, opinions identical to your own and will stick to them all their lives.

Finally, alone before your worktable and your blank paper, you will ask yourself: “What do women want? What are the sentiments, the vices they love? What dose of philosophy, bitterness, and obscenity can they bear? What insults tickle them best and will wring from them the ‘Ah! the monster!’ by which they give themselves more completely?”

And you will concoct a fresh adultery.