(
Le Siècle
, 9 March 1879)
In his commentary on
The Vatard Sisters,
Zola had stressed the role of reality, as opposed to that of the imagination, as the primary factor in the Naturalist creative process: “If we spurn the imagination, in the sense of something invented that is added on to reality, we put all our creative forces into presenting real life truthfully…” (
Le Voltaire
, 4 March 1879). Unsurprisingly, given the hostility to Naturalism in the conservative press, this nuanced view was caricatured by a number of reviewers of Huysmans’ novel, mostly notably by Albert Wolff
,
a conservative journalist who had already made a name for himself with a series of ferocious criticisms of the Impressionists
.
Wolff deliberately distorted Zola’s words and mocked Huysmans’ novel for its lack of imagination:
The present situation is summed up in a word with regard to a novel by a young man, M. Huysmans; it is called
The Vatard Sisters
and paints without any effort of imagination, in unbridled realistic terms, an episode in the life of two female workers. It is apropos of this obstreperous book that Émile Zola, the male wet-nurse of the whole school, cried with such pride:
—This book is our triumph. There’s no imagination at all in the whole thing!
No imagination, that’s to say no illusions, no poetry, nothing but a completely arid life, with all its desolations, its sadnesses and its abominations. Man is a biped like any other animal, who has descended from the apes in order to become a worm.
(
Le Figaro
, 17 March 1879)
A similar technique was used by the reviewer in
La Jeune France
:
After
La Dévouée
[a novel by Huysmans’ friend and fellow Naturalist, Léon Hennique], here comes
The Vatard Sisters
. And after
The Vatard Sisters…
? Honestly, is all this really serious? They tell us that there is talent in this book, we would like it better if there weren’t. M. Zola himself has summed up his literary theory: “No imagination”. Books like this one show that M Zola is being obeyed—even more perhaps than he would like.
(
La Jeune France
, 1 April 1879)
As well as using Zola’s ideas as a means of attacking Huysmans’ book, another approach was to compare it to
L’Assommoir
, which had itself caused an outrage on grounds of indecency. Gaston de Saint-Valry in
La Patrie
, described the novel as “a second dilution of
L’Assommoir
”, which was not intended as a compliment, before summing it up in the following terms:
In short, nothing is more vulgar, more banal, nothing demands less talent, originality or invention.
(
La Patrie
, 11 March 1879)
Likewise, the critic of
Le Soir
was similarly offended by the general tone and subject matter of the book and compared it to the worst aspects of
L’Assommoir
, though he at least acknowledged that Huysmans had some good qualities as a writer:
Why don’t we tell M. Huysmans the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? He has within him a germ of a bold, virile talent; he has a faculty of intense observation, a physiological and psychological eye that is fairly good and broad, so that one can tell him quite plainly that his book is nothing but a poor copy of M. Zola’s and he is mightily mistaken if he imagines that it is sufficient, in order to obtain a success similar to that which
L’Assommoir
had the good fortune to achieve, to write a book which a sterner reader than ourselves would say was nothing but the portrayal of unspeakable morals…
By retaining only the infected parts from M Zola’s only too infamous book, M Huismans [
sic
]has written a novel which nothing can excuse…
(
Le Soir
, 19 March 1879)
Aurélien Scholl, a journalist renowned for his cutting, ironic manner (which had led to him frequently being called out for duels as a result), also used comparisons with
L’Assommoir
to Huysmans’ detriment, arguing that at least Zola had other tools in his literary armoury:
The Vatard Sisters
has its admirers, so much the better for M. Huysmans and M. Charpentier. As for me, although I’m aware the author has a very real talent, I’ll wait for a different novel than this one to make a judgment.
There is in
The Vatard Sisters
a desperate monotony of description. The atmosphere always smells bad; every ten pages a heavy stench obliges one of his characters to “open the fanlight”.
Every time the author mentions a pair of boots they’re oozing and stinking; of a gathering of the fair sex M. Huysmans tells us about the women’s sweat, adding that there was “a strong smell like that of goats that had gambolled in the sun,” and he concludes by saying that these odours “mingled with the putrid emanations of cold meat and wine, acrid cat’s piss, and the nauseous stench of the toilets.”
Well that may be true, but I prefer other things.
It’s Naturalism, so they tell me.
But excuse me. When a certain number of female workers, even those in the bookbinding trade, get together, there are other things than smells. There are physical appearances, different characters, various emotions. However, I swear to you that after finishing the book I’d be hard put to it to say what Céline or Désirée looked like.
(
L’Événement,
23 March 1879)
Firmin Boissin, a Catholic journalist and writer who went on to slate a number of Huysmans’ subsequent books, including
À rebours
and
Là-bas
, fulminated in typical fashion against the crudities of Naturalism he felt the book contained:
M. Émile Zola has created a school, and the disciples of this master, who can’t equal him in talent, have far surpassed him in filthy extravagances, in Naturalistic stupidity. Here is a Belgian, M. J. K. Huysmans, whose debauched pen doesn’t recoil from the description of anything, not even what occurs in certain houses of ill-repute.
Marthe,
the first novel by this shameless writer, is the cynical and brutal history of a prostitute. It would show a lack of respect to our readers to analyse this obscene production. And from the same author we have
The Vatard Sisters
, which isn’t much better, but whose subject one can at least talk about.
From time to time, the author tries to introduce poetry into his disgusting descriptions, a poetry which murmurs its song, in the evening, in deserted streets, through the immortal mouthpiece of “a softly gurgling urinal, its entrance bubbling with a froth of chlorine.” Enough, it’s too much.
(
Polybiblion Revue Bibliographique,
October 1880)
Interestingly, most of the reviewers who took such an outraged stance at the “filth” and the “obscenities” they affected to find in the book, seemed to have no qualms about reproducing the most offensive passages in the columns of their paper. Huysmans was not unaware of the likely reaction to his novel, indeed he was even looking forward to it: “I hope we’ll create a fine stir,” he wrote to Hannon in September 1878, a few months before the book’s publication. To Lemonnier, he was even more explicit: “I know that with the enormous mass of books which are published these days you have to strike hard in order to be heard, you even need to cause a scandal.”
Although Huysmans complained about the torrent of bad press
The Vatard Sisters
had received, there were financial compensations:
With the exception of Zola’s notice and a favourable remark in
Le Gaulois,
I’ve received nothing but insults: which makes me happy, as nothing is better for a book’s sales.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 17 March 1879)
There were some genuinely sympathetic reviews, however. Jules Christophe gave a long and studied account of the novel, setting it in the context of the rest of Huysmans’ work, which he was obviously familiar with.
What do they reproach the novel for? Above all for its lack of imagination, for showing nothing but common people meeting each day, for describing places and things familiar to everyone; objections endlessly reprinted by obstinate idealists. To which the author could reply: “Yes, I scorn imagination in the novel as I would a lie in real life, I describe and I explain what I see and what I know. Make of that what you will!”
M. Huysmans having had the occasion to see a bindery at close hand, he has quite naturally given himself up to describing a few of the workers, both male and female, he recounts what he has seen and set the action in locales he has scoured, in both senses of the word; such is his crime, but isn’t it that of all writers who are enamoured with the truth? Now what if his characters in this story are badly dressed, lacking in education, spouting bad ideas? The author fashions them as he has seen them, he has a duty neither to embellish them nor to uglify them. One sees things through one’s own particular temperament: now M. Huysmans sees like a Dutch or a Flemish painter, and the present novel is like Parisian modern life as painted by Teniers.
(
Le Coup d’Oeil
, 17 April 1879)
Christophe praised the book’s “lively comic feeling”, singling out the scene where the Testons arrive at the Vatards during a rainstorm as a particularly fine piece of comic writing. His only real reservation was about Huysmans’ literary style, and he advised him to use a simpler vocabulary, less obscure expressions, and fewer archaisms and neologisms.
Another positive review came from Huysmans’ friend, Théodore Hannon. Like Zola, Hannon also used the occasion to promote his own aesthetic views. Hannon was a supporter of Naturalism, but more in a Baudelairean sense, as an attempt to capture Modernity through the distinctively individual temperament of the artist. Whereas Zola praised the book’s “human simplicity” and criticised Huysmans for “over-using rare words which sometimes makes his best analyses less realistic,” Hannon vaunted the novel as the work “of a gourmet”, of a “refined man”, and enthusiastically described its “bizarre perfume”, its “nervous style”, its “jewel-like adjectives and adverbs”:
Certainly palates accustomed to the bland pastilles of our fashionable literary confectioners will grimace at the intense flavours of the spicy dish that is the object of this review, but what a strong and bizarre perfume it retains on the mouth! […]
The book is like a series of paintings: still lives, genre scenes, landscapes. To prove it, read for yourselves that stunning description of a funfair, with its odours, its noise, its hubbub and its joyous chaos…You have only to read a page of Huysmans to understand the suppleness, the edginess, the exuberance of the instrument he wields: he doesn’t write with a pen, he uses a glittering paintbrush, dipped in a magic inkwell.
(
Journal des Etrangers
, 19 March 1879)
Aside from the reviews in the press, Huysmans also received private feedback from two of the “fathers” of the realist school: Gustave Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt. Flaubert wrote a long letter to Huysmans in which he detailed a number of the positive things he found in the book, but he also took the occasion to castigate Huysmans over certain elements that annoyed him in his style and his general approach:
If you weren’t my friend and if I’d thought your book mediocre, I would have just made a banal compliment and that would have been it. But I feel that there is a lot of talent in the book, a lot; it’s a work that is out of the ordinary and
very intense.
So, I will tell you what I really think. Your dedication, in which you praise me for
L’Éducation sentimentale
, gave me an insight into the structure of your novel—and its faults—which, on a first reading, I hadn’t noticed. Like
L’Éducation
,
The Vatard Sisters
suffers from a falsity of perspective. There is no progression. The reader, at the end of the book, has the same impression he had at the start. Art is not reality. Whatever one writes, one is obliged to choose among the elements it provides… and as a result one must choose wisely. Your descriptions are excellent, your characters well-observed. One says throughout: “Yes, it’s just like that,” and one believes in your fiction, which is brilliantly executed. What struck me the most is the psychology, you analyse like a master. In your next book, give full rein to this facility, which seems natural to you and which is your own.
The basis of your style, its very substance, is very solid. However, it seems to me you don’t have confidence in it. Why did you feel the need to reinforce it with lively and often crude expressions? When it is the author speaking, why do you speak like one of your characters?…When a writer employs a whole pile of words that aren’t in any dictionary, I have the right to rebel against him, because it offends me, it spoils my pleasure…
You have an aesthete say that he finds withered wallflowers
more interesting
than blooming roses. Why? Neither wallflowers nor roses are interesting in themselves: what is interesting is the manner in which they’re depicted. The Ganges is not more poetic than the Bièvre, but neither is the Bièvre more poetic than the Ganges. Take care, otherwise you’ll fall, like in the time of classical tragedy, into an aristocracy of subjects and an over-refinement of words…You may have reversed the rhetoric, but it is rhetoric nonetheless. It pains me that a writer of your originality should spoil his work with such childish absurdities. Have a little pride, by God, and don’t believe in formulas.
That said, I can only admire your conception of the novel and its development. Vatard père is a real find…and the ending is almost sublime.
(
Letter from Flaubert to Huysmans
, 7 March 1879)
Despite Flaubert’s attempt to be encouraging in his letter to Huysmans, he was more laconic in his assessment of the book a week later in a note to the actress Edma Roger des Genettes, with whom he frequently corresponded on literary and political subjects:
I recently read three books which they sent me,
The Vatard Sisters
by Huysmans, one of Zola’s pupils, which I found abominable…
(
Letter from Flaubert to Mme Roger des Genettes
, 14 March 1879)