Michael Rosen, The Disappearance of Emile Zola (Faber)One day I might end my three decades and more of sabbatical from Proust and then I'll need a deeper knowledge of the Dreyfus Case. I remember hearing about it at school but the finer details, and its pertinence in A la recherche, were more than that provided. Thus this book looked like a good idea, offering a biography of Zola into the bargain.
As a result of his involvement, publishing the polemic J'Accuse, Zola was sentenced to imprisonment and a fine but preferred to abscond to England and spent some difficult years in London suburbs.
The first half of Michael Rosen's account lacks a bit of tension as Zola moves addresses, is in danger of being recognized and newspapers carry made up stories concerning his whereabouts. His wife is childless but his mistress has his two children which probably seemed very French of him but he continues to write while opinion of him is divided between admirers of his realism and those who think he is a purveyor of sordid, decadent stories.
The books gathers momentum and power as it progresses, though. In his novel, Truth, Zola writes,
There were really no Jew questions - at all; there was only a Capitalist question - a question of money heaped up in the hands of a certain number of gluttons and thereby poisoning and rotting the world.
It is to be regretted that such an ostensibly accessible proposition was, and remains, beyond the grasp of such a significant section of the population who prefer the less demanding answers available in a common scapegoat.
The National Vigilance Association should by now sound like a cartoon creation, 'keeping an eye on immoral writing', but perhaps they don't. If only their weird vigilance could have prevailed, we might have been spared the work of Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and any number of others that were among the first loves of subsequent generations of readers of literature.
The France that Zola envisaged was slow coming into being, as something like it eventually did, and it is hard to credit how instutionalized and official the anti-semitism of which Dreyfus was the iconic victim actually was. The values and principles that he stood for didn't gain widespread acceptance until it was too late for him but Rosen places him at the forefront of the gains that came after his death, suffocating in a bedroom filling with carbon monoxide that, according to a report that came to light much later, was deliberately engineered by anti-Dreyfusard workmen.
It's not just the politics of the case, the fact that the issues involved never went away or that there's a whole other book on Zola's major novels that isn't attempted here that convince us of his heroism and that literature is essential beyond its usual intellectual constituency. I'm not always keen on the idea of overt politics in literature as a good thing but, everything being ultimately political, Zola is a paragon example of the literary figure that is equally significant as polemicist, however untidy and inconvenient that might seem to the aesthete.
And Michael Rosen, allowing his own family history into the sweep of his survey, becomes heroic, too, in the process. It seemed like we were only being offered a slightly pedestrian story about a novelist in genteel exile, estranged but still domestic, vilified and in hiding, more or less like Salman Rushdie was to find himself later, but it became much more than that. It is a fine book, essential for anyone with an interest in Zola, Dreyfus or the issues involved, and presumably still useful to those scholars who know it all already.
I have checked where my bookmark is in my Proust. It was left in page 306 of volume 2 of the three Penguin paperbacks of Terence Kilmartin's translation, each of which are over 1000 pages, in about 1984. Maybe I'll go back to it one day but I might need a recap.
But perhaps not just yet.