Balzac and other stories

How closely does a writer's life resemble their fiction, or maybe it's the other way round. Graham Robb's hugely impressive biography of Balzac could easily pass as yet another of those teeming, torrential novels about money, Paris, social status and, quite often, despair. But it's not as if Balzac used his life as raw material for fiction, which up to a point he did, but that he lived out the life as a further expression of his art.

 I remember a TV costume drama from the 1970's on the subject and now find that Depardieu, almost inevitably, has made a film of it which will have to be investigated. Some of the fascination springs from the z that gives his name that zing and zest in the same way that the x in Buxtehude makes him seem exotic. I read Old Goriot years ago and added several more titles in recent years. And there he was always, of course, in Thom Gunn's poem in My Sad Captains.

5 ft. 2 and bullish, there is no area in which he didn't prove prodigious, from his vast literary output to his serial womanising to his debts. That he lived only to 51 seems evidence that he used his life up at double speed but makes his colossal achievement more intense.

Graham Robb has some statistics to show how it was done, citing that he worked from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m. averaging 33.3 words per minute and only slept for two hours a night which increases later to 15 thousand words in a night.but then obliterating proofs with amendments that could remove whole passages. While having political ambitions for a while on a far right agenda, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx found much in the work that fitted with their analysis. Invited to dinner as a guest at which a 'scientific gossip' had asked a pschiatrist to bring a madman, 'the inevitable confusion arose' when Balzac appeared,

Strangely attired and with his hair in disarray, he babbled continuously with his mouth full.

Robb is able to compare the Traité de la vie élégante with Roland Barthes nearly 130 years ahead of its time and I was glad to see confirmed one of those things one knows is true but never hears acknowledged, that, 

The term 'plagiarism' is practically meaningless in a literary form which, like popular music today, was largely a matter of re-arranging existing phrases.

He also devotes two pages to 'tricks' involved in producing popular romantic fiction which Balzac did hack writing on in his formative years 'if only to highlight the contrast with his later work.' Therein lies a truth that needs be universally acknowledged, that much is a template, technique or trick that can be learnt and can provide satisfactory results but the 'art', the 'poetry' and the worthwhile bit is what is of interest.

There are a number of great literary biographies and I'm not going to nominate this as the outright best before I've even finished it but it must be among the best but it can hardly fail with Graham Robb's superb scholarship and his subject that threatens to make Lord Byron look like Philip Larkin. Top marks.

I'll be back at the library next to pursue Henry James, that came out of reading Wendy Lesser, and perhaps the biography of Dusty Springfield.

Wendy's Why I Read is somewhere further along the forthcoming list. I don't know if it is specifically an answer to Orwell's Why I Write but I thought I'd have a go at my own answer before finding out her better reasons. It's an easier job than saying why I write. Can't bloody help it is as far as I get with that.

I'm very much against the idea that reading is educational or self-improving, that it is more worthy than carpentry, cooking or golf. But I much prefer it.

It might be a retreat from the world or an engagement with it but either way it 'objectifies' 'life', that is, it makes an artistic piece for consideration out of it. Much is due to the words of Socrates that 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. The habit of doing this website and reviewing concerts and books has gradually meant I can't just listen to music or read a book and passively let it pass. I have to 'review' it for my own purposes or else it might as well have been a sunny interval or a rainshower that passed over and was immediately forgotten.

It is a sort of entertainment but the Shostakovich String Quartets or Hamlet shouldn't be confused with something that passes an evening enjoyably. I once heard  that if one is left alone for more than a couple of minutes, one picks up something to read which is why waiting rooms have magazines about yachts or cars or some other neutral thing. I'm not sure that's true for 'serious' readers who only do other things apart from read if they have to. The book is the main thing, the fact I tried to nail the fence back together under the duress of a string wind was an unfortunate distraction but some people of more manual dexterity and more practical mindest would have a fine, stalwart fence in the first place as a priority and only read Tolstoy as an admission that there was nothing else to do.

But, mainly, it's the words. There is a massive difference between good quality writing and ordinary and that can be enjoyed for its own sake. It might lead some of us to read writing about writers and writing, which sounds self-serving, but that doesn't matter as long as it seems to be improving one's quality of life.

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It's not been a bad week for those two indices with which I superficially measure my 'quality of life.' This afternoon I restored the rating at Lichess 2+1 to 1700, which has come to be regarded as acceptable, and my little mug punter game of backing horses with pop song titles followed up Monday's You Wear It Well with Ain't No Sunshine in the last at Kelso today.

With the Tizzard stable in better form this season and Fiddlerontheroof now finally looking like the horse one hoped it was, he could be the only bet tomorrow in an attempt to complete some sort of musical three-timer. 3/1 would be very generous. We'll have some ammunition to aim at Cheltenham and still come out of there in front. After this weekend, where Goshen at Wincanton would be a cert if he continues with his good behaviour, most of the evidence will be in place and we can have the Cheltenham Preview. There could be a few trebles to be landed by stringing together some of the short-priced good things but the job is to weed out those that might get beaten. Most of it's done in draft form, I'll just have to read it and see if I believe it myself before putting it here.