THE twenty novels Zola wrote about the Rougon Macquart family were designed to demonstrate how individual fates were determined by heredity and environment. The novelist thought of himself as a scientist, mixing chemicals in carefully calculated amounts and precisely noting the results. A scientist, however, works with given materials; a novelist's materials are created by the writer.
Zola went to immense trouble to give his novels the illusion of reality by amassing reams of documentation and assiduously studying medical and sociological treatises, but he had to invent characters to bring his theories to life, and his theories are inadequate to explain the behaviour of his characters. The novels frequently threaten to collapse under the weight of documentary details but the obsessive nature of Zola's imagination constantly reinforces the structure.
The Rougon Macquart genes are transferred in encounters which are always unpleasant, unsatisfactory and visited by retribution. Zola saw the beast in man (a characteristic novel is called La bete humaine) waiting to break out in an act of homicide or a sexual act, and the reader is drawn through pages of exhaustive description by an oppressive sense of impending catastrophe. The action, particularly in crowd scenes, takes on the intensity of nightmare.
What was the origin of this malign power? The author of this biography is inclined to locate it in Zola's early years. Zola's father died leaving his family in straightened circumstances and his only child, aged seven, to be brought up by an over attentive mother and grandmother. The young Emile Zola grew up in the shadow of his absent father, who seemed to be both an encouraging mentor and a forbidding judge, placing on the orphan the double burden of emulation and vindication. Other traumas that may have contributed to Zola's vision of a world out of control were an attack of what was called "brain fever", at the age of two, and an indecent assault made on him when he was five. He grew up a prey to nervous diseases, very timid and excessively superstitious.
At school in Aix en Provence he made friends with Paul Cezanne and the pair went for day long excursions in the countryside, reading poetry and fantasising about the girls they were too shy to approach. The Cezannes were well off but Cezanne's living father was even more inhibiting than Zola's dead one, which makes one wonder how crucial was the death of Zola's father.
The Zolas escaped from the provincial stuffiness of Aix when Emile was 18 and returned to Paris where he had been born and where his mother's people had originally settled. He completed his schooling there and got a job as a clerk in the customs, a tedious job which he left after a few months. About this time he had a brief affair with a dissolute young woman whom he seems to have thought he could save even though he was penniless.
Eventually he managed to get a job in a publishing office and also establish himself in the world of journalism. Four years later he had gained some notoriety both as the author of two novels and as a forceful commentator on the artistic scene, and he became a free lance journalist.
In 1870 Zola, then 30 years old, married Alexandrine Meley, who had been his mistress for the previous five years. The outbreak of the Franco Prussian war in the same year meant that they could not settle down for a while and that the projected Rougon Macquart series was slightly delayed. The first of the series appeared in 1871 and Zola wrote one a year for the next 20 years. He remained a fluent and prolific journalist, made some amusing and ill advised attempts to write dramas, and became very friendly with Daudet, Flaubert, Turgenev and Goncourt.
L'Assommoir, the seventh of the Rougon Macquart series, a study of the effects of alcohol on the Parisian working class, made him famous and wealthy. He bought a second house in the country, extended it and had house parties for old friends from Aix and for new ones such as Maupassant and Huysmans. But he was not happy. He had been upset by the death of Flaubert, a father figure to him, doubly upset by the death of his mother with whom he had identified, and he went into a depression and became extremely stout. He began to feel that he had given too much of his life to literature and that marriage had not supplied the erotic thrills that his pen had conjured up in so many novels.
He went on a diet, lost his paunch, and fell in love with a seamstress his wife had engaged, Jeanne Rozerot. Photographs, by Zola, him self a keen amateur photographer, show a very attractive, dark haired girl (not blonde, as twice stated in the book). She was 21, Zola was 48. He had two children by her (his marriage had been childless) and kept the affair secret from his wife for three years, but Alexandrine was informed by an anonymous letter and was so furious that she might have killed the mistress had she been able to lay hands on her. Zola, unwilling to abandon either woman, was forced to lead a double life. Alexandrine gradually came to accept and love the children, but there was no rapprochement with the mistress until after Zola's death.
Frederick Brown's Zola: A Life generously documented and reads at times like a history of the Second Empire and the Third Republic. Zola's famous open letter J'accuse, demanding justice for Captain Dreyfus, who had been wrongly accused of being a spy, earned Zola a place in political as well as literary history, and the obloquy of those French who regarded him as an even greater traitor than Dreyfus. There is evidence to suggest that Zola's death in 1902, three years after the Dreyfus Affair, by asphyxiation from inhaling fumes from a coal fire, may have been caused by one of those "patriotic" Frenchmen - fifty years after the event, an anti Dreyfusard claimed he had blocked up Zola's chimney.
Zola's chief claim on our attention is as a novelist and Brown pays a lot of attention to each of his novels, elucidating the relationship between novelist and man and where possible extricating passages of disguised autobiography. In such a thorough biography it is strange that no mention is made of L'enfant roi, an opera libretto which is a mirror image of Zola's double life, even if it would have added little to Brown's comprehensive portrait.