IN THE MAGAZINE

VICE PRESENTS THE PEOPLE'S LISTS - PART 1

Biographies of Four 19th-Century Novelists

Excerpted from The People’s Almanac by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace

HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799–1850)

Balzac, one of the supreme writers of realistic fiction, was, in his own life, a man of gross appetites and pretensions as well as of gargantuan genius and accomplishment. In his novels he could portray the hearts and minds of his fellow middle-class Frenchmen with the accuracy and gusto of a Dickens or a Tolstoy, yet he pretended to be of noble birth. (The addition of the aristocratic particle “de” to his surname was strictly his own idea.) He yearned for wealth, yet when he achieved it, he squandered it and managed to be constantly in debt. In fact, he reached a point when he seemed unable to write during those infrequent periods when creditors were not yapping at his heels. He could abstain from food and drink almost to the point of starvation and then suddenly indulge himself orgiastically in all the delights of the table. A man of many love affairs, he sired three daughters and a son, but he took no interest in them for he found his fictional characters more real than any human being. Even his physique was one of contrasts. Balzac had a noble, leonine head and massive shoulders mounted upon spindly legs. His height was no more than 5' 3". At times he would dress like a dandy, at others like a beggar. Never did Balzac approach life moderately; he always rushed in and seized it.

Born in Tours, France, Balzac was the son of a petty official and a pretty heiress. Balzac was never his mother’s favorite, and his childhood, including his schooldays, was miserable. He did, however, gain a great love of literature and a thorough background in the French and English novel. Against its wishes, his family agreed to support him in a Parisian garret while he wrote a tragedy based on the life of Oliver Cromwell. The only thing tragic about it was that it was wretchedly written—and his family told him so. Undaunted, Balzac turned to grinding out slightly pornographic gothic novels. This work sustained him until he became immersed in the masterwork of his life, La Comedié Humaine, a series of interrelated novels and stories. So prodigious was his effort that over a 20-year period he produced 97 works covering 11,000 pages. Among these are such immortal classics as Le Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, La Grand Bretèche, and the Droll Stories, whose raciness matches that in the milder “adult” magazine fiction today.

A typical day for Balzac was to be awakened at midnight by his servant. He dressed himself in a monk’s robe and then sat at his writing table, where he filled page after page of paper tinted blue so as not to ruin his eyes. When he reached the point of exhaustion, he fortified himself with countless cups of extremely strong black coffee. Not drugs or alcohol but caffeine poisoning is believed to have hastened his death, as if even in overindulgence, Balzac was determined to be different.

However, another and more likely cause of Balzac’s death may well have been love, a love that lasted for 17 years but was often impeded by circumstance and distance. In 1832 he received a fan letter from Mme Eveline Hanska, a married Polish noblewoman who possessed great wealth. An ardent exchange of letters ensued, and two years later their love was finally consummated when Mme Hanska, accompanied by her husband, met Balzac in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She was taken aback by his ridiculous figure and eccentric appearance, while he was utterly captivated by her voluptuous form. And although she willingly took him into her bed, she was extremely reluctant to take him for life. She realized that her spendthrift lover would go through her money as quickly as he had his own, and she was not about to jeopardize her social position or her daughter’s dowry. After her husband’s death, Mme Hanska stalled Balzac for seven years, but finally yielded and married him two months before his death because she pitied him and realized that he had lost his health pursuing her.

Back in Paris after their marriage in the Ukraine, Balzac’s condition worsened. On his deathbed he is reputed to have looked at his doctor and cried out, “Send for Bianchon!” For Balzac, his masterwork, La Comedié Humaine, was more real than life—Dr. Bianchon was his own fictional creation.


CHARLES DICKENS (1812–1870)

At times in the 19th century, vast crowds, eagerly awaiting the arrival of a ship from England, would form on the docks of New York and Philadelphia. What they were waiting for was not an exciting celebrity or a great invention, but the latest installment of a Dickens novel. Perhaps no other novelist before or since, particularly in the English-speaking world, has been able to create and sustain such popular enthusiasm. And no other novelist has received such critical acclaim at all levels, for Dickens appeals to the average reader, the child, and the intellectual alike.

There was very little indication in Dickens’s early life of the success to come. His father was a minor official in the Navy Pay Office of Great Britain, who lived beyond his means and fell deeply into debt. Eventually he was sent to debtors’ prison, and his son Charles was forced at age 12 to take a job washing and labeling bottles in a filthy, rat-infested warehouse. So searing was this experience to Dickens that he found it extremely difficult to speak of it in later life (except through the medium of David Copperfield, his autobiographical novel). Dickens could never overcome the shock of his parents’ apparent indifference to his fate. He wrote many years later, “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget that my mother was warm for my being sent back.” And henceforth he was determined to make his life a success.

Dickens was eventually freed from the factory and sent to school by his parents. After that he served as a law clerk for a brief time. Because of his self-taught shorthand skill, he became a reporter of parliamentary debates. Everything he learned at work as well as every experience of childhood was stored up to be used in his true vocation, which was about to begin. Dickens wrote and sent a sketch to a monthly magazine, but he was so shy about it that he told no one and mailed his effort in the dead of night. So successful were his early pieces, for which he received nothing, that Dickens was asked to provide the text that was to accompany some sporting scenes. These rapidly were turned into the famous Pickwick Papers, an enormous hit with the public. Dickens never suffered the loss of popular acclaim.

Dickens’s output was prodigious. Such novels as Oliver Twist, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol poured forth from his pen. He traveled extensively and enjoyed parties and amateur theatricals. He lent his name and abilities to such causes as prison reform and education for poor children. He never forgot his distrust of the “Establishment,” whose injustices he had witnessed as a court reporter, and his experience as a lad whose only crime was being poor.

In the last years of his life, Dickens had enough energy to build a second career for himself. In England, crowds swarmed into the theaters to hear him read such horrifying scenes as the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist. In America, people paid the then-enormous sum of $3 just to attend one of his readings.

By Victorian standards, Dickens’s private life was unusual. He formed deep attachments with two of his wife’s sisters, who had come to live in the Dickens household. The first was Mary Hogarth; when she died, Dickens removed a ring from her finger and kept it on his own until he himself died. Her place was taken by her sister Georgina Hogarth, who often acted as Dickens’s hostess and companion in place of his dull wife. However, the truly great love of Dickens’s life was Ellen Ternan, a pretty actress who was young enough to be his daughter. Dickens’s wife refused to let him move out of the family home quietly, so the great defender of hearth and home and teller of Christmas stories was forced to announce their separation publicly.

When Dickens died, the whole world mourned. He was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, the highest tribute England can bestow upon one of its writers. One of the most poignant memorials was a cartoon showing his writing desk surrounded by characters from his novels. The chair was empty.


CONTINUED:
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