A documentary from Perspective, The Life of Honoré de Balzac, examines the achievements and struggles of the great 19th century writer who gave us The Human Comedy.
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Writers, especially those of fiction, are often viewed as peculiar people. So much time spent alone? Hunched over a notebook or laptop, essentially playing pretend? Why?
It’s true that many writers embody quirky habits. Then again, what profession doesn’t have its fair share of oddball characters? (The movie Office Space is relatable and funny for a reason.) In all likelihood, writers are no more or less quirky than any other sorts of people.
Nonetheless, the idiosyncrasies of famous artists can be mildly amusing to hear about. For the 19th-century French writer Honoré de Balzac, there are at least two: cups of java and very long days spent at his desk. Those might not sound like quirky habits at all, but hold on.
His coffee intake involved not just a few strong cups—or even double or triple that—but as many as fifty. Yes, for real.
Balzac’s caffeine habit was accompanied by a far more important one: long, concentrated stretches spent writing. He would sometimes commit himself to sixteen hours a day at his desk. Even taking into account his massive coffee intake (which presumably involved one or two bathroom breaks), that’s some serious dedication to his craft.
When Balzac died in 1850, at just 51 years old, he’d written over eighty novels, dozens of short stories, and an impressive amount of novellas, plays, philosophical tracts, opinion pieces, and personal correspondence.
As is true for anyone with such a large body of work, the quality of Balzac’s writing varied. But he undoubtedly left us many great works of literature, including the novels Père Goriot, The Magic Skin, and Cousin Bette, and the novella Colonel Chabert.
It seems reasonable to ask then: Why is the name Honoré de Balzac relatively unknown? One of his near contemporaries, Gustave Flaubert, wrote much less and yet we all know his name along with the name of his famous novel, Madame Bovary. This might have been an interesting topic for the documentary to touch on, but no luck.
In any case, this documentary from Perspective presents a helpful overview of the prolific writer, detailing the emotional hardships of his school years, his highly productive middle years, and his fews years of married life before his death.
Balzac’s childood was not an easy one. At age 8, he was sent to “a monastic boarding school that actively discouraged any contact between pupil and parent.” (Here again, we might ask, why did his parents send him there?)
During this lonely and depressed period, there was at least one bright side, which was that Balzac fostered his love of reading. Relief finally came in 1813, when his days at the school were over. His family moved to Paris, and he attended further school.
In his 20th year, Balzac made a decision that would ultimately define the rest of his life: he decided to become a writer. In a small, inexpensive apartment, Balzac got to work on his earliest literary creations, the first of which was a tragic poem entitled Cromwell. It didn’t sell though, which was the same fate for many novels after. Success was elusive. And like many authors, especially young ones, the lack of recognition took its toll on the Balzac. Depressed and dejected, he gave up writing.
The next few years featured a string of events, both good and bad. Having put writing behind him, Balzac started a publishing business. It failed, and left him in a world of debt (a situation that remained with him his entire life).
Hounded by creditors and seeking a change of place, he moved to Brittany (in the northwest of France) where he once again fell in love with writing. This time around, he found success. His novel The Chouans (1929) was first taste of it, followed again a short time later with The Wild Ass’s Skin (1832). He was just getting started.
Given his enormous output—and how difficult it can be to come up with fresh plots and characters time and again—it’s surprising to learn that Balzac was a very “unautobiographical” writer. He was excellent at writing about the lives and experiences of women, says one scholar, and “[he] probably had a better understanding of females than some women writers.” It was thanks to his many close relationships with women, including his sister, that Balzac gained this window into the female mind.
But his perceptiveness and curiosity for other people certainly didn’t end there. Balzac was interested in nearly every aspect of society, large and small.
When he conceived of his life’s project, The Human Comedy, his ambitions were to capture the complexity, chaos, and characters of French society in the late 18th and early 19th century. The project was massive in scope, with well over 100 novels planned. He didn’t quite make it (he died at just 51), but he completed roughly two thirds of it, and became the progenitor of literary realism.
That’s a lot of seminal achievements for someone who almost gave up on writing.
Spectatio 