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Balzac — Life as Fiction |
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August 18, 2010 |
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| On this day in 1850 Honore de Balzac died at the age of fifty-one. Balzac's last months were as tumultuous as all the others, and as brimming with life as anything in his seventeen-volume Human Comedy. Balzac believed that such adventures and appetites finally killed him, his finite store of vital fluid having been used up. [full
story] |
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Anita Loos died on this day in 1981. In A Girl Like I, her 1966 autobiography, Loos tells us that the 1,200 copies in the first edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926) was sold out by noon, that the second edition numbered 65,000 copies, that there were forty-five more editions by 1966, and that the whole world was reading the novel in translation, though some had to rationalize the fun:
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When the book reached Russia, I was told by our then Ambassador, William Bullitt, that the Soviet authorities embraced it as evidence of the exploitation of helpless female blondes by predatory magnates of the capitalistic system. As such, the book had a wide sale, but Russia never sent me any royalties, which seems rather like the exploitation of a helpless brunette author by a predatory Soviet regime.
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Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the U.S. on this day in 1958, (three years after the first, French edition), and it too was an instant hit, selling 100,000 copies in three weeks. But the debate over whether the book was satire or pornography or poignant tragedy persisted, as Nabokov’s winking “Foreword” had suggested it would. The Foreword purports to be by “John Ray Jr., Ph. D.,” a specialist in perversions, a recent recipient of the Poling Prize (for “Do the Senses make Sense?”), and a cousin of the lawyer entrusted with Humbert Humbert’s written confession of his nymphet-crimes. Dr. Ray warns us that Humbert is a man of “diabolical cunning,” one whose “singing violin can conjure up a tendresse” with the best psychopaths. Most importantly, Dr. Ray cautions, we are to read ethically, alert to our responsibility:
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…for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. Lolita should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. |
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If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.
—Montaigne, in “On Friendship”
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The friend who inspired Montaigne’s essay was Etienne de la Boetie, who died on this day in 1563, aged thirty-two. Apart from his connection to Montaigne, de la Boetie is most famous for his “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” a paper written while still a teenager, and so explosive that it was circulated covertly. As Machiavelli, thirty years earlier, had addressed the Renaissance princes who ruled Europe, so de la Boetie addressed those ruled, asking them to explain something he couldn’t:
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I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.
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Finding no good explanation, de la Boetie urges the citizenry to simply shake off their slavery: |
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
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Such passages were quoted enthusiastically in the 18th century, on both sides of the Atlantic. |
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