Word: balzac
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Helens in Hecubas. The second impulse that led Balzac to write the 90-odd novels of The Human Comedy, says Zweig, was his passion for women. In his early books, while still in his twenties, he had fiercely championed loveless ladies entering frustrated middle age, the married woman whose husband took her for granted and seldom into his arms. Women became his first devotees, wrote him letters by the thousands, frequently offered themselves to their indiscriminate advocate. Wrote Zweig: "This man could see a Helen in every woman, even in Hecuba, as soon as his will power came into play...
...Zweig's own testimony, Balzac's load of debt from his business failures and love of high living seems to have driven him on to writing as much as women or the urge to power. The ill-mannered, unkempt son of a tight-fisted petit bourgeois, he was at heart a snob and a social climber who faked a claim to nobility. To keep up with the post-Napoleonic Joneses, Balzac sat at his table for twelve hours a day, years on end, turning out alternately tripe and masterpieces. Before he was 40 his fame was such that...
When Austrian-born Biographer Stefan Zweig committed suicide (together with his wife) in Brazil almost five years ago, he had been working on Balzac for a decade, referred to it as "the large Balzac" that was to become his magnum opus. Now published, his passionately sympathetic portrait of the prolific French novelist is clearly handicapped by the sudden death of its author...
...edited and somewhat rewritten by Zweig's friend Richard Friedenthal, it still exposes its incompleteness, especially in the sketchy final chapters. Balzac is the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which 13 years ago singled out Zweig's Marie Antoinette...
Zweig has two explanations for the vast productivity of the squat, ugly writer who became the acknowledged master of the 19th Century realistic novel. One was Balzac's feverish lust for power. "If the opportunity had offered, Balzac might equally well have become a businessman or a slave-dealer, a speculator in real estate or a banker. It was mere chance that directed his genius into the channel of literature...