Word: zola
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...EMILE ZOLA (148 pp.]-Angus Wilson -Morrow...
...expect justice," said Emile Zola in 1897, at the height of his fame. "I know that I must disappear." So far as his literary popularity was concerned, the forecast was sound. After his death in 1902, his readers began dropping away. Between 1932 and 1952 not a single book about Zola was published in English. In the U.S., thanks to Actor Paul Muni's performance in a movie version of his life, Zola is stereotyped as an angry old Frenchman in a plug...
...against this background that British Author Angus Wilson moves for a "deserved re-estimation" in his short, sharp critical study, Emile Zola. Wilson's summary: Zola was "one of the great cumbrous, magnificent pithecanthropi of 19th century literature . . . the close companion of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, a little less than them . . . but having ... a strange clarity of direct vision which their great fusions of the dream kingdom and the waking world obliterate...
...Zola was sent to school in Paris. He hid his provincial manners with an abrasive gruffness, but he could scarcely hide his provincial ignorance. In his final exam he declared that Charlemagne died in the 16th century, was forthwith flunked for being off by some 700 years. Apparently unconcerned, he plunged into a Bohemian life, took a tart for a mistress, and during one starved winter dressed in blankets because he had pawned even his last pair of pants to keep her. He wrote a trilogy of epic poems, notably bad and terribly long. His family, through a friend...
...clerk at the publisher Hachette's, started Zola off on the main track of his career. He ran a literary gossip column for a scandal sheet, hacked out newspaper serials, and even managed to publish a couple of poor books...