Dull As Dishwater Huysmans Biography

The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, by Robert Baldick.  This has a sterling reputation as one of the great literary biographies, and as Huysmans is one of my favorites, and one of the true greats, I was looking forward to reading it. Alas, it’s as dull as 19th century dishwater. It provides only a surface look at Huysmans’ life: on this day Huysmans and Theodore Hannon went to a whorehouse in Brussels, on this day Huysmans had dinner with Zola, Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt, on this day Huysmans and Mallarme visit Villiers’ sick bed, on this day Huysmans attends a seance with Joseph-Antoine Boullan, on this day Huysmans visits Chartres, on this day Huysmans is depressed at Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. The biography completely lacks any psychological insight into the quirky author of the Grand Masterpiece of Decadent Weirdness, A Rebours. Particularly disappointing is how little attention is paid to Huysmans three decades long career as a government clerk. Please, this guy was a brilliant writer, and for thirty years he had to shuffle papers at a boring, soul-crushing job, and we get almost no information on this part of his life, and more importantly, what effect it had on his writing. Only the ten or so pages that recount Huysmans’ agonizing death from mouth/jaw cancer have any life. The rest of this book falls far short of its acclaim.