What can account for the weirdly inflated personalities of so many writers from a hundred and fifty years ago—the extravagant traits and cosmic ambitions upon which Victor Hugo, who loved everything grandiose, fondly pasted the label “monstrous”? Emerson and Whitman thought of themselves as gods, more or less. Dickens never doubted that he was much more than a writer—that he was childhood’s sword and shield against the heartless adult world. Balzac appointed himself the recording secretary of French society and proceeded to write novels at a fantastic speed with the intention of capturing the whole of life. And Victor Hugo outdid everyone else. His mental and sensory capacities appear to have been superhuman. According to Graham Robb, the author of “Victor Hugo: A Biography” (Norton; $39.95), Hugo possessed “a spectacular, long-term photographic memory,” one so powerful that, even in old age, he never told the same story twice to the same person. His ear could locate the underground noises of moles and ants. His eyesight could zoom in, binocularlike, on the farthest distances.
In a famous chapter in “Notre-Dame de Paris” (he hated the title “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” which was tacked onto his book by one of his free-spirited English translators), Hugo gazed down from one of the cathedral towers to describe in archeological detail the jumble-tumble streets of medieval Paris, quite as if, like a video camera mounted on a smart bomb, he were fully capable of entering the tiny, faraway windows and exploring their draped interiors—and that chapter reflects what are said to be the actual capabilities of his powerful eye. The intensity of his visual experiences led him to take up drawing and painting. Almost three thousand drawings are known to remain, not to mention his paintings, some of which are quite good, full of splattery brushstrokes ornamenting the giant initials “V.H.” with galactic vapors, or illustrating characters from his own novels—the grinning imp Gavroche from “Les Misérables,” and the man-eating giant octopus from “The Toilers of the Sea,” undulating its puckered arms.
His sexual energies were vast. As a young man, he upheld a stern morality, and in one of his early volumes of poetry, “Les Orientales,” he condemned, with a gaze that lingered a moment too long, the harems of barbarous Ottoman sultans. Yet his own desires were not easily satisfied—he could make love nine times a day—and to his official wife, Adèle, he eventually added an unofficial wife, Juliette Drouet, whom he maintained in a humiliatingly smaller home nearby. Then he resolutely cheated on both wives with actresses, maids, the barber’s wife, his son’s mistress, and anybody else who proved vulnerable to a seductive recitation of rhymed couplets by France’s greatest master of the rhymed couplet. He grew fond of prostitutes, too, and in later years visited them daily. Even when he was in his seventies, his distressed family had to conspire to keep the frisky old poet from escaping into the streets in search of adventures in no one knew what shady corners of Paris. And these amorous enthusiasms were expressed not just in the flesh but in verse—the lyric odes of a cheerful satyr, courtly and mischievous, a little too pleased with himself to push into the darker zones of the sensual, but flirty and amusing and (as always in Hugo’s writings) agreeably sympathetic toward the downtrodden and the rebellious.
He wrote in more styles and genres than anyone else I can think of. English-language readers know Hugo mostly through “Notre-Dame de Paris” and “Les Misérables” and maybe one or two other novels that are much too calculated and ponderous for my taste but are gorgeously rich in Gothic bell towers, Parisian barricades, ancient Brittany forests, and Atlantic sea storms—those superimaginative landscapes that Hugo could produce at the level of genius (thus guaranteeing immortal life for his novels, especially in the world of theatre and film, where spectacle is king). Yet if you picture his collected works as an overstuffed Second Empire parlor the giant novels occupy only a single corner, tucked between the easel and the collection of medieval helmets. He put an equal effort into his plays, one of which, “Hernani,” truly a ridiculous swashbuckler, set off a riot at its opening and even today survives in the form of a lesser opera by Verdi, “Ernani” (while a lesser play of Hugo’s, “Le Roi S’Amuse,” survives as one of Verdi’s greater operas, “Rigoletto”). And, beyond the monumental novels and the operatic plays, Hugo’s greatest energies went into his poetry, one fat volume after another inscribed with idylls, epics, imprecations, satires, polemics, chants, ballads, songs, prayers, and sci-fi fantasies. It was a poetry meant to resemble those same medieval streets he saluted in “Notre-Dame de Paris,” full of noise and bizarre things, cheerfully hostile to the laws of good taste—a poetry of visual images, a painter’s poetry.
He went through an Orientalist period, a medievalist period, a Spanish period, a German period, an English period, a red revolutionary period, a grandfatherly period, and a mystical period awash in table-knocking spiritualism. Yet somewhere beneath each of those phases you can see a single insistent doctrine, the deepest of all his many beliefs. It was an idea about history—the grand old idea from the early and middle nineteenth century that man begins in darkness, and history is grim, yet man is dragging himself forward, and eventually avalanches of freedom and enlightenment will fall upon him. And how, exactly, does man drag himself forward? Through the deeds and words of prophets and heroes, which in ancient times meant the founders of great religions but in modern times had come to mean the geniuses of literature. Among the nineteenth-century writers who cultivated extravagant personalities, nearly everyone subscribed to some aspect of that very broad and stirring idea. And Victor Hugo subscribed with a heartier gusto than anyone else.
He believed that progress in literature corresponds to progress in human liberty, and that artistic advances are moral advances, which meant that if he could only produce a few literary innovations of his own he, too, would be a liberator of mankind. As it turned out, literary innovations came to him with an inexplicable ease. He did not grow up in an artistic household. His father was a military officer, who rose through the ranks to become one of Napoleon’s generals—the very last of the Napoleonic commanders to cease fighting after the calamity at Waterloo, in 1815, when little Victor was thirteen. His mother, estranged from his father, became the lover of one of Napoleon’s conspiratorial enemies in Paris, and may even have done some conspiring herself. Yet in that environment, drenched with war and politics, the young boy somehow became a prodigy of poetry. Well-composed verses took shape unwilled in his mind, sometimes in his sleep and obsessively in his waking hours.
He was a victim, Robb tells us, of the peculiar mental disorder known in the nineteenth century as metromania, in which the brain, like a twitching muscle, secretes verbal rhythms and rhymes at an uncontrollable rate. And the results were astounding. At the age of fifteen, he entered a poetry contest sponsored by the French Academy, and might very well have won except that he committed the tactical error of revealing how ridiculously young he was, which seems to have given the judges pause. Before he was twenty, he was leading a revolution in verse, supported by an entire generation of young writers—though the young generation consisted mostly of Hugo himself, writing under eleven pseudonyms in a magazine published by his older brother. I’ve never fully understood the formal elements of Hugo’s revolution, apart from a willingness to break a few minuscule rules of old-fashioned prosody—a willingness, for instance, to string together explosive alliterations like “The priests who prayed have perished,” which is one of the innovations that Robb singles out for mention. Yet those innovations, whatever they were, got the conservative critics complaining, which gave the poet a chance to draw his sword, and commit mayhem, and boast:
The most jewel-like of his books, I think, is “Les Orientales,” written in Paris during his twenties—a book of voluptuous warrior fantasies about Turks, Jews, Greeks, Arabs, and Spaniards, a violent book, insolent, buoyant, and tense. (There was always something scary about Victor Hugo, except when he was in his lovable grandfather mode.) But his true masterpiece has got to be a volume called “La Légende des Siècles,” to which are properly appended, in the Pléiade edition in France, two unfinished works, “La Fin de Satan” and “Dieu.” He labored over these writings off and on for decades in his difficult, later years, and the result, at more than a thousand pages, is both preposterous and sublime. “La Légende des Siècles” and its epilogues recount nothing less than the history of the universe, in the form of legends. The book is one of those nineteenth-century supertomes which aspire to contain every possible piece of wisdom about man and eternity, something like “The Human Comedy,” “Leaves of Grass,” or “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” except gaudier—a mad, disorderly procession of ancient gods, Biblical episodes, the Seven Wonders of the World (with each wonder declaiming in its own oracular voice), tyrannical sultans, El Cid, and Roland. There are Catholic Inquisitors and corrupt popes, fulminations against dictatorship, idylls of love, poems of Pan and the woods and seduction, and astronomical meditations, all of it wending from the earliest Edenic dawns into the age of steamships and outward to the cosmos.
Most of “La Légende” follows the verse form of twelve-syllable alexandrines (French verse meters are generally counted in syllables, not in metric feet) arranged in couplets, which can wear on the ear after five or six hundred pages. The effect is always grand, though. The stories are treasures. The titan Pthos, imprisoned under Mt. Olympus by the tyrannical gods, breaks his chains, escapes to the outside world, discovers a previously unnoticed enormous eyeball staring down from the heavens, and climbs the mountaintop to inform the terrified Olympians, “O gods, there is a God!” A cruel king with a bronze eagle ornamenting his helmet chases a young knight into the woods and slaughters him—and the eagle turns on the king and gouges out his eyes. An emperor murders a nobleman’s granddaughter and orders the nobleman decapitated—only to have his own head inexplicably fly off his body while, in the distant zones of the azure sky, an archangel can be seen drying his sword on the clouds. A Spanish lord, abandoned by his evil son, descends into the crypt of his castle to commune with a statue of an ancestor—and the statue’s bronze hand caresses the heartbroken father’s cheek. A feather from Satan’s wing, tumbling behind him in the abyss of space, metamorphoses into the angel Liberty and goes to challenge Satan in his lair: the “colossal reptile in the infinite cesspool.”
And all these lyric meditations and gory tales of justice keep pointing toward a larger story of forward motion—of progress in the realms of political freedom and of science and, equally, in the realm of verse. By the end of “La Légende des Siècles,” Hugo has sent mankind soaring through the futuristic skies of the twentieth century on a flying machine called an aeroscaphe (much admired by Jules Verne, according to Robb), fashioned from Newton’s physics and Pindar’s odes. Standing at his writing desk (Robb tells us that Hugo wrote “La Légende” standing up) with his pen in the air, waiting for the next perfect rhyme to drop effortlessly into its foreordained place, Hugo must have felt that human progress was flowing metrically from his own imagination; must have felt that he had become as great as any hero or god who traipses across his pages; must have felt electric tingles in his flesh as his pen descended once more to the paper to push mankind forward to the measure of yet one more completed couplet. He became a superman because his own doctrines of history and the arts called for him to be one; and because his amazing fluency in several fields of literature persuaded him that he really did have a superman’s gifts; and because this belief imbued him with a heliumlike self-confidence, which lifted him up and away, the poet on his own aeroscaphe, safely above the gravitational pull of insecurity and doubt.
Robb’s biography is solid, thick (at almost seven hundred pages), factually reliable, genially knowledgeable about French literature, and cleverly written. Robb says of Hugo’s prose, “Vastly extended metaphors moved over the subject like weather systems.” I like his remark that Hugo’s early poetry was aimed at crowds, which were expected to break into cheers at the end of every stanza. Robb’s enthusiasm for the monumental novels and some of his other literary judgments leave me unpersuaded, however, and his indignation at Hugo’s personal life and self-promotional habits goes a bit far. But the principal failing of his book—a terrible failing, characteristic of too many literary biographies—is that it quotes only a few snippets of the poetry. Robb excuses himself by saying, in regard to the epilogues of “La Légende des Siècles,” that “to give a short quotation would be like using a cup of water to explain the sea.” The right short quotation would be nothing like a cup of water, though. Here is the opening section of one of those epilogues, “La Fin de Satan,” in my own, unrhymed translation—a few lines that show the booming sound of Hugo’s voice whenever the mood to rewrite the Bible came upon him, which was often:
What is best about Robb’s biography is its focus on Hugo the public figure—and again, Hugo’s life yields a giant theme. For, on top of writing his books and painting his pictures and chasing women, Hugo managed to pursue with real seriousness a career as a political leader—originally as a royalist and reactionary, then, after mature reflection, as a republican and a socialist of a nondogmatic sort. He was brave, too. In 1851, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, staged a coup d’état, and Hugo, forty-nine years old, left his house in the Montmartre district, with its knickknacks and mirrors and a naked Venus over his bed, and went into the streets to harangue the crowds: “Citizens! You have two hands. Take your legal rights in one and your rifle in the other and attack Bonaparte!”
But there was no uprising, so Hugo fled to Belgium and then, after the timid Belgian authorities reacted fearfully to his presence, to England’s Channel Islands, off the Normandy coast. He spent most of the next two decades in heroic isolation on those islands, first on Jersey, then on Guernsey in his elaborately renovated Hauteville House (with a small home for Juliette Drouet nearby, as always). And from those islands he waged a campaign of supremely articulate vilification of Louis-Napoleon’s dictatorship. Hugo was a Solzhenitsyn, as Robb points out—the first Solzhenitsyn in European letters. Classic volumes of political and social protest welled up from him volcanically during those years: “Les Misérables” (which immediately went on the Catholic Index of prohibited literature); the first edition of “La Légende des Siècles”; “The Toilers of the Sea”; some journalism; and a solid volume of invective called “Les Châtiments,” consisting of furious curses and sneers in verse, arranged under such gloriously sardonic headings as “Society Is Saved” and “The Family Is Restored.” And each book in turn went floating skyward across the Channel into France and rained sulfuric condemnation on every revolting thing that was taking place under the despotism of Napoleon’s nephew.
By the time Hugo made his way back to Paris, at a moment when the dictatorship had collapsed into wars and massacres, those several books and his adamant spirit had converted him into a kindly, bearded symbol of national virtue and republican ideals. He was repeatedly elected to the National Assembly, then to the Senate. There was talk of his running for President. It’s true that he had no talent for back-room legislative deal-making, and perhaps no desire to be a politician in the ordinary sense. He said, “I find that delivering one speech is as exhausting as ejaculating three times—even four!” But he was a success at reassuring everyone in France, except the extreme right and the hierarchs of the Catholic Church (who thought him insane), of the compatibility of republican values and national greatness. On his seventy-ninth birthday, in 1881, more than half a million of his loyal fellow-citizens paraded in his honor past his new home in the sixteenth arrondissement. Five thousand musicians played “La Marseillaise.” His street was renamed Avenue Victor Hugo. When he died, four years later, a crowd larger than the entire population of Paris accompanied his pauper’s hearse (Hugo’s faultless theatrical instincts extended even into the details of his own funeral) across the city to his burying place, in the Pantheon.
Robb says that Hugo ended up the most famous man in the entire world during his era—which is probably true, if only because Queen Victoria was a woman. Worldwide adulation was not necessarily ideal for his writing, though. It is always agreeable for a talented author to become a street, but to become an avenue can be a little much. A depressing number of Hugo’s sappiest poems have established themselves as staples of French literature, and lately “Notre-Dame de Paris” has been reduced to a sort of stuffed animal by Disney. Genius that he was, the mere idea of Victor Hugo, I’m afraid, can seem slightly comic today. Yet who was to blame for that downward curve in his reputation? There are moments in “Les Misérables” when he seems the spitting image of any cagey French politician, catering to one sector of the public after another—now the Catholic liberals, now the radical socialists, now the worshippers of Napoleon—as if, in his mind, the line between literature and coalition-building had grown a bit vague.
His hunger for popular acclaim had a bad effect on the poetry, too. In “Les Orientales” the young Hugo included a poem of two simple stanzas called “Ecstasy,” in which he described himself standing at the water’s edge and thinking about God. But he became gassier in time, and fonder of himself, and craftier. Eventually, he reëmerged with an updated version called “Magnitudo Parvi” (meaning, in Latin, “The Grandeur of the Little”)—a central poem in the Hugolian œuvre, in which, still standing at the water’s edge and thinking about God, he gesticulates at twinkling stars and lonely hermits’ huts and all kinds of other symbols to explain, over a span of twenty-five windswept pages, the meaning of the universe, nothing less. “Magnitudo Parvi” came out in a book called “Les Contemplations” in 1856, a year after the first edition of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and a year before the first edition of Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil,” and it must be said that all three poets, citizens of their age, share a good many thoughts and images. But the comparison with Whitman and Baudelaire is devastating to Hugo. In that poem about stars and huts and the universe, Hugo looks like a man orating in front of a mirror. You find yourself wondering if, for all his talent, he wasn’t essentially a fake.
With Hugo, though, the thing to do whenever he arouses that suspicion is to keep turning the pages, secure in the certainty that he was, in fact, talented, and was only sometimes a fake. “Les Contemplations” goes directly from the stars and the huts to record what was plainly the hardest, most unbearable event of Hugo’s life—not the failure of his uprising in 1851 or his exile from France but the death of his daughter Léopoldine in a boating accident at Villequier, on the Seine. You might suppose that if Hugo had subscribed in every inch of his soul to his many theories about eternity, solitude, the wisdom of prophets, and the greatness of France, those several profundities would console him then, and in writing about his daughter he would bang his drum harder than ever. But no. He becomes less theatrical, not more so. In the opening section of a poem called “At Villequier” he speaks with tremendous intensity, yet in a reasonably natural way, like this (except that, in rendering his lines into English, I cannot re-create his perfect rhyme and perfect meter):
That is the chant of someone whose shoulders are quietly heaving in one rhythm, and whose blood is racing in a second rhythm, and who is trying to tell us, in still another rhythm, that his shoulders are not heaving and his blood is not racing—a poem of absolute fidelity to absolute grief. It shows us that Hugo’s cosmologies and his history of mankind are all very nice, and in places magnificent, and they are certainly the source of his spectacular self-confidence, but this man’s personality is authentically enormous, and in some corner of his enormous soul he knows very well that whole parts of his most extravagant doctrines are merely entertainments. In this poem he has no more wisdom to bestow upon humanity, no more ambition to be the leader of France, and no patience for the vanities and delights of pretending otherwise. He is merely a father. Under that spectacular personality of his, Victor Hugo turns out to have been a man with a vulnerable heart. A good poet, almost always—and sometimes a great poet, especially when life got in his way and he had no time to think about his own greatness. ♦
