Pages from the Goncourt Journals Book

People died differently in the nineteenth century, and they took a long time doing it. The appalling deaths described in the Goncourt Journal are enough to make you get down on your knees and thank God and Pasteur for antibiotics. Henri Murger, author of the source novel for La Bohème, contracted something called 'senile gangrene' and literally rotted to pieces; when his attendants tried to trim his moustache, his lip came off. The journalist Robert Caze punctured his liver in a duel and spent months dying in a fourth-floor apartment. And then there's Jules de Goncourt himself, who by his late thirties was showing symptoms of advanced syphilis: memory loss, aphasia, paralysis and dementia, each stage being scrupulously recorded by his brother in the journal they had shared.

Why do I keep coming back, year after year, to this cynical, malicious, death-haunted book? Or did I just answer my own question? And while I'm on the subject, why are all my favourite books cynical, malicious and death-haunted? Why are they so freaking French, in other words? But let's not talk about that now.

You know how they say every generation thinks it discovered sex? Well, maybe it would be equally true to say that every generation thinks it invented modernity. Already the fashions and gadgetry of the 90s'remember flannel shirts? The Discman? The 'information superhighway'?'must seem ineffably lame to the smug fifteen-year-olds I see on the subway blasting that hippity hop racket out of their so-called 'cellular telephones'.

On the evidence of the Goncourt Journal, though, the signifiers of hipness'irony, urbanity, a disaffected pose'were well in place long before Lou Reed first put on sunglasses and a sneer. Historically speaking, the brothers may have been stranded among the plush and gaslights of the Second Empire, but spiritually they were already living in their own private twentieth century. It's not included in this translation, but there's a passage in the original where the Goncourts and a bunch of their Boho friends are sitting around and bitching about how disgustingly modern they feel. When someone or other disagrees, good old Théophile Gautier gets up and declares himself so modern he wants to puke.

That's another thing about the journal: it's funny. The Goncourts knew all the leading writers of the day and used to host glorified piss-ups for them at a chi-chi restaurant in Paris. So you had all these impossibly witty guys hanging out and totally burning each other over oysters and champagne. You get the impression the Goncourts spent the whole night jotting one-liners down on napkins and muttering to themselves, 'Oh man, this is gold.'

And what did they talk about, these assembled geniuses? Women, mostly. Sure, every once in a while there'd be a screaming match about prose style, but they always came back to women. Women and sex. It's almost sweet, in a pervy, French sort of way. (At one point, Zola confesses that he fantasizes about pubescent girls: 'Yes, it frightens me sometimes…I see the Assize Court and all the rest of it.')

With Jules' death in 1870, some of the youthful piss and vinegar goes out of the journal, but if Edmond was a little more decorous than his brother, he was definitely the bitchier of the two. I don't think I've read anything as eloquently catty as this tremendous putdown of Hippolyte Taine and his wife:

The stupid walk of that potbellied clergyman, with his sly, hypocritical gaze hidden behind his spectacles, and the swarthy, unhealthy ugliness of the horrifying wife, who looks like a diseased silkworm which a schoolboy has daubed with ink, make a truly dreadful sight for the eyes of an aesthete.

I have no idea what a diseased silkworm might look like, but it sounds really, really mean.

I've nattered on shamelessly but I don't know if I've managed to convey just how awesome the journal is. That's the problem with trying to talk about a book that's a whole lot smarter and funnier than you are: it ends up judging you.