Getting to Know Hugo

Even his name is weighty. Victor Hugo. The kind of name you’d expect a great man of letters to have.

Can’t you see him sitting there, in his robe, in a comfortable arm-chair in his study, dictating to a secretary his latest story or perhaps going through the never-ending correspondence from his many admirers, a fire crackling in the hearth beside him?

As I picture him, he’s running his fingers contemplatively through his beard, speaking deliberately, slowly, each magnificent sentence coming from his lips fully-formed, perfection uttered.

I had always placed Hugo high in the pantheon of great writers in my mind, perhaps not on a par with the greatest, but securely in the clouds, beyond the point where they can be seen clearly, enveloped in reputation amplifying haze, up there with Gogol and Schiller, Ovid and Proust, and all those others I’ve hardly read but who I’m told are great. And with Hugo, the particular charm was that he could appeal to the most highly cultured and the most brutish of souls both. I recently came across a travel piece in which the writer encounters on a remote island a poacher, a dangerous man, a murderer, an ex-convict, yet someone who speaks fondly of his favorite writers, Dostoyevsky (of course) and Victor Hugo, the great portrayers of tormented souls.

But the sad fact is until very recently I’d never read anything by Hugo. As someone who speaks a little French, I had always told myself I should wait to read French literature when I can read it in the original. Sadly, that level of fluency always seemed to remain just out of reach. So, despite my French name and French relatives and extensive travel in francophone countries, I am embarrassingly illiterate when it comes to French literature.

Several months ago, in Skyline Books on 18th Street -- one of my favorite places in spite of the pervasive cat odor -- I came across a small copy of Hugo’s Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-three), about the bloodiest year of the French Revolution, 1793. It was in one of those school editions designed for students of French complete with a vocabulary at the back and handy notes to explain the idiomatic expressions and other bits of French arcania. I dove into it. Well, actually, wading would be the more apt metaphor. Like a swimmer tentatively walking into chilly water, I went forward slowly, my progress halting and deliberate, flipping back and forth between text and vocabulary, rereading sentences whose meaning was unclear, referring back to earlier chapters to see if Hugo’s use of a once new, now familiar, word had changed. Eventually, however, I was in deep, swimming slowly, deliberately, but still keeping my head above water. I was reading Victor Hugo, in French and I was very pleased with myself.

But I was not at all pleased with the story. From the very first page I was confronted with wooden, two-dimensional characters. I could hardly believe what I was reading. Was this sappy stuff really by Victor Hugo, that towering genius of French letters? To excuse him I told myself it must be the subject matter that was causing him to write this way. Maybe for a Frenchman it is just too difficult to portray both sides of participants in the Revolution with depth and subtlety, so great were the passions, so raw the violence.

In Hugo’s characters, the two sides, revolutionary and royalist, conformed to the most crude generalizations. The revolutionaries were stalwart folk. Parisian workers for the most part, but leavened with a few hardy peasants who had finally risen up against the venality of the aristocracy and the clergy to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with they oppressed urban brethren. They were tough, brave, and loyal, fired by revolutionary and nationalistic zeal to rid the land of their former oppressors and the foreign monarchs now preying on France. Interestingly, in Hugo’s version, they are never led by one of their own but always by a former aristocrat or clergyman or general who has embraced the revolution. As if to say, these simple folk make great soldiers, but don’t ask them to actually think or take initiative. The royalists, in the main, were made up of ignorant peasants still in the thrall of the church, too timid or too stupid to envision an alternative to their miserable lives. These were led by aristocrats, men of great honor and character who committed great acts of cruelty against the revolutionaries, as if these could not be Frenchmen anymore having risen up against the ancien regime.

The very first character Hugo introduces as the book opens is of a piece with the others that follow. She is a peasant woman, three young children huddled miserably around her, the youngest one literally at her breast. She is in hiding in the deep woods, hungry, clothes in rags, running from the life that saw her house destroyed and her husband wrenched from her arms, sent to fight by priest and seigneur for a monarch he had never seen. She is found by the hardy Parisian revolutionaries and immediately taken into their company, her children happily adopted as mascots of the unit. It doesn’t get much better. In each new chapter I was confronted by yet another cardboard character: the kind-hearted hermit who befriends a lost stranger and shares with him his humble hovel and simple evening meal of chestnuts, not realizing until later that the stranger was actually a noble, returned from abroad to lead the counter-revolution and a devastating scorched-earth policy; the defrocked priest, now revolutionary leader, who risks his life to save a young nobleman who had once been his charge in more peaceful days; the bloodthirsty aristocrat whose sense of honor compels him to walk into a burning building to save three peasant children knowing as he does so it will mean certain capture and execution by the encircling revolutionary forces. And there were many others, each one utterly unsatisfying. How, I kept asking myself, could Victor Hugo, the great, perhaps greatest, novelist in French be responsible for characters like these? What does this say about him? What does it say about French literature?

I kept reading. Who doesn’t love melodrama, after all? But, it was more than that. For every cringe-inducing character, for every syrupy statement, there were descriptions of sublime beauty. Interestingly, these tended to be descriptions of landscape or movement or atmosphere, not the utterings of his characters. One of the most harrowingly beautiful descriptions is the life he breathes into a canon broken loose on the pitching deck of a ship. In the destructive, utterly irrational, careening of this canon Hugo paints an astonishing portrayal of evil suddenly come to life. Among the hardened sailors -- men who cheer when they learn they are about to face an enemy in battle -- this wild animal of wood and iron invokes instant terror. They know it can crush a man, that it obeys no known rules of movement, has no mind, yet it is alive, an enraged, malevolent beast bent on killing or maiming every crewmember who comes within its reach. I read that passage and my pulse was racing. I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a more terrifying, more beautifully breathtaking description of an inanimate object.

And there were many others, interspersed between the embarrassing utterances and actions of his cut-out characters. It was for these I kept on reading Quatre-vignt-treize.

To illustrate, I’ll end by quoting a passage contrasting nature’s creation with one of man’s as dawn breaks over the land and the morning light illuminates the scaffold of a guillotine erected for an early morning execution.

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”Never was the fresh sky of day more charming than that morning. A soft breeze stirred the heather, the haze crawled softly in the branches, the forest of Fougeres, fully infused by the breath that came from the springs, smoked in the dawn like a vast pan full of incense; the blue of the firmament, the whiteness of the clouds, the clear transparence of the waters, the verdure, this harmonious gradation which goes from aqua-marine to emerald; the fraternal groups of trees, the sheets of grass, the deep plains, all had this purity which is the eternal counsel of nature to man. In the midst of all that was spread out the awful human immodesty; in the midst of all that appeared the fortress and the scaffold, war and torment, the two figures of the bloodthirsty age and the bloody minute. In the presence of flowering creation, perfumed, loving, and charming, the splendid sky inundated [the fortress of] La Torgue and the guillotine at dawn, and seemed to say to man: look at what I make and look at what you make.”