It’s hard now to convey the importance of the novelist JK Huysmans for the French literary scene of the late 19th century and for the Catholic revival in France. He was famous as an elaborate stylist, for his idiosyncratic vocabulary, as a Decadent, as a Catholic convert. The tired aestheticism of Huysmans’ most famous book, Against Nature, can be summed up by his description of a tortoise whose shell the wealthy aesthete of the novel has embellished with jewels so he can see the precious stones moving about his apartment; the poor creature dies. The Oblate of 1903 is the last of his Durtal novels, and perhaps the least read of his works.
But this new translation by Brendan King, for the publisher Daedalus, may help to put the novel back on the literary radar. Like all the novels featuring the writer Durtal, it is essentially autobiographical. Like Durtal, Huysmans had joined a Benedictine community as a lay associate who shared the liturgical life of the monastery, as an oblate. And like his alter ego, he had to abandon the project – in his case, at the monastery of St Martin in Ligugé, which features in The Oblate as the monastery of Val-des-Saints – when the monastery was dissolved following the passing of the law on associations by the anti-clerical government of 1901, which effectively banished the religious orders from France. What he had hoped to be a lifetime refuge turned into an intense monastic interlude of two years.
The novel itself is essentially a description of the liturgy and the life of worship of a Benedictine community; Huysmans is an acute chronicler of the cycle of the office through the seasons. There are passages where Durtal explains the rationale of the office, why some chant is more beautiful than others, how the alluvial soil of divine worship is built up over time. He explains how the liturgy varies through the Church year, why it varies, the elements that are primitive, the accretions that are mistaken. It is, in short, impossible to imagine it being published now. If The Cathedral was essentially a discussion of Christian symbolism, The Oblate is an exploration of monastic liturgy. And yet these discussions, between Durtal and his friends or with monks of Val-des-Saints are curiously compelling, at least for a reader with an interest in the monastic life. They are to do with things that nourish the soul.
The backdrop to these things is quite simple. Durtal has fled from Paris, and from his later Trappist experience, to the monastery at Dijon. There he has taken a house nearby and brought his friend’s housekeeper, herself devoutly interested in the liturgy, Madame Bavoil, to look after him. Close by there live fellow oblates, Mlle de Garambois and her acerbic wealthy uncle, the monastery’s patron. They join the cycle of prayer of the monastery – though to their indignation, the ladies are excluded from Durtal’s profession as an oblate – and its privations; few of us would warm to the prospect of a 4am start to the daily office.
But the characters live and breathe; much of the human interest of the novel is to do with their exchanges about Church history and divine office, interspersed with occasional reciprocal meals, especially on feast days (Mlle de Garambois is an excellent cook). Durtal is a close observer of the monastery itself and the intensely individual character and foibles of the monks. The monastery’s garden, and that of Durtal’s own, are closely described. It is, as he intended, a Flemish-style portrait of a particular place, richly detailed and observed.
But there is through the novel the growing sense of menace from outside, from the anticlerical government which is pushing through the law of association, which finally results in the enforced exile of the monks. The divine office gradually dwindles with their departure, until finally Durtal must make up the necessary four who continue the worship of the community to the end. Then he too makes his way from this place where he had been so happy; the novel ends with him gloomily preparing to pack up his books and return to Paris, as Huysmans did.
And with that departure comes reflection; was the enforced exile of the monks to Belgium divine punishment for their sins, for those of the order as a whole or those of the Church? The miserable exodus with their humble cooking implements and chamber pots (to make them feel more at home) is unbearably poignant.
Brendan King’s translation is so good as to read effortlessly, with the minor quibble that he calls children “kids”. The cover is striking: Zurbarán’s St Francis. Alas, Francis was not a monk but a friar, and far from the Benedictines described here.
The Oblate, by JK Huysmans and translated by Brendan King, is published by Daedalus.
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