Backlisted - Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

Thérèse Raquin (1868), the third novel by French writer Émile Zola, is the book featured in this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss the sensational and still shocking founding text of Naturalism are the novelists Rachel Joyce and Andrew O'Hagan. Also in this episode John has been reading Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, while Andy takes a tour of the National Portrait Gallery's cancelled Cecil Beaton exhibition with Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things by Robin Muir.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)5'36 - Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things by Robin Muir11'38 by Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano14'46 - Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in 19th century Paris, in a narrow passageway near the Seine, as we look through a gloomy window into a haberdasher's shop,

where two women sit, surrounded by wool and thread and buttons, silent in the semi-darkness. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us today is, are, is, no, are the novelist Andrew O'Hagan and the other novelist Rachel Joyce. There are only two novelists and we've got both. Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize, was voted one of Grant's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and won the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He's editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the author of five novels, Andrew?

Yes, I think so. I'm trying to keep up. It's hard, you know. I mean, people think you've got an insider track just because you write them, but that is in fact a fallacy. I'm scratching my head. Let's say five. Of which the latest is Mayflies, and that was published recently by Faber. But that is all secondary to Andrew's most notable achievement. In 1986, listeners, I went to the H&R Cloak record shop in Croydon. That's the first mention of Croydon today, but not the last. Not the last. Oh, no.

To buy a single by a band that i had heard on the john peele show called the big gun and little did i imagine 34 years later that i would be doing a thing called a podcast which didn't exist on the internet which didn't really exist with the percussionist from the big gun andrew oHagan. Andy, my heart swells at this information, I have to say. Crossed continents to meet you. You found your fan, Andrew. It's brilliant. We sold a total, I think, of two copies. And my mother's happy to step forward as the proud owner of the other copy.

But here you are, Andy. I've been searching for years. I mean, there are tears in my face now. Oh, genuinely. I said before we started that certain things had come to light in the last few hours. That was one of them. I couldn't believe it.

I wish I could say that your wise punches saw me clear to buy my first house. Unfortunately, it was still paying back the presser of that record somewhere in the lovely town of culmarnock oh my goodness well that is a very happy happy thing brilliant joining uh andrew is the novelist rachel joyce rachel is the author of the international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, and The Music Shop.

Her books have appeared in 36 languages. She has been long-listed for the Booker Prize, short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize, and was awarded New Writer of the Year in the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards. And her latest novel, Miss Benson's Beetle, was published recently by Doubleday. Rachel, have you been in any bands in my record collection? I could lie.

Lie? Yeah, I have. Yeah, all of them. Yeah, strangely. No, I haven't haven't no I was never just not musical I really wish I was it was so cool to be musical but I just didn't need to be to be honest back not when I was a kid anyway that's also true just had to be a show-off that seemed to work quite well but you are quite into music I was reading an interview with you where you were hymning 12 tona oh yeah I love 12 tona in Iceland in Reykjavik yes the the Reykjavik's finest music emporium yeah it came about because I love record shops and so I just thought well this would

be a very good um form of research just having to go and spend a lot of time in them, which is what I did. And 12 Toner was, I mean, I love that. It's about one of the best. It's a shame we're not here to talk about music, really. Right. Well, the book, actually, we're here to talk about is Thérèse Racan, the third published novel by the great French master of naturalism,

Émile Zola. Originally serialized in the literary journal L'Artiste under the title A Love Story, it was first released in volume form as Thérèse Racquin by Albert Lacroix in 1867, December 1867, and despite some famously disparaging reviews, became an immediate bestseller and established Zola's literary reputation. But before we slip into the back streets of not-so-gay Paris, Andy, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book called Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things, written by Robin Muir. It's actually the exhibition catalogue that was published to tie in with an exhibition of the same title, focusing on Cecil Beaton's early photography in the 1920s and the social set that featured in it,

which ran for five days at the National Portrait Gallery, opened on March 12 12th, 2020, and closed on March the 17th because of COVID. So the vast majority of people never got to see this exhibition. And I imagine if you are the publisher of NPG books, you've got a huge unsold print run, which you would have expected to sell through in the npg gift shop but now this is the this is the main record of that exhibition

and listeners will remember that i've been following my own little path this year through books that are to do with british artistic movements and culture between the wars. John Piper's Brighton Aquatints, Romantic Moderns, Square Haunting, those are all books that I've talked about this year. And this book actually works remarkably well as a book in its own right. I didn't go to the exhibition and I won't get to go, but in a way actually sitting and reading an exhibition catalogue from cover to cover is probably an experience that we don't have very often. And I found it incredibly rewarding. It's very well put together. It's really beautifully designed. It has biographies and excerpts from

Beaton's journals to accompany each photograph. And the cast of characters includes the various members of the Sitwell clan, William Walton, Lady Diana Cooper, Lord Berners, Stephen Tennant, Daphne du Maurier, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and many, many Toffs, routinely described as the most beautiful woman of their generation. What's so interesting about it is it's a group of individuals who are both deeply attractive and utterly repulsive. There's a tension constantly going on between these beautiful people and their appalling politics and behaviour.

And I reread Vile Bodies after I read this. I read The Well of Loneliness for the first time because both Radcliffe Hall and Evelyn Waugh feature in the exhibition and in the book. In fact, here's a little bit, the section about Evelyn Waugh. Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh held towards each other a lifetime of mutual loathing, which for eight-year-old Cecil startedon and Evelyn Waugh held towards each other a lifetime of mutual loathing which for eight-year-old Cecil started in 1912 as a day boy at Heathmount Preparatory School,

Hampstead, where Waugh, a year older, was also a pupil. In his memoir A Little Learning, 1964, Waugh remembered Cecil as, quote, a tender and very pretty little boy. The tears on his long eyelashes used to provoke the sadism of youth, and my cronies and I tormented him on the excuse that he was reputed to enjoy his music lessons. And then Beaton subsequently recalled, Evelyn was already an experienced bully, and his expert eyes had seen in me from a distance of 30 yards a mother's pretty an excessively timid darling who was an easy victim for ridicule and torture my arms were turned back to front and my face spattered with spit from the pea shooters and there's clearly a 40-year psycho drama that then plays itself out between Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh,

which I'd not really appreciated that that had been a thing, but they were constantly running into one another. You know, they moved in the same social circles. There's a fantastic photograph here of Evelyn Waugh at Ashcombe, Cecil Beaton's beautiful house in Wiltshire where you can sort of see all the enmity that war has for Cecil Beaton in that picture he's looking at him with the pea shooter just out of shot there you can see so it's a really really good book and I find Cecil Beaton endlessly fascinating this is just about one aspect of his career and uh coincidentally ashcombe in wiltshire has just gone on the market for four million pounds being sold by its current owner mr guy ritchie the film director so with perhaps the big gun millions andrew you could

think about uh saving that for the nation. I would pay more attention to you, but I'm on the phone to my real estate dealer as we speak. It's really interesting that thing about enmity among that crowd. You know, it passed down the generations. Evelyn's son, Auburn War, made himself hated by the novelist that posh people call Anthony Paul and everybody else calls Anthony Powell. By referring to him in the literary review constantly, referring to Paul as the horse-faced dwarf, every time he had the opportunity to review one of his books, he would use those words. It was set on every was to drive paul mad his wife admitted so that enmity became a bit of a kind of um generational thing they just passed it on to

each other i think it's not a book that you finish and think gosh i'd like to go down to the pub with those people but but it's secure in the knowledge nor would they want to go down to the pub with you so so that's fine uh anyway that's really good that's published by a national uh mpg and it's about it's quite expensive but if you look around you can find it relatively cheap so why don't you do that right john what have you been reading this week actually i've been reading i've been finishing i've been reading this book for probably 20 years on and off. It's, I think, one of the great works of the 20th century. I don't know whether you'd call it history, even he, it's by the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano. And even he's not really sure what it was. It's called Memory of Fire. It's a three volume history of the Americas with a focus on

Latin America, but it takes the whole of the continent. The structure is the thing that I love most about it. It's written in very small chunks, like an anthology. Although what he says is, I don't think it's really an anthology. So it's bits of fiction, it's bits of history, it's bits of journalism, it's firsthand accounts, it's poetry. It starts with the creation myths gathered from all over the continent. And he kind of works through in the first book, which is called Genesis through creation myths, first contact up into the 18th century. Then the second book is the 18th century and the 19th century, which is the sort of the formation of dictatorships and the rise of America.

And then the final, the final, Century of the Wind, the final, which I've just finished, is the 20th century. It's a magnificent sort of symphonic work of both history and imagination. What he says is, I don't know to what literary form this voice of voices belongs. Memory of Fire is not an anthology, clearly not, but I don't know if it is a novel or an essay or an epic poem or a testament or a chronicle, but deciding robs me of no sleep. I do not believe in the frontiers that according to literature's custom

officers, separate the forms. It tells a terrible story. It tells a story of genocide, exploitation, disease. But he does it in such a way that you're drawn into the characters. You meet the cast of characters, obviously, is epic, from unknown shaman in Amazonian tribes all the way through to characters like Billy the Kid. So when did you start reading this then? So it was published between 1982 and 1986. And I should also say, Galeano, he's known as one of the great kind of left-wing heroic writers of South America,

was Uruguayan, went into exile, lived in Spain for a long time and came back to Uruguay in 1985. But the first volume, Genesis, was written when he was still living in Spain. He's one of the best literary writers about football. So he has a whole other fan base. Not I know something that you're going to love. That's why that aspect is not familiar to me. That Venn diagram. So I started reading it back when I was a bookseller. So it's probably 30 years ago. Wow.

I finally decided I wanted to finish it. So I've reread that in the last, I suppose in the last six months, I've reread the whole thing again and found it even more, even more inspiring. Okay. So that is The Memory of Fire Trilogy by Eduardo Galeano. Okay. It's time now for an advert.

One of the things about this novel is it has inspired multiple adaptations and interpretations in the last 150, 160 years in all sorts of musical genres. So we're going to be hearing a few different things in the course of the show today. So that's opera. You can tick, if you had opera on your card, you can tick that off. Rachel, can you remember when or where you first read this novel? I can. I mean, there's a lot I can't remember, it has to be said, but I really remember it. I was 18 and I decided to hitch down through France to Avignon to get to the theatre festival. to hitch down through France to Avignon to get to the theatre festival. And I took Thérèse Racan with me.

And I think rather arrogantly and 18 year old Lee read it quite ostentatiously in French. I don't know that I really understood a lot of it. So I did have to reread it, work out what was going on. But I was bowled over by it and have been ever since. It just really took a hold on me. I find it so bold and so dark. And I absolutely loved it. I think it is, I mean, as a young person as well,

I think it does really, really speak to you. And I think I probably was quite dark. I still am quite dark. So it was going to appeal to me I remember sitting there in Avignon in these kind of for the theatre festival and then you were sort of sitting in little attics watching Beckett being played by you know an audience of two of us in deck chairs probably and you know the Beckett would go on for about six hours and there I was with Therese Rackham no not even supposed to but with Therese Rackham it just completely worked it really suited my image held up prominently for all to see it worked on so many levels even if I didn't completely understand it I had a similar experience I read it oh gosh in 1987 I

think right and hadn't reread it until I knew we were going to be doing it for this. And I was really surprised at how much of the, you know, some books change a lot, don't they? You don't change. The books change. Some books change a lot in that gap. Actually, I was astonished at how much of Therese Racan I could remember and also how much of the mood of it, the feeling of it, had stayed with me over 30 years. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The golden light is interesting because I think of it as a green light.

You mean the yellow light that filters through the book? You think of it as a green light? It just feels like green everywhere, that kind of mossy, oozy. I mean, there's so much ooze in this book, isn't there? So much slime. It's the grimmest Paris novel. You know what, John? It is the grimmest Paris novel. And that's, John? It is the grimmest Paris novel.

And that's saying something because we did Huismans on Batlisted a while ago. And he's no slouch on the grim front. No, no, he's not a barrel of laughs. Andrew, when did the force, the Zola force, writer doesn't really do justice to it, does it? When did Emil Zola first enter your life, your understanding? The comical story for me is that the works Therese Rakan were legend in our house.

I grew up the youngest of four boys in a house 25 miles outside Glasgow. And in 1980, when I was 12, there was a BBC adaptation of Zola's famous novel in which there was loads of sex. And we were banned from the living room by my Catholic parents during the broadcast. And much staring through banister slats and looking through the tops of doors to try and get a glimpse of this pair rolling about on a French bed as we allowed ourselves to think of it

and indeed it was but so for years I wondered what is this Therese Rakan? And actually, it wasn't the Zola that I read first. It was four years after that, of course, in Ayrshire, which is where we were, as well as all over the country, the great big subject was the miners' strike. And it was during the miners' strike in 84, in autumn of that year, that I picked up Germainard, In autumn of that year, I picked up Germinal, his great novel about the strike in northern France, almost in the Belgian border. That classic, I think.

I mean, there is no book like Germinal. It sent me into a place of proper empathy, I think, with the British miners in 84. I mean, so many of us were reading that. We didn't have book clubs then, but we had a tattered copy that was passed from boy to girl to boy to girl in our community. And it gave us an understanding of exactly what was at stake humanly in that great conflict in Britain. So that then sent me, of course, out into all of Zola, at least as much of it as you could get a hold of in Ayrshire in the 1980s.

But of course, Vina Lee, Therese Rakan, for other reasons, was still in my mind. And I eventually did get a hold of it. It didn't disappoint on the sizzle front, I have to say. There's so much that we will go on to discuss, but it's a sexy book. Okay. Well, Andrew, listeners, hang on to your hats

because as luck would have it, here is a clip from that suppressed adaptation. What on earth did you marry Camille for? I was brought up with him. Why? What happened to your parents? My mother was a foreigner. Algerian. Moroccan.

She died when I was little. Ran off with someone more like. More like? My father was drowned at sea. Oh yes, I remember that. Madame Raquin was his sister. She brought me up since I was six.

In the same room as Camille. He was always ill. And I always had to take a spoonful of his medicine or he wouldn't. I slept in the same bed with him. And the smell of his body made me feel sick. I don't know why I didn't die. And then when I grew up, it just seemed natural to go on living in the same bedroom.

Madame Raquel was always kind. But Camille turned out to be the same bedroom. Madame Raquel was always kind. But Camille turned out to be the same feeble, sickly creature I'd been sleeping with since I was six. You should have married me. I'm not feeble. No. No. That's Kate's I'm not feeble.

That's Kate. I'd just like to warn listeners retrospectively that that was Kate Nelligan as Therese Racan and Brian Cox as Laurent. And they were in bed in that scene and they apparently had no clothes on. So your parents were right to uh to protect you i think they were right to protect me from that dialogue as literary adaptations go shall we just agree that that's slightly over explicit

yeah yeah it's if they yeah but rachel you were saying earlier, like Kate Nelligan is really, they play that whole piece in that adaptation as melodrama. But because they've cast it so brilliantly, Alan Rickman is in it as well. And she is particularly good in it. I think she is especially good. I mean, I do remember it when it was on. Obviously, I was allowed to see it. I don't know what that says about my home life. But anyway, we'll just skip along very, very mer merrily but I do remember it was her for me she's so it's kind of

visceral I mean she felt she was she she was Therese and when she she has a sort of anger and a you know steeliness to her and yet such vulnerability I mean never fragile which is what I really love about them. Yeah. It's that strange way that she can go from looking, she can have a very mean face to an incredibly beautiful, smouldering, kind of sexy. It's great. That's beautifully consistent, John, with how Zola has it in the novel. I mean, when he first considers having an affair with her, he says, you know, she's not good looking. But as time goes on, he begins to see that she's sort of ravishing and incredibly, he becomes obsessively interested in how sexy she looks. Yeah. What does he call it? Desire's secret work begins to work on him. I love that. It's the Zola, the old, yeah, we'll talk about Zola, the kind of the idea of him as an experiment.

The whole thing is an experiment into morals and human behavior, the laws behind human behavior. Rachel, you said you'd read it again recently, over the last week or so. Were there things that had changed since the first time you read it? I think I was more aware this time of how meticulously plotted it felt, just this kind of, the descent is, I mean, I actually went through each chapter and I could go through each chapter going, this is where hatred comes, you went, actually went through each chapter and I could go through each chapter going,

this is where hatred comes, you know, this is remorse. This is, it's, it's so finely, I don't mean plotted. I mean, I do mean plotted, but charted, I suppose is a better word for it. And, you know, and I saw things, I mean, which you only, I mean, it's the delicious thing about rereading, rereading, isn't it? So that, you know, when they go to the river, the sun is biting his neck. And I mean, it's just a kind of slight delicious kind of freestyle. Because you just think this writer is so in this that the whole thing seems to be, you know, alive and evident to him. So I'm full of admiration for it. I mean, I do really love it. I love how unflinching it is

and i love that it goes to places that it really should not go and and and it delivers yeah there's a kind of remorseless fidelity isn't there to the idea that he's set up you know unflinching is right you you might want to look away, Rita, but I won't. Yeah, and you're going to see the whole thing. You're going to really, really go with it. And not only that, I'm going to lay it out for you why this is the case. So it's never kind of gratuitous because even if you despise it or are appalled or want to look away, whatever,

you understand why they're doing what they're doing. Andrew, it's sort of a psychological novel before psychology has been defined as a science, isn't it? Absolutely. And science is the right word, I think, in this context. I mean, I think Rachel expresses it very well. There's something utterly forensic about the form of this book. It's a sort of perfect novel of its kind.

You know, it's not for everyone. And the style of it is so self-advertisingly naturalistic, scientific, and so on. But that forensic patterning of the human experience in the book is so deftly done that it's sentence by sentence quite perfect. I read it again recently preparing to talk to you all and just was so bowled over by the fact that, as Rachel said, it's not plot. I mean, thriller writers can do plot. They can do surprising twists and turns. There aren't really many surprises in this,

but it's a proper unfolding of psychological motive and then the action of guilty conscience in a terrible relationship. I mean, psychologically, it goes all the way in to the rather sort of dark terribleness of what they did and how they did it and then what they're left with by way of guilt and trying to recover. And Henry James later said that there was something so crude and ugly about Zola's talent and yet he had something, said James. And you know what he means that, yes, it is quite ugly

sometimes. And it's been mentioned that sickly greenness and that yellow light that comes through. It's full of premonition, though, in a way that a plotty writer wouldn't know how to offer, as it were, subconscious ammunition to the reader the way that Zola does. You'll remember that when Laurent is painting that portrait early in the book of Camille, it's described at one point, his face as looking green, like a drowned man. You know, in the wrong hands, that would be crude, but actually it just feels like a gentle premonition. It's properly forensic

and it gives you a little dull bell in your head that something very terrible is going to occur in this book. And yet when it comes, it comes with all the incredible, meticulous drama of the best writing. But you get that from the opening. I mean, he is brilliant at scene setting, Zola.

But the sense of claustrophobia, of suffocation, of the shop, of the dust, of the greasiness of the cobblestones and the light. And you never, as I say, apart from the one trip to where they go and order their cooked chicken out next to the Seine, and despite Madame Racan's attempt to create, she likes the shop, the haberdashers, because it's quiet, because it reminds her of the country. But it's such a because it reminds you of the country. But it's such a claustrophobic. And that thing of being buried, of drowning, of suffocation,

those themes just are woven all the way through the novel. It takes a writer of very rare talent, I think, to describe boredom, not boringly. And those Thursday nights when the friends come round with the dominoes i mean it's just it's stultification beautifully anatomized but it's if anything exciting to read i mean that's an enormously brilliant trick that rachel what is the pulse in this book what is the thing i i agree with what Andrew was saying, what you were saying. It's very gripping. And yet, as we've just said, it's not plot that's gripping you, is it? You're not reading it thinking, oh, I wonder if they'll be found out.

That's not the motive. No, although that extraordinary moment when Madame Rakan starts to move with her finger on the table if Laurel and there is have and then that the food of the man apart remember his name is it gripe on me shows you know look what she's telling us they're so kind I can read her eyes and that's another just going back to that adaptation because I do think a lot about adaptations of Therese Rakan, the Kate Nelligan one, I cannot now remember the name of the actress, but playing Madame Rakan.

It's Mona Washbourne, most famous for playing Billy Lyre's mum in the film Billy Lyre. Quite early on, the murder is committed, isn't it? And I don't think you ever really think that they're going to get away from it. And I read somebody saying, why don't they just leave? And the point is, you accept that they're going to get away from it? And I read somebody saying, why don't they just leave? And the point is you accept that they cannot leave. I mean, he does give you a reason and it's money, but that seems just rather sideways.

It's that they're locked in this hell, in this room, and then first it's in the bedroom and then it just slightly expands. Rachel, adaptations. What is the thing that makes Therese Rakan so endlessly adaptable, do you think? Because there have been numerous stage film other productions. Well, Zola famously did it himself. That really was what sort of turbocharged its fame and success was his adaptation. I think it's probably as a dramatist, because I've adapted quite a lot. Nobody's ever let me have Therese Rackham and I really have tried. But I think it's because it's such, I mean, it is so rich, the stakes are so high. But also the way that it's told, it's not like you're given information, but you're often not given the actual scene.

but you're often not given the actual scene. So, for instance, a really kind of crucial scene, I'd say, if you were writing a dramatisation, would be where Laurent discovers that Madame Rican is not going to recover from her stroke. That is a kind of... That's a turning point in the drama. In the book, that is one sentence, and it's just referred to as something that happened.

So that dramatically, it feels as if there is there's a lot to kind of to play with as it's a very it's a very rich place but also because so much is about subtext in this book so often people having a conversation are not saying the thing that they're they just for whatever reason, or they're kind of dealing with unconscious thought, unconscious feelings or conscious thoughts, so that there are many, many layers. And I think dramatically, when you don't simply have a scene where people are saying this happened, this happened, where there's actually very rich subtext, you get a really crisp, tension and it's really exciting to write and it's really exciting to watch it's really interesting so much of this book takes place in the in the consciousness of

the characters yes so i mean uh it's it i mean there are challenges in doing that well on stage aren't they i mean i think on stage it's tough because stage, you know, if I were doing it, I would want to see I would want to see Camille. I would want I would want to see that bed with the two of them try to lie down. And then that Laura, they can't move because Laura is afraid of touching pulpy flesh, pulpy flesh, pulpy flesh, the disintegrating wet flesh. Pulpy flesh. Pulpy flesh. The disintegrating wet flesh. I need to see that on stage.

It's almost as if stage, it's to do with different levels of reality, isn't it? And stage, even though it is kind of such a suspended way of telling a sort of truth, I think it almost can't take it. Whereas film, I think, could because in a way it's so big and so subtle. Andrew Zola famously wanted to present this novel, or after the event, wished to present it as the product of a scientific inquiry. And it's the founding text of naturalism. In fact, the next episode of that listed is about the odd women by george gissing

gissing inspired by zola and by the naturalist movement but i've found rereading it that you know in addition to being ahead of its time psychologically you could also see elements of there's a gothic sensibility to it. And there's, fascinatingly, Rachel, in terms of adaptation, there's a real film noir thing going on in Therese Rakan. Yeah. She is a femme fatale, absolutely, yeah. You know, double indemnity, James Caine, pulp. You can see there's a kind of pulp feeling to it as well, Andrew.

The descriptive power is just absolutely amazing. I mean, it's hard to think of a writer whose descriptive powers are sharper, more enormous, more encompassing than Zola's. Let's just have a look for a second at that essay, the experimental novel published in 1880. I just want to read a couple of paragraphs from it because it gives you actually chapter and verse from him about his methodology. We should operate on the characters, he wrote, the passions, on the human and social data, in the same way that the chemist and the physicist operate on inanimate beings. And as the physiologist operates on living beings, determinism dominates everything. And later, he writes, today we feel the necessity of analysing

anger and love, of discovering exactly how such passions work in the human being. This view of the matter is a new one. We have become experimentalists instead of philosophers. In short, everything is summed up in this great fact. The experimental method in letters, as in the sciences, is in the way we explain the natural phenomena, both individual and social, of which metaphysics until now has given only irrational and supernatural explanations. That's what he gave us in that essay. But Andy, you're right. He wasn't actually 100% true to his own methods. Despite his journalistic powers and his brilliant reporting and his amazing descriptive capacity, he was quite supernatural. And there are episodes in this novel, don't you agree, Rachel, where it's phantasmagoric.

They start to have nightmares and see shapes in the dark. Ghosts, haunting, vampirism, you know, they're continually harking on about the wound on his neck and she says it's bleeding. That's another adaptation, you know, of which we don't have a clip. There was an adaptation in 2009 called Th yeah as a vampire film in korea it's a shame rachel i'd love you to read a bit and i'm just gonna set it up if i may by picking up what andrew was saying about zola's willingness to not be a scientist but be a

novelist in fact this is the blurb um this will help people if they haven't read Therese Racan. This is the blurb from a 1950s paperback, American paperback of Therese Racan. The book was published as Therese. Therese. Therese. Therese. Therese.

This is how you sold this book in the 1950s. And it is worth saying before I read this that for many, many years, Zola was certainly in Britain and America, firstly, not much translated. And when he was translated, he was sold as lurid and bannable. Well, he was banned and his publisher went to jail in the UK. So here we go. Here's the blurb from Teresa.

She listen only to the demands of the flesh. In those words lies the core of this woman's story. With Teresa's submission to her lover begins the smouldering drama that drives two people down and down the path of human degradation emile zola master of bold unsparing realism has here written a novel that ranks with the world's most compelling stories of men and women in the clutch of passions too strong for them to control. Any feelings about that, Rachel? Yeah, yeah.

It gets me right from the first sentence, to be honest. I mean, I suppose they had to sell it, didn't they? What really gets me, well, first that it's her. It's all her fault. I feel very strongly about the way she's described at the beginning and that she is a woman on hold. She kind of comes alive with the murder, but she's been sacrificed, it seems to me, by Madame Racan for Camille. And really the sacrifice is Madame Racan's because her love for her sickly son is so intense, as anyone's would be, that she can't bear the pain of him suffering that's madame rican you know that's her love so she needs to smooth it to make it easier by marrying off this

girl you know by matching him up but but um therese is used right from the start and i love the descriptions of her just angrily watching everybody at those domino games but as the book progresses we understand you know we understand more and more about that state in which she's put herself so even kind of describing her disposition as nervous seems a strange one to me because she's she's just a woman who's been made not to feel anything. All her decisions have been taken away from her. Could we hear a little? Yes.

I mean, one bit is just the bit where she's sitting there with these Thursday dominoes. This is early on. Could I ask which translation you've got there? Well, I do have the Adam Thorpe translation, which I really loved. I think it's such an intelligent translation yeah it's good we featured alberton by adam thorpe on an earlier episode of batlisted so we're we're pro adam thorpe here oh i love that book love it her elbow on the table cheek pillowed on the palm of her hand she would watch her aunt and her husband's

guests seeing them through a kind of yellow smoky fog given off by the lamp. All these people enraged her. She would turn from one to the other with profound loathing, a dull exasperation. Old Michaud would display a deathly pale face, spotted with red blotches, the type of lifeless face that old men have in their dotage. Grive had the tight mask, round eyes and thin lips of a cretin. Olivier, whose bones pierced his cheeks, earnestly bore a stiff, insignificant head on his ridiculous body. As for Suzanne, Olivier's wife, she was pale all over, with vague eyes, white lips, a slack expression.

And Therese could not find a man, not a single living soul, among these grotesque and sinister creatures she was shut up with. At times she was overcome by hallucinations, thinking herself buried at the bottom of a vault, surrounded by mechanical corpses waggling their heads, jiggling their legs and arms when their strings were twitched. The heavy air of the dining room choked her. The chill silence, the lamp's yellowish glimmers thrilled her with a vague terror and inexpressible dread. I love it because it's so angry and yet it's just deadened. Even when you read that, you think something's got to happen you cannot carry on like that andrew in this novel and i think this is true of other novels by zola is it fair he likes a set

piece doesn't he he likes for instance in this novel the trip to the morgue or the visit of one painter to look at Laurent's paintings. And in Germinal, the incredible scenes of specific things where he set himself the task of describing something he can't possibly have seen or has seen and reproducing it with as much fidelity as he can. I think when it comes to the morgue scene, for example, he very much did see it. I mean, the reporter in him was very strong. And that muscle, if you like,

the journalistic one, I mean, he would absolutely exercise it. He went into the Paris morgue again and again. He knew exactly what he was describing. You know, one of the things that you hear in the extract that Rachel just read, and we'll hear in this extract I'm about to read from the morgue scene, is it's an absolute reverse of everything that is taught in creative writing courses around the world. Isn't it true? The first thing they say to you when you come in the door is, drop all your adjectives, cut them all out. your adjectives, cut them all out. Well, not if you're Emile Zola you don't. It's the right adjective though in every case. It's like a kind of impressionist painting but thickly in pastos. So painted. More detail. You could see how he was close to Cézanne. You know, that use of the palette

knife to put more and more slick, oozing, to use Rachel's word, oozing detail everywhere in the novel. Let me just give you a paragraph or two from the morgues. When he entered, he was nauseated by a sickly smell, the smell of washed flesh, and chill shivers ran over his skin. The dampness of the walls seemed to make his clothes weigh heavier on his shoulders. He made straight for the window seemed to make his clothes weigh heavier on his shoulders. He made straight for the window, separating the onlookers from the corpses, glued his pale face to the glass and looked. Rows of grey stone slabs stretched out in front of him. Here and there on the slabs lay naked bodies, making patches of green and yellow, white and red. For some of the bodies had kept

their flesh virgin white in the rigidity of death. For others were like heaps of rotting, bleeding meat. On the wall at the back were hanging pitiful tatters, skirts and trousers contorted against the bare plaster. At first, Laurent could only see a general impression of dingy grey slabs and walls in which the garments and corpses made red and black blotches. There was a murmur of running water. Gradually, he could make out the bodies and then he passed from one to the next. He was only concerned with the drowned, and when there were several swollen and blueish from immersion, he studied them eagerly, trying to recognise Camille. Often, the flesh of the faces was coming away, bit by bit. The bones had pierced the soft skin,

and the whole face was a mere flabby pulp. and the whole face was a mere flabby pulp. I mean, that's incomparable. There isn't another writer, I don't think, of the period who would have gone that far. That goes way beyond Dickens, even in his reportage mode, doesn't it? It's amazing. I borrowed this little book here from the London Library when I knew we were going to be doing this episode. This is a study of Emil Zola's novels by Angus Wilson. And the second thing is that Wilson is very much focused

on the Rujun Makar 20 novel sequence. In the 1950s, he sees that as Zola's bid for immortality rather than Therese Racan. Wilson is quite dismissive of Therese Racan, but I found this very interesting. I'd like to ask you to comment on it. This is Angus Wilson talking about how sex plays out in Zola's work and the extent to which sex is not recessed in his novels

and certainly not in Thérèse Racan. This is what he writes. It's very short. For Zola, sex is the Achilles heel of humanity, responsible parenthood its crowning glory. Sex was a temptation into which a man might be led without the full use of his will. Habitual promiscuity was the negation of the will. habitual promiscuity was the negation of the will. The sexually promiscuous in his books are the indolent, the slipshod, the weak. The sexual act was a loss of energy, a further emphasis of the random futility of humanity in a determined cruel world. Work, regular hours of writing, world. Work, regular hours of writing, regular numbers of words written, was Zola's recipe for success and self-respect. Promiscuity was a sin against work. I mean, you wouldn't want to be

Zola, would you? I mean, he's not like those easy to confuse with those bright young things you were talking about before, Andy. So true. And yet that's the thing for a novel with, if we just take the example of Therese Racan, for a novel with so much sex in it, which was sold as that blurb I read earlier suggests as a sexy book. It's one of the least sexy things you could ever read, isn't it? I mean, it's so full of loathing for the flesh except in that early part i think the desire is so raw in that early part that you know the combination of the boredom and uh you know being sick of the husband and then this the way that a male straight writer is able to describe the desirability of Laurent is very strong.

Remember the thickness of his neck, you know, the compacted flesh. I mean, it's homoerotic. I mean, I noticed as well that I was, when I was looking through it, the sort of end, I would call it the end of Act One, if I was, because I started dramatizing it in my mind. But he says, this life of tossing about and cooling down lasted for eight months the lovers were living in a state of utter bliss so there we are that's the answer Therese was no longer bored desired nothing else Laurent sated pampered and fattened up even more dreaded merely

that he might see this lovely existence come to an end so that I mean it is i mean i feel that it isn't just that it's i mean it is it's a hunger and it's in need and i think it's for her it is a release it's interesting by the end of the book when she's there's a great passage where he says she felt that vice was failing her just as much as had the farce of remorse yes Yes. She had dragged herself in vain through all the cheap lodgings of the Latin Quarter. In vain she had led a dirty, rowdy life. Her nerves were shattered, debauchery, physical dissipation. These no longer gave her sufficiently violent spasms

to procure her oblivion. God. I mean, that's attempting to dull yourself with with sex with empty sex it is true to say isn't it that um in zola's moral universe there was a high price to be paid for hot sex yeah you know for all of them you know poor old uh madame racan too i mean it's as if in the mind of zola, you can't get away with it. It's obviously the ending is not a happy ending without giving too many spoilers away. But reading it again this morning, I couldn't help thinking that the hell, the hell is the living in the room.

The hell is other people. And actually, the ending is that there's a kind of release. And, you know, for Zola, who is not a Christian, you know, who's sort of, you know, throughout his life against organised religion, I mean, I'd always thought that it was a sad ending, but it's the one way out that they have. And with Madame sitting there looking at them kind of piled on the floor, maybe even for her as well.

And I think it's extraordinary, that last paragraph, where it goes. But it describes them as becoming children. You think nowhere in the book has Therese ever felt like a child or Laurent. They've never had that freedom. And something sweet and tender. Where is sweet and tender being in this book until this moment? I mean, and then, you know, that they what they've got to do and the relief, the end for everyone, and it's done

without him even saying that. It was enormously influential, this novel, we should mention that, you know, that much as the critics were harsh at the time, and Zola seems to have spent his whole life, especially his life as a journalist, you know, riling people and being pursued and did, being pursued and prosecuted for libel and so on,

very famously over the Dreyfus case and fleeing to England. Actually, that book reverberated right through the literatures of many cultures. If you look at a writer like Theodore Dreiser in American Tragedy, it's unthinkable without Therese Rakan. Even Nabokov, although he was always putting Zola down as a stylist, I mean, King-Queen-Knave has a boating scene straight out of Therese Rakan. So the influence, I think, was massive. I mean, I'll never really be able to understand, I don't think, why a godless man was so compelled by the operations of conscience the way that he was. In some sense, you wonder what it would have been like, a version of this novel, if it was Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway running off into the sunset having just modelled. They're the very opposite. They just can't go far.

And he plays with a lot of Catholic stuff in the third act, doesn't he, with the remorse. And there's a lot of, you know, the kneeling at Madame Raquin's feet asking for forgiveness. Yes. Now, normally on Backlisted, we do a straightforward biography. But Emil Zola led such an incident-packed life that we've prepared what I've got written there. What Steve Wright would call five fun facts about Emil Zola. Were he in the posse to discuss it. So Zola was born on April the 2nd, 1840, and he died on September the 29th, 1902.

Born in Paris, died in Paris. He wrote approximately 30 novels. He was a journalist and a playwright and a librettist and a real figure in French public life. His most famous novels, in addition to Thérèse Racan, are Germain, which we've talked about, La Sommoire in 1877, Nana in 1880, La Bête humaine in 1890. He basically, he writes the 20 novels in the Rujon Macar series in 22 years. And some of those are big novels.

Germinal is five, 600 pages. So we've mentioned this already, but the first fact about Zola is Zola's best friend as a child was the painter Paul Cézanne. Zola was a great supporter of the Impressionists, and you can see painter technique at work in Thérèse Racan. The friendship with Cézanne came to an end with the publication of Zola's 1886 novel, L'Oeuvre, which features a painter called Claude Lantier. And the last known correspondence between Zola and his childhood friend, Paul Cézanne,

is the letter from Cezanne thanking him for the novel which has just arrived and thereafter they never speak again Zola was the head of publicity at the publisher Hachette now Andrew you were talking about this this is a thing that made Zola somewhat unpopular with his contemporaries in his lifetime. Flaubert initially was a great supporter of Zola, but grew weary of him because he felt that Zola was always going for the publicity angle, the thing that would be sensational in the press.

And, you know, he was never offering reassurance to anybody ever over anything. You know, he didn't see that as being a writer's responsibility to reassure the public or titillate them or entertain them. He wanted to, as it were, refine their morals and give them a sense of the world that they otherwise might not be able to access. He was an artist devoted to that cause, I think. success he was an artist devoted to that cause i think but when it came to journalism i mean if you compare him to people today in the age of twitter i mean where everybody gets wounded and sort of uh feels that they've not had their due if they aren't immediately adored by hundreds of thousands of people on social media or indeed get all hurt if they get a bit of a pile on for a day

or two which we've all had by the way and itings at the time, but you need to quickly go over it. Zola actively invited it. He loved a pylon. And actually, the critics were always in wait for him, but the public too. I mean, over the Dreyfus case, I mean, here's a man who tried to stand up against an endemic, as we now say, anti-Semitism in the institutions of France,

lost the case, was done for libel, had to free from England. I hope, by the way, Andy, and your fun facts about Zola... Stop. Stop. You're going to spoil it because I know where you're going. I know where you're going with fun fact number four. I'm going to hold it in reserve. But yeah, he seems to have seen notoriety as not a negative quality, but something that will illuminate and bring clarity to an issue that he wants to write about. was in a way like a character in a French existentialist novel. He's like, you know, Meursault in Camus' The Outsider, you know, that famous last paragraph where he says, you know, my final wish is that I should climb to the gallows and be met with cries of execration.

He loved the idea of the public mob objecting to what he had to say. He wasn't one of those novelists always wheedling for approval. Okay, so fun fact number three is that Emil Zola was a pioneer of the selfie. That's true. John, would you care to add to that? He developed a little trigger at this stage. He had 10 cameras. He was a very keen amateur photographer. But obviously, mostly because long exposure time,

a lot of those photographs at that time, they were taken in profile. They weren't taken full on. But he actually managed to get a trigger. So there are some really mournful pictures. Nadar, the great French photographer, was one of his friends. There are some really mournful pictures of him and his children. I put a few up on Twitter earlier uh looking like they're having the worst possible talk about hell is other people yeah he had a very complicated at that time uh personal life

with his wife and his um sort of other wife mistress who was the was the mother of his children and they came over to London to stay with him. So he had a brief period where he was paterfamilias with them, but then Alexandrine came over, his actual wife. It's complicated, as they say. Fun fact number four, as Andrew was suggesting, at one point during the Dreyfus Affair, he'd been prosecuted and he had to go into exile, didn't he?

the Dreyfus Affair, he'd been prosecuted and he had to go into exile, didn't he? Emil Zola spent Christmas 1898 in hiding at the Queen's Hotel in Upper Norwood, Croydon. Yay! That was the fun fact I wanted. I thought it might be. Well, we're pro-Adam Thorpe and we're pro-Croydon on that listed. So I'm always looking to get a Croydon angle in. Can I just add that he spent most of his time in upper norwood complaining about the lack of window shutters yeah yeah the terrible food terrible things that english people did to vegetables he liked kippers he got he had a developed a taste for kippers really yeah yeah and michael

rosen's written a book hasn't he he has He has, very good book. Called The Disappearance of Emil Zola, about this period. It was very well done, Rosen's book, because it gives you a sense of how somebody suffering very steeply from ennui could go even further if they just turned up in England at that particular period. Ended up in Croydon, the capital, let's be honest, the capital city of ennui. How dare you, Mitchinson. How dare you. I'd like to add at this point that I was actually brought up in West Norwood, so I do have a Croydon. Oh!

Yep, yep. Right, okay. So I withdraw. That's three Croydon mentions, listeners. I hope anyone who had that on their scorecard, well, they've done very well. It's at this point that Andy brings out an essay on Zola by Anita Bruckner and the circle is complete and we can all retire. All right. And let's have the last fun fact. It's not really fun.

It's to do with his death. So Emile Zola died on September the 29th, as we said, in 1902 in Paris. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning from an improperly ventilated chimney. This continues to be debated about whether he died accidentally or whether he was murdered by his enemies. After he died, it was widely believed that he had been murdered. And then it swung back the other way when it was pointed out that it's actually quite a labour-intensive way to ensure that you can kill someone with carbon monoxide poisoning.

That's a quite tricky way to do it. There was a deathbed confession by the guy who'd fitted the chimney. There was, but this is the fun fact. It was the chimney sweep. A report in 1953 that the chimney sweep, Henri Bouronfos, had confessed on his deathbed to blocking the chimney, but obviously that's impossible to verify. But Zola, I think the thing that really surprised me,

to bring this back round to the work, is he was 62 when he died, which whilst accepting that in that era is a reasonable age, he had still managed to fit in. It's nearly 30 novels. I mean, it's an incredible output. He has that trollopian industry without being clearly anything like Trollope, that he clearly could sit down and produce, write the definitive scene that he wanted to write and then be on to the next thing. It's astonishing actually when you compare it to the way people talk about the writing vocation

today, where your average novelist who produces a novel every four years and might occasionally write a restaurant review for The Guardian is described as having back-breaking industry and people are always stroking their arm and saying are you okay you must be exhausted before we wind up i'd like to ask both of you a really straightforward but difficult question so rachel i'm going to pick on you first oh excellent okay what is therese racan about that's a very interesting question and um i'm glad you asked one of the things because i've been working quite a lot on as i said on adaptations and also film and talking to somebody recently who's a film producer, she said, in any film, you have to ask yourself, what is the question that this film is asking?

And I think that's always interesting to ask of a book. And so as I was going through the book, I was thinking, what is the question that this book, you know, what is it positing as an idea? And I came across that paragraph where Madame Raquin realises what Thérèse and Laurent have done. And it sort of describes her kind of sweet sense of the goodness of people being destroyed. And she realises, and this is obviously her thinking, all is lies and all is crime.

And I thought that's a very interesting question that this book might be asking in that, is it all lies and is it crime? Because it seemed to me that everybody in the book is lying and everybody has committed a crime of a kind. You know, whether or not it is this kind of enormous crime that is difficult to get away with, but they've all done something to somebody else, you know, to serve their own purposes, and they've got away with it. So that's where I came to with what it's about. Brilliant. It's asking me that question.

Is it true? Is that the truth? And I feel at the end, the truth is not that. The truth is not that it is all lies and all crime. And it's because of that last paragraph that I believe that. Andrew, same hard, easy question to you I'm reminded of the time somebody asked Tom Stoppard what Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern was about and he said after a short pause it's about to make me very rich Zola has lasted it's lasted I, because it is, as Rachel indicates, it's about human truth. You know, of course, all novels think they are.

But this was an experimental, naturalistic effort to get at the truth of a particular moral and human problem, the problem of desire and its costs of conscience and it's a drama if you like Ernest Hemingway loved Sola and when somebody asked him why he said because it's just one true sentence after another yeah and that's what I love about it is that you just go through this book and all those rules as as we mentioned, about creative writing, about don't use adjectives, avoid adverbs, you know, don't explain things.

He does all of it. He makes all the mistakes, quote, unquote. But, you know, there is no mistake because what you end up with is one true sentence after another. And a kind of incredible philosophical confection that by the end his experiment in the novel works because you leave it with what? With an unforgettable series of images in your mind

that will travel with you all your life. It's right next to Crime and Punishment with Wee in 19th century novels. It's just, it's a great, great book. Right, well, I mean, that's where we've got to leave off this particular literary investigation. A huge thank you to Andrew and Rachel for guiding us through the gloomy alleyways of this haunting novel, to Nicky Birch for weaving our disembodied voices into a harmonious whole, and to Unbound for the steadying glasses of absinthe.

Unbound for the steadying glasses of absinthe. Steadying glasses of absinthe. You can download all 119 previous episodes, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram or via our Patreon. Yeah, you can show your love directly. Patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

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