The Devil's Disciple

DOWN THERE (La-Bas) (317 pp.) --Joris-Karl Huysmans, translated by Keene Wallis -- University Books ($5).

"With his hooked paw. the Devil drew me toward God," wrote a crazy mixed-up Frenchman named Joris-Karl Huysmans. He was never so crazy as when he earnestly took up diabolism. The record of his descent to the depths among the witches and warlocks of Paris was written in the first year of the '90s, and nothing more appalling appeared in the rest of that de cadent decade. L`a-Bas, now republished in the U.S., might well call to the mind of old-fashioned readers Browning's:

. . . my scrofulous French novel

On gray paper with blunt type!

Simply glance at it, you grovel

Hand and foot in Belial's gripe.

The hero of L`a-Bas is a novelist named Durtal, who is doing research into the monstrous life of Gilles de Rais, often mistaken for the original Bluebeard.*A dedicated researcher, Durtal himself dabbles in the same black arts that Gilles de Rais practiced-- for De Rais, found guilty of murder and executed in 1440, seems to have attracted disciples in 19th century Paris. The core of their infamy is the bizarre and blasphemous rite known as the Black Mass, in which every imaginable obscenity is committed and the Eucharist itself is invoked to bring the celebrants closer not to God but to Satan.

This odd narrative begins with a conversation between the Novelist-Hero Durtal and a learned physician. Des Hermies. The friends go to the tower cell of a saintly but simple character -- the bellringer of Saint-Sulpice Church -- where they dine and talk about theology. It all sounds very dull, and Durtal is not far off the mark when he confides that his book about Gilles de Rais will be "as tedious to read as to write." But Durtal's affair with the seductive Hyacinthe -- widow of a manufacturer of chasubles and wife of an au thor of religious biographies -- might be enough to put L`a-Bas off the public shelves of most libraries. It is she who leads Durtal into the obscene rituals of Satanism, presided over by an unfrocked priest. (Both the weird wife and the de frocked priest were drawn from life by Author Huysmans.)

Bluebeard & Bluenose. Ever since it first appeared serially in Echo de Paris, the book has enjoyed a kind of scandalous celebrity among men of letters. Zola attacked Huysmans; Maupassant, Verlaine and others defended him. In 1924, the present publishers report, L`a-Bas was is sued in the U.S. but ran afoul of John S. Sumner, industrious secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Publisher Albert Boni agreed to withdraw the book and destroy the plates. Now, a generation later, readers may well be of two minds as to who had the right of the matter -- the celebrated bluenose or the historian of "Bluebeard.'' At any rate, those who look to the book for bits of cheerful pornography will be disappointed. Satanism is dismal stuff, and blasphemy meaningless to those who do not believe in the things blasphemed against. In many ways, Author Huysmans own story is more interesting than his book.

Huysmans was a minor public official "wracked by physical and spiritual ills, from neurosis to dyspepsia and pessimism to rheumatism," according to one biographer. According to another, he "oozed with misanthropy." Said Poet Paul Valery: "He was a great creator of disgusts, welcoming the worst and thirsting for the 'excessive, credulous to an incredible degree . . . His strange nostrils quivered as they sniffed everything in the world that had a bad smell ..." Huysmans first made a literary name for himself with A Rebours (1884), a novel then widely hailed as a masterpiece. Its hero, Jean Floressas des Esseintes, was a kind of French Dorian Gray (in fact he served as Oscar Wilde's model), a character who dabbled in sadism, had a sensualist's preoccupation with taste (comparing liqueurs to musical instruments, he likened kummel to the oboe, creme de menthe to the flute). Des Esseintes always preferred the artificial to the real, kept an aquarium of mechanical fish, and declared that, as a work of "plastic beauty," no woman could compare to a locomotive.*

Lines & Spirits. Strangely, the writing of L`a-Bas and the personal experience that went into it led Huysmans to religion. In great anguish, he evidently came to understand that it is madness to believe in the Devil without believing in God. As a character observes in L`a-Bas, "the wiliest thing the Devil can do is to get people to deny his existence." Huysmans must have agreed. He re-entered the church and later wrote the story of his conversion in a devout book titled En-Route. He became a notably fervent Catholic--but one tortured to the end of his life by fears of diabolic possession. These fears were always worst at night, when he drew chalk lines around his bed and offered special prayers to defeat evil spirits.

Even so, Huysmans was visited by mysterious buffeting about the head. Towards the end of his life (he died in 1907), his eyes were painfully afflicted. As an occasional art critic, he had delighted in the visible world, and he believed that his blighted sight was a sign that special penitence was demanded. He had his eyelids sewn shut and never saw the world again. He had probably seen too much of it.

*The model for Charles Perrault's tale was probably a 6th century Breton king named Comor. According to legend, he cut his wives' throats when they became pregnant.

*Recalling the notable pyschiatric case history of a patient who had an irresestible passion for streetcars.

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