Sublime Windbag

By ROBERT HUGHES

When he died in 1885 at age 83, Victor Hugo was beyond question the most famous man of letters in France, and perhaps the world--his only rival being Charles Dickens. The English put up plaques to show where their literary celebrities lived or were born, and sometimes grant them burial in Westminster Abbey. Hugo, however, is the only writer to have a stone mark his place of conception. His parents' epochal embrace took place in a forest 3,000 ft. up on the flank of Mount Donon, overlooking the Rhineland, in May 1801, though it's typical of Hugo's own mythomania that in adult life he claimed it happened 3,000 ft. higher still, and on Mont Blanc.

In his life he was compared (often by himself) to an eagle, a titan, an ogre, a monster; to Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Cervantes. He wrote enormous, turbulent, dark novels, two of which (Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) in our own day have been turned, respectively, into a kitsch-book musical and a saccharine Disney film. Few read the originals, at least in English, though they are of course more disturbing and entertaining than their modern clones. He wrote 21 plays, which transformed the French theater, hoicking it out of the noble stasis of Corneille and Racine. One of them, Hernani, was the emblematic starting point of the Romantic movement in France and is sometimes credited with helping provoke the 1830 revolution.

With his voluminous poetry reckoned in, Hugo's effect on French literature exceeded anything short of the Bible itself. Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier all stood in his shadow, along with foreigners like Dostoyevsky and Conrad. In the words of English scholar Graham Robb, whose brilliant new biography, Victor Hugo (Norton; 682 pages; $39.95), does for this sublime windbag what George Painter did for Proust 30 years ago, Hugo was "a one-man education system through which every writer had to pass...The story of Hugo's influence after death is the story of a river after it reaches the sea. It was so pervasive that he was sometimes thought not to have had an influence at all."

At the peak of his fame several streets in Paris were named after him. He lived besieged by infatuated women. "Imagination," he said in one of his more phallocratic moments, "is intelligence with an erection." Aged nearly 70, in the hectic relief that followed the lifting of the siege of Paris, he averaged one sexual encounter a day--40 different women in five months, competing for the touch of what Hugo called his "lyre." Larger than life, he was almost larger than death: half a million people, the biggest funeral attendance since the death of Napoleon, followed his cortege to the freshly deconsecrated Pantheon, a building he detested and compared to a sponge cake. There he still lies. "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo," bitched Jean Cocteau some decades later. So might a chihuahua fix its tiny fangs in the ankle of a bull elephant.

Hugo also drew, incessantly. This is the least-known aspect of his work, even in France; in the U.S. it will come as a complete surprise, even to art lovers. It is not known how many drawings Hugo made. About 3,000 survive, shared among various French state collections and a few private ones. From this mass, a distillation of some 100 images has been made for the Drawing Center in downtown New York City by curators Ann Philbin and Florian Rodari. It went on view last week, and it is an amazing show, a splendid (if unscheduled) complement to Robb's biography.

Leonardo da Vinci once advised painters to draw inspiration from random blots and stains on walls, in which the drifting imagination could see landscapes and battle pieces. Most of Hugo's drawn work was dedicated to this idea. From puddled stains and splotches he would summon up the primary images of his imagination--storms, cliffs, caves, brooding castle towers, desolate landscapes, monsters, shipwrecks, Gothic fantasies of every kind. They were provoked, as he put it, by "hours of almost unconscious daydreaming." Together, Hugo's drawings make up one of the most striking testimonies to the image-forming power of the unconscious in all Western art. They don't describe a predetermined image; they allow visions to surface through spontaneous play.

"Any means would do for him," wrote one of his friends, "the dregs of a cup of coffee tossed on old laid paper, the dregs of an inkwell tossed on notepaper, spread with his fingers, sponged up, dried, then taken up with a thick brush or a fine one... Sometimes the ink would bleed through the notepaper, and so on the reverse another vague drawing was born." He would also, when the impulse struck him, use stencils, fingerprints, soot, imprints from ink-soaked lace, stones and fingernails. He would fold the sheets of paper to make Rorschach blots in the wet ink. He worked like an omnipotent child, in a sort of haptic delirium of free association.

The drawings are scratchy, messy, dark and sometimes as fecal as the under-Paris of sewers that he had created in Les Miserables. They are full of the fustian of Romanticism, but one must remember that it was a fustian that he himself had largely created through his own writings, years before. And in many respects, it, and what he said about it, seems almost incredibly forward-looking. Sometimes this is due to the apocalyptic subject matter, seen nearly 150 years later through late 20th century eyes. Hugo's Mushroom, circa 1850, a gigantic fungus looming irrationally up against a dim and devastated-looking landscape, can't help reminding you of atomic disaster, though not even Hugo could have imagined that.

The really new element in Hugo's work was the condition of its making. "Great artists," Hugo wrote, "have an element of chance in their talent, and there is also talent in their chance." Chapter and verse for many a 20th century painter, from the Surrealists to Jackson Pollock. Some of Hugo's taches ("blots" or "stains"), like the undated Abstract Composition, are hauntingly beautiful. It is his surrender to process, to the way in which the nature of the medium is allowed to form the image with the minimum of conscious control, that makes him seem prophetically modern.

When Hugo sets off on a string of imagery, the associations never seem to stop: they grow and replicate, spawning variations--a fractal imagination with no final term. The components keep interfusing. Thus, although Hugo never seems to have drawn a nude, he could invest even typography with sex, as in the strange drawing known as Marine Terrace with Initials, 1855. Marine Terrace was the house on the Channel Island of Jersey where Hugo lived with his family during some of his period of political exile (1851-70). He disliked the place--"brick-laid Methodism," he called its white square architecture, so unlike the dirty, suggestive, intricate Gothic he was crazy about. Here it shines with cold pallor under a gray sky, but over it flies a clawed, gnarled, vinelike object that on close inspection turns out to be a monogram, the interlaced initials of Victor Hugo and his mistress Juliette Drouet, the stems and serifs furiously grappling in the sky above the house of virtue. In Hugo's world, nothing--least of all himself and his desires--was safe from apotheosis.