Against Nature

AGAINST NATURE

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS was born in Paris in 1848, the only son of a French mother and a Dutch father. After a childhood saddened by his father’s death and his mother’s speedy remarriage, he became a junior clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained for thirty-two years. He spent the first half of the Franco-Prussian War in hospital, suffering from dysentery, and the second half under fire in the besieged capital. When peace returned he went back to the Ministry, and three years later published his first book, Le Drageoir à épices (1874), a collection of prose-poems after Baudelaire. He then turned to novel-writing and published Marthe (1876), Les Sæurs Vatard (1879), En Ménage (1881) and A Vau-l’Eau (1882). A Rebours, published in 1884 and hailed by Arthur Symons as ‘the breviary of the Decadence’, marked his break with Zola’s Medan Group and the beginning of an attempt to widen the scope of the novel. His other novels were En Rade (1887), Là-Bas (1891), En Route (1895), La Catbédrale (1898) and L’Oblat (1903). He died in 1907.

ROBERT BALDICK, the late co-editor of the Penguin Classics, received his MA and D. Phil. from Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of Pembroke College. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he wrote biographies of J.-K. Huysmans, Frédérick Lamaître and Henry Murger, a study of the Goncourts, The Siege of Paris and The Duel. Authors whose work he translated from the French include the Goncourts, Montherlant, Radiguet, Restif de la Bretonne, Sartre, Simenon and Jules Verne. For the Penguin Classics he translated Flaubert’s Three Tales and Sentimental Education, Chateaubriand’s Memoirs and Huysmans’ Against Nature. He died in 1972.

PATRICK MCGUINNESS was born in 1968 in Tunisia. He is a fellow of St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, where he lectures in French. He is the author of Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (2000), and has edited T. E. Hulme’s Selected Writings (1998), Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de siècle (2000), Anthologie de la poésie Symboliste et décadente (Paris, 2001) and Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry (2002). His translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb was published in 2003. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors, and his poems and translations have appeared in a variety of books and reviews. He lives in Cardiff.

JORIS – KARL HUYSMANS

Against Nature

Translated by ROBERT BALDICK

With an Introduction and Notes by

PATRICK MCGUINNESS

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This edition first published, 2003

1

Translation copyright © Robert Baldick, 1956
Introduction, Notes and translation of Appendices copyright © Patrick McGuinness, 2003
Chronology copyright © Terry Hale, 2001

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors have been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90660–7

Contents

Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

Note on this Translation

Against Nature

Appendix I: Preface, Written Twenty Years After the Novel

Appendix II: Reviews of and Responses to Against Nature

Notes

Chronology

1815 Birth of Godfried Huysmans, father of the novelist, in the Dutch town of Breda. A lithographer and miniaturist by profession, he settles in Paris as a young man.

1845 June Godfried Huysmans proposes to a young French schoolmistress, Malvina Badin.

1848 5 Feb. Birth of Charles Marie Georges Huysmans at no. 11 (now no. 9) rue Suger in the 6th Arrondissement.

1848 Ordination of Joseph Antoine Boullan.

1856 24 June Death of Godfried Huysmans.

1857 Mother re-marries, to a M. Jules Og.

1858 May Mother and stepfather purchase a small bookbindery at no. 11 rue de Sèvres in the 7th Arrondissement.

1862 Huysmans enrols at the Lycée Saint-Louis.

1864 First sexual experiences with prostitutes.

1866 7 Mar. Huysmans passes baccalauréat.

1866 1 Apr. Following in the footsteps of other members of the family on his mother’s side, Huysmans enters the Ministry of the Interior as an employé de sixième classe (employee: sixth grade) on a salary of 1,500 francs p.a.

1866 Autumn Enrols in the Faculties of Law and Letters of the University of Paris.

1867 8 Sept.