Huysmans soon became acquainted with the most innovative writers and artists of the period. Among his friends and correspondents were Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Mallarmé – a representative cross-section of the many literary tendencies of the time.

Huysmans’ first novel, Marthe, histoire d’une fille (Marthe: Story of a Prostitute), was published in 1876. According to his biographer (and the translator of this edition of Against Nature), Robert Baldick, it was the first novel to deal with prostitution in licensed brothels, memorably described as ‘slaughterhouses of love’. His next book, Les Soeurs Vatard (The Vatard Sisters), which appeared in 1879, contains a character, the artist Cyprien Tibaille, who is eccentric and inward, an idealist caught in a disappointing world. Flaubert, to whom Huysmans sent his novel, admired it but criticized it on two counts. First, he claimed that, like his own L’Education sentimentale, there was no ‘false perspective’ in the novel and thus no ‘progression of effect’: ‘art is not reality’, Flaubert told him, ‘like it or not, we must choose carefully among the elements [reality] provides’ (undated letter of February–March, 1879). Flaubert’s second criticism concerned Huysmans’ passion for rare, difficult or specialized vocabulary: whether refined or coarse, arcane or streetwise, Huysmans’ love of words attracted notice from his earliest work. After Les Soeurs Vatard, there followed En Ménage (Living Together, 1881), about a failing and claustrophobic marriage, which Zola describedas‘a page of human life, banalyet poignant’. Interestingly, several of Huysmans’ early ‘Naturalist’ novels were important to André Breton, the self-styled leader of the Surrealists, who was fascinated by Huysmans’ apparently subversivelife: a penpusher and bureaucrat writing his disturbing novels at his ministry desk, often on ministry headed paper. This is how Breton, in his Anthologie de l’humour noir (Anthology of Black Humour, 1939), imagined Huysmans at work:

With a derision whose secret pleasure he has discovered, the life of this great imaginative writer ebbed away between ministerial filing boxes (reports from his superiors depict him as a model employee). It fits perfectly with this writer’s style, at once crushing and elevating, that in breaks from work, with a few technical manuals within reach and a cookery book always open before him, Huysmans should – with unique foresight – have pieced together most of the laws which would govern modern feeling.9

Huysmans was attached to the bureaucratic life. It gave him time to write as well as subjects to write about; but above all it kept the world at bay. When in 1893 he retired from his ministry he kept the headed notepaper, doctoring it so that it read ‘Ministry of the Interior [Life]’.

Some critics have suggested that there was little in Huysmans’ previous work to prepare for Against Nature, but this is misleading. Readers of his early novels had already noticed his fixation with the demeaning mundanities of life, with daily existence as a pleasureless assault course of disappointment and minor degradation. Huysmans was interested in the stuff of lives that would never amount to tragedy, but this did not mean that his prose needed to be flat and factual. Besides the descriptive detail, documentary precision and social observation associated with Naturalism, Huysmans’ style – as Goncourt, Flaubert and Zola noticed – was colourful and nervy, full of rare words and startling adjectives. Edmond de Goncourt had found even in Marthe that Huysmans was too easily tempted by ‘the fine expression, the brilliant, startling or oddly archaic word’, and that this threatened to ‘kill the reality of [his] well-conceived realistic scenes’ (letter of October 1879). Reviewing Sac au dos, the novelist Jean Richepin had called Huysmans’ writing ‘the debauchery of style: rare substantives, strange epithets, unexpected fusions of words, archaisms and neologisms’ (Gil Blas, 21 April 1880). It is curious to see how responses to Huysmans’ ‘Naturalist’ work resemble responses to Against Nature, in which, as Léon Bloy puts it, Huysmans is ‘continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax’.10 Huysmans’ contemporaries had noticed also his attentiveness to the intimate emotional and intellectual processes of characters who were often sensitive creatures, men (very occasionally women) designed for pain and disappointment, battered by the casual brutality of modern life. These characters were often isolated; lost and bruised and ill-fitted to their lives, they were not ‘types’ but exceptions. Where Zola excelled at painting the crowd, Huysmans excelled at portraying the individual; where Zola plotted the progress of a family, Huysmans fixed his eye on the bachelor, the unpartnered or the isolated. The Naturalists are often simplistically read, with critics crying foul whenever they spot a metaphor or an imaginative reflex in a ‘Naturalist’ book. We do not need to worry about classifying Huysmans, but to remember that there was plenty of room in Naturalist theory and practice to exercise the imagination and to perfect the art of illusion. A valuable insight into Huysmans’ style and his contexts (those in which he was read as well as those in which he wrote) comes from James Joyce. ‘The very intensity and refinement of French realism betrays its spiritual origins’, wrote Joyce, before noting, in a beautiful and precise formulation, ‘the angry fervour of corruption… that illuminates Huysmans’s sad pages with a blighted phosphorescence’.11

The nearest analogy to Huysmans’ manner, this sense of ‘blighted phosphorescence’, was what was known as ‘écriture artiste’, the rarefied, hypersensitive style of the Goncourt brothers, the aristocrats of Naturalist writing. In one of Against Nature’s most memorable images, Des Esseintes describes the Goncourts’ style as ‘gamey’, and calls Edmond de Goncourt’s writing ‘penetrating and sickly, tense and subtle’. For Des Esseintes, language, like meat, is at its tastiest as it is turning – as, on the cusp of rotting, the flavours are released. It is one of Against Nature’s recurrent analogies: between food and language, and if the reader finds Huysmans’ style ‘hard to swallow’ or ‘hard to keep down’ this is as it should be. After all, this was an author who regularly wrote to his friends asking for information on technical language, bureaucratic lingo, street slang, and who relished the strange words he dredged up from glossaries and manuals.

It was the short novel A Vau-l’Eau that opened the way for Against Nature. Its hero Folantin searches without success for good food, decent furnishings, good male and female company.