The Drinking Den Read Online Free PDF

subtlety, saying that he is more effective when dealing with the outer life of crowds than the inner life of individuals, and accusing him, at times, of sacrificing art to a mechanical ‘system’. Yet, in the end, ‘the more he could be promiscuous and collective… the more he could strike us as penetrating and true’. Among all the novels, he singles out
The Drinking Den
for the highest praise and the portrait of Gervaise in particular, describing the intensity of her creator’s visionof her fate as ‘one of the great things the modern novel has been able to do’. 8
    Zola’s reputation was always high in Russia and, as one might expect, after 1917 he was to be highly regarded in the Soviet Union and later in the East European socialist countries, though primarily for the reasons set out in the
Great Soviet Encyclopaedia
(3rd edn., 1975) – that ‘he debunked bourgeois-republican demagoguery and the hypocritical lie about class harmony…’ A. V. Lunacharsky, Lenin’s Commissar of Education, and Maxim Gorky, whose work was taken as the model of Socialist Realism, both admired the Rougon-Macquart, giving a definitive seal of approval to Zola’s work in the Soviet Union.
    In England, despite James, Zola’s reputation was to remain for a long time on far shakier ground. Up to the Second World War, the French Literature syllabus at Oxford did not extend beyond 1870, excluding virtually all Zola’s work, including
The Drinking Den
. Then, in the period immediately after the war, the scholar Martin Turnell published an influential study of the French novel which, in much the same way as F. R. Leavis had done for the English novel in
The Great Tradition
(1948), set out to characterize the specific features of France’s contribution to European fiction. He found this French ‘great tradition’ in a particular type of psychological novel, from Madame de La Fayette to Proust via Stendhal and Flaubert, ruthlessly excluding whatever did not fit his thesis. Both Balzac and Zola were almost entirely discarded, the second being outrageously dismissed in a single phrase – ‘the dreary realism of novelists like Zola’ 9 – which makes one wonder if Turnell had actually read the Rougon-Macquart cycle. He did relent somewhat in a later study, though grudgingly. 10 His earlier book, however, had become a standard text in English, widely used by both students and general readers.
    The publication of Angus Wilson’s little book on Zola’s life and work in 1952, and the more extensive studies of F. W. J. Hemmings, including his biography in 1953, 11 did something to redress the balance; so, too, did the appearance of modern translations of the major works in collections such as the present one. Leonard Tancock’s version of
L’Assommoir
was published by Penguin Classics in 1970. Tancock, who described this in his Introduction as ‘one of the funniest novels of thenineteenth century’, translates it in a way that stresses the element of social satire and the grotesque. In dealing with Zola’s slang, he opts for a mainly British and Cockney language that has already dated after some thirty years, and he tends actually to exaggerate the crudity of some expressions that Zola uses – so that Coupeau’s remark:
‘T’as l’air d’une nourrice
’ becomes, in Tancock’s English: ‘You look like a fucking nurse.’
    A version of the novel that was suitable for the early 1970s, when there was still excitement at the fact that the most commonly used sexual expletive in English could at last be set down in print, may be less appropriate at the end of the century, at a time when few people are scandalized (and fewer still surprised) to hear it spoken in films or on television, or to read it in newspapers. At any rate, nothing is achieved now by calling Zola’s plain
nourrice
‘a fucking