Painted into a corner ... Camille Pissarro's
portrait of Cézanne. © Private Collection
In contemporary fiction it's become almost routine to exploit not just autobiography but the lives of friends, family and lovers. But long before this strategy was used by Philip Roth in novels such as Operation Shylock, it was taken to an extreme by the French nineteenth century writer Emile Zola in a case that's fascinating because the friend whose life he stole is now more famous than Zola himself.
Zola grew up in Aix-en-Provence. His best friend at school was Paul Cézanne. Both had creative ambitions, Emile as a writer, Paul as a painter. Zola quickly became famous. His boyhood friend sank into the half-life of a failed artist - you can see his pitiable portrait by Pissarro in the National Gallery's new exhibition Rebels and Martyrs. Still, they remained friends, until in 1886 Zola published a scathing novel about the Paris art world.
L'Oeuvre (usually translated as The Masterpiece) tells the story of Claude Lantier, a painter who rejects academic convention. As you read, it becomes more and more obvious that Cézanne is its model - Lantier has Cézanne's rage, his obsession with an ideal just beyond attainment, his isolation.
Paul - sorry, Claude - Lantier ends up killing himself. To add insult to injury there is a successful novelist character obviously representing Zola who's unfailingly generous to his friend. Gruesomely, Zola actually imagines himself attending Lantier/Cézanne's funeral.
Zola sent Cézanne a copy; they never spoke again. You have to ask - why did the novelist do it? Did he hate Cézanne? More likely he was trying to shock his school friend out of what he saw as a headlong decline.
Anyway this isn't personal; it's art. Zola has good aesthetic reasons for betraying his friend. The heroic pioneer of the realist novel wants to set life raw and distressing on the page, and exploits the sorrows of Cézanne for the same reason that his novels talk about sex in a matter-of-fact way that caused outrage in the 19th century press: to smash the picture frame that seals fiction off from reality.
Cézanne did not kill himself, of course. He inherited his father's wealth and, free from the need to make a living, achieved his ideal of a new art. Does this invalidate Zola's novel? Of course not. Real life adds frisson to fiction but a novelist has no responsibility to tell the truth. To borrow an idea from Philip Roth, in Zola's novel you encounter not the life of Cézanne, but a counterlife.
