Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on ‘The Paradise of the Rich’)

“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” — French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), The Man Who Laughs (1869)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on the Upper and Lower Classes)

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”—French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Les Miserables (1862)

The image accompanying this post shows Fredric March as Jean Valjean, sentenced to prison for stealing bread to feed his starving children, in the 1935 film adaptation of Hugo’s novel.

This Day in Film History (Chaney’s Template-Setting ‘Hunchback’ Premieres in NYC)

Sept. 2, 1923— “The Super Jewel” of normally parsimonious Hollywood studio Universal Pictures, The Hunchback of Notre Dame premiered at New York’s Astor Theatre, followed four days later by a general release in which audiences marveled at the hideous, deformed figure at the center of it.

A couple of silent versions of Hugo’s classic 1831 novel had been released in the prior two decades in France and the U.S., but they did not have the impact that the adaptation starring Lon Chaney Sr. would have.

Chaney set the template for all who would play Quasimodo on the big and small screen through the end of the 20^th century, including Charles Laughton and Anthony Quinn (sound versions released in 1939 and 1956, respectively), Warren Clarke and Anthony Hopkins (1976 and 1982 TV adaptations), and the voice of Tom Hulce (Disney’s 1996 animated musical).

From his small leather makeup kit (now at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum), the actor had already produced countless faces and bodily varieties, eventually earning him the nickname “Man of a Thousand Faces.”

In creating the pathetic title character of the Hugo novel, though, Chaney’s preparation was particularly arduous, with three-and-a-half hours each day applying makeup (including a right eye simulating a growth specified in the novel) and prosthetics (such as a twenty-pound plaster for the hump). His dentist assisted in creating his false teeth.

A knotted wig, nose putty for warts and on the cheeks, use of cotton and flexible collodion, and adhesive tape completed the stunning transformation.

All that makeup had to be endured through a seven-month shoot, the longest of Chaney’s career. Understandably, he later called it “the hardest part I ever played, that’s all.”

But, when all was said and done, the actor had managed, beneath the monstrous exterior, to convey the inner torment of his character. He had started by interviewing people with various physical disabilities, then ensured that his makeup and prosthetics left enough muscle mobility to distort his face into different expressions. The result was an exquisite portrait of unrequited love, ineradicable melancholy and loneliness.

Moreover, through Chaney’s empathetic depiction of Quasimodo, the film formed a bridge between the costume dramas that was already a major part of the Hollywood dream factory and the horror genre that Universal would perfect in the 1930s.

Audiences would be prepared for Boris Karloff’s inarticulate, misunderstood, maligned monster in Frankenstein because Chaney had outlined a similar character in Hunchback.

Few other actors were as acculturated to dealing with such outsiders as Chaney. From communicating with his deaf and mute parents, he had learned how to express thoughts and emotions through body language. These skills likewise enabled him to thrive in silent cinema. 

Though a notoriously private person, Chaney gave the moviegoing public a hint at what informed his performances in an autobiographical article he wrote in 1925 for Movie Magazine:

“I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice. The dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals. Most of my roles since ‘The Hunchback,’ such as ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ ‘He Who Gets Slapped,’ ‘The Unholy Three,’ etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are the stories which I wish to do.”

Irving Thalberg, Hollywood’s “Boy Wonder” at age 23, gulped when Chaney, still seething over Universal’s mistreatment of him from a decade before, insisted on $2,500 over and above his original salary—but he convinced the other executives at the studio that the actor was worth it.

Thalberg proved correct. Even costing $1.25 million—the second most expensive silent that Universal ever released—Hunchback more than earned back its money.

Like many releases of the silent era, the film exists now only in adulterated form—in this case, in 16mm, with an estimated 10 to 15 minutes of footage still missing. Even so, when I saw it first almost 50 years ago on my local PBS station along with another Chaney silent, He Who Gets Slapped, I was awed by what I saw. What I have learned about him since then has only increased my respect for him.

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on Life and Love)

“Life is a flower, and love is its honey.”—French playwright, poet, and novelist Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Le roi s'amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”) (1832)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on Misery and Humanity in Different Classes)

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”—French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Les Miserables (1862)

(The image accompanying this post shows Fredric March as Jean Valjean in the 1935 film adaptation of Les Miserables, co-starring Charles Laughton as nemesis Inspector Javert.)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on the Learned Man)

“The learned man knows that he is ignorant.” — French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography (Postscriptum de Ma Vie), translated by Lorenzo O’Rourke (1907)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on Those Men Hate)

“Men hate those to whom they have to lie.” —French novelist Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Toilers of the Sea (1866)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on Laughter)

"Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face." —French novelist Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on Thanksgiving)

"To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do." –Attributed to French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

(Thanks to my friend Holly for the quote and inspiration.)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on How to ‘Frame Life’)

“You'll see that, since our fate is ruled by chance,

Each man, unknowing, great,

Should frame life so, that at some future hour

Fact and his dreamings meet.”—Victor Hugo, “To His Orphan Grandchildren” (July 1871), in The Poems of Victor Hugo

This Day in Literary History (Balzac Buried, Hailed by Hugo)

August 20, 1850—Worn out from two decades of perhaps the most prolific output of any major novelist, the body of Honore de Balzac was laid to rest at the Cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise, as a large Parisian crowd—including pallbearers Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas—followed in a rain-drenched procession from the funeral mass at the Church of Sainte Philippe du Roule.

At the gravesite, Hugo delivered the eulogy for Balzac, paying tribute particularly to the deceased’s astonishing achievement in the more than 90 novels, novellas and short stories that Balzac collectively titled his La Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy):

“All his books form but one book…a book which realizes observation and imagination, which lavishes the true, the esoteric, the commonplace, the trivial, the material, and which at times through all realities, swiftly and grandly rent away, allows us all at once a glimpse of a most sombre and tragic ideal. Unknown to himself, whether he wished it or not, whether he consented or not, the author of this immense and strange work is one of the strong race of Revolutionist writers. Balzac goes straight to the goal.”

With Dickens in London and Dostoyevsky in Moscow, Balzac pioneered the great realistic urban novel of the 19th century. His grand opus was filled with nearly 2,500 named characters from all walks of life, a number of whom reappear throughout. 

In their attempt to depict a particular place or society with exactitude, Tom Wolfe, John O’Hara and even the modernist William Faulkner can be thought of as his literary heirs.

Balzac needed every bit of his enormous energy to sustain not only this incredible achievement, but his gargantuan appetites for nearly everything. No sooner was he done pouring his heart out in a letter to a mistress than he’d take his maid—far closer to hand—to bed. 

If he could describe so well the instinct to acquire money and possessions, it was because he himself was gripped so tightly by it.

The most common image I summon of Balzac is of him working through the night—part of a punishing 15-hour-daily writing schedule—his eyes squinting because of his dim candlelight, downing one cup of thick, black coffee after another to stay awake.

Balzac’s description of the beneficial aspects of coffee deserves to be quoted at length:

“Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

In such a state, Balzac could reach a kind of creative chaos, his pen scratching out entire pages of inserts that printers would puzzle over. You would think he’d have had mercy on his poor printers, since he had briefly been one himself. 

Nothing doing: that first 60,000-franc investment in the business left him with nothing except more debts than he’d ever be able to repay, along with a typically defiant statement of his condition: “A debt is a work of the imagination which no tax collector can understand.”

When he descended from his creative, caffeine-induced peak, Balzac could assess the physiological impact of his hastily consumed black brew:

“You will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counselled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate.”

“Immediate death” wasn’t his fate, but what followed was bad enough, a list of medical ills almost as long as his bibliography:

* a slight “brain congestion” and dizzy spills, eventually diagnosed as arachnoiditis;

* stomach cramps;

* high blood pressure;

* hypertrophy (abnormal enlargement) of the left ventricle of the heart;

* facial twitches;
* hepatitis;

* headaches;

* poor eyesight;

* bronchitis.

Amazingly, amid all this physical trauma, Balzac produced some of his best work, including two late novels about poor relations, Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons. 

In a 1946 essay on these two novels, collected in the anthology The Pritchett Century, British man-of-letters V.S. Pritchett perceptively assessed how the French novelist caught but transcended his time:

“Balzac arrived when the new money, the new finance of the post-Napoleonic world, was starting on its violent course; when money was an obsession and was putting down a foundation for middle-class morals. In these two novels about the poor relation, he made his most palatable, his least acrid and most human statements about this grotesque period of middle-class history.”

The authors I mentioned earlier as being heavily influenced by Balzac probably come as no surprise, but one who might is Henry James, whose growing obsession with every single word in his work is more reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert than the older French novelist. 

Why, then, in a celebrated 1905 piece, did James call Balzac “the only member of his tribe really monumental…the father of us all”?

Part of it is due to the fact that the two men were exploring the same territory, what James called “the money passion.” Both men came to adulthood in eras when a new economy overthrew all old moral restraints. 

It makes me wonder, in the era of “the Celtic Tiger” (and now, of course, that tiger’s toothlessness), who is—or is ready to become—the Irish Balzac?