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By Root 1451 0

and in the meantime he was constantly attacked by anti-Semites and the right (the overlap between those two designations was nearly one hundred percent). The attacks occurred in the press, although they undoubtedly would have been physical had Zola been sufficiently imprudent to show himself in public, and they consisted of every possible form of insult, one journalist taking it upon himself to besmirch the life and career of Zola’s father and employing forged documents to make his case. When it appeared that Zola’s appeal would fail, his friends counseled voluntary exile, and he went off, under a pseudonym and leaving his family behind, to voluntary exile in England. It was nearly a year later that the Cour de Cassation, the highest appeals court in France, finally reversed Dreyfus’s conviction. Zola then returned, although his own sentence was never formally voided.

He had continued to write, by then engaged in a new series, Les Quatre Evangiles (The Four Gospels), consisting of Fécondité (1899; Fecundity) , Travail (1901; Work), and Vérité (1903; Truth), the last bearing largely on the Dreyfus case; his death interrupted the final volume, Justice. In his last years he also became an accomplished photographer whose scenes of city and country life are valuable documents of their time and apt extensions of his documentary novels. He was only sixty-two in September 1902—although physically and psychologically much aged by his sufferings—when he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A clogged chimney diverted fumes from the pellet stove into the bedroom as he and his wife slept; she recovered. Murder was alleged and investigated, but the matter was never resolved. At his funeral a delegation of coal miners accompanied the casket, gravely intoning “Ger-mi-nal” in cadence, over and over again.

Zola’s star has risen and fallen since his death. In the first half of the twentieth century he was one of the most widely read authors in the world, his name virtually synonymous with the struggle for social progress. He was translated into all languages and was a staple, especially, in the Soviet Union. His role in the Dreyfus affair doubly assured his stature—because of it he was even the subject of a Hollywood film, The Life of Émile Zola (1937), with Paul Muni in the part. But the 1930s were probably the peak of his posthumous career. After World War II, especially, his work acquired a reputation as turgid, well-meaning gruel. The New Left more or less consigned him to the dustbin of history, and litterateurs everywhere decided he was clumsy, laborious, didactic. It is true that even in his lifetime and among his supporters he was never considered a particularly subtle author, and his most fervent disciples would have found it hard to make a case for him as a prose stylist—a fatal deficiency in France, where style reigns supreme, where his older colleague Flaubert, the model of the stylist, sometimes hesitated for weeks over a choice of words.

Nana, however, shows how wrongheaded all such approaches were in regard to Zola, and effects a demonstration of his unparalleled strengths. Zola may not have parsed ambiguities or dealt in fugitive emotions—he did not work close up, with a single-hair brush, but on a large scale, with a palette knife (perhaps, actually, like his old friend Cézanne, he could be said to have worked with a brush in one hand and a knife in the other). The analogy to painting is not idly chosen, and it is not simply because of his close connection to the Impressionists, although in many ways he resembles less the starkly graphic Manet or the dreamily approximative Monet or even the dramatically essentialist Cézanne than he does Gustave Caillebotte, the Impressionist most devoted to depicting the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, which he framed as radically as with a camera lens. For that matter, while it has become a terrible cliché to say of a writer of the past that had he lived in our time, he would surely have become a filmmaker, with Zola it might actually be true.

Zola is at his best when staging crowd scenes