One of the greatest pleasures of used books for me is the all but random read. New books tend to come with some ballyhoo, if only to the extent of a page in a catalogue or multiple copies being displayed on a table. I see 'em every day. I see used books every day, come to that, but there's a lot of the same, most days, and little of it exactly to my taste. (Which is a good thing, 'cause we are trying to sell used books rather than just acquire them.) The tempting ones are rarer than one might think, even doing what I do for a living (see name of blog.) Now and then though one simply pops up, like unexpected flower amidst the dismal, dead weeds of midwinter. For me, the books for which one looks, the authors collected, etc., are and will always be the point of making regular raids on the used shops. In any bookstore, including the one in which I work, browsing is inevitable, but familiarity can make for a kind of shelf-blindness. More than once I've failed to notice a new book until it's on the returns-cart. Really it's more often in my weekly trip to the used shop down the street that I make most of my discoveries, even though I know those shelves now nearly as well as my own, not to mention the ones where I actually get paid to shelve. Nonentheless, fortune sometimes smiles on the desultory.
Case in point. Henri Perruchot's book was sitting on a shelf behind my desk, just waiting to be priced. How long had it been there? No idea. Had I bought it for the store? I honestly don't remember, but it's certainly possible. Now, did I want "a definitive biography" of the artist Toulouse-Lautrec? No, I did not. But there it was, in a stack to be entered into inventory. For whatever reason, seeing it waiting to be priced and tagged, the appeal was immediate and irresistible. Seems I'd never read a full life of Henri de Toulous-Lautrec, though I've pored over his pictures since I was a kid. I am a fan. Lautrec's genius must have a special appeal to anyone with an appreciation of masterful line. Also, the story of his short life would wring tears from a stone. While I've never been a serious student of either his art or of art history in general, this is a painter of whom I never tire. So, why not? Not a huge book. Interesting photos throughout -- including unexpectedly Henri swimming nude. And there was that word on the cover, "definitive." Truth be told, what I know of his biography I suspect I owe more to José Ferrer in John Huston's 1952 movie than to any reading I'd done. Easily corrected then.
Henri Perruchot (1917 - 1967) was a French art critic and editor. In roughly a quarter of a century, he wrote a short shelf of biographies on artists from Cezanne to Van Gogh. His Toulouse-Lautrec (1958) was just one among the half dozen to have been translated into English, all, so far as I can tell by the delightfully named Humphrey Hare. (Couldn't find anything more online about the translator other than his few credits on Perruchot's biographies. Shame, as I'd rather hoped to discover some connection to the eccentric Victorian diarist and biographer, Augustus Hare -- an old favorite of mine.)
Many of the books I pick up in a random way I can't be bothered to mention here. This one's worth mentioning for two reasons, one good the other not. I'll try to be quick about both.
First, I can easily recommend Perruchot's biography to anyone wanting a brief life of the artist. It is an efficient, informative and informed little book. Perruchot knows the period well and tells his often sad story without sentimentality or pity.
The rough outline of the life of Henri de Toulous-Lautrec (1864 - 1901) should be to familiar to most. He had an idyllic childhood as the spoiled scion of an aristocratic French family; money, horses, dogs, drawing, a doting mother and a deeply eccentric father, Le Comte Alphonse de Toulous-Lautrec Montfa. (Perruchot's portrait of this horrible if entertainingly mad father is fascinating. Let one anecdote speak for the whole: at the funeral for his only son, Henri, Comte Alphonse became impatient at the pace of the hearse, climbed up and took the reins himself. He whipped the horses into such a furry as to set the mourners behind running to keep up. Typical, that.) Toulous-Lautrec's childhood ended, and his life as an artist began when the boy inexplicably all but stopped growing. His condition was exacerbated by two separate falls in which in short order he broke first one and then the other leg. As an adult, Henri would stand barely five feet tall and was forced to walk with a stick -- "my button-hook" he called it -- most of his life. His physical limitations, and his own ugliness, as he and others saw it, were to dictate the direction of both his life and his art. Rejected by his father as a useless cripple, he was encouraged by his mother and teachers to pursue his studies as a painter. Had he not suffered as he did, he might have become one of those gentlemen who painted. Instead, convinced he was all but unlovable, he rejected in turn the high society into which he was born, and the respectability of academic painting. Instead he embraced both the alcoholic Bohemianism of the Parisian demi-monde and the experimentalism of the rising generation of modern painters. He loved the prostitutes and the dancers and entertainers in the working-class nightclubs of the Montmartre. These would be the scenes he immortalized in his paintings, posters and prints.
He basically drank himself to death by his thirty-seventh birthday -- the same age, his biographer points out, at which Toulous-Lautrec's friend, Vincent Van Gogh met his untimely end.
A difficult life then, and all too brief indeed, but productive of extraordinary beauty. Perruchot's biography concentrates on the personal history of the artist, taking largely as given Toulous-Lautrec's genius -- though always careful to enumerate his production in a given years, his sales, etc., and offering a generous number of quotes from his contemporaries and critics. Whatever Perruchot's opinion of Lautrec's work, in this biography the critic would seem to have limited himself largely to describing some works as important and other, later efforts as failures, again reflecting the artist's own judgement.
Above I described the book as unsentimental. By 21st Century standards, this very mid-century book might almost be called cruel, or at the very least cold. Words like genius, and less flatteringly, "cripple", "dwarf" and "whore" are used unselfconsciously throughout, as indeed they were used by Toulous-Lautrec's contemporaries and by the artist himself. Perruchot accepts both the artist's tragedy and the glory of his art as fact. It's very declarative, very French.
No need to explain here why this analysis can feel a bit reductive, and the language dated. (See Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow.) It works well enough to the purpose at hand. If anything, the biographer's cool makes the end of his story all the more moving for being told without flinching, without emotional manipulation.
As for that second, bad reason to write about this book, it is so minor a point as to embarrass, now I come to it. Still. It was a feature of much English translation up to and including the period of this biography to leave untranslated in the text any verse quoted from either poetry or song. (This was true of subtitles in film as well.) Most annoying. In a biography of Lautrec who spent his adult life in the company of cabaret performers, poets and singers, this feels specially egregious. Why not at least a footnote with a literal translation of the quote?! After all, if I could sing in French, I would presumably be able to read it as well. no? Well, I can do neither so translators, please, make the effort!
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