On Huysmans' Tomb

On Huysmansʼ Tomb (Sur la tombe de Huysmans originally) is a collection of critical essays written by Léon Bloy about his erstwhile friend, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Written between 1884 and 1893, and published in book form in 1913, six years after Huysmansʼ death, it is an appraisal of Huysmans himself and his most important work at that time: À Rebours, En Rade, Là-Bas, - as nobody other than Léon Bloy could have written, with keen psychological insight into Huysmansʼ mind and personality, and providing first-hand information about the inception of those works, particularly Là-Bas, that satanic masterpiece of Huysmansʼ that originally was intended to look up (Là-Haut), rather than down.

"The intensity of a writer like Huysmans is, principally, in his contempt... The well-known author of À Rebours has not at all the ignivomitous allures of an imprecator, and the torrential flux of green bile is, in him, merely the literary illusion of some prickly vanity... Huysmans had finally divested himself of the pedagogic reminiscences of his art education, in order to enter upon certain originality, ... The synoptic pessimism of des Esseintes appeared to many as a stopping place or as a refuge, and the agonizing future of that anchorite of analysis excited the emulation of a large group of dreamers..."

"En Rade does not appear to be a work fated to modify the destiny of that reprobate [des Esseintes]. The pessimism of À Rebours has merely been strengthened and consolidated... No counterweight, from now on, to the deep despondency of souls. No pale brightness, no wan glimmer of the skies... Never has hope been so positively dismissed..."

The appendix includes a review by Jules Barbey dʼAurevilly on À Rebours.