Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was born in 1848 to a French schoolteacher and a Dutch artist. He spent most of his life as a civil servant doing a job he disliked, but he also began a long career as an author in 1874, writing under the Dutch-ified version of his name, Joris-Karl, or J.-K., Huysmans. Originally he was known as an up-and-coming author of the Naturalist school, associated with Zola, but in the 1880s, having become convinced that Naturalism was deteriorating into a tedious treadmill of the same and the ordinary, he began to drift in another, darker direction, and eventually became known as one of the major writers in the Decadent school. In this period, his works became gloomy and exaggerated versions of his own life experiences and attempts to deal with the dreadfulness of modern life. He had originally expected this entire trajectory of his writing career to do poorly in terms of publication, consoling himself with the fact that he was doing something genuinely new, but the works touched a chord and often sold well.
The next fortnightly book is Huysmans's darkest and most controversial Decadent novel, Là-bas; the translation is literally 'Down There' but it is often given in English as The Damned. It tells the story of a man named Durtal, bored and disgusted by life, who throws himself into writing a biography of Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais was once the Marshal of France, a distinction he earned by exceptional valor while serving with St. Jeanne D'Arc. There is very little historical information about their relationship, which seems to have been purely professional and even merely occasional, but writers ever since have not been able to resist treating it as more, because of one very significant fact: Gilles de Rais, afterward, would go down a dark road, starting with grave financial troubles and ending with a trial in which he was accused of trying to summon demons (to get rich) and convicted and hanged for heresy, sodomy, and the murder of children. Historians debate how much of this was strictly true and how much of it was exaggerated (some of the financial troubles and some of the killings are almost certainly true), and folklore and the inevitable story-fascination of a saint interacting with an eventual devil-worshipper have exaggerated them even more. Gilles de Rais became a symbol for nineteenth-century Satanists, and thus Durtal's study of him leads him to the Satanist community in Paris. One of the many things that made the novel notorious was its depiction of Black Mass, based loosely on Huysmans's own experience of such a ceremony.
Là-bas would not be the last of Durtal; after the 'black book' of Là-bas, he wrote the 'white book' of En Route, and then La cathèdrale (his best-selling work), and L'Oblat, through which Durtal (in a path that was mirroring his creator's) continues to find disappointment in trying out means to escape the drudgery and sordidness of modern life, but on the way converts to Catholicism and eventually becomes a Benedictine oblate. All of that, however, is in the future. Huysmans himself did not yet know that this was to be Durtal's fate; he had not lived it yet. Here we begin, with the 'black book', the book of despair, the book about the disgusting horror pleasure can become when you try to make it something it cannot be.
