Early life Huysmans was born in Paris, France, in 1848. "His young mother, Élisabeth-Malvina Badin Huysmans, had been a schoolteacher before she married, and his father, Victor-Godfried-Jan Huysmans [Dutch: Huijsmans], was a Dutch immigrant who worked in Paris as a commercial artist." Huysmans's father (1815-1856) died when Huysmans was eight years old.
Constant Cornelis Huijsmans, the Dutch painter and art teacher (including of
Vincent van Gogh), was his uncle. Huysmans mother quickly remarried, and Huysmans resented his stepfather, Jules Og, a Protestant who, with Huysmans's mother, purchased a bookbindery on the ground floor of the building where they lived. During his childhood, Huysmans turned away from the Roman Catholic Church. He was unhappy at school but completed his coursework and earned a .
Civil service career For 32 years, Huysmans worked as a civil servant for the French Ministry of the Interior, a job he found tedious. The young Huysmans was called up to fight in the
Franco-Prussian War, but was invalided out with
dysentery. He used this experience in an early story, "
Sac au dos" (Backpack) (later included in his collection,
Les Soirées de Médan). After his retirement from the Ministry in 1898, made possible by the commercial success of his novel,
La cathédrale, Huysmans planned to leave Paris and move to
Ligugé. He intended to set up a community of Catholic artists, including
Charles-Marie Dulac (1862-1898). He had praised the young painter in
La cathédrale. Dulac died a few months before Huysmans completed his arrangements for the move to Ligugé, and he decided to stay in Paris. In 1905 Huysmans was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. He died in 1907 and was interred in the
cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.
Writing career , (
Musée d'Orsay) He used the name Joris-Karl Huysmans when he published his writing, as a way of honoring his father's ancestry. His first major publication was a collection of prose poems,
Le drageoir aux épices (1874), which were strongly influenced by
Baudelaire. They attracted little attention but revealed flashes of the author's distinctive style. Huysmans followed it with the novel, ''
Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876). The story of a young prostitute, it was closer to Naturalism and brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar: sombre, realistic and filled with detailed evocations of Paris, a city Huysmans knew intimately. Les Sœurs Vatard (1879), dedicated to Zola, deals with the lives of women in a bookbindery. En ménage'' (1881) is an account of a writer's failed marriage. The climax of his early work is the novella ''
À vau-l'eau (1882) (translated as With the Flow
, Downstream
, and Drifting''), the story of a downtrodden clerk, Monsieur Folantin, and his quest for a decent meal. , by
Coll-Toc, 1885 Huysmans's 1884 novel (
Against the Grain or
Against Nature) became his most famous, or notorious. It featured the character of an
aesthete, des Esseintes, and decisively broke from Naturalism. It was seen as an example of "
decadent" literature. The description of des Esseintes's "
alluring liaison" with a "cherry-lipped youth" was believed to have influenced other writers of the decadent movement, including
Oscar Wilde. Huysmans began to drift away from the Naturalists and found new friends among the
Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in
À rebours. They included
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly,
Villiers de L'Isle Adam, and
Léon Bloy.
Stéphane Mallarmé was so pleased with the publicity his verse had received from the novel that he dedicated one of his most famous poems, "Prose pour des Esseintes", to its hero. Barbey d'Aurevilly told Huysmans that after writing
À rebours, he would have to choose between "the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross." Huysmans, who had received a secular education and abandoned his Catholic religion in childhood, returned to the Catholic Church eight years later. Huysmans's next book after
Á rebours was the novella
Un dilemme, which tells "the story of a poor working-class woman who gives birth out of wedlock. When her bourgeois lover, the father of the baby, dies, his heartless family members refuse to help, leaving the mother and her child destitute." Huysmans's next novel,
En rade, an unromantic account of a summer spent in the country, did not sell as well as its predecessor. "The novel's originality lies in its abrupt juxtaposition of real life and dreams." His
Là-bas (1891) attracted considerable attention for its portrayal of
Satanism in France in the late 1880s. He introduced the character Durtal, a thinly disguised self-portrait, who is writing a biography of the notorious 15th-century child-murderer and torturer
Gilles de Rais. The later Durtal novels,
En route (1895),
La cathédrale (1898) and ''
L'oblat'' (1903), explore Durtal/Huysmans's conversion to
Roman Catholicism.
En route depicts Durtal's spiritual struggle during his stay at a
Trappist monastery. In
La cathédrale (1898), the protagonist is at
Chartres, intensely studying the cathedral and its symbolism. The commercial success of this book enabled Huysmans to retire from the civil service and live on his royalties. In ''L'Oblat'', Durtal becomes a
Benedictine oblate. He finally learns to accept the world's suffering. Huysmans was a founding member of the
Académie Goncourt. Huysmans's work was known for his idiosyncratic use of the
French language, extensive vocabulary, detailed and sensuous descriptions, and biting, satirical wit. It also displays an encyclopaedic erudition, ranging from the catalogue of decadent
Latin authors in
À rebours to the discussion of the iconography of Christian architecture in
La cathédrale. Huysmans expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism. This had led him first to the philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer. Later he returned to the Catholic Church, as he described in his Durtal novels.
Art criticism In addition to his novels, Huysmans was known for his art criticism, collected in his books ''L'Art Moderne
(1883) and Certains
(1889), both recently translated into English by Brendan King. In 1905, Huysmans published his third and last book on art, "Trois primitifs'' ('Three Primitive Painters'), his studies of
Matthias Grünewald, the 'Master of Flémalle' (now generally considered to be
Robert Campin), and the unknown artist of a painting in the Frankfurt Museum." Huysmans "was a perceptive and talented art critic who was among the first to recognize the genius of
Degas and the Impressionists." Huysmans became so associated with the Impressionists "that one critic, the journalist
Félix Fénéon, referred to Huysmans as 'the inventor of impressionism. Robert Baldick wrote: But after Huysmans sent a copy of ''L'Art Moderne'' to
Camille Pissarro, Pissarro wrote to him, "How is it that you don't say one word about
Cézanne, whom not one of us has failed to acknowledge as one of the most singular temperaments of our time, and one who has had a very great influence on modern art? I was extremely surprised by your articles on
Monet. How can such astonishing vision, such phenomenal execution and such rare and extensive decorative feeling not have struck you back in 1870 ...?" ==Style and influence==