I love this expression of Emile Zola, while being greatly relieved it doesn’t apply to me.
What’s great about it is the physicality of the suggestion of something being hammered, the anvil being the great inflexible immovable thing whose thereness furnishes the base for creativity, a base around which sparks fly, a base where one creates a din. Yes, something like that does happen as a deadline nears.
Then there’s the imagined act of forging. I imagine a lot of sweat, and a man with great physical strength wielding crude tools. His ingredients are unpromising and unmanageable; dangerous, even. But with enough stamina and skill, the smith—or forger, if you will—can unite and shape them into miraculous things. And any smithy worth his salt can get up and do this every day. Thus, style, no matter how miraculous, is tethered to “the terrible” and the everyday.
There, in a nutshell, is the proof that Zola himself had become a great writer. A journeyman journalist who was immensely prolific, Zola was capable of tossing off amazing aphorisms like the one above that people like me are still gushing over 100+ years later. He was one of France’s great novelists, wrote the withering political diatribe J’Accuse, and is suspected of having been killed by his enemies, who may have caused his fatal asphyxiation by stuffing his chimney. Famous as a realist, Zola rose to great heights by grappling with the messy facts and implications of the everyday in a way that was fearless and unrelenting.
Writing is both heaven and hell, I used to say. Each person who writes has to find her or his own motivation, her own rationale and guiding image. Was it Joyce Carol Oates who once likened writing to pushing a peanut across the floor of a room using the tip of her nose? And I believe it was Henry James, an inexhaustible writer, who, when asked what made him write, answered, “Doubt.” So here’s to all those writers living and dead, who’ve tended to their forges, and their peanuts, and their doubts.
Image: Drawing of Emile Zola (1840-1902) at his desk, from this source.
Now Susan, I feel very guilty that I haven’t written in ages and all with good “reasons” but knowing that I “need” to write and not setting any deadlines to do just that! Great food for thought and a real motivator to get me going. Amazing!!!
I really enjoyed your writings about religion, politics, and your family, so I do hope you find a way to write more if you are inclined to.
Having this website has been a way to get away from deadlines and judgments and figure out, in a low-risk way, what I can and want to write at this stage of my life. I’m terrible with deadlines, and find that I do better when writing in the more informal social setting the internet provides. I like the instant gratification of seeing my morning’s work in print and hearing back from readers. It’s good to discover some activity that has an organic and communal character–it seems to me that’s something you work to promote–that connectedness–, and that isn’t part of politics anymore.
I think Zola was using style as a metaphor for life……..our lives are forged on the anvil of daily events……there is no escaping that…….
What I like about your interpretation is that the task is inescapable–We are all forging our “styles” by meeting the demands of everyday life, no matter what—and regardless of we realize it or not. Certainly various politicians develop characteristic styles of governing, just as men and women develop distinctive styles of running their households.
I personally am preoccupied with questions of style, but find it a pretty diffuse topic to think about–you are suggesting that we might not need to.
Yes the anvil of life will forge us all…..there is “No Exit.” Was that Sartre or Camus?
What comes to my mind is the image of the careless family member who gets too close to the process, unannounced, and finds himself thusly singed.
PS The Muse’s poolside reading this summer is Ladies’ Paradise.
I’ve heard that’s been known to happen too.
I’m more a Dickens man, myself. But enjoy!
SB