The First Decadent, Being the Strange Life of J. K. Huysmans

"This is the first full-length biography in English of the French writer, Joris-Karl Huysmans. His most famous and certainly his most notorious novel, Là-Bas, published in 1884, became a classic overnight, and his later works, especially Against the Grain, En Route and La Cathédrale, which are concerned with his pilgrimage toward the Catholic Church, are extraordinary in their vivid power. Huysmans' work occupies a unique and important place in French literature of the 'eighties and 'nineties. In his biography, James Laver, author of Whistler, traces Huysmans' strange and unusual life and his progress through the horrifying by-ways of diabolism and the Black Mass to the Catholic Church. He shows Huysmans' relation on the one hand to the Naturalism of Emile Zola and to the Goncourts, and on the other to Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the Symbolists and the Catholic converts. Huysmans' works receive considerable attention in this, his first biography in English. Mr. Laver has delved deeply in the evidence concerning Satanism and the occult to furnish the background for an understanding of Là-Bas. He has gone to great pains to identify the characters and themes of this and other novels."--Dust jacket.