What Is a Good Novel?

Originally published in 1891, Karl-Joris Huysmans’ notorious Là-Bas was another of those books which seriously used the profane to extol the sacred, and exploited the scabrous to endorse sanctity. Baudelaire may be said to have invented the formula, and Huysmans is only one of a large number, from Oscar Wilde and Baron Corvo to Charles Williams and Jean Genet whose varied intentions have borrowed its possibilities. In his own way, even Cecil B. DeMille adapted it in his biblical epics, where much of the screen time shows the wholesale debauchery which the King of Kings or Moses will then redeem.

Là-Bas used a double plot. In the course of researches into the life of the infamous thirteenth-century satanist, Gilles de Rais, a young writer, Durtal, discovers that the Devil and the Black Mass are still actively flourishing in his own Paris of 1890. Thus Huysmans offered his public vivid details of not only medieval sodomy but contemporary succubi. The book was an enormous success from the moment it was serialized in the Echo de Paris, and Huysmans went on to its sequels, as well as his own haunted life, in its way more interesting than anything he wrote. When Albert Boni attempted to publish an English translation in 1924, he was forced to withdraw it, and it is this same version, by Keene Wallis, with a scholarly introduction by Huysmans’ British biographer Robert Baldick, which has now been issued as Down There: A Study in Satanism (University Books, $5.00), so that after nearly seventy years this underground bestseller is making its first legal appearance in American bookstores.

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Robert Phelps

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Originally published in 1891, Karl-Joris Huysmans’ notorious Là-Bas was another of those books which seriously used the profane to extol the sacred, and exploited the scabrous to endorse sanctity. Baudelaire may be said to have invented the formula, and Huysmans is only one of a large number, from Oscar Wilde and Baron Corvo to Charles Williams and Jean Genet whose varied intentions have borrowed its possibilities. In his own way, even Cecil B. DeMille adapted it in his biblical epics, where much of the screen time shows the wholesale debauchery which the King of Kings or Moses will then redeem.

Là-Bas used a double plot. In the course of researches into the life of the infamous thirteenth-century satanist, Gilles de Rais, a young writer, Durtal, discovers that the Devil and the Black Mass are still actively flourishing in his own Paris of 1890. Thus Huysmans offered his public vivid details of not only medieval sodomy but contemporary succubi. The book was an enormous success from the moment it was serialized in the Echo de Paris, and Huysmans went on to its sequels, as well as his own haunted life, in its way more interesting than anything he wrote. When Albert Boni attempted to publish an English translation in 1924, he was forced to withdraw it, and it is this same version, by Keene Wallis, with a scholarly introduction by Huysmans’ British biographer Robert Baldick, which has now been issued as Down There: A Study in Satanism (University Books, $5.00), so that after nearly seventy years this underground bestseller is making its first legal appearance in American bookstores.