This trail-blazing book explores previously uncharted aspects of law and literature, as well as the psychology, paradoxes and wonderful mystery of creativity. A study of artistic inspiration, Unlikely Muse examines and analyzes the lives and works of three very different writers who combine law, literature and imagination: nineteenth-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac, modernist American poet Wallace Stevens, and controversial playwright-memoirist Lillian Hellman. From the literary careers of those three writers emerge two intertwined and exciting new themes. The first theme demonstrates unexpected synergy between law and literature. Opening original lines of inquiry, Unlikely Muse probes the possible relationship between legal training and artistic creativity. A surprisingly large number of great creative artists - writers (such as Balzac), poets (such as Stevens), painters (such as Matisse) and composers (such as Tchaikovsky) - studied or practiced law. This book asks whether such people became great creative artists because of or despite their legal background. Others, such as Hellman, had no legal training but wrote much about the law. This book sketches the intellectual atmosphere and biographical background that shaped these three writers' creative process, highlighting the impact of the law on their work. The second theme uses these same three writers to focus on the changing role of imagination in literature. From Balzac through Stevens to Hellman and beyond, the author traces imagination's arc from a positive artistic quality to something that is sometimes more controversial, perhaps deceitful, and negative. In the last few decades - ever since Hellman's memoirs were attacked as untrue - journalists, memoirists and other writers have palmed off works of fiction as non-fiction, often causing literary scandals. This book offers a new theory why this phenomenon is happening and how it should be regarde

Unlikely Muse

Legal Thinking and Artistic ImaginationBy Daniel J. Kornstein

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Daniel J. Kornstein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-3298-2

Contents

PREFACE..................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................1PART I. BALZAC: DID HE KNOW MORE THAN ALL THE LAWYERS?...................................................................151. Beneath The Robe......................................................................................................172. Pegasus At The Plow...................................................................................................213. Preview Of Law In Balzac's Work.......................................................................................274. Statesmen Charged With Private Business...............................................................................335. Professional Ethics...................................................................................................516. Specific Legal Subjects...............................................................................................697. Writing Style.........................................................................................................838. Legal Philosophy......................................................................................................859. Legal Reality.........................................................................................................8910. An Ideal Intersection................................................................................................95PART II. THE DOUBLE LIFE OF WALLACE STEVENS: IS LAW SOMETIMES THE "NECESSARY ANGEL" OF CREATIVE ART?.....................10311. The Double Surprise..................................................................................................10512. Outer Shields........................................................................................................11113. Interior Made Exterior...............................................................................................11714. The Double Life Explained............................................................................................14915. The Double Life Rejected.............................................................................................17516. Strumming The Blue Guitar: Legal Thinking And Artistic Creativity....................................................18317. The Great Things In Life.............................................................................................209PART III. LILLIAN HELLMAN AND THE LAW: DID SHE INVENT WHAT SHE NEEDED?...................................................21518. A New Perspective....................................................................................................21719. The Plays: Of Lies And Law...........................................................................................22120. The Controversial Memoirs............................................................................................22921. Role Of Truth In Law.................................................................................................23122. Memoirs As An Art Form...............................................................................................23723. Truth And Lying As Hellman Themes....................................................................................24324. Her Life And The Law: Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy......................................................................24725. Other Legal Episodes.................................................................................................25526. Her Last Legal Statement.............................................................................................26327. Hellman's Uncertain Legacy: Truth And Imagination....................................................................267CONCLUSION...............................................................................................................275SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................281ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..........................................................................................................291

Chapter One

Beneath The Robe

"Let's start with Balzac," the Lawyer suggests to his two drinking companions. "He is first in time, first in influence, and first in imagination. His life and work neatly knit together law, literature, and imagination."

* * *

One of the most beautiful spots in that most beautiful city of Paris is the sculpture garden of the Rodin Museum. There, on the Rue de Varenne, on the Left Bank directly across from Napoleon's Tomb on one side and the fashionable restaurant Arpge on another, in a peaceful, park-like, outdoor setting, a lucky visitor can quietly contemplate and admire the best of Auguste Rodin's awesome sculptures. Here is the massive, intricate, fascinating Gates of Hell; there is that huge embodiment of civic devotion, The Burghers of Calais. A short stroll brings the charmed visitor to the Victor Hugo monument and to that sensuous marble tribute to love, The Kiss. And over there, atop a column, the ever-so-familiar Thinker still famously sits, chin on fist, meditating forever on who knows what.

Perhaps he is thinking about one of the other statues. For prominent among these famous works of Rodin's art is the imposing, eye-catching, mysterious, once highly controversial bronze sculpture of nineteenth-century author Honor de Balzac, a great figure in French literature and a writer of world interest. Rodin's larger-than-life statue Balzac is memorable. A glance at it reveals the sculptor's hope of conveying something of the novelist's essence, his immense creative energy and elemental life force. The statue shows a thick, heavyset, self-indulgent, introspective Balzac standing, in a simple but powerful pose, with his legs a little apart and his left arm crossed low, wearing a long dressing gown or beltless monk's robe, which falls to the floor. The massive robe, modeled on the one Balzac wore while he wrote and that entirely covers Balzac except for his head, draws the viewer's attention.

Pondering that unusual, all-encompassing robe, the somewhat puzzled and intrigued visitor understandably wonders what, if anything, is beneath it. Does it hide something? Did Rodin mean for us to think that the robe serves as the skin of Balzac's living thought and abundant creativity? In fact, Rodin draped the robe in a single piece over a free-standing, daring, phallic statue of Balzac nude, with one hand clutching his erect penis to symbolize his wondrous fertility of imagination in bringing to life a whole literary world and siring over 2000 fictional characters. Once past our understandable surprise and natural prudishness, we realize (with a smile) how profound and apt are Rodin's image, conception, and symbolism. To avoid scandal, Rodin supplied the robe, without altering what was underneath. But what lies underneath, below the surface, is important and adds meaning.

We might do well to take a hint from Rodin and look underneath the surface of Balzac's reputation. And what a reputation! Henry James, who did not dispense literary compliments freely, admired Balzac as "the greatest master" of the novel. Balzac won that title the old-fashioned way: he earned it. Born in 1799, Balzac lived only fifty-one years, but crammed into his relatively short life much personal excess, extravagance, and even more creative energy. In that brief but prolific span, filled with many all-night bouts of writing fueled by huge amounts of strong coffee, the constantly debt-ridden Balzac struggled up from obscurity and wrote almost one hundred novels about his contemporary society, and he did so with the eye of an astute and close observer.

But quantity alone is not why we remember and still read Balzac, although there is a point where quantity suddenly turns into a difference in quality. The quantity and the quality of his work are, as Henry James gushed, "truly amazing." A number of his books are masterpieces, and several others extraordinarily fine. The novels Balzac is best known for in the English-speaking world - Pre Goriot, Eugnie Grandet and Cousin Bette - perennially appear on high school and college reading lists in America. Balzac's total oeuvre and method are unmatched.

A "great genius" in James's estimation, Balzac wrote quite unlike anyone else before him and produced enduring work of universal value. He is considered by many to be the father of the modern novel. Balzac's writing - which he collectively called The Human Comedy (in contrast to Dante's epic poem) - is a prose epic in many parts, a sprawling, multi-volume saga that zeros in, with a sense of the complexity of the human situation, on the people and the society of his own time and place - Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. Balzac, who saw himself as the "secretary of society," focused on manners and drew characters driven by some dominant, often unappealing passion - for money, love or social position. He was a leading hybrid practitioner of both literary romanticism and realism, and ambitiously tried, in his series of novels, to produce a complete portrait of his civilization.

But perhaps Balzac can and should be reconsidered from a new, unexpected point of view, a point of view that casts Balzac in a fresh light. This is where the metaphor of the robe comes into play. We should try to peek beneath the robe of the great Balzac's reputation. After all, if we wish to truly understand a person, we must search for what lies behind the surface.

If a visitor continues to study closely Rodin's statue of Balzac, something else - something equally significant - might appear. An earthiness marks it. The Balzac statue has a non-ethereal quality, as if it rises from the ground, drawing strength and sustenance from it. Balzac the writer, like Balzac the sculpture, is firmly planted in reality, however much that reality is reshaped by his seething, restless, febrile imagination. Although not knowable merely from looking at Rodin's sculpture, we perhaps are still surprised, if only a little, to discover that at least some of Balzac's reality - raw material for his work, his deep understanding of human nature and motivation, the mundane aspects of human conflict - came from, of all things, law. The unknown secret beneath the robe of Balzac's literary reputation may well be his legal training.

Chapter Two

Pegasus At The Plow

Balzac was trained as a lawyer, and the law almost became his career. But the impact of Balzac's three years of intense legal training on his great literary life has, oddly, never been adequately assessed. The result has been a crucial and inexplicable gap. Many of Balzac's biographers, concentrating on his literary life, have ignored or slighted his legal training. If they mention it at all, they do so only in passing, as if they are dealing with a curious but not particularly vital biographical fact, a mere false start without lasting impact or deep meaning.

Yet sweeping Balzac's legal training under the rug or minimizing it is a mistake, a serious error. To ignore or downplay Balzac's apprenticeship at the law is to miss a crucial component in the development of Balzac's literary imagination, sensibility, and style. To overlook the role of law in Balzac's life (inner as well as outer) and work (literary and non-literary) is to neglect a vital shaping force on both. In short, one cannot get to the bottom of Balzac, one cannot truly understand or grasp this powerful literary dynamo, without assessing the place of law in his personal and professional growth. But the gap remains.

A Case of Strange Neglect

This gap is still odder and more paradoxical in light of the impressive growth of Law and Literature as a distinct and self-contained discipline in the past forty years. Discussions in those four decades of the law and Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, and a host of lesser literary lights abound, but almost nothing beyond an occasional passing reference mentions the law and Balzac. Frankly, Balzac has not been given his due. In this oversight, the Law and Literature movement has repeated the critical neglect Balzac received generally in the nineteenth century. Then, as now, he was taken less seriously than he should have been. It is almost as if Balzac, a huge figure in literary history, a prolific writer who constantly wrote about the law, is an unsung hero, a forgotten man, of Law and Literature.

This is not the first time Balzac has been mysteriously slighted. A century or so ago, Henry James complained that Balzac was even then not getting enough recognition. The little attention Balzac received struck James as "seldom" and "perfunctory." The only explanation James could come up with was that Balzac's greatness had been taken for granted for many years, so that critics were inclined to say, "let us not talk of him." James found that explanation unsatisfactory.

Equally unsatisfactory are today's explanations. It is easy and tempting, for example, to blame the strange dearth of modern commentary about Balzac and the law - a new form of benign neglect - on the vagaries of fashion: literary fashion, legal academic fashion, intellectual fashion, and even political fashion. Balzac, we are told, is not trendy, he is not "hot" right now among the intelligentsia; he is not "existential"; he is not "in"; he is not post-modern; he is not dense, opaque, obscure, vague, or inaccessible. He is not the focus of any current pseudo-intellectual fad. While French, his name is not Foucault or Derrida. Balzac has been largely disowned by American universities as a Dead White European Male "irrelevant today."

Seemingly sharing this view, one influential Law and Literature scholar, Richard Weisberg of Cardozo Law School, also excludes Balzac on grounds of "relevance." In his important 1984 book The Failure of the Word, Weisberg acknowledges Balzac's large treatment of law in The Human Comedy, but then he surprises the reader. In a brief, intriguing, and ultimately provocative footnote, Weisberg announces that Balzac's "narrative stance" toward law renders his work "less relevant" than that of Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Camus. His dismissive and patronizing attitude toward Balzac is palpable.

A few years later, in response to criticism of his general approach to Law and Literature, Weisberg somewhat elaborated his terse footnote. "Our task, of course," he wrote in 1988, "is to choose the texts that proffer (often only covertly) the subversive voice we find representative of the age." Then he went on, "We begin our study of the modern law-related novel with Flaubert and Dostoevsky rather than with Balzac and Dickens, and we do so because the former integrate narrative ambiguity and non-omniscience with the anti-rationalistic and word-skeptical schemes they so brilliantly produce." Apparently Weisberg discerns some dividing line in the development of narrative that puts Balzac (and Dickens!) on the far side of Law and Literature, around the bend, in an immature, unevolved, early, Pleistocene state, and therefore not worth our time and trouble today.

Whether or not Weisberg is correct (and I for one wholeheartedly disagree), Balzac's curious exclusion from the last forty years of Law and Literature scholarship is confusing, puzzling, paradoxical, striking, and inexplicable. Balzac deserves better; he deserves to be taken seriously by Law and Literature. Balzac is a giant of Law and Literature; to exclude him from the Law and Literature canon is grievously wrong and defies common sense.

Balzac should not be ignored or mentioned only perfunctorily by Law and Literature. He can enlarge our understanding of the subject. Balzac is simply one of the greatest, most productive, and imaginative storytellers who ever lived, and he wrote a lot about law. Law and Literature at its best is at least a study of its best practitioners. Balzac was one of them. More than two hundred years after Balzac's birth and more than one hundred and fifty years after his death, it is time to start, at last, to do a proper modern assessment. As Henry James said of literary criticism in 1905, so too now: it is time for Law and Literature to "rekindle excitement" in Balzac. It is overdue, especially in an era when Law and Literature is a burgeoning movement. The English-speaking world of Law and Literature should now, finally, be ready to talk about Balzac.

Lawyer in Training

One should start by talking about Balzac's legal training. Balzac's being a writer was not his parents' idea. His middle-class parents, obsessed with money and status, wanted - not unlike many parents today or in any era - to make sure their son had a stable, respectable, and financially secure livelihood. As a boy, however, Balzac had an undistinguished academic record, saved only by his passion for reading. Nonetheless, when Balzac was seventeen, almost a year and a half after the Battle of Waterloo, his parents, who lived in Tours, decided that he should become a lawyer and in November 1816 enrolled him at the School of Law at the Sorbonne in Paris. The normal three-year course of study included going to lectures, poring over law books, and concentrating on legal theory.

Hectic as this schedule might seem, Balzac the law student filled his time even more. As at any law school, including American law schools today, classes are only part of the learning experience. Talking about law and socializing with fellow students are often at least as important. In addition, Balzac's interests went beyond the law, so he went to many lectures at the Sorbonne on other subjects - particularly philosophy and literature. As if Balzac were not busy enough with this school routine, his parents insisted that he balance the theoretical side of his legal education with practical experience in a law office. As a result, Balzac became a law clerk while he went to law school.

Thus, at about the same time he started to attend classes, he began as a junior clerk in the chambers of his father's lawyer-friend Guillonnet-Merville. Merville was a fine advocate and mentor, as well as a cultivated man with a taste for letters, whom Balzac admired and respected, and with whom he had a good relationship. Balzac would later show his appreciation to Merville in two ways. Balzac immortalized Merville as the good, competent, reliable, ethical lawyer Derville in his novels. And he fondly dedicated one of his books - An Incident During the Terror - to Merville, his "dear and former patron," stating that it was from Merville that Balzac had learned enough of legal procedure to manage the business of his "little world."

But a law clerk's life - even when the preceptor was an outstanding lawyer - was less than ideal. Balzac and his fellow clerks lived together, working from five a.m. in a large, dusty, smelly, overheated room, with grimy windows and legal notices all over the place. He copied legal documents and took dictation from the head clerk. He engrossed official papers. It did not appear to be a perfect environment for learning a dignified and useful profession.

In this clerkship, Balzac earned an odd reputation. He was something of a cut-up who occasionally got in the way of office business, so much so that the head clerk once felt obliged to write him: "Monsieur Balzac is requested not to come today because there is a great deal of work to be done." Was Balzac happy or sad to receive such a note? What did his bourgeois, status-conscious parents think?

Two years later, in 1818, Balzac finished his clerkship with Merville, and took another one with the Balzac family lawyer, Passez. There he learned about bankruptcies, sales, and contracts. Performing so well, Balzac received an offer of potential partnership and eventual inheritance of Passez's practice. It was an offer that one in Balzac's position could not ordinarily afford to refuse. Balzac's budding legal career seemed to be going well indeed.

The next year - 1819 - would change all that. The year started out well enough. In January 1819 Balzac passed the first part of his written examinations for his law degree. But six months later, a political crisis caused the government to suspend classes at the University, and that interruption triggered something in Balzac. "The flame of revolt," as Stefan Zweig, one of Balzac's biographers, colorfully writes, "subdued and smothered all these years, flared up in Balzac's breast." He had listened and watched. He listened, watched, was revolted, and revolted. He leapt up from his stool at the office and waved goodbye to the dusty files on his desk. Balzac had had enough of the law. He told his preceptor Matre Passez that he was quitting, and then Balzac gave his family the unexpected news that he was leaving the law to become -heaven forbid - a writer, and that as a writer he would achieve greatness and wealth.

Another potentially crucial event for Balzac's psyche happened around this time. In 1818, Balzac's uncle was arrested and charged with murdering a pregnant village girl whom he was alleged to have seduced. The embarrassing legal proceedings dragged on for a year. After a sensational trial, Balzac's uncle was found guilty and, on August 16, 1819, guillotined. All of this went on while Balzac was choosing what to do with his life.

(Continues...)

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