My Fantoms by Theophile Gautier, Richard Holmes (Translator)

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The Barnes & Noble Review

The French critic and man of letters Théophile Gautier is best known, at least on these shores, as a kind of father figure to the Bohemian romantics of 19th-century Paris, famous for his coinage of that enduring mantra "Art for Art's Sake." In the hands of his sure-footed translator, the biographer Richard Holmes, however, he is a master in his own right, the author of the seven gothic phantasmagoria collected in My Fantoms. The "Fantoms" of the title are, variously, apparitions and seductresses emerging from death and worlds beyond in pursuit of an earthly love ("fantom" is itself a "decorous, slightly arch" term of Holmes's own invention). Gautier's heroes are men treading the line between dream-states and madness, prone to romantic reverie at the hands of the women who enchant them. With the exception of "The Poet" -- less a story than a eulogy to Gautier's dearest friend, the writer Gérard de Nerval -- they share an otherworldliness, a sense that the line between reality and the imagination is more porous than we tend to believe. In "The Tourist," for instance, a young traveler, obsessed by the perfect cast of one of Pompeii's ash-encrusted women on display at a museum in Naples, is transported across the centuries to meet his ideal love, alive in the streets of that ill-fated city. "The Priest," one of Gautier's more outré creations, marries the French erotic tradition with a gothic sensibility: the result is a boldly transgressive tale, replete with a vampiress, a splintered self, and a glancing exploration of necrophilia. Like Onuphrius, his alter ego in "The Painter," Gautier is an artist who "almost invariably…injected everyday events with some grotesque element on his own fantasy." We are luckier for it. --Amelia Atlas

Synopsis

Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature.

In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…”

Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”

Biography

Théophile Gautier (1811—1872) was a poet, novelist, art critic, and one of the most prominent French Romantic writers of the nineteenth century. He originally studied as a painter but his friendship with Nerval and Hugo turned him toward a career in literature. By his twenties he had become a leading figure in the Jeune-France group, and the publication of Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1836 placed him at the heart of the Parisian literary world. Apart from his weekly journalist contributions to La Presse for twenty years, he worked on comedies, pantomimes, ballet scenarios, and produced novels, stories, and travel books.

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974; Dr Johnson and Mr. Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia.