I don't remember where I first read about this negative biography of Victor Hugo, written by a young Eugène Ionesco, but I thought that at some point during my reading of Les Misérables I might enjoy taking a break and reading Ionesco's reasons for considering its author a pitiful, despicable man, as well as a bane on the world of literature. I don't imagine that I'll ever feel more familiar with Mr. Hugo than I do now, eight hundred pages in to Les Mis, so I decided to give Hugoliade a try. I wasn't looking for reasons to hate Victor Hugo, or to convince me to stop reading Les Mis; I actually thought that seeing the author from a different perspective would help me better appreciate the book I'm reading. I also imagined that Ionesco would find a lot of chinks in the armor of such a "great" man as Hugo, and that I would be heartily amused by a chronicle of his not-so-sterling qualities in life and in literature. Finally, I was excited to read another book by Ionesco, whose Rhinocéros was one of my favorite books from last year.

Ionesco was 26 when he wrote this book, and found the figure of Victor Hugo, author-authority and literary institution, to be distasteful and representative of a type of literary tyranny that went against his own youthful beliefs. Hugo, looking outward on the world and writing about the men and women of his time, never inward to analyze his own soul and his own place in that world, occupies a role quite opposite of what Ionesco believes an author's should be. His poetry, full of ornately constructed metaphors, lacks raw emotion to Ionesco, who believes that the true beauty of words in poetry should lie in their ability to convey naked human emotion. Through his writings and the ever-increasing prestige he garnered, Hugo built himself up into a god-like dispenser of truths; not only literary truths, but political and moral ones as well. Ionesco does not like this man-god of French literature and relishes the chance to tear down the tower of glory that has been built around Hugo. Ionesco is also of the opinion that Victor Hugo is just too damn serious. He writes that the thing that makes him laugh to the point of tears when he thinks about Hugo is his way of taking everything so seriously.

The rest of the book consists of a series of anecdotes which reflect the hypocrisy of one of Hugo's favorite statements: "une bel âme et un beau talent poétique sont presque toujours inséparables." Ionesco illustrates Hugo's various romantic follies with his mistresses, often contrasting the author's sleaziness with his wife Adèle's relative virtue. In one episode of the grotesque life of V. Hugo, his daughter Leopoldine drowns in the Seine while Hugo is off on vacation with his mistress. He uses her death as an opportunity to write a bunch of poetry about death and loss, but he manipulates the dates of his writings to make it seem like he wrote them a few years later. It would have been rather distasteful to spend the first days of mourning on poetry, rather than truly grieving with actual, intense human emotions (which is what Adèle was doing back in Paris). He panders to whichever political faction is in power, royalist, republican, it doesn´t really matter to Victor Hugo. He uses his status as a "pair de France" to extract himself from a sticky situation where he's caught with his pants down with a mistress, while the mistress is sent to jail. Adèle ends up discretely helping the poor woman who has fallen prey to the sleazy literary god. In all, the episodes illustrate a man whose soul is not particularly virtuous, certainly not virtuous enough to stand up to his reputation as a dispenser of truth and poetic virtue.

It's a funny book, and was a welcome respite from all the seriousness of Les Mis. You don't come across many biographies that seek to belittle and defame their subjects, and I enjoyed reading about the dark side of a "great man." There was an essay included after the text on the relationship between Victor Hugo and Eugène Ionesco, written by a man named Gelu Ionescu. It helped situate this book as an important early step in Ionesco's literary career, identifying the Victor Hugo of the anecdotes that make up Hugoliade as Ionesco's first "character." In his re-creation of the 19th century French writer, he's taking a first step toward his later creation of the fictional men and women who occupy his plays. Ionescu also turns the tables on Ionesco in reminding the reader that, while in this book Ionesco is railing on and on against a man who became a literary institution, in the decades after this book was written it would be Ionesco's turn to become an institution himself, as a writer of absurdist theater.

Finally, I enjoyed this book because Ionesco takes part in an exercise that I myself have enjoyed since childhood: the tearing down of idols. I was a huge Michael Jordan fan back when the Bulls won their first three championships, but then I started to hate him, looking for more and more reasons not to like a player who had previously been my chief inspiration on the playground (especially when the Bulls beat my Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals). When somebody dominates something for an extended period of time, the initial wonder wears off and I tend to start distrusting the greatness that I was initially caught up in: was Jordan that great, or did he just get all the calls at the end of the game? Would he have won even a single ring without Pippen? As his playing days have receded into the past, I've tempered my hate for second dynasty Jordan and tend to focus on my memories of the glory of the first Bulls dynasty. I've had similar experiences of the love-hate-acceptance cycle with Gabriel García Márquez, whom I loved as a teenager, hated as a young adult, and now accept as a good and enjoyable writer, if not one of my favorites. I wonder if Ionesco, who wrote this book against Victor Hugo at 26, might not have been able to enjoy Hugo's poetry and fiction in later decades? ( )