Money, Magic & Love

PROMETHEUS: THE LIFE OF BALZAC by AndreMaurois. 573 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

Honore de Balzac did not look or act like a writer, and the literary assessors of his time declined to treat him as one. He was short, fat, gap-toothed, messy, and, according to one contemporary, had "the face of a pantler, the general look of a cobbler, the girth of a barrelmaker, the manners of a hatter." Estimates of his work were hardly more flattering: Sainte-Beuve dismissed his style as "prolix and formless, slack." The author of La Comedie Humaine, that panorama of post-revolutionary France, died up to his chins in debt to his mother, wife, sister, mistress, gardener and the village constable in Ville-d'Avray. Now the world stands heavily in Balzac's debt, and in the 115 years since his death, dozens of doting biographies have tried to even the account.

This book, though at times tedious, heaps a hillock of fresh laurels on Balzac's grave. Andre Maurois, an old hand at literary biographies (Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Proust), disavows that intention. "This is a life of Balzac, not a critical study," he says in a foreword and, having passed his 80th year, announces that it is the last biography he will write. Nevertheless, Prometheus is strewn with the kind of judgments that a disciple makes at the feet of the master: "A super-novelist," "the greatest novelist of the century." Balzac's very faults become virtues: "The enforced disorder" of his life "reproduces the disorder of life" itself.

Critics have repeatedly noted that Balzac's life would have made an excellent Balzac plot. So it would. And so, to a considerable degree, it did. Like many others before him, Maurois reckons up the bill that Balzac's output--97 novels and novellas, scores of stories, articles and plays, 6,000,000 words--owes to the author's experiences. The son of a petit bourgeois whose roots ran deep in France's soil, Balzac never really escaped his origins. Of life he demanded money, love and magic --the themes of all his books--and spent them faster than they came in. He dreamed of the $100,000 pineapple crop he would harvest from the slope of his modest villa in Ville-d'Avray, of fortunes in old Roman silver to be found in Sardinia--meanwhile hiding from creditors in the home of one of his married mistresses.

But the visionary also chained himself to his work table for nights on end, compulsively churning out that prodigious torrent of words that is his own monument and literature's as well. Old Goriot, Lost Illusions, Louis Lambert, Droll Stories, Eugenie Grandet--these and other components of Comedie, his grand design, enjoy a special favor on the shelf of classics that not many others there can claim: they can be read today just for pleasure, by nonscholars, without respect to their literary pedigree.

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