“I have nothing more to tell you, dear doctor”: A Gay Man’s Intimate Confession to Emile Zola

Abstract

The “Italian invert’s confessions” have long been known to historians of sexuality, yet this new edition lends them an authenticity never before enjoyed. The Prime Mover in the publication is Michael Rosenfeld, a young literary scholar trained in Israel, Belgium and France, who teemed up with a group of academics and William A. Peniston, a retired American archivist and librarian who also appears in these pages and who, until recently, has been the doyen among experts in the affairs and intrigues of this anonymous Italian. It is to Columbia University Press’s credit that it played a part in making these “confessions” accessible after almost a century of neglect. A French edition appeared five years ago yet had little impact in the Anglo-Saxon world. Zola’s role in the transmission is curious and should be clarified, otherwise an erroneous impression arises about the part he played. The anonymous author delivered the manuscript to him in 1886 in the hope that France’s then most celebrated novelist would trumpet the Confessions’ existence as only an auteur le plus connu can. Balzac had been dead for three decades and Andre Gide—eventually to become France’s best-known “invert”—was then married to a woman and not yet in the public eye, an obscure smalltown mayor living in a commune in remote Normandy. In a four-paragraph précis Zola claimed to have been deeply moved by the Confessions yet judged himself ill-placed to announce them publicly. Instead he passed the manuscript to a young French physician, Georges Saint-Paul trained at the School of Military Medicine in Lyon. Saint-Paul studied there under Alexandre Lacassagne who encouraged him to pursue a doctoral dissertation on the uses of “Interior Language” in the self-narratives of criminal types, an interdisciplinary topic conjoining philosophy, physiology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature and anticipating approaches Freud would encourage among his own students. To their credit the editors have also included a suggestive photograph of Zola in his early fifties identified merely as “photographed by Paul Nadar” (ix), without further commentary about the circumstances leading to this extraordinary image. The publication profits from the commentaries of a team of scholars; not merely the already mentioned Michael Rosenfeld but individual commentators writing about the