The Floating Island (2 page)

In 1852, Jules became secretary
of Paris’s Théâtre Lyrique, a position that entailed the demanding
responsibilities of dealing with artistes, producing posters and seeing to all
the details of stage management for little or no pay, but with the possibility
of making contacts that would enable him to get his plays produced - a hope in
which he was to be disappointed. Despite his dedication to the dramatic arts
and his capacity for hard work, his temperament and talents were not ideally
suited to the milieu he longed to enter or the theatrical pieces he struggled
to write. Although he was witty and his gift for clever repartee was much
admired among the circle of young artists and writers who surrounded Alexandre
Dumas, Jules lacked the
bonhomie
that makes for success in theatrical
circles. He did not make friends easily, had no time for conventional social
pleasantries, and his manner struck many as curt and abrupt. As one of his
friends put it, ‘he is a mixture of coldness and sensibility, of dryness and
gentleness... like tempered steel he bends for those who are his friends, and
remains stiff before those who are strangers’, while another observed ‘when one
has the key one can see into him, but nothing will ever make him expansive
about himself.
[v]
The key to Jules’s character lay largely in the prudent provincial values and
stern moral principles that he seemed, at this stage in his life, to be trying
to slough off like an unwanted skin. He had a seriousness of character that was
utterly at odds with the frivolity of the theatrical farces then in vogue, and
he had a deep dislike of emotional display that prevented him from writing
convincingly excessive melodramas. Above all, he had a literal mind that always
took precedence over his imagination. He could not abandon himself to flights
of fancy unless he was convinced of the soundness of the premises on which the
actions were predicated, and this more than anything explains his inability to
produce convincing comedies of manners and emotional tragedies in which the
characters and values were so different to his own.

Pierre Verne considered Jules’s
association with the Théâtre Lyrique ‘bizarre’;
[vi]
resigned to the fact that his son would never be a lawyer, he had come to
believe that Jules could become a good writer if his talents were directed into
the right channels. In the same year that he joined the theatre, Jules wrote a
third novella for the
Musée
called
Martin Paz
, based largely on
Jacques Arago’s adventures in South America. Albeit in rudimentary form, this
work displayed many of the elements that would typify Jules’s later books - the
combination of imagination and solid fact, a visual approach to narrative and a
concern with social issues - in this case the predicament of peoples of mixed
race in Peru. On reading
Martin Paz
, Pierre Verne decided that Jules’s
true forte was the novel, and tried to divert him from the theatre without
success. The impasse continued until 1855 when Jules left the Théâtre Lyrique
having failed to make his mark as a dramatist or impresario, but having
overworked himself to the extent that he acquired a facial tic that would recur
throughout his life in times of stress. He returned to the solitary life of a
writer, and immersed himself in work. His passion for science now nearly
equalled that for the stage, and he applied himself to trying to develop a new
style of scientific writing in which technical phrases could be integrated into
ordinary language, thus making science accessible and avoiding cumbersome
academic periphrases. In his approach to science he represented the viewpoint
of the intelligent and well-informed layman interested less in pure theory than
in its practical application, and he most admired engineers, explorers and
other men of action whose exploits and invention put theory into practice.
While not a scientist himself, he numbered many eminent scientists among his
acquaintances, and would often meet with them to discuss the latest scientific
theories and technological innovations. But the theatre continued to distract
him and he carried on writing unsuccessful comedies and plays.

Pierre Verne continued to provide
encouragement and financial assistance, but his confidence in his son’s future
received a heavy blow in 1856 when Jules fell in love with Honorine Morel, a
widow with two children, and announced that he wished to marry and to go into
stockbroking in partnership with Honorine’s brother. ‘One more illusion gone -
my son, instead of being a writer, is to become a stock-jobber’
[vii]
lamented Pierre Verne, but he
bought Jules a share in a stockbroking business and Jules married Honorine in
1857. Marriage made little difference to Jules’s régime. He continued to rise
at five to write before he went off to the Stock Exchange, where he proved to
be better at banter than broking, and Honorine complained to her mother-in-law ‘There
are manuscripts everywhere - nothing but manuscripts! Let’s hope they don’t
finish up under the cooking-pot!’
[viii]
Jules continued to pursue success doggedly. The pieces of scientific reportage
he wrote for the
Musée
and other journals were always well received, but
he persisted in writing undistinguished comedies and plays which drew a steady
stream of rejections from publishers and producers. Jules had dreamed of being
a success by the age of thirty-five; at thirty-four he had failed to make a
mark in any field. Finally, even Jules’s confidence began to flag. As he wrote
to his father;

It’s
as if, the moment I get an idea or launch on any literary project, the idea or
the project at once goes wrong. If I write a play for a particular theatre
director, he moves elsewhere; if I think of a good title, three days later I
see it on the billboards announcing someone else’s play; if I write an article,
another appears on the same subject, etc. Even if I discovered a new planet, I
believe it would at once explode, just to prove me wrong.
[ix]

In 1862, Jules submitted a
manuscript on hot-air ballooning to the innovative Parisian publisher
Pierre-Jules Hetzel. In its first draft, the manuscript was an uneven
combination of narrative and scientific reportage - Hetzel advised Jules to
rewrite the work and ‘make a real novel of it’.
[x]
Two weeks later Jules returned to
Hetzel with the rewritten manuscript for
Five Weeks in a Balloon
which
Hetzel accepted for immediate publication, offering Jules a long-term contract
for three books a year into the bargain. Jules accepted with alacrity, and took
his leave of the Stock Exchange with a formal speech to his friends;

I
have an idea, the sort of idea that... ought to come to a man once a day, but
which has come to me only once in my life, the sort of idea that should make a
man’s fortune. I have just written a novel in a new form, one that’s entirely
my own. If it succeeds, I shall have stumbled upon a gold mine. In that case, I
shall go on writing and writing without pause, while you others will go on
buying shares the day before they drop and selling them the day before they
rise. I am leaving the Exchange.
[xi]

Jules’s confidence was not
misplaced.
Five Weeks in a Balloon
was an instant best-seller among
readers of all ages, who recognized that a new literary genre had been created
- that of the scientific novel. The response was overwhelming and sensational,
as befit a unique work so ideally suited to the times. As Jules’s publisher
Hetzel put it;

The
novels of M. Jules Verne have come just at the right time. When an eager public
can be seen flocking to attend lectures given at a thousand different places in
France, and when our newspapers carry reports of the proceedings of the Academy
of Sciences alongside articles dealing with the arts and theatre, it is surely
time for us to realize that the idea of art for art’s sake no longer meets the
needs of the time we live in, and that the day has come when science must take
its rightful place in literature. To M. Jules Verne goes the merit of being the
first to tread this new ground...
[xii]

All Jules’s interests -
previously seemingly irreconcilable - now come together. The years he had spent
developing a new and simple scientific prose style made the theoretical
passages of his writing accessible to all; the enthusiasm with which he
outlined his theories made them fascinating. The pace and flow that had eluded
him in his plays now came easily, giving excitement to the narrative and drama
to the action. The wit and humour that he had been unable to convey in his
comedies now came to the fore, and the moral sense that had kept him from
devising convincing characters for the stage now found expression in the lofty
moral idealism of his heroes.

He was a writer of genius who had
finally found his true medium and over the next forty-two years he devoted
himself to writing what he planned as ‘a long, imposing procession of works’
[xiii]
- ultimately sixty-four in number
- in which the reader was led through different fields of human knowledge
through the device of having the plots, the action and often the denouement
turn on the proof or disproof of various scientific theories, on inventions
that were extension of known scientific principles, or on confrontation with
natural phenomena. All his early works were imbued with a belief in the virtue
of progress and in the potential of science to improve the human condition by
enabling man to master the forces of nature and harness them to his will for
the general good of all, in the idealistic and humanitarian tradition of
Saint-Simon. In the new world Jules envisaged, the exploitation of man by man
would be replaced by the exploitation of nature by man; machines were designed
to serve man and enhance the conditions in which he lived by offering new
possibilities in travel, communication and comfort, and the true responsibility
of science was not to engage in endless theoretical speculations or to serve
special interest groups, but to put their theories into practice for the
benefit of mankind.

At the time he met Jules, Hetzel
had been planning to start a monthly magazine for young people called the
Magazin
d’Education et Recreation
. Many of Jules’s books were serialized in the
magazine before they were published in book form, but it would be a mistake to
think of Jules as a children’s author for he was read as avidly by adults as by
the young, and the French writer Raymond Roussel reflects current literary
opinion when he argues that Jules’s writings have so many hidden depths of
meaning that

It
is just as monstrous to give them to children to read as it isto give them the
Fables of La Fontaine, which are so profoundthat few adults are capable of
appreciating them.
[xiv]

In 1886, when Jules’s fame and
fortune were at their apex, he suffered a series of personal tragedies - the
deaths of his mother and his publisher Hetzel, who had been his closest
confidant since the death of Pierre Verne in 1871, and a physical attack by his
deranged nephew who shot him in the leg, inflicting injuries from which he
never completely recovered. Always something of a misanthrope, he now became
reclusive and melancholic, a change that coincided with a growing conviction
that his earlier faith in progress had been misplaced. He had once believed
that science and human character were sufficient to change the destiny of
mankind; he now began to believe that science would only progress as quickly as
society and, on the evidence of the last twenty-five years society had, if
anything, regressed. In describing his grandfather’s state of mind at this
time, Jean Jules-Verne recalled

He
lost his blind faith in unlimited progress. The conquest of nature was
dependent on the conquest of wisdom - and mankind had no wisdom. Men’s pride
made them forget the ephemerality of their existence and the worldly
possessions they were so eager to acquire. In order to gain a momentary
possession of a fragile fragment of a precarious world, pride made them
continue to indulge in the absurd and cruel strife from which they were the
first to suffer.
[xv]

The French writer Jean Chesneaux
has traced Jules’s disillusionment with science to the socioeconomic and
political developments of the late nineteenth century - the development of
large-scale industry had increased human misery instead of alleviating it, and
the rise of industry had enabled the development of large-scale finance
capitalist enterprise in Europe. Colonial rivalries increased as the great
powers raced to expand their colonial empires, the armaments race reflected the
growth of war technology, the possibilities of science had become increasingly
subordinated to the power of money, much of Europe was in economic crisis and
governments had become more repressive in character. Faced with these hard
social realities, Jules’s orientation began to change, and he extended his
interest beyond scientific forecasts to include the problems of social
organization, social conditions and the responsibility of science towards
society.
[xvi]
He now embarked on a series of satirical novels that pass judgement on an age
whose legacy is still very much with us.

For Jules, the greatest
disappointment of the previous quarter century had been America, which had held
a special place in his affections. America had once seemed to him to be a
near-perfect embodiment of the new world he envisaged, and he set twenty-three
of his books there. The demographic, economic and technological development of
America was unparalleled; industrial enterprise was carried out on a grand
scale, innovation and initiative were actively encouraged, new inventions were
seized upon with alacrity and the population of America enjoyed the highest
modern standard of living in the world. It was a country where it seemed that
all things were possible - as Jules put it in
From the Earth to
the
Moon
, ‘Nothing can astonish an American ... In America everything is
simple, everything is easy, and as for mechanical difficulties, they are
resolved before they arise.’ The passage of time had shown Jules another face
of America, and he became alarmed as the expansionist trends of the “big stick”
policy took shape... as the power of the dollar grew stronger and as a
materialist technology increased its hold over mankind’.
[xvii]
For Jules, America had been a
symbol and a model for the future - now America seemed to constitute a threat
which he countered by writing
The Floating Island
- a satire on the
American way of life.