The Goncourt Journals

The Goncourt Journal was a diary written in collaboration by the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt from 1850 up to Jules' death in 1870, and then by Edmond alone up to a few weeks before his own death in 1896. It forms an unrivalled and entirely candid chronicle of the literary and artistic Parisian world in which they lived, "a world", it has been said, "of bitter rivalries and bitterer friendships, in which every gathering around a café table on the Grands Boulevards [was] a chance to raise one's status in the byzantine literary hierarchy". Fear of lawsuits by the Goncourts' friends and their heirs prevented publication of anything but carefully chosen selections from the Journal for many years, but a complete edition of the original French text appeared in the 1950s in 22 volumes, and there have been several selective translations into English.

The Goncourt brothers formed a very close literary partnership. Not only were all of their novels, dramas and non-fiction works written in collaboration until Jules' death but, more surprisingly, so was their Journal. The Journal was produced by a process Edmond called "dual dictation", one brother dictating to the other and each revising the other's work. Their styles were so similar that it is impossible to tell which brother was writing any particular passage. For the most part they wrote the Journal late at night, without much consideration about literary style, and there are therefore few of the laboured mannerisms that characterize their novels. Edmond himself admitted that because the journal entries were "hastily set down on paper and not always re-read, our syntax is sometimes happy-go-lucky and not all our words have passports", and they particularly delighted in accurately recording the slanginess and vulgarity of ordinary speech. The collaboration came to an end with Jules' decline and early death from syphilis, recorded by his brother in excruciating detail. When that story drew to its close Edmond initially decided to abandon the Journal, but he took it up again in time to give a detailed description of life during the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris, and the Commune. Some critics find that the Journal improved when Edmond resumed it without Jules.

The many accounts of conversations in the Journal were aided by Edmond's excellent memory, and, according to Flaubert, by Jules' habit of jotting notes on his shirt-cuff on the spot.Ludovic Halévy, who was present at many of these conversations, gave the brothers credit for extreme accuracy, and similarly the narrator of Proust's Le Temps retrouvé thought that Edmond de Goncourt "knew how to listen, just as he knew how to see"; but some among the Goncourts' contemporaries claimed that the brothers either consciously or unconsciously distorted the conversations they recorded. The painter Jacques Blanche, for example, said that "nothing is less true than their journals", though André Gide, who thoroughly enjoyed the Journal's accounts of conversations, retorted that that would make the Goncourts' achievement as original artists all the greater.

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