There has always been a suspicion that those who admire or enjoy the novels of Emile Zola do so for the wrong reasons. When he died, a century ago, on September 28, 1902, the pseudo-scientific bases of his fiction were already discredited. His cycle of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, set out to analyse French society under Napoleon III and the Second Em-pire (1852-1870) through the intersecting destinies of two families, tracing the supposed influence of hereditary traits. Zola's Naturalism was founded on the belief that it was possible to apply scientific methods to such sociological analysis - a belief that even the writer himself had modified by the time he completed the 20 novels that make up the cycle.
Les Rougon-Macquart attracted attention throughout Europe and America, but critics in Britain were unfavourable and translations slow to appear. Wilde quipped that Zola was determined to show "that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull".
It was not until 1884, after the success of Nana in the United States, that the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore negotiated translation rights on Zola's behalf with the publisher Henry Vizetelly, who specialised in foreign literature, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Flaubert. Vizetelly's son Ernest translated L'Assommoir, a story of working-class life that had been a succès de scandale in France because of its use of popular language, and Nana, the story of a high-class prostitute.
The Vizetellys made some cuts, in deference to the sensibilities of Victorian ladies, but when the series reached The Soil, Ernest's unavoidably earthy version of La Terre, the National Vigilance Association decided something had to be done.
In May 1888, the MP Samuel Smith tabled a motion in the Commons deploring "the rapid spread of demoralising literature" and naming Vizetelly and Zola as the chief culprits. Smith knew just what he felt about Zola: nothing more "diabolical" had ever been written by the pen of man, he told the House. Zola's novels were "inartistic garbage", "only fit for swine", characterised by "sheer beastliness" and amounting to "dirt and horror, pure and simple".
Nor did he miss the chance of a dig at the hereditary enemy: in France, he warned, the moral fibre of the nation was well on the way to being destroyed by the poison of such literature and the country was approaching the condition of Rome under the Caesars. Beware: now that the Elementary Education Act had made it possible for young people of all classes to read such books, there were no safeguards here against the effects of this "licentious literature".
The House agreed, the motion was passed and by October 1888 Henry Vizetelly was in court, on the first of three charges of publishing an obscene libel. He pleaded not guilty and listened as the prosecution outlined the case against the "bestial obscenity" of this "filthy book".
Then the Solicitor-General began to read his personal selection of 21 passages from The Soil, at which a member of the jury interrupted, asking if they really had to listen to all of them. It was as unpleasant for him to read these obscenities, the Solicitor-General assured them, as it was for them to listen. This exchange was enough for Vizetelly to realise his case was doomed. He changed his plea to guilty, and was bound over for 12 months and fined £100. Later in the year, he was tried again and sentenced to three months' imprisonment.
Not surprisingly, Zola hesitated before accepting an invitation from the Institute of Journalists to visit London in 1893. In the event, he found the British unexpectedly hospitable. He was put up at the Savoy, fêted at the Atheneum and taken on a trip down river to Greenwich by the novelist George Moore. Speaking at the Authors' Club, he hoped his audience found him less black than he was painted. They laughed heartily and applauded his toast to the novelists of France and England.
Despite this friendly reception, he gave no sign of wanting to return; it took force majeure to get him back. In 1898, he had written his impassioned open letter to the President of the Republic, "J'Accuse", denouncing the unjust conviction for spying of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army. The affair redeemed Zola in English eyes: previously considered "the apostle of the gutter", the socialist trade unionist Herbert Burrows wrote, he "suddenly stands before astonished Europe as the champion of truth and justice". This did not prevent him from being accused of libelling the head of state and being sentenced to a year's imprisonment. A second trip to England seemed advisable before the gendarmes arrived.
With nothing but the clothes he stood up in, he arrived at Victoria station on July 19, 1898, and made for the Grosvenor Hotel. He wrote to Ernest Vizetelly, telling him to come and ask for "Monsieur Pascal". Vizetelly hurried round, delighted at being involved in this political intrigue: his book, With Zola in England, is an amusing account of his manoeuvres to put journalists and French spies off the scent. After a few changes of address, Zola reached the Queen's Hotel in Upper Norwood, where he was to spend most of his exile, from October 1898 to June 1899, receiving occasional visits from his wife, Alexandrine, and his mistress, Jeanne.
It was not a happy time: Zola felt isolated in a country where he did not speak the language, had few friends and was unable to understand English cooking, cricket, Sundays and sash windows. All that concerned him was to get on with the writing of his next novel, Fécondité. He seems to have avoided contact with English writers: it was not until the very end of his stay that he took dinner with his greatest disciple, George Moore. Meanwhile, the influence of French Naturalism was making its mark through the work of writers such as Moore, Somerset Maugham and Arnold Bennett.
After his death, Zola's literary reputation continued to waver. Henry James wrote a long essay on his work, hedged with typical Jamesian reservations, balancing praise of Zola's love for truth with criticism of his lack of psychological subtlety and the accusation that he had sacrificed art to "a system".
This was not considered so much of a drawback elsewhere: among Marxists, Zola was seen as an important critic of bourgeois society and a precursor of Socialist Realism - which merely helped to reinforce the feeling among English critics that he could only be liked for the wrong reasons. In The Novel in France (1950), which became a standard work for British students, Martin Turnell expunges his name entirely from the history of the French novel, apart from a single reference to "the dreary realism of novelists like Zola".
To dismiss Zola as tedious and didactic is clearly unjust (as even Turnell would later, grudgingly, admit). Forget the pseudo-science. The novels of Les Rougon-Macquart are a huge imaginative achievement, encompassing a whole society and built around the symbolic importance of material objects that assume mythical dimensions: the railway engine in La Bête Humaine, for example, the coal mine in Germinal or the distilling apparatus in L'Assommoir. Few other writers have had such a powerful sense of the impersonal forces beneath the surface of human lives.
· Robin Buss's translations of L'Assommoir and Au Bonheur des Dames are published by Penguin Classics.
· A homage to Zola will be held at the Institut Francais, London, from October 16-19, tel 020-7073 1350.
· The Norwood Society is commemorating Zola's stay in England with an exhibition, including Zola's photographs, on November 9, at the Phoenix Centre, Westow Street, Norwood, SE19