Naked Came I, subtitled "A Novel of Rodin", is a biography/novel of French sculptor and artist Auguste Rodin, by American actor and author David Weiss. Published in 1963, the novel was a commercial success, and it is one of the books I've seen regularly over the years at thrift stores and in garage sales. It was also apparently abridged in Reader's Digest. After many year's of seeing this book around, I found a free copy in my library's gazebo, and brought it with me to Costa Rica. With almost 600 pages of history and dialog, I thought it would keep me busy for a while, and it did.
The book follows the life of Auguste Rodin and contemporaries, and also on the history of France and Europe. Born into a poor family, Auguste Rodin discovers a passion for drawing early in life. This meets with the disapproval of his family, who wish for him to have a better career, but Rodin perseveres in his work. As he gets older, despite having support from a mentor, he is still rejected by the French artistic establishment, because his art is too energetic and passionate. Despite this, he makes friends with a group of up-and-coming artists, including Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, who support him as a struggling artist. He also meets and falls in love with Rose, a young provincial woman, and has a son with her. He tries to support a family while France suffers internal and external conflict, and lives the life of a struggling artist in poverty. Over time, he starts to gain respect, and becomes a fixture of the French artistic establishment, but his perfectionism and artistic choices continue to cause friction with others, despite gaining friends ranging from Georges Clemenceau to George Bernard Shaw. By the time of his death, he has finally gained respect, transformed sculpture, and is generally happy.
All of these six hundred pages of rich historical detail and personal narrative follow a predictable arc that I could compress into much fewer words: struggling artist from a poor background deals with rejection from the establishment and becomes a revolutionary artistic figure. It is the synopsis of many artistic stories. It could be the story of Elvis Presley. But notice that I am writing about "Naked Came I", not writing about Auguste Rodin. And notice that the subtitle of this book is "A Novel of Rodin". One of my biggest questions about this book was whether I was reading a biography or a novel. The book is naturalistic and focused on its subject, and seems to be telling the story in the most direct way that it can. In some ways, I think the style of the book is parallel to the subject matter--- emotional, but natural, with no trace of surrealism or abstraction, which also could describe the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. But one of Rodin's most famous sculptures is "The Thinker", which I learned from this book, was originally a sculpture of Dante Alighieri. But when people see "The Thinker", they think of Rodin, not of Dante. But when people read this book, they think of Rodin, not of David Weiss. This book is a good factual treatment of Rodin's life, that follows a predictable narrative of artistic struggle, and I know a lot more about Rodin and 19th century France then when I started, but I don't feel it really transforms its subject matter.
I am also curious how much of the life of Rodin was censored, obviously or subtly, during the writing. This book was a best seller in middle America, and something selected by notoriously conservative Reader's Digest. There are a few love scenes, and an appreciation for Rodin's daring nature, but I imagine that many aspects of Rodin's bohemian existence were censored. Some of his love affairs are mentioned, but only once, when talking about the scandal of Rodin's sculpture of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, is homosexuality mentioned, with a strong denial of Rodin's homosexuality. Not that I have any reason to believe that Rodin was gay, but I feel that the book avoided certain topics of sexuality that a modern biographer would find inevitable---either in Rodin's life itself, or in the artistic milieu of the society.
I found this an entertaining book that taught me some good background about the world of art, but I was a bit disappointed that it treated its subject matter a bit too literally.