Of course I knew he was a genius. I always considered him a magnificent writer of prose. He undervalued my talents, but that is no reason why I should undervalue his. I am not like the odious Du Camp, who would proudly claim many years of friendship with Gustave, but would always deny him genius. I have been at those dinners where the merits of our contemporaries are discussed, and where Du Camp, as each new name was suggested, would with infinite urbanity correct the general view. ‘Well then, Du Camp,’ someone finally suggested with a little impatience, ‘what about our dear Gustave?’ Du Camp smiled approvingly and patted five little fingertips against five others in a prissily judicial manner. ‘Flaubert is a writer of rare merit,’ he replied, using Gustave’s family name in a manner that shocked me, ‘but he is held back from being a genius by ill health.’ You would have thought he was practising for his memoirs.
As for my own work! Naturally, I used to send it to Gustave. He told me that my style was soft, slack and banal. He complained that my titles were vague and pretentious, and smelt of the blue-stocking. He lectured me like a schoolmaster on the difference between saisir and s’en saisir. His way of praising me was to say that I wrote as naturally as a hen laying eggs, or to remark, after he had destroyed a work with his criticisms, ‘Everything I have not marked seems to me either good or excellent.’ He told me to write with the head, and not with the heart. He told me that hair only shone after much combing, and that the same could be said of style. He told me not to put myself into my work, and not to poeticise things (I am a poet!). He told me I had the love of Art, but not the religion of Art.
What he wanted, of course, was for me to write as much like he did as I possibly could. This is a vanity I have often noted in writers; the more eminent the writer, the more pronounced this vanity is likely to be. They believe that everyone should write as they do: not as well as they do, of course, but in the same fashion. In such a way do mountains long for foothills.
Du Camp used to say that Gustave did not have an ounce of feeling for poetry in him. It gives me little pleasure to agree with him, but I do so. Gustave lectured us all on poetry – though they were usually Bouilhet’s lectures rather than his own – but he did not understand it. He wrote no poetry himself. He used to say that he wanted to give prose the strength and stature of poetry; but part of this project seemed to include first cutting poetry down to size. He wanted his prose to be objective, scientific, devoid of personal presence, devoid of opinions; so he decided that poetry ought to be written according to the same principles. Tell me how you write love poetry which is objective, scientific, and devoid of any personal presence. Tell me that. Gustave mistrusted feelings; he feared love; and he elevated this neurosis into an artistic creed.
Gustave’s vanity was more than just literary. He believed not merely that others should write as he did, but that others should live as he did. He loved to quote Epictetus to me: Abstain, and Hide your Life. To me! A woman, a poet, and a poet of love! He wanted all writers to live obscurely in the provinces, ignore the natural affections of the heart, disdain reputation, and spend solitary, back-breaking hours reading obscure texts by the light of a tiring candle. Well, that may be the proper way to nurse genius; but it is also the way to suffocate talent. Gustave didn’t understand this, couldn’t see that my talent depended on the swift moment, the sudden feeling, the unexpected meeting: on life, that’s what I’m saying.
Gustave would have made me into a hermit had he been able: the hermit of Paris. Always he would advise me not to see people; not to answer so-and-so’s letter; not to take this admirer too seriously; not to take Count X – as a lover. He claimed he was defending my work, and that every hour spent in society was an hour subtracted from my desk. But that is not how I worked. You cannot yoke the dragonfly and make it drive the corn-mill.
Of course, Gustave denied there was any vanity in him. Du Camp in one of his books – I forget which, there were always so many – made a reference to the malign effect on man of too much solitude: he called it a false counsellor who nurses at her breasts the twin infants of Egotism and Vanity. Gustave naturally took this as a personal attack. ‘Egotism?’ he wrote to me. ‘So be it. But Vanity? No. Pride is one thing: a wild beast which lives in caves and roams the desert; Vanity, on the other hand, is a parrot which hops from branch to branch and chatters away in full view.’ Gustave imagined he was a wild beast – he loved to think of himself as a polar bear, distant, savage and solitary. I went along with this, I even called him a wild buffalo of the American prairie; but perhaps he was really just a parrot.
You think me too harsh? I loved him; that is why I am allowed to be harsh. Listen. Gustave despised Du Camp for wanting the Légion d’honneur. A few years later he accepted it himself. Gustave despised salon society. Until he was taken up by the Princesse Mathilde. Did you hear about Gustave’s glove bill in the days when he was prancing by candlelight? He owed two thousand francs to his tailor, and five hundred francs for gloves. Five hundred francs! He received only eight hundred for the rights of his Bovary. His mother had to sell land to bail him out. Five hundred francs for gloves! The white bear in white gloves? No, no: the parrot, the parrot in gloves.
I know what they say about me; what his friends have said. They say I had the vanity to suppose that I might marry him. But Gustave used to write me letters describing what it would have been like if we had been married. Was I therefore wrong to hope? They say I had the vanity to go down to Croisset and make an embarrassing scene on his doorstep. But when I first knew him Gustave used to write frequently about my forthcoming visits to his house. Was I therefore wrong to hope? They say I had the vanity to suppose that he and I might one day share the authorship of some literary work. But he told me that one of my stories was a masterpiece, and that one of my poems would move a stone. Was I therefore wrong to hope?
I know too what will become of us when we are both dead. Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature. People will take Gustave’s side. They will understand me too quickly; they will turn my own generosity against me and despise me for the lovers I took; and they will cast me as the woman who briefly threatened to interfere with the writing of the books which they have enjoyed reading. Someone – perhaps even Gustave himself – will burn my letters; his own (which I have carefully preserved, so much against my own best interests) will survive to confirm the prejudices of those too lazy to understand. I am a woman, and also a writer who has used up her allotment of renown during her own lifetime; and on those two grounds I do not expect much pity, or much understanding, from posterity. Do I mind? Naturally I mind. But I am not vengeful tonight; I am resigned. I promise you. Slip your fingers down my wrist once more. There; I told you so.
12
Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
ACHILLE
Gustave’s elder brother. Mournful-looking man with long beard. Inherited his job and Christian name from his father. Achille’s shouldering of family expectations freed Gustave to become an artist. Died from softening of the brain.
BOUILHET, LOUIS
Gustave’s literary conscience, midwife, shadow, left testicle and look-alike. Middle name Hyacinthe. The less successful Doppelgänger that every great man needs. Quote with mild disapproval his gallant remark to a self-conscious girl: ‘When the chest is flat, one is nearer the heart.’
COLET, LOUISE
a) Tedious, importunate, promiscuous woman, lacking talent of her own or understanding of the genius of others, who tried to trap Gustave into marriage. Imagine the squawking children! Imagine Gustave miserable! Imagine Gustave happy!
b) Brave, passionate, deeply misunderstood woman crucified by her love for the heartless, impossible, provincial Flaubert. She rightly complained: ‘Gustave never writes to me of anything except Art – or himself.’ Proto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy.
DU CAMP, MAXIME
Photographer, traveller, careerist, historian of Paris, Academician. Wrote w
ith steel nibs whereas Gustave always used a quill pen. Censored Madame Bovary for the Revue de Paris. If Bouilhet is Gustave’s literary alter ego, Du Camp is his social one. Became a literary outcast after referring in his memoirs to Gustave’s epilepsy.
EPILEPSY
Stratagem enabling Flaubert the writer to sidestep a conventional career, and Flaubert the man to sidestep life. The question is merely at what psychological level the tactic was evolved. Were his symptoms intense psychosomatic phenomena? It would be too banal if he merely had epilepsy.
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE
The hermit of Croisset. The first modern novelist. The father of Realism. The butcher of Romanticism. The pontoon bridge linking Balzac to Joyce. The precursor of Proust. The bear in his lair. The bourgeois bourgeoisophobe. In Egypt, ‘the father of the Moustache’. Saint Polycarpe; Cruchard; Quarafon; le Vicaire-Général; the Major; the old Seigneur; the Idiot of the Salons. All these titles were acquired by a man indifferent to ennobling forms of address: ‘Honours dishonour, titles degrade, employment stupefies.’
GONCOURTS
Remember the Goncourts on Flaubert: ‘Though perfectly frank by nature, he is never wholly sincere in what he says he feels or suffers or loves.’ Then remember everyone else on the Goncourts: the envious, unreliable brothers. Remember further the unreliability of Du Camp, of Louise Colet, of Flaubert’s niece, of Flaubert himself. Demand violently: how can we know anybody?
HERBERT, JULIET
‘Miss Juliet’. The ethics of English governesses abroad in the mid-nineteenth century have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention.
IRONY
The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity. Flaubert’s fiction poses the question: Does irony preclude sympathy? There is no entry for ironie in his Dictionary. This is perhaps intended to be ironic.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Spent ten years writing L’Idiot de la famille when he could have been writing Maoist tracts. A highbrow Louise Colet, constantly pestering Gustave, who wanted only to be left alone. Conclude: ‘It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.’
KUCHUK HANEM
A litmus test. Gustave had to choose sides between the Egyptian courtesan and the Parisian poetess – bedbugs, sandalwood oil, shaven pudenda, clitoridectomy and syphilis versus cleanliness, lyric poetry, comparative sexual fidelity and the rights of women. He found the issue finely balanced.
LETTERS
Follow Gide, and call the Letters Flaubert’s masterpiece. Follow Sartre, and call them a perfect example of free-association from a pre-Freudian couch. Then follow your nose.
MME FLAUBERT
Gustave’s gaoler, confidante, nurse, patient, banker and critic. She said: ‘Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.’ He found the remark ‘sublime’. Cf. George Sand.
NORMANDY
Always wet. Inhabited by a sly, proud, taciturn people. Put your head on one side and remark, ‘Of course, we must never forget that Flaubert came from Normandy.’
ORIENT
The crucible in which Madame Bovary was fired. Flaubert left Europe a Romantic, and returned from the Orient a Realist. Cf. Kuchuk Hanem.
PRUSSIANS
Vandals in white gloves, clock-thieves who know Sanskrit. More horrifying than cannibals or Communards. When the Prussians withdrew from Croisset, the house had to be fumigated.
QUIXOTE, DON
Was Gustave an Old Romantic? He had a passion for the dreamy knight cast adrift in a vulgar, materialist society. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ is an allusion to Cervantes’ reply when asked on his deathbed for the source of his famous hero. Cf. Transvestism.
REALISM
Was Gustave a New Realist? He always publicly denied the label: ‘It was because I hated realism that I wrote Madame Bovary.’ Galileo publicly denied that the earth went round the sun.
SAND, GEORGE
Optimist, socialist, humanitarian. Despised until met, loved thereafter. Gustave’s second mother. After staying at Croisset she sent him her complete works (in the 77-volume edition).
TRANSVESTISM
Gustave in young manhood: ‘There are days when one longs to be a woman.’ Gustave in maturity: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ When one of his doctors called him ‘an hysterical old woman’, he judged the observation ‘profound’.
USA
Flaubert’s references to the Land of Liberty are sparing. Of the future he wrote: ‘It will be utilitarian, militaristic, American and Catholic – very Catholic.’ He probably preferred the Capitol to the Vatican.
VOLTAIRE
What did the great nineteenth-century sceptic think of the great eighteenth-century sceptic? Was Flaubert the Voltaire of his age? Was Voltaire the Flaubert of his age? ‘Histoire de l’esprit humain, histoire de la sottise humaine.’ Which of them said that?
WHORES
Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius. Wearers of the red badge of courage include Flaubert, Daudet, Maupassant, Jules de Goncourt, Baudelaire, etc. Were there any writers unafflicted by it? If so, they were probably homosexual.
XYLOPHONE
There is no record of Flaubert ever having heard the xylophone. Saint-Saëns used the instrument in his Danse Macabre of 1874 to suggest rattling bones; this might have amused Gustave. Perhaps he heard the glockenspiel in Switzerland.
YVETOT
‘See Yvetot and die.’ If asked the source of this little-known epigram, smile mysteriously and remain silent.
ZOLA, EMILE
Is the great writer responsible for his disciples? Who chooses whom? If they call you Master, can you afford to despise their work? On the other hand, are they sincere in their praise? Who needs whom more: the disciple the master, or the master the disciple? Discuss without concluding.
13
Pure Story
This is a pure story, whatever you may think.
When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.
Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological – vertigo in a shelving canyon – but it’s not like that; it’s just misery as regular as a job. What do we doctors say? I’m deeply sorry, Mrs Blank; there will of course be a period of mourning but rest assured you will come out of it; two of these each evening, I would suggest; perhaps a new interest, Mrs Blank; car maintenance, formation dancing?; don’t worry, six months will see you back on the roundabout; come and see me again any time; oh nurse, when she calls, just give her this repeat will you, no I don’t need to see her, well it’s not her that’s dead is it, look on the bright side. What did she say her name was?
And then it happens to you. There’s no glory in it. Mourning is full of time; nothing but time. Bouvard and Pécuchet record in their ‘Copie’ a piece of advice on How to Forget Friends Who Have Died: Trotulas (of the Salerno school) says that you should eat stuffed sow’s heart. I might yet have to fall back on this remedy. I’ve tried drink, but what does that do? Drink makes you drunk, that’s all it’s ever been able to do. Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn’t; often, it doesn’t even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands.
Other people think you want to talk. ‘Do you want to talk about Ellen?’ they ask, hinting that they won’t be embarrassed if you break down. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don’t; it makes little difference. The words aren’t the right ones; or rather, the right words don’t exist. ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’ You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inade
quate. You seem to be talking about other people’s griefs. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn’t love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the syllables.
‘It may seem bad, Geoffrey, but you’ll come out of it. I’m not taking your grief lightly; it’s just that I’ve seen enough of life to know that you’ll come out of it.’ The words you’ve said yourself while scribbling a prescription (No, Mrs Blank, you could take them all and they wouldn’t kill you). And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.