And still you think about her every day. Sometimes, weary of loving her dead, you imagine her back to life again, for conversation, for approval. After his mother’s death, Flaubert used to get his housekeeper to dress up in her old check dress and surprise him with an apocryphal reality. It worked, and it didn’t work: seven years after the funeral he would still burst into tears at the sight of that old dress moving about the house. Is this success or failure? Remembrance or self-indulgence? And will we know when we start hugging our grief and vainly enjoying it? ‘Sadness is a vice’ (1878).
Or else you try to sidestep her image. Nowadays, when I remember Ellen, I try to think of a hailstorm that berated Rouen in 1853. ‘A first-rate hailstorm,’ Gustave commented to Louise. At Croisset the espaliers were destroyed, the flowers cut to pieces, the kitchen garden turned upside down. Elsewhere, harvests were wrecked, and windows smashed. Only the glaziers were happy; the glaziers, and Gustave. The shambles delighted him: in five minutes Nature had reimposed the true order of things upon that brief, factitious order which man conceitedly imagines himself to be introducing. Is there anything stupider than a melon cloche, Gustave asks. He applauds the hailstones that shattered the glass. ‘People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.’
This letter always calms me. The function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along, and I am telling you a pure story.
She was born in 1920, married in 1940, gave birth in 1942 and 1946, died in 1975.
I’ll start again. Small people are meant to be neat, aren’t they; but Ellen wasn’t. She was just over five feet tall, yet moved awkwardly; she ran at things and tripped. She bruised easily, but didn’t notice it. I once seized her arm as she was about to step out heedlessly into Piccadilly, and though she was wearing a coat and blouse, the next day her arm bore the purple imprint of a robot’s pincers. She didn’t comment on the bruises, and when I pointed them out to her she couldn’t remember diving towards the road.
I’ll start again. She was a much-loved only child. She was a much-loved only wife. She was loved, if that’s the word, by what I suppose I must agree to call her lovers, though I’m sure the word over-dignifies some of them. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn’t love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. Perhaps she was sick of being loved. At twenty-four Flaubert said he was ‘ripe – ripe before my time, that’s true. But it’s because I’ve been reared in a hothouse.’ Was she loved too much? Most people can’t be loved too much, but perhaps Ellen could. Or perhaps her concept of love was simply different: why do we always assume it’s the same for everyone else? Perhaps for Ellen love was only a Mulberry harbour, a landing place in a heaving sea. You can’t possibly live there: scramble ashore; push on. And old love? Old love is a rusty tank standing guard over a slabby monument: here, once, something was liberated. Old love is a row of beach huts in November.
In a village pub, far from home, I once overheard two men talking about Betty Corrinder. Perhaps the spelling isn’t right; but that was the name. Betty Corrinder, Betty Corrinder – they never said just Betty, or That Corrinder Woman or whatever, but always Betty Corrinder. She was, it seems, a bit fast; though speed, of course, is always exaggerated by those standing still. Fast, this Betty Corrinder was, and pubmen sniggered enviously. ‘You know what they say about Betty Corrinder.’ It was a statement, not a question, though a question now followed it. ‘What’s the difference between Betty Corrinder and the Eiffel Tower? Go on, what’s the difference between Betty Corrinder and the Eiffel Tower?’ A pause for the last few moments of private knowledge. ‘Not everyone’s been up the Eiffel Tower.’
I blushed for my wife two hundred miles away. Were there places she prowled where envious men told jokes about her? I didn’t know. Besides, I exaggerate. Perhaps I didn’t blush. Perhaps I didn’t mind. My wife was not like Betty Corrinder, whatever Betty Corrinder was like.
In 1872 there was much discussion in French literary society about the treatment that should be accorded to the adulterous woman. Should a husband punish her, or forgive her? Alexandre Dumas fils, in L’Homme-Femme, offered uncomplicated advice: ‘Kill her!’ His book was reprinted thirty-seven times in the course of the year.
At first I was hurt; at first I minded, I thought less of myself. My wife went to bed with other men: should I worry about that? I didn’t go to bed with other women: should I worry about that? Ellen was always nice to me: should I worry about that? Not nice out of adulterous guilt, but just nice. I worked hard; she was a good wife to me. You aren’t allowed to say that nowadays, but she was a good wife to me. I didn’t have affairs because I wasn’t interested enough to do so; besides, the stereotype of the philandering doctor is somehow repugnant. Ellen did have affairs, because, I suppose, she was interested enough. We were happy; we were unhappy; I miss her. ‘Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?’ (1855).
What it’s hard to convey is how untouched by it all she was. She wasn’t corrupted; her spirit didn’t coarsen; she never ran up bills. Sometimes she stayed away a little longer than seemed right; the length of her shopping trips often yielded suspiciously few purchases (she wasn’t that discriminating); those few days in town to catch up on the theatres occurred more often than I would have liked. But she was honourable: she only ever lied to me about her secret life. About that she lied impulsively, recklessly, almost embarrassingly; but about everything else she told me the truth. A phrase used by the prosecutor of Madame Bovary to describe Flaubert’s art comes back to me: he said it was ‘realistic but not discreet’.
Did the wife, made lustrous by adultery, seem even more desirable to the husband? No: not more, not less. That’s part of what I mean by saying that she was not corrupted. Did she display the cowardly docility which Flaubert describes as characteristic of the adulterous woman? No. Did she, like Emma Bovary, ‘rediscover in adultery all the platitudes of marriage’? We didn’t talk about it. (Textual note. The first edition of Madame Bovary has ‘all the platitudes of her marriage’. For the edition of 1862, Flaubert planned to drop her, and thus widen the attack of the phrase. Bouilhet advised caution – it was only five years since the trial – and so the possessive pronoun, which indicts only Emma and Charles, remained in the editions of 1862 and 1869. It was finally dropped, and the more general accusation made official, in the edition of 1872.) Did she find, in Nabokov’s phrase, that adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional? I wouldn’t have imagined so: Ellen didn’t think in such terms. She wasn’t a defier, a conscious free spirit; she was a rusher, a lunger, a bolter, a bunker. Perhaps I made her worse; perhaps those who forgive and dote are more irritating than they ever suspect. ‘Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn’t love’ (1847).
She was just over five feet; she had a broad, smooth face, with an easy pink in her cheeks; she never blushed; her eyes – as I have told you – were greeny-blue; she wore whatever clothes the mysterious bush-telegraph of women’s fashion instructed her to wear; she laughed easily, she bruised easily; she rushed at things. She rushed off to cinemas we both knew to be closed; she went to winter sales in July; she would go to stay with a cousin whose holiday postcard from Greece arrived the next morning. There was a suddenness in these actions which argued more than desire. In L’Education sentimentale Frédéric explains to Mme Arnoux that he took Rosanette as his mistress ‘out of despair, like someone committing suicide’. It’s crafty pleading, of course; but plausible.
Her secret life stopped when the children came, and returned when they went to school. Sometimes, a temporary friend might take me on one side. Why do they think you want to know? Or rather, why do they think you don’t know already – why don’t they understand about love’s relentless curiosity? And why do these temporary friends never want to tip you off about the more important thing: the fact that you’re no longer loved? I became adept at turning the conversation, at saying how much more gregar
ious than me Ellen was, at hinting that the medical profession always attracts calumniators, at saying, Did you read about those terrible floods in Venezuela? On such occasions I always felt, perhaps wrongly, that I was being disloyal to Ellen.
We were happy enough; that’s what people say, isn’t it? How happy is happy enough? It sounds like a grammatical mistake – happy enough, like rather unique – but it answers the need for a phrase. And as I say, she didn’t run up bills. Both Madame Bovarys (people forget that Charles marries twice) are brought down by money; my wife was never like that. Nor, as far as I know, did she accept gifts.
We were happy; we were unhappy; we were happy enough. Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? I have it now; she had it earlier. After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.
I have to hypothesise a little. I have to fictionalise (though that’s not what I meant when I called this a pure story). We never talked about her secret life. So I have to invent my way to the truth. Ellen was about fifty when the mood began to come upon her. (No, not that: she was always healthy; her menopause was quick, almost careless.) She had had a husband, children, lovers, a job. The children had left home; the husband was always the same. She had friends, and what are called interests; though unlike me she didn’t have some rash devotion to a dead foreigner to sustain her. She had travelled enough. She didn’t have unfulfilled ambitions (though ‘ambition’, it seems to me, is mostly too strong a word for the impulse that makes people do things). She wasn’t religious. Why go on?
‘People like us must have the religion of despair. One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say impassive like it. By dint of saying “That is so! That is so!” and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.’ Ellen did not even have this religion. Why should she? For my sake? The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?
Perhaps there was something else as well. Some people, as they grow older, seem to become more convinced of their own significance. Others become less convinced. Is there any point to me? Isn’t my ordinary life summed up, enclosed, made pointless by someone else’s slightly less ordinary life? I’m not saying it’s our duty to negate ourselves in the face of those we judge more interesting. But life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Ellen’s secret life led her into despair. For God’s sake, her life is not a moral tale. No one’s is. All I’m saying is that both her secret life and her despair lay in the same inner chamber of her heart, inaccessible to me. I could touch the one no more than the other. Did I try? Of course I tried. But I was not surprised when the mood came upon her. ‘To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.’ My wife had only good health to offer.
Does life improve? On television the other night I watched the Poet Laureate asked that question. ‘The only thing I think is very good today is dentistry,’ he replied; nothing else came to mind. Mere antiquarian prejudice? I don’t think so. When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements – the invention of some new valve or sprocket – while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.
Does life improve? I’ll give you my answer, my equivalent of dentistry. The one thing that is very good in life today is death. There’s still room for improvement, it’s true. But I think of all those nineteenth-century deaths. The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius – ‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide – ‘But one doesn’t have the right.’
‘Is it splendid or stupid to take life seriously?’ (1855). Ellen lay with a tube in her throat and a tube in her padded forearm. The ventilator in its white oblong box provided regular spurts of life, and the monitor confirmed them. Of course the act was impulsive; she bolted, she bunked from it all. ‘But one doesn’t have the right’? She did. She didn’t even discuss it. The religion of despair held no interest for her. The ECG trace unrolled on the monitor; it was familiar handwriting. Her condition was stable, but hopeless. Nowadays we don’t put NTBR – Not To Be Resuscitated – on a patient’s notes; some people find it heartless. Instead we put ‘No 333’. A final euphemism.
I looked down at Ellen. She wasn’t corrupted. Hers is a pure story. I switched her off. They asked if I wanted them to do it; but I think she would have preferred me to. Naturally, we hadn’t discussed that either. It’s not complicated. You press a switch on the ventilator, and read off the final phrase of the ECG trace: the farewell signature that ends with a straight line. You unplug the tubes, then rearrange the hands and arms. You do it swiftly, as if trying not to be too much trouble to the patient.
The patient. Ellen. So you could say, in answer to that earlier question, that I killed her. You could just. I switched her off. I stopped her living. Yes.
Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.
Perhaps I am too accepting. My own condition is stable, yet hopeless. Perhaps it’s just a question of temperament. Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory. Such is the Flaubertian temperament. Compare the case, and the temperament, of Daudet. His schoolboy visit to a
brothel was so uncomplicatedly successful that he stayed there for two or three days. The girls kept him concealed most of the time for fear of a police raid; they fed him on lentils and pampered him thoroughly. He emerged from this giddying ordeal, he later admitted, with a lifelong passion for the feel of a woman’s skin, and with a lifelong horror of lentils.
Some abstain and observe, fearing both disappointment and fulfilment. Others rush in, enjoy, and take the risks: at worst, they might contract some terrible disease; at best, they might escape with no more than a lasting aversion to pulses. I know in which camp I belong; and I know where I’d look for Ellen.
Maxims for life. Les unions complètes sont rares. You cannot change humanity, you can only know it. Happiness is a scarlet cloak whose lining is in tatters. Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around. Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. You cannot change humanity, you can only know it. Les unions complètes sont rares.
A maxim upon maxims. Truths about writing can be framed before you’ve published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it’s too late to make any difference.
According to Salammbô, the equipment of a Carthaginian elephant driver used to include a mallet and a chisel. If, in the midst of battle, the animal threatened to run out of control, the driver was under orders to split its skull. The chances of this happening must have been fairly high: to make them more ferocious, the elephants were first intoxicated with a mixture of wine, incense and pepper, then goaded with spears.