Not putting ‘673’ or ‘700’ or ‘c.700’ instead of ‘600’ hardly seems to qualify as a Mistake to me. The shakiness of Golding’s optics, on the other hand, must definitely be classed as an error. The next question is, Does it matter? As far as I can remember Professor Ricks’s lecture, his argument was that if the factual side of literature becomes unreliable, then ploys such as irony and fantasy become much harder to use. If you don’t know what’s true, or what’s meant to be true, then the value of what isn’t true, or isn’t meant to be true, becomes diminished. This seems to me a very sound argument; though I do wonder to how many cases of literary mistake it actually applies. With Piggy’s glasses, I should think that (a) very few people, apart from oculists, opticians and bespectacled professors of English would notice; and (b) when they do notice, they merely detonate the error – like blowing up a small bomb with a controlled explosion. What’s more, this detonation (which takes place on a remote beach, with only a dog as witness) doesn’t set fire to other parts of the novel.
Mistakes like Golding’s are ‘external mistakes’ – disparities between what the book claims to be the case, and what we know the reality to be; often they merely indicate a lack of specific technical knowledge on the writer’s part. The sin is pardonable. What, though, about ‘internal mistakes’, when the writer claims two incompatible things within his own creation? Emma’s eyes are brown, Emma’s eyes are blue. Alas, this can be put down only to incompetence, to sloppy literary habits. I read the other day a well-praised first novel in which the narrator – who is both sexually inexperienced and an amateur of French literature – comically rehearses to himself the best way to kiss a girl without being rebuffed: ‘With a slow, sensual, irresistible strength, draw her gradually towards you while gazing into her eyes as if you had just been given a copy of the first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary.’
I thought this was quite neatly put, indeed rather amusing. The only trouble is, there’s no such thing as a ‘first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary’. The novel, as I should have thought was tolerably well known, first appeared serially in the Revue de Paris; then came the prosecution for obscenity; and only after the acquittal was the work published in book form. I expect the young novelist (it seems unfair to give his name) was thinking of the ‘first, suppressed edition’ of Les Fleurs du mal. No doubt he’ll get it right in time for his second edition; if there is one.
Eyes of brown, eyes of blue. Does it matter? Not, does it matter if the writer contradicts himself; but, does it matter what colour they are anyway? I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes: there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler. How can you escape all this without some haversack of a parenthesis about the lady’s character? Her eyes are mud-coloured; her eyes changed hue according to the contact lenses she wore; he never looked her in the eye. Well, take your pick. My wife’s eyes were greeny-blue, which makes her story a long one. And so I suspect that in the writer’s moments of private candour, he probably admits the pointlessness of describing eyes. He slowly imagines the character, moulds her into shape, and then – probably the last thing of all – pops a pair of glass eyes into those empty sockets. Eyes? Oh yes, she’d better have eyes, he reflects, with a weary courtesy.
Bouvard and Pécuchet, during their investigations into literature, find that they lose respect for an author when he strays into error. I am more surprised by how few mistakes writers make. So the Bishop of Liège dies fifteen years before he should: does this invalidate Quentin Durward? It’s a trivial offence, something tossed to the reviewers. I see the novelist at the stern rail of a cross-Channel ferry, throwing bits of gristle from his sandwich to the hovering gulls.
I was too far away to observe what colour Enid Starkie’s eyes were; all I remember of her is that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious French accent. But I’ll tell you another thing. The Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, who was ‘well known for her studies of the lives and works of writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gautier, Eliot and Gide’ (I quote her dust-wrapper; first edition, of course), who devoted two large books and many years of her life to the author of Madame Bovary, chose as frontispiece to her first volume a portrait of ‘Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter’. It’s the first thing we see; it is, if you like, the moment at which Dr Starkie introduces us to Flaubert. The only trouble is, it isn’t him. It’s a portrait of Louis Bouilhet, as everyone from the gardienne of Croisset onwards and upwards will tell you. So what do we make of that once we’ve stopped chuckling?
Perhaps you still think I’m merely being vengeful towards a dead scholar who can’t answer for herself. Well, maybe I am. But then, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And I’ll tell you something else. I’ve just reread Madame Bovary.
On one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15); and on another blue eyes (16).
And the moral of it all, I suppose, is: Never take fright at a footnote. Here are the six references Flaubert makes to Emma Bovary’s eyes in the course of the book. It is clearly a subject of some importance to the novelist:
1 (Emma’s first appearance) ‘In so far as she was beautiful, this beauty lay in her eyes: although they were brown, they would appear black because of her lashes …’
2 (Described by her adoring husband early in their marriage) ‘Her eyes seemed bigger to him, especially when she was just waking up and fluttered her lids several times in succession; they were black when she was in shadow and dark blue in full daylight; and they seemed to contain layer upon layer of colours, which were thicker in hue deep down, and became lighter towards the enamel-like surface.’
3 (At a candlelit ball) ‘Her black eyes appeared even blacker.’
4 (On first meeting Léon) ‘Fixing him with her large, wide-open black eyes’.
5 (Indoors, as she appears to Rodolphe when he first examines her) ‘Her black eyes’.
6 (Emma looking in a mirror, indoors, in the evening; she has just been seduced by Rodolphe) ‘Her eyes had never been so large, so black, nor contained such depth.’
How did the critic put it? ‘Flaubert does not build up characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that …’ It would be interesting to compare the time spent by Flaubert making sure that his heroine had the rare and difficult eyes of a tragic adulteress with the time spent by Dr Starkie in carelessly selling him short.
And one final thing, just to make absolutely sure. Our earliest substantial source of knowledge about Flaubert is Maxime du Camp’s Souvenirs littéraires (Hachette, Paris, 1882–3, 2 vols): gossipy, vain, self-justifying and unreliable, yet historically essential. On page 306 of the first volume (Remington … Co., London, 1893, no translator credited) Du Camp describes in great detail the woman on whom Emma Bovary was based. She was, he tells us, the second wife of a medical officer from Bon-Lecours, near Rouen:
This second wife was not beautiful; she was small, had dull yellow hair, and a face covered with freckles. She was full of pretension, and despised her husband, whom she considered a fool. Round and fair in person, her small bones were well-covered, and in her carriage and her general bearing there were flexible, undulating movements, like those of an eel. Her voice, vulgarised by its Lower Normandy accent, was full of caressing tones, and her eyes, of uncertain colour, green, grey, or blue, according to the light, had a pleading expression, which never left them.
Dr Starkie appears to have been serenely unaware of this enlightening passage. All in all, it seems a magisterial negligence towards a writer who must, one way and another, have paid a lot of her gas
bills. Quite simply, it makes me furious. Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage.
7
Cross Channel
Listen. Rattarattarattaratta. And then – shhh – over there. Fattafattafattafatta. And again. Rattarattarattaratta – fattafattafattafatta. A soft November swell has set the tables rattling metallically at one another across the bar. An insistent approach from a table close at hand; a pause while some unheard throb shifts across the boat; and then a softer reply from the other side. Call and response, call and response; like a pair of mechanical birds in a cage. Listen to the pattern: rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta. Continuity, stability, mutual reliance, it says; yet a change of wind or tide could end it all.
The curving windows at the stern are freckled with spray; through one of them you can make out a set of fat capstans and a listless macaroni of sodden rope. The seagulls have long since given up on this ferry. They cawed us out of Newhaven, had a look at the weather, noted the lack of sandwich packs on the rear promenade, and turned back. Who can blame them? They could have followed us the four hours to Dieppe in the hope of picking up trade on the way back; but that makes for a ten-hour day. By now they will be digging worms on some damp football pitch in Rottingdean.
Beneath the window is a bilingual rubbish bin with a spelling mistake. The top line says PAPIERS (how official the French sounds: ‘Driving licence! Identity card!’ it seems to command). The English translation underneath reads LITTERS. What a difference a single consonant makes. The first time Flaubert saw his name advertised – as the author of Madame Bovary, shortly to be serialised in the Revue de Paris – it was spelt Faubert. ‘If I make an appearance one day, it will be in full armour,’ had been his boast; but even in full armour the armpit and the groin are never completely protected. As he pointed out to Bouilhet, the Revue’s version of his name was only a letter away from an unwanted commercial pun: Faubet being the name of a grocer in the rue Richelieu, just opposite the Comédie-Française. ‘Even before I’ve appeared, they skin me alive.’
I like these out-of-season crossings. When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again. Or perhaps it’s just a way of admitting a preference for empty ferries.
There can’t be more than half a dozen people in the bar. One of them is stretched out on a banquette; the lulling rattle of the tables is coaxing its first snore from him. At this time of the year there are no school parties; the video games, disco and cinema are silent; even the barman chats.
This is the third time I’ve made the trip in a year. November, March, November. Just for a couple of nights in Dieppe: though I sometimes take the car and get down to Rouen. It’s not long, but it’s enough to make the change. It is a change. The light over the Channel, for instance, looks quite different from the French side: clearer, yet more volatile. The sky is a theatre of possibilities. I’m not romanticising. Go into the art galleries along the Normandy coast and you’ll see what the local painters liked to paint, over and over again: the view north. A strip of beach, the sea, and the eventful sky. English painters never did the same, clustering at Hastings or Margate or Eastbourne to gaze out at a grumpy, monotonous Channel.
I don’t just go for the light. I go for those things you forget about until you see them again. The way they butcher meat. The seriousness of their pharmacies. The behaviour of their children in restaurants. The road signs (France is the only country I know where drivers are warned about beetroot on the road: BETTERAVES, I once saw in a red warning triangle, with a picture of a car slipping out of control). Beaux-arts town halls. Wine-tasting in smelly chalk-caves by the side of the road. I could go on, but that’s enough, or I’ll soon be babbling about lime trees and pétanque and eating bread dipped in rough red wine – what they call la soupe à perroquet, parrot soup. Everyone has a private list, and those of other people quickly appear vain and sentimental. I read a list the other day headed ‘What I Like’. It went: ‘Salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay [would you read on?] … roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould …’ The list, which is by Roland Barthes, continues, as lists do. One item you approve, the next stirs irritation. After ‘Médoc wine’ and ‘having change’, Barthes approves of ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’. Good; fine; we’ll read on. What’s next? ‘Walking in sandals on the lanes of south-west France.’ It’s enough to make you drive all the way to south-west France and strew some beetroot on the lanes.
My list mentions pharmacies. They always seem more single-minded in France. They don’t stock beachballs or colour film or snorkelling equipment or burglar alarms. The assistants know what they are doing, and never try to sell you barley sugar on the way out. I find myself deferring to them as if they were consultants.
My wife and I once went into a pharmacie in Montauban and requested a packet of bandages. What was it for, they asked. Ellen tapped her heel, where the strap of a new pair of sandals had rubbed up a blister. The pharmacien came out from behind his counter, sat her down, removed her sandal with the tenderness of a foot-fetishist, examined her heel, cleaned it with a piece of gauze, stood up, turned to me gravely, as if there were something which really ought to be kept from my wife, and quietly explained, ‘That, Monsieur, is a blister.’ The spirit of Homais still reigns, I thought, as he sold us a packet of bandages.
The spirit of Homais: progress, rationalism, science, fraud. ‘We must march with the century’ are almost his first words; and he marches all the way to the Légion d’honneur. When Emma Bovary dies, her body is watched over by two people: the priest, and Homais the pharmacien. Representing the old orthodoxy and the new. It’s like some piece of nineteenth-century allegorical sculpture: Religion and Science Watching Together over the Body of Sin. From a painting by G. F. Watts. Except that both the cleric and the man of science manage to fall asleep over the body. United at first only by philosophic error, they quickly establish the deeper unity of joint snorers.
Flaubert didn’t believe in progress: especially not in moral progress, which is all that matters. The age he lived in was stupid; the new age, brought in by the Franco-Prussian war, would be even stupider. Of course some things would change: the spirit of Homais was winning. Soon everybody with a club foot would be entitled to a misconceived operation which would lead to an amputated leg; but what did that signify? The whole dream of democracy,’ he wrote, ‘is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.’
That line often makes people edgy. Isn’t it perfectly fair? Over the last hundred years the proletariat has schooled itself in the pretensions of the bourgeoisie; while the bourgeoisie, less confident of its ascendancy, has become more sly and deceitful. Is this progress? Study a packed cross-Channel ferry if you want to see a modern ship of fools. There they all are: working out the profit on their duty-free; having more drinks at the bar than they want; playing the fruit machines; aimlessly circling the deck; making up their minds how honest to be at customs; waiting for the next order from the ship’s crew as if the crossing of the Red Sea depended on it. I do not criticise, I merely observe; and I’m not sure what I would think if everyone lined the rail to admire the play of light on the water and started discussing Boudin. I am no different, by the way: I stock up on duty-free and await orders like the rest of them. My point is merely this: Flaubert was right.
The fat lorry-driver on the banquette is snoring like a pasha. I’ve fetched myself another whisky; I hope you don’t mind. Just getting braced to tell you about … what? about whom? Three stories contend within me. One about Flaubert, one about Ellen, one about myself. My own is the simplest of the three – it hardly am
ounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence – and yet I find it the hardest to begin. My wife’s is more complicated, and more urgent; yet I resist that too. Keeping the best for last, as I was saying earlier? I don’t think so; rather the opposite, if anything. But by the time I tell you her story I want you to be prepared: that’s to say, I want you to have had enough of books, and parrots, and lost letters, and bears, and the opinions of Dr Enid Starkie, and even the opinions of Dr Geoffrey Braithwaite. Books are not life, however much we might prefer it if they were. Ellen’s is a true story; perhaps it is even the reason why I am telling you Flaubert’s story instead.
You expect something from me too, don’t you? It’s like that nowadays. People assume they own part of you, on no matter how small an acquaintance; while if you are reckless enough to write a book, this puts your bank account, your medical records, and the state of your marriage irrevocably into the public domain. Flaubert disapproved. ‘The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.’ For the religious, death destroys the body and liberates the spirit; for the artist, death destroys the personality and liberates the work. That’s the theory, anyway. Of course, it frequently goes wrong. Look what happened to Flaubert: a century after his death Sartre, like some brawny, desperate lifeguard, spent ten years beating on his chest and blowing into his mouth; ten years trying to yank him back to consciousness, just so that he could sit him up on the sands and tell him exactly what he thought of him.
And what do people think of him now? How do they think of him? As a bald man with a drooping moustache; as the hermit of Croisset, the man who said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’; as the incorrigible aesthete, the bourgeois bourgeoisophobe? Confident scraps of wisdom, hand-me-down summaries for those in a hurry. Flaubert would hardly have been surprised at the lazy rush to understand. It was an impulse out of which he made a whole book (or at least a whole appendix): the Dictionnaire des idées reçues.