Homme plume
Victor Brombert
Frederick Brown
FLAUBERT
A biography
628pp. Heinemann. £25.
0 434 00769 2
US: Little, Brown. $35. 0 316 11878 8
Flaubert maintained that a writer should never celebrate himself, that he should in fact pretend not to have lived. He claimed to be an “homme plume”, a pen man, and that the only adventures in his life were the sentences he wrote. Yet he was not always tied to his desk, quill in hand. He travelled to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Greece. In Paris, in 1848, he witnessed the street fighting and the violence of the mob. He frequented some of the most notable people of the period: the sculptor James Pradier, the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, the critic Sainte-Beuve, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, George Sand – with whom he developed a tender friendship – Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, and Maupassant, who considered himself Flaubert’s disciple. He had a turbulent affair with the writer Louise Colet, one of the most flamboyant women of the century.
Despite quasi-monastic vows pronounced in the service of the religion of Art, Flaubert’s life was not as withdrawn as he would have us believe; it is full of encounters and events – a most interesting life in fact, especially when told by as gifted a biographer as Frederick Brown, whose thorough, colourful, intelligently paced book never fails, over close to 600 pages, to hold the reader’s attention.
Many of Flaubert’s claims must be approached with a dose of scepticism. At some point, for instance, he expressed the desire to write “un livre sur rien”, a book about “nothing” – an ideal book that would hold up through sheer force of style and structure, without any concern for subject matter. This metaphor of a godlike artificer’s detached creation has been much quoted by critics eager to enlist Flaubert among the early postmodernists. But the fact remains that Madame Bovary, thoroughly grounded in the daily realities of his native Normandy, contained enough precise subject matter to have made his fellow Normans scream with anger. Emma Bovary, oppressed and repressed by a mediocre society, is a carefully described clinical case. She is also a quixotic figure in pathetic quest of the unattainable, and in that she remains superior to the environment that crushes her. Certainly no one thought at the time Madame Bovary appeared that it was merely a stylistic tour de force. Flaubert’s notoriety in 1857 was largely due to a well-publicized trial for affront to public and religious morality, and to plain decent behaviour.
Nor is Salammbô, which resuscitates ancient Carthage, a novel about “nothing”. Flaubert went to the trouble of meticulous historical and archaeological research, and even travelled to Tunisia in the spring of 1858. As for L’Éducation sentimentale, Flaubert’s great novel about the moral and political history of an entire generation straddling the Revolution of 1848, it focused on precisely documented historic moments, as well as keen personal memories. Brown never loses sight of Flaubert’s grounding in his own time. He does so with a historian’s sensitivity to the changes in mood and manners during an agitated period, uncommonly rich in upheavals and political transformations.
Flaubert was born in 1821 into an affluent and well-respected family. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was the revered chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Rouen. Gustave was a boy under the Restoration that marked the return of the Bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. He grew to be an adolescent after the Bourbons were chased out once again, and France became a constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe. Flaubert was twenty-seven years old when the Revolution of 1848 got rid of that king too, and a Republic came into being. That Republic was short-lived, however. Only three years later, a coup détat by its President transformed France into the Second Empire, and Louis Bonaparte became Napoleon III. Flaubert lived to see the end of this regime also, when Prussia defeated France in 1870, and Prussian soldiers occupied the Flaubert family house in Normandy. The violence of the Commune in 1871 and its brutal repression, which were not soon forgotten, gave way to the apparent stability of the Third Republic. Flaubert died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1880, after years of overeating and excessive pipe smoking, and no doubt also from the long-term effects of epilepsy and syphilis. Daily bouts of indignation surely also affected his blood pressure.
From the first paragraph of Browns Flaubert, where we glimpse his subject dreaming, in his prosaic Normandy, of distant deserts, we know that we are in for a treat. Elegant and well articulated, Browns narrative illuminates the complexity of Flauberts inner contradictions. Jealous of his independence, frequently misanthropic, taking pride in his monk-like withdrawal, the hermit of Croisset , as he came to be known, was in fact thirsting for friendship, affection and encouragement. In later years, despite his grouchiness and iconoclasm, he was flattered to have become a friend and protégé of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, to be a regular in her salon on the Rue de Courcelles, and to be invited to parties at the Imperial Court.
Brown is especially good at detailing the physical and moral portrait of the novelist: his sense of the comic, his bluster and vituperations, his pet dislikes, his erotic fantasies, his loud laughter and stentorian voice, his fascination with imbecility, his jowls and increasingly drooping moustache, his scatological lexicon. Behind the vigorous façade there was, hidden from public view, a vulnerable being who sought refuge from every form of unwanted involvement (such as choosing a career) by welcoming the epilepsy that surfaced when he was in his twenty-third year. Above all, he needed friendship, and in that need he was well served. His friends included the brilliant Alfred Le Poittevin, his early mentor who introduced him to philosophy; Maxime Du Camp, his travelling companion to Egypt; Louis Bouilhet, his literary adviser and confidant over the years; George Sand, late in his life, for whom he felt a special and reciprocated affection that is reflected in their prolific correspondence; and Ivan Turgenev, on extended sojourns in Paris, with whom he formed a strong bond.
Stimulated and encouraged by his history teacher Adolphe Chéruel, Flaubert might have become a historian. His early passion for history is attested by numerous texts and fragments of texts he wrote while still in school. He never lost his appetite for research and erudition. In preparing to write his books, notably La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Salammbô and Bouvard et Pécuchet, he would indulge in encyclopedic readings to the point of indigestion. This obsession with documentation, especially if it had to do with exotic regions and antiquity, was for him a form of travel in time and space. His yearning for exotic thrills was fulfilled when he set out in 1849 for a year-and-a-half-long voyage to Egypt and other Near Eastern countries. He visited the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, travelled in a cangia up the Nile, spent a steamy night in Esna with a heavily scented Egyptian courtesan: these experiences would feed his novels. He was mesmerized by the bazaars, the brothels, the bathhouse, the camels, the lewd male dancers (though he found their art somewhat vulgar). But while daydreaming during the slow river journey towards the cataracts of the Nile, he also began to consider liteary projects that would lead back to the realities of Norman boredom and to Emma Bovarys own dreams.
Brown himself seems to have an impressive capacity for documentation. We learn about the French school system, the professional conflicts between surgeons and physicians, the Paris law-school curriculum, the treatment of epilepsy. He provides colourful evocations of Rouen, with its medieval streets and modern textile manufactures; of Paris in the 1850s, when Baron Haussmann demolished large slums and created broad new arteries; of Vichy as it was being developed into a fashionable spa. He leads us on excursions into various French institutions, including literary gatherings such as the Magny dinners, which featured rich food and cacophonic exchanges (when they could hear each other) between such luminaries as Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, the Goncourt brothers, and Flaubert himself. (It was at one of these dinners, every two months, in a restaurant on the Left Bank that Flaubert met Turgenev.) Brown also provides economic information about the earnings of domestic help, the wages of unskilled labourers and the daily diet of the working class, as well as the flow of capital and the fever of speculation in the heyday of the Second Empire.
Every biography of Flaubert must rely on his abundant correspondence, and Brown makes especially good use of the extraordinary letters that Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet during the years he was labouring on Madame Bovary. Their vividness and allure, their variety of moods, their exuberance, their almost spoken quality as Flaubert unbuttons, make of them one of the truly exceptional correspondences in the French language. Through these letters, it is as though, without the benefit of a recording device, we were able to hear Flauberts personal voice. But there is also much substance in them. They communicate the novelists stylistic concerns, his worries about the structure and the rhythm of his book, his strivings and doubts, his theoretical preoccupations. The cult of Art (a word he habitually spelled with a capital A) is at their centre, and this cult, together with an almost religious belief in the writers vocation, is grounded in a deep-seated pessimism about the inadequacy of existence and the instantaneous decay of all things. The letters also help to dispel some hazy notions about Flaubert-the-realist (he in fact detested reality) and ferocious debunker of Emma Bovarys romantic readings. He never ceased to proclaim his allegiance to Romanticism, calling himself an old troubadour . In his craving for the unattainable, the creator of Emma Bovary seems himself afflicted with bovarysme.
Brown has shunned the all too frequent temptation of biographers to psychologize and invent states of being. He does not follow Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his massive LIdiot de la famille, conjured up intimate scenes (for instance between Flauberts father and mother in bed) for which there is not a trace of evidence. Sartres study of Flaubert, the result of years of a love-hate relation with him, is a brilliant tour de force, especially in its analysis of the novelists juvenilia. But it is tendentious in its emphasis on an authoritarian and repressive father, and in its insistence that young Gustave willed his epilepsy in order to justify his passivity and thus become, through writing, a Knight of Nothingness . Brown judiciously gives a different picture of the father who, it would seem, was loving, tolerant and open-minded in his dealings with an often difficult son. He is also fair to the mother (though she was no doubt possessive and given to sentimental blackmail), as he is to Louise Colet, who has in the past been much maligned.
Along the way, this new biography of Flaubert provides lively sketches of some famous and not so famous peole who crossed the novelists path. And there are portraits that amount to mini-biographies. At times Brown appears to overindulge in digressions. Do we need to learn that Pope Pius VII refused to allow gaslight and smallpox vaccination in papal territory? But these digressions usually turn out to be relevant, such as the striking one-paragraph analysis of Alexandre Dumas filss theatre which illustrates societys hypocritical moral values at the time of the Madame Bovary trial.
Frederick Brown has received deserved praise in the past for his biographies of Jean Cocteau and Émile Zola. In his Theater and Revolution (1989) he proved to be an excellent cultural historian, as he did in his illustrated study of the Père-Lachaise cemetery (1973), the great necropolis of nineteenth-century Paris. Even higher praise is now due for his Flaubert. Written with literary flair and restraint, graced by many a happy turn, this biography is sustained by patient build-ups. It covers considerable ground and takes the reader into many side alleys, but never loses its sense of focus and continuity.