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February 12, 2002
SYNDICATED: Study in sympathy
What is it about Gustave Flaubert that authenticates the old cliche, “larger than life”? Enchanted with her new friend, after his first visit in 1869, George Sand flattered Flaubert with this composite appreciation: “The immensity of his brain troubles him. He doesn’t know if he’s going to be a poet or a realist. Being both, he finds it awkward. He has to untangle his visions. He sees everything and he wants to take hold of it all at once. He is too much for the public who prefer little morsels and choke on anything large.”
Less flatteringly, the Goncourt brothers gently ridiculed the spectacle of Flaubert reciting extracts from Salammbo. They found his compulsive, bellowing binges of reading aloud almost frightening, with “his eyes bulging, his face turning red, his arms in the air...like a lion roaring”.
But no one gives more splendid self-portraits than Flaubert himself, drawing, as Geoffrey Wall points out, on a great and varied bestiary that he added to throughout his life. Reassuring his father that he is working at his law in Paris, he is “surrounded by his books like a gherkin in its vinegar”, or a “dreamy oyster in its jar”.
A singular fact about Flaubert, perhaps due to his physical bulk, is that both his energy and his torpor seem monumental. To write the life of Flaubert therefore requires exceptional energy and patience. Wall has acquitted himself superbly on both counts, and his Flaubert: a life is as entertaining as its subject — a tremendous achievement.
The book is, above all, a study in sympathy. One attractive feature of its intimate style is the imaginative licence Wall grants himself, within strictly justifiable limits. Thus he helps us see, smell and feel the house at Croisset where Flaubert spent the best part of 40 years, and where he wrote his masterpieces. “We have to imagine the smell of the place, a rich, warm, damp blend of riverbank, garden leaf mould, ancient staircase, leather-bound folio, authorial pipe smoke and cuisine bourgeoise. We have also to remember what a plaintive and lugubrious company of family ghosts, the living and the dead, was hovering just beyond the spacious charmed circle of Flaubert’s writing table.”
Or we see Flaubert when he sits down to pen his first love letter to Louise Colet, arranging the mementos of their love on his table: “And here is the most precious relic of all, a pair of her slippers....Endearingly ridiculous, he eventually confesses to her, ‘I think I love them as much as I love you.’” There is no detail here that is not sanctioned by what Flaubert has put in his letter.
The same letter contains a reference to his mother (“she wept at seeing me return”); Flaubert thus institutes from the start the blocking movement that will thwart any emotional commitment. He was not the last dutiful son to use his widowed mum as a buffer against the designs of a female such as the hysterical, manipulative and power hungry Colet. But they deserved each other.
Flaubert’s life falls into two phases. The small boy peering into the wards of the Hotel Dieu in Rouen, where his father made his rounds; the reluctant student in Paris; the Mediterranean journey and the clandestine composition of his first novel — these vignettes make up the early phase, brusquely terminated by the attack of epilepsy in 1844. This event, the discovery of Flaubert’s intimate wound, changed the direction of his life.
The dark side in Flaubert, which always shadows the Rabelaisian grotesque, is related to what he called his “nervous illness”. With it comes his essential unhappiness and feeling of unworthiness, his sense of being contaminated, as though the contents of his mind and body were evil smelling — an obsession that recurs frequently in the Letters.
Slogging away at art, keeping Louise at arm’s length, dining with his deaf mother, hating the bourgeois and being lionised by them, the distraction of oriental travel and the ravages of syphilis make up the second phase. Like his semblable, Saint Anthony, most of his life was spent in sacrifice and refusal. At the end he acknowledged as much to his niece: “I have spent my life depriving my heart of its rightful fodder. My existence has been industrious and austere. And now I just cannot keep it up any longer.” — Dawn/Guardian news service
Flaubert: a life
By Geoffrey Wall
Faber
ISBN 0571195210
419pp. £25
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