A Writer's People (15 page)

All that my setting up as a writer required was a table, an exercise book, a pen (I would have preferred a typewriter), and a small acting talent, so that I could think of myself as a writer and stay at the table. I filled pages, writing as fast as I had done when doing my essays. I had no idea what I was doing and where I was going. I believed in my star, believed that my great ambition guaranteed a talent, and went on. Six months later—a dark time, all this period: deep down, I wasn't fooling myself—I realised I didn't know how to do this other kind of writing. If I had had even a little money I would have stopped, put an end to the unwelcome, debilitating playacting at the writing table, and looked for something else to do.

I was full of grief for some weeks, and often (especially when I was on a bus) close to tears. The idea then came to me one day, from some unsuspected source of new energy (perhaps, really, from the depth of my despair), that I should forget everything I knew or thought I knew about writing, that in anything new I might attempt I should start from scratch, seeking to do a narrative only out of simple, direct statements. This was what I did. I saved my soul and got started as a
writer. For three years I stayed with the hard rules I had made for myself; and then there was no need: as a writer I was always in control, no longer hoping for magic.

I have written of this before. I repeat it here, to lead into what follows. If it is hard as a writer to make the leap from university essay-writing to writer's writing, it is many times harder for a reader—since reading is a common attainment—to arrive at a true, even a visionary, idea of a master's quality. People who think they know about prose-writing might look for a special language and rhythm. But that is only part of the story. Again, I speak for myself. It was in late middle age, after I had written many books and after I had spent some years as a novel-reviewer, that I was granted a vision of Flaubert's narrative splendour in
Madame Bovary
.

I had read an abridged version at school, and then in my twenties or thirties I had read the full text—read it in my fast, gobbling-up way. The book had made an impression. I remembered some of the details: Charles Bovary's terrible, mistaken surgery on somebody's ankle, for instance: Charles not a properly qualified doctor or surgeon, even in those days (perhaps the 1840s), only a health officer with a licence to practise medicine. Other details faded with time, as details of a novel do, but I never ceased to think of
Bovary
as a book I knew.

What did I possess of the book? There was the impression, increasingly ghostlike, of background and people, that had come to me at that first, fast reading. As a novel-reviewer I depended on that kind of impression. It told me as much as I needed to know about a writer's mind or sensibility. That was what I wished to write about in my column. And—a small
technical point—I found it helped if in a review I didn't mention the names of the characters; in that way I got nearer to a book's essence; certain books condemned themselves. I had no further reviewing scheme. Other people, seeking (so to speak) to sovietise the critic's indefinable function (and to please publishers), thought a novel should be judged according to its plot, characters and style, and marks given under each of those heads. In this way all novels were “product,” more or less the same, and novel-reviewing, always painful, became a vale of tears. I didn't allow that to happen to me.

Reviewing was many years behind me when I came upon
Madame Bovary
again. I was between books and I was travelling. I was in an easy, receptive mood, and one morning I found in the house where I was staying an old green-bordered Penguin Classics translation.

I opened the book near the beginning. And there, in five paragraphs at the end of the first chapter, Charles with the help or superintendence of his mother was marrying his first wife: thin, bony, forty-five, a bailiff's widow from Dieppe, in demand because she is thought to have money. To win this bride for her son, Charles's mother has had to defeat a scheming butcher. All this in five paragraphs: so much that Flaubert would have enjoyed creating, and so much that I had forgotten.

We have hardly met this first wife when—such is the pace of the opening narrative—we are introduced to the woman who will be the second wife. It happens like this. One winter night, at about eleven, when Charles and his first wife are in bed they hear a horse stopping outside the house. The maid opens the window of her attic, calls down to the street; there is
a conversation; and then the maid comes down, shivering in the cold, undoes the lock and the various bolts of the front door (the effects up to this point are all of sound), and lets in the visitor. He comes into the main bedroom directly behind the maid. Charles props himself up on his pillow to see who it is; his wife, out of modesty, turns her face to the wall.

The visitor has come with a written message. It is wrapped in cloth and tucked inside his grey woollen cap and has a blue-wax seal. He takes out this precious message and hands it ceremonially to Charles. The maid holds the lamp for Charles to read. Someone has broken a leg in a farm eighteen miles away. A cross-country journey on a rainy night, and the moon not yet up: Charles's wife thinks it too dangerous for Charles on his own: better to send the stable-boy to prepare the way, and to get the farm to send a boy to meet Charles. (If Charles is only a health officer and not a real doctor, there are further gradations all the way down.)

Fully four hours later Charles starts out, rehearsing what he has learned about fractures. Little birds, their feathers fluffed out, are silent on the bare apple trees. Trees around farmhouses are dark violet. Charles, on his horse, drowses: now in his fantasy he has just left his marriage bed, now he is still a student. He sees a boy sitting on the grass next to a ditch. The boy says, “Are you the doctor?” And when Charles says yes, the boy takes up his wooden shoes and runs ahead all the way to the farm. (This, about the boy and the wooden shoes, is a magical, unexpected detail: it fixes the cross-country ride in the imagination. It is more than a rustic detail; it gives a pre-industrial edge to what has so far been a modern story.)

At the farm the boy dives into a hole in the hedge, reappears on the other side, and opens the farm gate for Charles. The farm is done in swift detail: watch dogs barking and pulling on their chains, big plough-horses in the stable feeding peaceably off new racks, a steaming dunghill with peacocks pecking at the top, carts and ploughs in a shed with their tackle discoloured by the dust floating down from the loft.

A young woman in a blue merino dress welcomes Charles at the door and takes him into the kitchen, where there is a big fire—the sun coming up, now, showing through the window—and breakfast is being cooked for the farm people: a lot of sturdy kitchen equipment here, and clothes drying in the fireplace.

The patient, the farmer with the broken leg, is upstairs. He is sweating below his blankets and—a nice curmudgeonly touch—he has thrown his nightcap to a far corner of the room. There is a carafe of brandy on a chair beside the bed. He has been using that to keep his spirits up; for twelve hours, since he sent his message to Charles, he has been cursing. Now that Charles has come he begins to groan. It is a simple fracture, without complications. Charles can deal with it. He uses a lath from the cart-shed to make splints; the maidservant tears up a sheet to make bandages; and the job is done.

Before he goes, though, he has to have something to eat; it is the farmer's courtesy. He goes down to the sitting room below: a big bed there, with a canopy of Indian cotton, and with sacks of wheat standing upright in the corners, an overflow from the store-room, which is to one side of the room, up three stone steps. At the foot of the bed there is a little table set with two silver jugs, and there Charles eats with the farmer's
daughter, the woman in the blue merino dress. She is running the farm while her father is ill, and they talk easily about the patient, the weather, the frosts, the marauding wolves. Charles then goes up to say goodbye to the patient. When he comes down Charles sees the woman in blue again. She is looking out at the wintry garden, with her forehead against the window: the bean poles have blown down. She is surprised to see him. She says, “Are you looking for something?” He says he is looking for his riding crop. They both start looking.

She sees where it has fallen between the sacks of wheat and the wall and she bends down to get it; at the same time, in a reflex of courtesy, to save her the trouble, Charles reaches down for it; and so it happens that while she is bent below him his chest touches her back.

She straightens up; she is embarrassed; she hands him the crop. It is a bull's pizzle, a
nerf de bœuf
. They are both country people; the detail may not matter to them. But that intimate moment with Emma is full of meaning for Charles. It brings him back to the farm the next day, and thereafter twice a week and more. He wears black gloves and his new waistcoat for these visits and wipes his shoes on the grass before he enters the house.

When Charles's wife, the middle-aged Dieppe widow, finds out that there is a young woman at the farm, and a convent-educated woman, she is enraged. She tells Charles that for all Emma's airs and graces and the silk dresses she wears to church, Emma's grandfather was a shepherd, her father is not as well off as he seems, and there was a cousin who nearly went to the assizes on a charge of wounding. She makes Charles
swear on the prayer-book that he will stay away from the farm, and the awful scene she has created ends with sobs and kisses and love. She is in control, after all; she has the money.

It happens now that the lawyer who has been looking after this money of the widow's vanishes one day, and with him goes the widow's famous fortune. (This happens in nineteenth-century novels.) Not a penny is left. There is the house, of course; the lawyer couldn't take that with him; but they find that the house has been heavily mortgaged. So in one day the widow with a fortune becomes a middle-aged pauper. Charles's father breaks a chair in his rage; he blames Charles's mother for going out of her way to arrange this marriage. Charles's wife begs Charles to protect her against the anger of his parents. But he can't. A week later, when she is hanging out clothes, she spits blood; she dies the next day, crying out, “Oh, God!” And Charles is free to woo and marry Emma.

I
REMEMBERED ALMOST
nothing of this carefully made and rich chapter. I suppose that on my earlier reading when I had got here I had a fair idea of the way the narrative was going and read to confirm what I thought I knew. I would have read fast to get to the substance of the book; I wouldn't have dawdled. But I found now I couldn't read fast. I wished to possess the details, to be able to recall them, before moving on. These details seemed to take me to the mind and experience of the writer. I was seeing things, light, evanescent things Flaubert himself might have seen and noted in quite different personal circumstances: the winter dawn, the boy sitting with his
wooden shoes beside the ditch, the farmer's sick room with the cotton nightcap flung to a far corner of the floor, the four-poster and the upright sacks of wheat in the sitting room.

At school in 1947 and 1948 our French teacher, a serious and enthusiastic man, fresh from his own university training, had told us that Flaubert wrote carefully, concerned with the musicality of his words. I knew only little bits of Flaubert, but privately I questioned what the teacher said; I thought that prose was prose, and poetry was poetry. And I thought now that in this chapter there was no self-regarding “style” such as we had been taught about; the language was plain and clean and brief. The elegance and the drama lay in the spare, unexpected detail (the boy carrying his wooden shoes, the farmer's nightcap on the floor); this was what caught at the reader, even when he knew the drift of the narrative. The detail of Pushkin's prose stories (many of them unfinished) was as selective. But this was profounder; this was more thought-out. This was prose that had to be read slowly. I felt that to read a whole book written at this pitch of intensity would be wearing; and I was glad to find, some time later, when I read the book through, that it was not all at that intensity.

It seems quite another writer—someone coarser, steeped in nineteenth-century orientalism and melodrama—who, five years later, published
Salammbô. Salammbô
is a historical novel about Carthage. After
Madame Bovary
it might seem a
jeu d'esprit
. a restful piece of self-indulgence, but Flaubert had thought about this novel for many years. The wish to do a book about antiquity might have come to him when he was thirty, long before
Madame Bovary
, during his year-long
travel with a friend in the Middle East. The travel excited him; he caught syphilis; he wrote scabrous, perhaps boastful letters about the brothels; they gave him his view of the countries he travelled in. But when he went back to Rouen he allowed this heady matter to go underground, so to speak. The book he began to write was
Madame Bovary
.

Flaubert said or wrote many things about his writing. He was an early self-publicist. He wished people to know that his writing didn't come easily, like Balzac's. It took time, and was original. (In this wish to comment on his own work he was a little like E. M. Forster, who wrote many different forewords to
A Passage to India
to explain the meaning of a book that hides its prompting and really has no meaning.) One of the more arresting things that Flaubert said—he said it to the Goncourts two years before
Salammbô
was published and it sounds like an early, teasing trailer for the book—was that he mentally gave a different colour to each of his books.
Bovary
was grey,
Salammbô
purple. He didn't care about narrative and character; he just did the colour. This is nonsense, but the idea of colour is interesting and must have come to Flaubert out of the labour and strain of the second book. It must have seemed to him that during the greyness of the work on
Bovary
he had been solacing himself with the thought of the purple book about Carthage to come, when he would let himself go. It gave a logic to the work he was doing, and it was a good idea for the Goncourts to play with.