Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (20 page)

Poets, in order to write great poetry, don't need to see as much as novelists must in order to write great novels. If literature is a spectrum (and Hugo hogs the rainbow), then Mallarmé is working in ultra-violet. Nowadays we probably honour him more in the breach than in the observance. Anthropologists, we hunch over the wise-looking magician, and take what he does much at his own estimation; but capturing a sacred wind with an array of hempen knots is only one of poetry's skills. If the
Mona Lisa
ate asparagus, it would show in her urine; and this would make her richer, both as a woman and as a subject for art.

*
It is now in public hands: “Courbet's oil,
L'Origine du monde,
was owned / by Madame Jacques Lacan and through some tax / shenanigans became the Musée d'Orsay's. / Go see it there. Beneath the pubic bush— / a matted Rorschach blot—beneath blanched thighs / of a fat and bridal docility, / a curved and rosy closure says, ‘Ici!' ” From John Updike's characteristically titled “Two Cunts in Paris”
(American and Other Poems,
2001).

*
Flaubert's maxim: “Honours dishonour, titles degrade, office-holding ossifies.” By the time he wrote this, however, he had already accepted the
Légion d'honneur.

*
“For a start leave out / The real, because it's cheap / Too much precision will wreck / The dreaminess of what you write.”

*
“Hence, messenger / by tram, coach or ferry—it doesn't matter— / And take this to No.
2
, rue Gounod / Home of our friend Georges Rodenbach.”

*
They ordered these things more efficiently in France. In Britain, thirteen years later, Yeats had to make his own pronouncement on the death of Swinburne: “I'm the King of the Cats now.” Compare Berryman's uncertainty on the death of Robert Frost: “Who's Number One?”

(9)
Flaubert's Death-Masks

Flaubert's death-mask

(a) Biographer

Alcoholism softens the flesh—or at least, it did in nineteenth-century France. When Verlaine died, Mallarmé watched a cast being taken of the face of this staunchly self-destructive drinker. He reported to the poet Georges Rodenbach that he would never forget “the wet, soggy sound made by the removal of the death-mask from his face, an operation in which part of his beard and mouth had come away too.”

After the morticians, along come the biographers: they, too, carefully mould the wax to preserve every last tuck and wrinkle, aiming to convey the final, decisive expression on the lips; but sometimes the flesh is soft, and the reverent process proves destructive. Bits of Flaubert's moustache, for instance, have been coming away for a century. When he died in 1880, the
Times
obituarist confused him with his brother Achille and said he had once trained as a surgeon (the Paper of Record also retitled his last novel
Bouvard et Peluchet).
The first proper study of Flaubert, by Emile Faguet (1899; Englished in 1914), firmly and misleadingly declared that the writer's affair with Louise Colet “may be considered as the only sentimental episode of any importance in Flaubert's life.” In 1967 Enid Starkie prefaced her two-volume account with a portrait of “Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter”—thereby managing to rip off his entire face in one go, since the picture was in fact of Louis Bouilhet. Sartre was less of an impression-taker, more an imposer. In
L'Idiot de la famille
he seared the novelist with a terrifying theoretical grid—like an imperious chef branding false scorch-marks on to a steak after it's been cooked.

In 1859, Ernest Feydeau wrote to Flaubert asking for biographical details to pass on to a journalist. It was an inept request. “I have no biography,” Flaubert replied, and went on to complain:

As soon as you become an artist, it seems that grocers, legal registrars, customs clerks, bootboys and others feel themselves obliged to take a personal interest in your life. And there are others to inform them whether you are dark or fair, witty or melancholic, how many summers you have lived, and whether you are a devotee of the bottle or keen on playing the mouth-organ. I, on the other hand, believe that a writer should leave behind him nothing but his works.

It was a vain hope; and it would be little comfort to Flaubert that the disobedient pursuit of every detail of his life has on the whole been carried out by scholars and critics. They were, for him, the moral equivalent of bootboys and customs clerks; all his life he trawled their work for idiocies high and low to include in the “Copie” of
Bouvard et Pécuchet.

Yet to a certain extent Flaubert might still be able to say today, “I have no biography.” There was no early fact-dredging, no tracking-down of the faithful servant, the reticent mistress, the garrulous supplier of cabbages. So the interpreters, the dreamers, and the wonky theorists got in there without the sifters and sorters having first done their business. The best biographers in English either stopped half-way (like Francis Steegmuller) or were too brief (like Philip Spencer).

Now comes Herbert Lottman, the diligent biographer of Camus. Pre-eminently a dredger and sifter, an archive-pounder and source-badgerer, Mr. Lottman arrives approximately a hundred years too late, yet still needed. He arranges the known facts about Flaubert's life, and the known opinions of his contemporaries, with an effi ciency that has not been seen before. As against this, he writes badly, translates awkwardly, has no apparent opinion on Flaubert's works, and has little feel for the nineteenth century; he alternates stretches of drab invisibility with outbursts of perkily certain judgement, and is often crassly up-to-date. When Flaubert gets the pox, Lottman comments pompously: “The modern reader will be struck by the absence of respect for personal prophylactics …” Given the messy history of Flaubertian biography, this book has a certain value. But its formidable irritations confirm that the chuckling curse Flaubert put on his biographers hasn't lost its power.

He was modern literature's archetypal rewriter; he told us that prose is like hair—it shines with combing. Mr. Lottman's text is a tangle of nits and knots, a flour-bomb of dandruff, a delta of split ends. Flaubert, to begin with (line one), isn't a great writer but “a seminal figure.” His family roots in Champagne are swiftly outlined—perhaps too swiftly, Lottman worries: “Indeed, we have hardly made this Champagne region seem attractive. It is a countryside of chalky soil whose perfect grape, when dealt with in a certain way, becomes that fizzy wine.” Gustave grew up in Rouen: “One would love to be able to see the world as this child saw it.” At the age of six or seven, he passed a recently-employed guillotine and saw bloodied cobbles: “Surely every child can call up at least one unbearable memory, even if guillotines and heads in baskets are harder to find now.” Later, his education began: “Gustave went to school during the tail end of romanticism, which explains how romanticism was able to enter the classroom.” And so on.

Having reassured the timid reader that champagne comes from Champagne, Lottman similarly tickets and dockets the French nineteenth-century literary scene.
Les Fleurs du mal
is an example of “the liveliest modern writing”; Musset was once “a young star of French letters” (who also lacked the proper respect for prophylactics); Juliette Adam is “this premodern feminist”; the European phenomenon of Byronism is reduced to “Byron's works in French translation were among the best-selling books in the country in the decade preceding Flaubert's schooling”; while Louise Colet is jauntily characterized as “the poetry hustler.” This last phrase indicates the comparative shallowness of Lottman's depth of field: what strikes him as “hustling” was normal behaviour then (and still hasn't exactly died out). If Louise Colet was a hustler, so were Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

Then we come to the books. “The novel can be read for the story,” Lottman tells us of
Madame Bovary,
and this is, alas, his most incisive remark. His one-paragraph plot-summary also includes the sentence: “Meanwhile, Charles moves from one professional humiliation to another, despite the paternal counselling of the village pharmacist, Homais.” Perhaps “because of” would have been apter than “despite”; though this would, of course, mean something entirely different. Similar plonkingness affects Lottman's brief account of
Bouvard et Pécuchet. Trois contes
is “a book of three remarkable short stories”; and the third chapter of
Saint Julien l'Hospitalier
is summarized as follows: “When he discovers that he has indeed slain his parents, he abandons everything to beg, then befriends a leper and goes to Heaven.” Rarely can the process of attaining sanctity have been made to sound so jog-a-jogly routine; presumably Mr. Lottman thinks that the process of “befriending” a leper normally involves lying naked on top of him, chest to pustulated chest, mouth to mouth, warming him up with your body. Wisely in the circumstances, Lottman doesn't try too ambitious a plot-summary of
La Tentation de Saint-Antoine.
He also gets by without any mention of
style indirect libre.

Nor for that matter does he quote the Flaubertian motto
ne pas conclure
—no doubt advisedly. On the contentious topics of Flaubert's private life—such as epilepsy, homosexuality, and anti-Semitism—Lottman is briskly conclusive when brisk conclusion is not just unwise but impossible. Zola was disappointed on first meeting the author of
Madame Bovary
because
(inter alia)
he found his hero had a taste for paradox; and Lottman has a similar aversion to the unresolved, the ambiguous, the self-contradictory—the human, in other words. For instance, Flaubert is famously reported by Amélie Bosquet as having said:
Madame Bovary, c'est moi.
Lottman, in his pertly titled chapter “Louise Takes a Ride,” refers us to Flaubert's letter to Louise Colet of 6 July 1852, in which he mocks Musset and the idea of making art by setting one's personal feelings to music. This, Flaubert conceded, had been his failing in
La Tentation:
“In the place of Saint Antony, you find me.” Lottman at this point comments: “He would not make that mistake again. (So much for one remark attributed to Flaubert, that
Madame Bovary, c'est moi.)” So much for …
The comment must therefore have been invented, QED. Alternative factors Mr. Lottman might have considered: 1) Writers are frequently inconsistent in their statements about their art, and a gap is common between theory and practice; 2) The remark was intended to describe the almost psychopathic closeness which sometimes develops between novelist and character (Flaubert felt nauseous when Emma took poison);3) It was a joke, the wearily ironic response of a writer fed up with being pestered for the “real” identity of his most famous creation;4) It was a reference to Cervantes's supposed remark on his deathbed, declaring himself to be the original of Don Quixote; 5) All of these at the same time.

The toughest part of Lottman's book to read is the first half, since what is known of Flaubert's life up to about 1860 has been much-repeated, and there is little for him to add: but after this point, he grinds a grudging recognition from his victim. He is particularly informative on the non-artistic aspects of Flaubert's life: on his exact financial position at various times, his relationship with his publishers, his “hustling” to promote his niece's career as a painter, and his own fiasco in the theatre. If you want to know where Flaubert was at a particular time, what he was doing, what he wrote to friends, and what those friends were saying behind his back, then this is the first book you should turn to. And if Mr. Lottman doesn't always make the desired point, he at least provides the facts from which the point can be made. For instance, Edmond de Goncourt, leaving an ill-attended Sunday afternoon
chez
Flaubert, discussed with Zola the “lack of radiance” around their host, for all his bonhomie and fame. Was this just a typical bit of Goncourt depreciation? How might this “lack of radiance” be quantified? Later, when Flaubert dies, Zola estimates the number of mourners at about three hundred. This may remind us of another funeral in the same city 120 pages earlier, that of Bouilhet (fellow Rouennais but a far less successful writer): it was attended by two thousand mourners. Lottman allows us to make such comparisons simply by including everything he knows.

One particularly successful strand to the book concerns Flaubert's relationship with Juliet Herbert, the English governess who first came to Croisset in 1855, and with whom Flaubert seems to have pursued a liaison for a quarter of a century, right up until his death. It is a story full of absences and negatives: their regular meetings in Paris have to be deduced from his regular lies, the dates of her summer holidays, his anonymous sexual boasting, plus stray hints in letters to his niece. The evidence was remarkably and convincingly assembled in 1980 by Hermia Oliver
(Flaubert and an English Governess)
, on whom Lottman naturally relies. But the simple insertion of Juliet Herbert into the novelist's larger life (instead of her standing as a story by herself) allows us to judge more fairly how much weight to give her in his overall emotional life: more than we ever imagined, is the answer. It also offers us a comparison of evasions: between the excuses the young Flaubert used to put off meeting Louise Colet and the excuses the old Flaubert used to find space in his year for his
rendezvous
with Juliet Herbert.