A Master of the Quill

Gustave Flaubert’s precepts are not exactly encouraging to a biographer. Convinced that the writer should never sing about himself or be the subject of his works, he maintained that it was the artist’s duty to pretend that he did not exist. Only words and the beauty of form mattered. Flaubert quipped that he was an homme-plume, a creature of the quill, and that the only adventures in his life were the sentences he wrote. Even his 11/2-year voyage to Egypt and around the Middle East in the company of his friend Maxime Du Camp was less meaningful to him than his daydreams of travel while on his divan before and after the journey and the exotic verbal imagery into which he translated those dreams.

In his biography “Flaubert: A Life,” Geoffrey Wall skillfully shows what efforts went into taming these wildest yearnings and transmuting them into worlds as different as the drab provincial setting of “Madame Bovary” and the mystic African landscape of “Salammbo.” The truth is that Flaubert execrated “reality,” even though he became the high priest of realism. It is no doubt this abhorrence of quotidian mediocrity that made him so sympathetic to Emma Bovary’s frustrations and aspirations. Flaubert’s own quest, however, was not for carnal entanglements but for ideal forms. His passionate cult of Art (the word “art” is always capitalized) required quasi-monastic dedication and sacerdotal fervor. Sustained anger against philistine values kept him going. He claimed to love his work the way an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scrapes his belly.

Flaubert claimed his ultimate ambition was to write a book “about nothing,” un livre sur rien, held together not by its subject matter (the story of a flea could be as beautiful as the story of Alexander the Great) but by the artificer’s skill, by the coherence of its structure and texture, by the poet’s mastery of the incantatory secrets of language. For the novelist is a poet, and a line of prose, according to Flaubert, is as immutable as a line of poetry.

Yet Flaubert’s life was mired in distressing reality, notably in illness--epilepsy, beginning in his early 20s, syphilis later, painful and unsightly boils at various stages. He came to welcome the nervous disorder that declared itself while he was a law student, since his epileptic seizures protected him against the pressures of his career-oriented father, who became concerned primarily about his son’s health. Wall provides a lively account of Flaubert’s family background and the setting of his childhood in the residential wing of the Hotel-Dieu of Rouen, the hospital where his father was chief surgeon and where the boy grew up close to the dissecting room, which exacerbated his morbid imagination. Flaubert liked to recall that the flies hovering around the flowers and his own face were attracted by the smell of decay. Wall’s portrait of the father is a refreshing corrective to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Family Idiot,” which insistently presents the father as repressive and oppressive. Dr. Achille-Cleophas Flaubert, a venerated figure in Rouen, combined energy, skepticism and generosity. Medicine was for him the new religion of humanity.

Equally satisfying is Wall’s depiction of the young Flaubert’s appearance and moods as his friends might have observed them. Unusually tall, increasingly corpulent, endowed with a stentorian voice, a walrus mustache and an exceedingly loud laugh, he was fond of lounging in a loose-fitting white burnoose--a hooded garment which, in addition to allowing for comfort and a display of “Oriental” eccentricity, corresponded to his fantasy of himself as a monk or a hermit. Flaubert derived much pleasure from masculine company and conversation. His friends--his mentor Alfred Le Poittevin, his travel companion and first “editor” Du Camp, his alter ego Louis Bouilhet and Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev--were all subjected to his preposterous jokes, his declamatory statements, his prolonged readings of his own manuscripts bellowed to the point of hoarseness.

Flaubert also displayed--especially in his writings--an androgynous sensitivity. In an early article on “Madame Bovary,” Baudelaire held the view that Flaubert had infused his virile blood into Emma’s veins. Sartre contended that in writing about Emma, Flaubert disguised himself as a woman and that the result is a masked confession. Wall judiciously links this feminine sensitivity to Flaubert’s epilepsy. His seizures were a stigma, yet they provided the freedom to devote himself exclusively to writing, since it was understood by his parents that he should not pursue a career. According to Wall, the seizures also enabled him to feel an affinity for extreme forms of psychic expressions and for the ecstatic visions of saints and sinners he so liked to describe. Wall hypothesizes that epilepsy allowed Flaubert to acquire a “sixth sense.”

Flaubert’s writings blend surprising contradictions. His disciplined prose and realistic settings may seem incompatible with his quixotic enthusiasms, his taste for freaks and monsters, his fascination with violence and mystic experiences. His hostile attentiveness to the social and political realities of his day (the period of Louis-Philippe, the revolution of 1848, the materialistic and prudish regime of the Second Empire that put him on trial for the so-called immorality of “Madame Bovary”) is at first glance hard to reconcile with his addiction to the poetry of ancient history that led to true debauches of the imagination. He claimed to carry the love of antiquity in his very guts.

But these contradictions are interdependent. His erotic fantasies are intertwined with hatred of the flesh, an awareness of the instantaneous decay of all things, crises of abstinence and even dreams of castration that further inflamed his senses. Masturbation, more than a habit, became for him a metaphor for writing. Much like Baudelaire, his contemporary, Flaubert conceived of ennui not as ordinary boredom but as a devastating taedium vitae, a metaphysical yawn ready to swallow the world yet betraying insatiable desires and a longing for the inaccessible.

Wall’s biography of Flaubert, even when it deals with complex issues, remains unpretentious. At times the tone is almost conversational but heightened by sharp formulations. Wall writes of Flaubert’s “physiology of the imagination,” pointing out that the famous impersonality meant not self-effacement but a bewildering self-multiplication. Flaubert was not only able to turn himself into a frustrated, rapturous woman but also conceived of numerous incarnations throughout his life, seeing himself in turn as a bandit, a mule driver, an acrobat, an oriental potentate, a pirate. To George Sand, with whom he shared (mostly by letter) an autumnal intimacy, he confided that he dreamed of having been a monk, a soldier in the Punic Wars, a boatman on the Nile. With all his talk of living like a monk, Flaubert spent stretches of time in Paris, frequenting literary friends as well as members of the Imperial family.

The major figures in Flaubert’s life, in addition to his father, stand out clearly: the protective and possessive widowed mother sentimentally blackmailing her son into remaining under her watch; the ambitious, hyperactive Du Camp, with whom relations became increasingly acrimonious; and of course Louise Colet, the invasive mistress, haunting him with her endless grievances, whom he learned to keep at bay by all conceivable forms of coitus interruptus and by sending her disquisitions on the art of writing instead of the love letters she expected.

At many a point, but always with taste, Wall comes up with an especially witty turn, as when he refers to Colet’s “incurably minor poetry”; to Flaubert’s life in Croisset under the wing of his hypochondriac mother as “perpetually filial, infantile, and asexual”; to “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” as a “stubbornly amphibious oddity” or--quite brilliantly--to the novelist’s vision as focusing “with equal acuity, at six inches, at six feet, and at infinity.”

In order not to burden the text with footnotes and elaborate references, Wall regrettably adopts a system of endnotes that leaves unclear at times under what circumstances and by whom certain statements were made. Some facile psychologizing might also have been avoided. It is not very helpful to learn that a given passage from a letter seems to jump “straight out of the unconscious,” that there is an “unconscious meaning” to the father accidentally burning Gustave’s writing hand with boiling water or that “looking for the Mother” was the novelist’s great erotic theme. Fortunately, Wall indulges only sporadically in similar affirmations.

More debatable is the underplaying of Flaubert’s juvenilia. It is true that Sartre read too much into those early exercises. Yet they are revealing. “November” and “Sentimental Education” are now studied in the classroom. As for “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” it surely will not do to dismiss it as an “extravagant impasse” when Flaubert, between 1848 and 1874, reworked three versions and was clearly obsessed with its images and themes. Baudelaire, upon reading some fragments published in 1856, immediately recognized that this dazzling, disquieting text was the secret chamber of Flaubert’s mind. It is in fact a compendium of motifs projecting the central feature of bovarysm, a craving for the impossible.

Flaubert was a perfectionist. His intransigent refusal to publish anything that did not satisfy him is summed up in a reply to Du Camp that Wall does well to quote: “May I die like a dog rather than try to rush through even one sentence before it is perfectly ripe.” Books were not to be written spontaneously. Like the pyramids, they were built with a plan, stone by stone, and that work, Flaubert insisted, was backbreaking. Ultimately, however, it was not so much the pangs of Art that filled him with awe. It was the tragic sense of being trapped between the difficulty of using words and the ineffable experience that can never be rendered by language. This struggle with language and the nature of the unsayable is at the core of Flaubert’s modernity.