March 12, 2008
Gustave Flaubert's last letters
Julian
Barnes reads between the lines of Flaubert's letters on sex, art, bankruptcy
and cliffs
Julian Barnes
Gustave Flaubert
CORRESPONDANCE
V: janvier 1876 – mai 1880
Edited by Jean Bruneau and Yvan
Leclerc
1,556pp. Gallimard. 62euros.
978 2 07 011612 6
The instrument case of Eugène
Delamare, a health officer based in the Normandy
village of Ry in the 1840s, was doubtless of standard
issue: so was Delamare himself. An inept if
conscientious fellow, he failed his medical exams, and only attained his modest
professional status through the benign intervention of the Rouen surgeon under
whom he trained. Two things, however, distinguished him, both unfortunate. The
first was his wife Delphine. She had dreams above her
status: her range of lovers and expensive tastes – yellow-and-black striped
curtains were particularly remarked upon – led in 1848 to financial and social
catastrophe; her exit strategy was suicide. Delamare
himself, imprisoned by grief, killed himself the following year. His second
misfortune lay in the name of the surgeon who had trained him: Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, father of a literary son. Thus Delphine Delamare became Emma
Bovary, a local fait divers became a great novel, and by the law of unintended
consequence Delamare’s instrument case – that is to
say, a real item whose only value lay in its theoretical connection to a
fictional character – was offered for sale in November 2007 by a Parisian
bookseller for ¤6,500. A sum which, had it been available to Mme Delamare, might have saved her from shame and thus obliged Gustave Flaubert to look elsewhere for the subject of his
first novel.
History’s whim, and scholarship’s
pertinacity, turn up strange trifles in the afterlife of a writer of
genius. For instance: in the late autumn of 1877, during the election campaign
whereby the reactionary President MacMahon sought to
hold on to power, an elderly man travelling in lower Normandy bought two large
carpenter’s pencils. He and his travelling companion used them to scrawl
scurrilous graffiti about MacMahon on walls and even
train seats. These minor jottings of a major novelist (who was researching Bouvard et Pécuchet
at the time) were never alluded to in his letters or recorded conversation.
Such anti-social behaviour – or freedom of expression
– only became known twenty-seven years after his death when his fellow traveller Edmond Laporte
mentioned it to a certain Lucien Descaves. And the
secret might even have died with the normally discreet Laporte
had not Flaubert harshly terminated their friendship two years after that
research trip.
More than any other writer of his time, Flaubert
sought to keep the inquisitive away from his life. “I have no biography”, he
once responded magisterially when asked for personal details. He rebuffed
journalists, and allowed no photograph of him to be published in his lifetime.
“Giving the public details about oneself”, he wrote to a friend six months
before he died, “is a bourgeois temptation I have always resisted.” He also
sought to deny posterity full access to his secrets. Alarmed by the posthumous
publication of two series of Mérimée’s love letters,
he had a letter-burning pact in 1877 with Maxime Du
Camp which wiped out “our life between 1843 and 1857”. Two years later, in an
eight-hour session with his protégé Maupassant, a lifetime’s incoming
correspondence was assessed, ordered, packeted, and
in some cases – certainly that of Louise Colet, and possibly of the English governess
Juliet Herbert – burnt.
Yet posterity is not so easily outfaced. Letters
cannot always be called back and destroyed; the content and purpose of gaps in
a correspondence can often be intuited; while the mere printing side by side of
virtually every known letter – something Flaubert can scarcely have envisaged –
will point up inconsistencies, contradictions and all the small hypocrisies of
polite behaviour. When Flaubert excuses himself in
May 1879 for not having visited the society beauty Jeanne de Loynes because he was “only in Paris for a few hours”, an
editor comes along 130 years later to point out that he was actually in town
for nearly three days. When he tell Edma Roger des Genettes in March of the same year that he has just
finished reading the whole of Spinoza for the third time, Jean Bruneau (whose life’s work the Correspondance
was) knows enough to explain that this boast can only apply to the Ethics,
since Flaubert did not discover the Tractatus until
1870. As for his sex life: the novelist is often caught lying to women friends
about where he is going, while asking male friends to cover for him, and later
reporting back to them what he had got up to.
The case of Juliet Herbert is particularly
instructive. Thirty years ago, the governess who tutored Flaubert’s niece
Caroline was just a fleeting presence in the letters; she was the subject of a
few laddish remarks between Flaubert and Louis Bouilhet, and also known to have completed the first (now
lost) translation of Madame Bovary, which she worked on side by side with the
author. But not a single letter between them has survived; nor has any
photograph of Miss Herbert ever surfaced. In 1980 Hermia
Oliver, in Flaubert and an English Governess, proposed that Juliet was a
greater and more continuing presence in Flaubert’s life than previously
assumed. And now the relationship is taken as not just lifelong but enduringly
sexual, so that when in 1878 – two decades after Juliet ceased work at Croisset – Flaubert signs off to Laporte
from Paris, “Je vous embrasse.
Votre GEANT (qui f . . . comme
un âne)”, the Pléiade edition soberly notes, “Perhaps an allusion to
Juliet Herbert”. It is hard not to wonder what the Herbert family would have
made of this.
The first volume of the Correspondance,
covering the years 1830–51, came out in 1973. Since then, it has taken
thirty-four years of editorial work to show the remaining twenty-nine years of
Flaubert’s life; loyal readers have thus had the strange sensation of growing
older at about the same rate as Flaubert did. Jean Bruneau
also grew old with him; and when he died in 2003, Yvan
Leclerc took over completion of an edition that is
virtually faultless (the only slight blemish on this fifth volume being Gallimard’s suppression of the index of letters, a useful
feature of its four predecessors). This final volume begins with the very last
letters of Flaubert’s long and key exchange with George Sand. To the end she is
preaching optimism, human virtue and social progress, still rebuking him for
his obsession with novelistic form, still dismissing his belief in authorial
absence as an “unhealthy fantasy”. He takes her well-meant scolding in good
heart, and explains yet again: “I cannot have a temperament other than my own.
Nor an aesthetic other than the one which is the
consequence of my temperament”. His life, he tells other correspondents, has
become “austere and farouche”; it consists of nothing but “work, memories and
dreams”. More than once he complains that the “mainspring” of his mechanism is
broken. He is finishing the Trois Contes
and writing Bouvard et Pécuchet; apart from that, these last four years are a time
of solitude and waiting for the end. The Hermit of Croisset
has reached his final eremitic stage.
It is true that his body is now running down: he
breaks a leg, and has only one “domino” left in his upper jaw; he suffers
lumbago, blepharitis, boils on the face, and that
perennial complaint of the sedentary writer, haemorrhoids.
His nerves, however, are the main problem: in 1879 the local doctor, Charles
Fortin, chidingly calls him a “big hysterical girl” – a judgement
which accords with Dr Hardy’s diagnosis five years previously (“a hysterical
old girl”). It is also true that these letters depict the life of an elderly uncompanioned man in all its mundane detail. He writes of
sponges and mouthwash and the high price of cauliflowers; he gets his
Strasbourg slippers soled; he has a pedicure; he buys sugar and apricots for marmelade; he mends the doorbell using a poker rather than
wire, loses the irrigator for his haemorrhoids, has the tiles in the bathroom and lavatory relaid. His dog “humiliates” him with its constant
erections, though amuses him by throwing up on the rug.
But the letters also undermine Flaubert’s
self-image of remorseless work and austere living: not just in the sexual
escapades during trips to Paris, but in his undiminished activism in various causes.
Much energy goes into lobbying, both in person and by letter. His longest
concern is trying to rescue the collapsing lumber business of Caroline’s
husband Ernest Commanville, by stirring up support
for a joint-stock company. But he is also politicking with ministers to find
employment for Laporte, Maupassant and a certain De
Le Plé; he is the promoter, almost manager, of Maupassant’s initial career as a poet and playwright, and
uses his influence to get an obscenity charge against the young man withdrawn;
he is on committees to erect memorials to Bouilhet in
Rouen and Sand in Paris; he harries publishers about a collected edition of Bouilhet’s poems; he pushes Caroline’s incipient career as
a painter. And on his own account, he is constantly working for re-editions of
his novels, for the staging of his (mediocre) féerie
“Le Château des coeurs”, for the operatic version of Salammbô (Verdi is rumoured to be
keen). It’s true that these projects had mixed success – Commanville
went bankrupt, “Le Château des coeurs”never made the
stage, and George Sand had to wait until 1904 for her Paris statue – but being
a man of influence was also part of Flaubert’s self-image. Though he despised
“business”, he also fancied himself, sometimes to a comical degree, as being
good at it when necessary. The hermit as fixer.
In these last years, he sometimes referred to
himself as “the last of the Church Fathers”. Caroline, in her memoir Heures d’autrefois, wrote that “he did look like some solitary figure from
Port-Royal”; and when he went to a funeral in Rouen Cathedral in 1878, his
clerical overcoat and silk skullcap caused one of the undertakers to address
him as “Monsieur l’Abbé”. But his true church, as
always, was “sacrosanct literature”, of which he was widely acknowledged as
high priest, cardinal, pope. Younger writers sought
his advice and blessing; the rising generation gave a dinner of praise and
thanks to himself, Zola and Edmond de Goncourt, a courtesy returned by this
trio of elders.
But here again the law of unintended
consequence kicks in. It is bad enough that the enduring success of
Madame Bovary has skewed, and in his view diminished, public and critical
appreciation of his subsequent books (“I assure you that if I could afford to,
I’d let it go out of print”). Worse, he finds that, as literary history begins
to solidify around him, his whole position seems to have been misunderstood.
The artistic world has become irritatingly full of schools and -isms: Realism,
Naturalism, Impressionism (“A bunch of jokers who have convinced themselves,
and want to convince us, that they’ve discovered the Mediterranean!”). And now
he finds himself hailed as one of the founders and princes of Realism. This despite having said that it was because he hated Realism that
he wrote Madame Bovary. Even if he also said that
success, when it came, always struck for the wrong reason.
What can he do except continue to preach his same
high-minded heresy? As once he had argued against Sand’s virtuous idealism, now
he must argue against Realism’s notion that truth to Nature is enough. “Such
materialism makes me indignant.” It is not just presumptuous and inadequate as
an aesthetic, it is also ahistorical. “What is this
mania for believing they have just discovered Nature?” he asks Léon Hennique three months before
his death. For him, as for any true artist, Reality is only a springboard,
assisting the imaginative leap towards the final aim: Beauty. He explains the
matter – while disguising it as a straightforward request for information – to his
most gifted pupil (and family friend) Maupassant. He is writing Bouvard et Pécuchet
and needs a sheer chalk cliff for a scene in which his two protagonists, after
a discussion about the end of the world, are to be panicked by a sudden rockfall. It must be a particular kind of cliff, with
horizontal layers of flint. He has searched for what he wants without success
near Le Havre; but Maupassant, who knows the stretch of coast between Bruneval and Étretat, might be a
more successful location scout. This may look like a Realist having a landscape
researched for him, the more so when Maupassant comes back with what Flaubert
admits is “perfect information”. But perfect information is not the same as
what he requires: “This is my plan, and I cannot change it. Nature must lend
itself to my plan”. So this is the inverse of Naturalism: the writer’s
conception is primary, reality is subsidiary – and when the appropriate reality
is found, it must neither contradict the artist’s imaginative vision, nor seek
to impose its own law upon it.
The colleague to whom Flaubert is aesthetically
closest in these last years is Turgenev (who translated two of the Trois Contes into Russian); he
admires Zola’s native genius and powerful work rate, but deplores his lack of
art and his opinion-mongering. As for the famous dead: he still finds no time
for “that idiot Stendhal”, and revises his opinion of Balzac after reading his
letters. Though he was undoubtedly a “great man”, he was neither “a poet”, nor,
indeed, “a writer”; merely “an immense fellow of the second rank”. When giving
Maupassant advice about his verse he signs himself “Gve
Flaubert sévère mais juste”. There may be valetudinarianism and old-codgery in much of his attitude to life, but when it comes
to art he remains both an encourager of the young and an admirer of what is
true and principled. Tolstoy (until he starts “philosophizing” at the end of
War and Peace); Berlioz, who also embodies the Flaubertian
dictum that hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue; and
Maupassant, whose Boule-de-suif he immediately acclaims as a masterpiece.
Maupassant represents the best hope of the next
generation; in consequence, Flaubert is both avuncularly
encouraging and “severe but just”. He sees a young writer of high talent and
poor discipline. He tells him to work harder, explaining that the religion of
art demands the sacrifice of life. He warns against the dangers of too many
whores, too much rowing, too much exercise: “A
civilized person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim”. Maupassant
complains that sex is becoming monotonous; Flaubert tells him to cut it out for
a while. Maupassant complains that “events are repetitive”; Flaubert orders him
to look at them more carefully. Maupassant complains that “There aren’t enough
phrases”; Flaubert replies, “Seek and ye shall find!”.
Maupassant appears to be sinking into self-indulgence and self-pity; Flaubert
warns him, “Sadness is a vice”.
Flaubert himself avoids sadness by a mixture of
pride, stoicism and exasperation. Provokers of exasperation are many. Among
them: MacMahon, democracy, the moral order, the “Mediocracy”, the bourgeoisie, the inhabitants of Rouen,
stupidity (“There’s only one crime in the world – stupidity”), journalism,
publishers (“soft turds”), illustrations in books and
literary magazines, and finally, always, the abuse, depreciation,
misunderstanding and hatred of art. These categories frequently overlap. In a
letter to his niece three weeks before he dies, Flaubert writes that stupidity
about art comes less from the public than from “1) the government, 2) theatre
managers, 3) publishers, 4) newspaper editors, and 5) official critics – in
short, from holders of power, because power is essentially stupid”. His remarks
about the literary marketplace will find resonance with writers today. After
listing the strengths and weaknesses of a Daudet novel, he adds, “But if he
corrected his faults, his sales would drop”. And for any literary novelist
inclined to exasperation at the fact that for several weeks last year the
hardback novel which the largest number of Britons wanted to buy was written by
a minor celebrity with major breast implants, there is slight comfort in an
equivalent event from 1878. Flaubert’s publisher Charpentier
had promised – for the second year running – to bring out Saint Julien l’Hospitalier in a special
New Year gift format, but at the last minute reneged, preferring instead a more
commmercial text by Sarah Bernhardt about going up in
a hot-air balloon. Flaubert huffs and puffs (“Charpentier
prefers Sarah Bernhardt’s literature to mine!”); while Turgenev, bracingly sane
on this as on everything, tries to talk him down. Why should such a “pinprick”
affect his friend so much? The book is “stupidly written and miserably
illustrated”; it is “already as forgotten as last year’s fashions”.
The final year of Flaubert’s life is, however,
darkened by an exasperation – and more – which not
even Turgenev could have lanced. Edmond Laporte had
known Flaubert since 1866, and had been his closest friend since the deaths of Bouilhet and Jules Duplan. He was
also his travelling companion, fellow graffiti-scrawler,
researcher and secretary (for none of which he appears to have been paid),
while working on his own behalf as the director of a lace factory, and a local
politician. It was Laporte who had given Flaubert his
dog (the one with humiliating erections, the one that threw up on the rug), Laporte who fetched the novelist home from Switzerland in
1874, Laporte who collaborated on the Copie of Bouvard et Pécuchet. When Commanville’s business began to fail, he helped by
guaranteeing Caroline’s signature on a document of repayment. The guarantee was
renewed; but then Laporte fell into financial
difficulty himself. If his debt was called in, he would have to mortgage his
house: a proof of financial incompetence which might compromise a political
career. The crisis came in 1879. Caught between the deviously self-interested Commanville and the commandingly self-interested Flaubert,
finding himself adrift in a bureaucratic job in Nevers, his future deeply uncertain, Laporte
declined to renew his guarantee yet again. Flaubert instantly cut him off,
charging him with “egotism” and “treason”. Laporte
became “mon ex-ami”; his
letters thereafter went unanswered. It is – along with his bullying of Caroline
into marrying Commanville in the first place – the
least honourable action of Flaubert’s life. And it is
compounded when he dies. At the funeral, Caroline and her husband put
Maupassant on the door to keep Laporte away.
But the law of unintended consequence applied here
too. Laporte’s daughter was to marry the Flaubert
scholar René Dumesnil. However, in Caroline’s eyes he
was forever tainted by his father-in-law’s “treachery”. As Jean Bruneau explained in the third volume of the Correspondance, Dumesnil’s
marriage “for a long time slowed down and handicapped Flaubert studies, because
the Commanville archive remained closed to him, as it
did to his great friend René Descharmes, the greatest
Flaubertiste of his era”.
When Flaubert died, on May 8, 1880, the house at Croisset was sealed, in accordance with French law. On May
20 the seals were removed and an inventory of goods made by Maître Bidault. This thirteen-page document was published for the
first time in the Bulletin Flaubert–Maupassant (no 8 – 2000). Everything in the
house was itemized and valued, from the contents of the writer’s wardrobe (280
francs) to a mixed lot consisting of “one soup tureen, one salad bowl, two
serving dishes, a pair of kitchen scales, another salad bowl, and a quantity of
pottery” (2 francs). On May 22, the lawyer valued Flaubert’s library, which
included his much-read (if not as much as he claimed) Spinoza, the works of
Louis Bouilhet, ten volumes of Zola, thirteen of
Daudet, thirteen of Maxime Du Camp, eighty of George
Sand (gift of the author), twenty by the Goncourts,
and the three-volume works of “Louise Collet” (sic).
Maître Bidault also had some trouble spelling
Flaubert’s book-titles, writing Salammbô in two
different ways, neither of them correct. The final section of the inventory
listed “diverse manuscripts of the works of M. Flaubert”, from “Madame Bovary autographe” to “Sallambo autographe” to “the unfinished manuscript of a work called Bouvard et Pécuchet”.
The household goods were estimated to be worth 5,315 francs, the library 1,610,
and there were 2,515 francs in cash found in the drawer of a bookcase. The wise
lawyer left the column beside the list of manuscripts blank, “given the
impossibility of valuing them at the present time”.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3537862.ece
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Times Newspapers Ltd.