Julian Barnes's review of Volume Four of Flaubert's Correspondance was
published in the TLS of December 18, 1998.
Gustave Flaubert. Edited by Jean Bruneau
Correspondance Volume Four: 1869-1875
1,484pp. Paris: Gallimard. 470fr.
2 07 011436 8
The beginning of Flaubert's decline and George Sand's last years
In the late autumn of 1875, Flaubert spent six weeks at Concarneau with the
naturalist Georges Pouchet. While his friend dissected fish and molluscs,
Flaubert took daily sea-baths, gorged himself on lobster, eavesdropped on
the table talk of a sardiners' club to confirm the "bottomlessness of
human stupidity", and wrote to his friends. His morale is extremely
low, his financial state parlous, his health poor, his brain worn out. He
has put aside Bouvard et Pecuchet as being too difficult. "Les beaux
jours sont finis", he writes to Turgenev. "La fin de ma vie n'est
pas drole", he tells Edma Roger des Genettes. He likens himself, in a
letter to his niece Caroline, to a piece of dead seaweed, torn from its
moorings and blown aimlessly about. Caroline urges a more stoical seaside
comparison upon him: he must be like a rock. It is unwise to bandy metaphors
with Flaubert; she should know, he tells her in reply, that old granite
often turns into layers of clay. Even more candidly, he tells Edmond de
Goncourt that he awaits the first sign of some mortal illness with
impatience. Goncourt knows him well enough, he adds, to realize that "Je
ne pose pas!" This fourth volume of Jean Bruneau's impeccable edition
of Flaubert's Correspondance was supposed to be the final one; and at first
it is surprising, even mildly disappointing, that it isn't. To take Flaubert
to within four and a half years of a death he is already crying out for, and
yet not give the reader closure: isn't this a trifle cruel to both parties?
A further anxiety is provoked by the realization that the major exchanges of
this volume, between Flaubert and George Sand, about art, politics and
optimism - exchanges in which Flaubert lays out his mature aesthetic credo -
are already well known and well edited. The correspondence with Turgenev is
also quite familiar. Jean Bruneau has, with his usual tenacity, turned up
seventy-six new letters, and managed, by consulting autographs, to complete
ninety-nine imperfect letters from the Conard edition. But will these, and
the old, lesser letters, be sufficient to sustain interest? Could this feel
like a holding operation?
Perhaps so, if we take Flaubert's letters as "merely" letters, to be
sifted for items of biographical fact and intellectual doctrine. If,
however, we treat the Correspondence as Flaubert's best biography - or, if
not quite biography, since that suggests objectivity and an illusion of
completeness, as the novel of his life, a novel filled with all life's
partiality, meandering, fussy detail and hovering incompleteness - then here
is a fourth volume to make us regret in advance that the next will
unavoidably be the final one. What does it add to those fierce and lofty
opinions which have been so often reprinted down the century? Only his life,
his life.
And these seven years are the great wailing hinge of Flaubert's existence.
There is a cruel structure and movement to this penultimate volume of the
novel of his life. It opens with Flaubert, publicly and privately, the
mature, successful, industrious and social being he frequently proclaims he
isn't. He is completing L'Education sentimentale, and just beginning, he
thinks, to understand what a novel could be; he is assiduous at Princesse
Mathilde's salon, rather preening himself on his insider status; he is also
engaged on one of those pieces of socio-political scheming - to get
Caroline's husband, Ernest Commanville, named Prussian vice-consul in Dieppe
- which he has considerable taste for, and imagines himself good at. (The
record is incomplete, but it somehow seems typical that if this was what
Flaubert was manoeuvring for, Commanville ended up instead as Turkish
vice-consul.) Apart from the regular vast irritations to a man of his
sensibility - critics, newspapers, politics, progressives, Parisians,
provincials, Nature - the world is as satisfying a place as it might be. "1869",
he predicts to the Princess in June of that year, "will have been a
good year for me."
The novelist should have known about dramatic irony: 1869 was precisely the
starting point of a catastrophic decade filled with deaths, illness,
financial ruin, precipitate old age and thunderously intrusive History. Less
than five weeks after his blithe prediction, he was writing again to
Princesse Mathilde to report the death of Louis Bouilhet, the friend he
variously described as half his brain, his literary compass and his left
testicle. The mixed reception given to L'Education sentimentale later that
year hinted that Flaubert would never again repeat the success of Madame
Bovary or Salammbo. The Franco-Prussian War tore at his view of France (and
Prussia); while the Commune reinforced his contempt for "mad-dog"
utopianists, and his marginally greater contempt for the plush idiots of the
Right. (One of his key objections to the Commune was that it made the French
forget to carry on hating the Prussians.) Jules Duplan, his closest friend
after Bouilhet, died in 1870, followed by Sainte-Beuve (his most important
critical supporter), Jules de Goncourt (whose death reduced to three the
original seven Magny diners), Gautier and Ernest Feydeau. His mother - the
mother who told him his mania for sentences had dried up his heart - died in
1872; his grief showed how wrong she had been. Finally, the collapse of
timber prices ruined Commanville and with him, effectively, Flaubert.
After such battering, his health, always fragile, cracks; in these pages he
suffers from rheumatism, angina, eczema, swollen glands, dysentery, gout and
the continuing effects of syphilis. A doctor tells him he is like a "vieille
femme hysterique"; he agrees. Looking back, he judges that he was
always afraid of life; he envies other professions, other ways of living; he
suffers child-regret. His existence has been arid, "laborious and
austere". But a man is not master of his destiny: life just pushes you
along, until one day you find yourself in a hole, with nothing to be done
about it, and you stay there, all alone, waiting for "le trou definitif".
"Since happiness is impossible in this world", he tells Elisa
Schlesinger in 1872, "we must strive for serenity." This is one of
the insistent themes of the years 1869-75. But striving for serenity has the
same internal contradiction as practising spontaneity. Nevertheless,
Flaubert does his best - that best naturally consisting largely of words, of
assurances to himself and to others. "Il faut etre philosophe", he
repeatedly declares; yet he never had the temperament of a philosopher. "I
pass from exasperation to prostration, then I rise from annihilation to
rage, so that my mean emotional temperature is a state of annoyance."
These fluctuations of the temperamental mercury have their comic moments. In
the run-up to the first night of his play Le Candidat, he assures Caroline
that he is quite unconcerned by the myriad last-minute changes to the
production. Everything is now in the lap of the gods.
In fact, he is no longer thinking at all about the play: "Tel est mon
caract re." As far as he is concerned, Le Candidat is something his
brain has finished with. So much the better. "I couldn't be calmer
about the whole thing", he assures her. Then Flaubert dips his pen and
starts a new paragraph: "But what exasperates me are the people who
keep asking for free seats!" Friends, naturally, give him advice in his
discouragement and rage. Turgenev's is quasi-soldierly: "Courage! Vous
etes Flaubert apr s tout." But his main caseworker is that prolific
counsellor George Sand. She warns him against solitude and the tyrannical
ego it spawns; she tells him not to live in literature so much; she advises
him to learn from the molluscs Pouchet is dissecting; she instructs him to
do more gym, since all his ills come from lack of exercise. She tells him to
marry; she tells him he ought to have had children. When Flaubert, brought
low by flu, compares himself to the canon of Poitiers, cited by Montaigne,
who reputedly kept to his room for thirty years because he was "incommoded
by melancholy", Sand's reply is specific: "There's only one
remedy, that's a minimum dose of a demi-centigram of acetate of morphine,
taken every evening after you've digested your dinner, for at least eight
days." When she has run through her own solutions, Sand tries
recommending her patient to a specialist.
She knows just the chap. Given Flaubert's veneration for great men - how he
envies Goethe his famous Calm - she suggests he sees more of Victor Hugo.
Only Hugo can change you and save you, she writes, because Hugo is a
philosopher as well as the great artist she knows herself not to be. He will
persuade you to accept life as if comes. "You must see him often. I
believe that he will calm you down." This sensible referral takes place
in December 1874. Three and a half months later, she gets her reply. "You
advise me to go and see more of le p re Hugo! Well, the last time I saw him
he really upset me. The idiocies he uttered about Goethe were unimaginable .
. . . The visit made me literally ill!" It's tempting to caricature
Sand as a hotline agony aunt. There is, mixed with her clean-edged mind and
serene temperament, a touch of the Berrichon Archers ("Whenever a tree
dies, you must plant two more in its place") and a certain relentless
mumsiness ("laughter is a fine doctor"). But she is still full of
the "frank, cordial simplicity" observed by the young Matthew
Arnold a quarter of a century earlier, and of all Flaubert's friends she is
the one who offers most: not just love, advice and support, but practical
assistance. She writes articles in support of his work, and that of
Bouilhet; she offers him money when he fears he is broke; she tries to get
him a job; she enlists what contacts she still has in high circles; and,
most touchingly, when Flaubert is distraught at the idea that he might be
turned out of Croisset, where he has lived for thirty years and written all
his books, she offers to buy the house and let him stay there until his
death. Such immediate and purposeful goodness disarms exasperation.
So she, who always puts her family before her work, who turns out "mon
petit roman de tous les ans" in a mere two to three hours per day over
two to three months, can get away with telling Flaubert, the saint and
martyr of literature, the "one-word-a-day book-constructor" in
Goncourt's mocking phrase, the man for whom work is a sore he has to
scratch, and who will put in a fourteen-hour day merely rejigging a Bouilhet
play, that he loves literature too much. Just like that. "You love
literature too much", she writes. "It will kill you, and you will
never kill off human stupidity." She was, at least, two-thirds right.
He is at times driven to complain about her. "Mme Sand is an excellent
woman", he tells Edma Roger des Genettes, "but too angelic, too
benisseuse." (This undictionaried word is twice applied to her, and
once to Hugo. "Preachily on the side of life"? "Happy-clappy"?)
Sand's attitude to human stupidity is typical of the divide between them.
She is just as aware as Flaubert that not all human beings are rocket
scientists. But she cannot, like him, hate what she calls this "pauvre
ch re betise". She views it instead with maternal eyes: stupidity "is
a sort of infancy, and all infancy is sacred". Flaubert rejects this:
for him, "Stupidity contains no seed." It is inert and probably
ineradicable, but that doesn't mean you should bless it. Sand is a
day-to-day meliorist, Flaubert a radical pessimist. He prefers the longer
view - though even he doesn't take the longest. This belongs to the Chinese
Ambassador at Versailles who is astonished that the French are astonished by
the events of 1870-71: "How funny you are! This is the way of things!
This is the norm!" Flaubert applauds the discovery that "the
contrary is the exception"; and the ambassadorial viewpoint perhaps
feeds into his triumphant assertion to Sand two months later: "Our
ignorance of history makes us slander our own time. Things have always been
like this."
Sand is surely right in suspecting that irritation was, increasingly, "necessary
to his organization" (Flaubert himself tells Goncourt that indignation
is the stick which holds up the doll: "If I weren't indignant, I would
fall down flat.") But its tonality is not always splenetic or
valetudinary. Flaubert's trip to Switzerland in 1874, for instance, is one
long, exhilarating display of comic rage. It's serious, too, which makes it
the more comic. Like his stay at Concarneau (and one with Caroline at Bagn
res-de-Luchon), this had a medical and morale-boosting aim. "The theory",
he writes sceptically, "is that the lower baro-metric pressure will
relieve my congestion by driving the blood into the lower organs."
His three weeks on Mount Righi make up probably the least calming rest cure
any human being has ever taken. For a start, he can't understand a country
which doesn't have any real history. Then there is the omnipresence of
Nature, which crushes him without inspiring thought. Then there is the
problem of boredom, which he assaults by eating, drinking and smoking a lot.
But the first two of these activities bring in the waiters, who here are
dressed in black even from early morning, so that they look like guests at
your own funeral. "Eight days here", he cries, "are like
three centuries." Then there are the other people, the dreadful Germans
and the dreadful English, who make him want to hug a cow for some human
contact.
His unimpressed eye falls on jaunty tourists wielding sticks branded with the
names of sites they have visited; a woman who plays Chopin on the hotel
piano "in such a way as to make all the cows of Switzerland flee";
and the cretin installed at the telescope on the hotel balcony, with his
arse pushed out and his hat on the back of his head, uttering imbecilities
about the view. Switzerland, he concludes, is only any good for "botanists,
geologists and honeymooners" - into none of which categories he falls.
Sand rebukes him for his disobliging observations: "You're not a man of
nature. So much the worse for you . . . . We are nature, we're in nature,
made by nature, made for nature." But Turgenev can be relied upon for
support in most things. He agrees about the Swiss. Despite living among such
sublimities, they are "the most deeply boring and the least gifted
people I have ever met. Whence cometh such an anomaly, the philosopher might
ask? Or is it perhaps not an anomaly at all? What would Bouvard and Pecuchet
say about the matter?" Flaubert's signatorial nicknames during this
period give evidence of his mood. He still remains "Ton Geant"
(though on one occasion "GEANT Aplati" - "Flattened GIANT"),
but is increasingly "Ton Vieux". When between these moods he is "Ton
Excessif". One characteristic way of being Excessive was in a
competitiveness of sensibility and experience, a trait which becomes more
apparent in these painful years. He has, he tells Caroline, "an
exasperated sensibility and a deplorable imagination". "What
merely scratches others", he tells Sand, "rips my flesh."
Hence his constitution is more adapted for pain than for pleasure. And hence
his pain is greater than that of others. Throughout the events of 1870-71,
he constantly assures correspondents that he is suffering more than anyone
else in France. "Others are more to be pitied", he writes, "but
no one suffers as much." It seems plodding to point out that a person
of lesser sensitivity might suffer more if the damage done were greater.
Neither Flaubert nor any of his family saw action or had anyone close to
them killed. Nor did the writer suffer significantly from the invasion; the
Prussians, he admits, "respected my study", when they occupied
Croisset, even if they did commit the Teutonic solecism of leaving their
helmets on his bed.
It is the same when his mother dies; he tells Leonie Brainne that since he has
the nerves of a flayed man, the loss has caused him more suffering than it
would anyone else. He even tells George Sand - of all people - that he has "loved
more than anyone" (though he does immediately add that the phrase is
pretentious). It is hard to know what to make of this trait. Genuine
con-viction, raw competitiveness, poetic fallacy (when it comes to taking
the suffering of France upon himself), or failure of imaginative sym-pathy?
All four at the same time? Goncourt in his Journal noted Flaubert's "craziness"
in imagining that he had done and suffered more than others, and
characteristically recorded two of its more risible manifestations. The
first has Flaubert getting into a fight with the sculptor Jacquemart over
which of them had been host to more lice in Egypt - which, as Goncourt
cattily put it, was "superior in vermin". On another occasion,
laddish talk in the smoking-room at Princesse Mathilde's turned to the
literary sex-aids of their youth. Many cited Amours du chevalier de Faublas,
an erotic tale of the late 1780s, as the text which did the trick.
Flaubert declared that he personally had never been able to finish it; for
him, the key volume had been Meursius's Aloysiae (that is to say, Aloysiae
Sygeai satira sotadica de arcanis Amoris et Veneris of 1658). "How
superior, how special", an irritated Goncourt comments. "Only
something in Latin could give him a hard-on." In Flaubert's defence, he
was not always so scholarly. While he was staying in Concarneau, Leonie
Brainne sent him her portrait; he replied that, lying in bed one morning and
contemplating her image, he had noticed that he was still a man.
Solitary, melancholic, hypersensitive, high-minded, competitive, exasperated,
impractical: how should such a temperament best be managed? The
forty-seven-year-old bachelor of the start of this volume, living at home
with his mother and servants, and lacking most financial restraints, can
exist with as much contentment as such a personality might allow; the
fifty-year-old whose mother has just died, precariously inhabiting a house
now belonging to his niece, and with his finances tied to those of the
Commanvilles, finds yet another form of suffering thrust upon him:
domestication. Even Flaubert was not competitive about his home-making
skills. The solution was self-evident, especially to women, especially to
George Sand: Flaubert should marry. That his female friends suggest it
indicates a hopeful if not fantastical misreading of his character.
Flaubert has long observed the state of matrimony: his married (male) friends,
he writes, do nothing but work, hunt and play whist; none will read poetry
with him. A quarter of a century previously, Flaubert had regarded the
marriage of his childhood friend Alfred Le Poittevin as a personal and
artistic betrayal; his opinion has scarcely changed. Besides, he is too old
now; besides, he can't afford it; besides, he is "too scrupulous to
inflict myself upon another in perpetuity".
This last is also the argument of Larkin's "Love" ("My life is
for me. / As well ignore gravity"). Marriage? Flaubert's friend Edmond
Laporte has the better suggestion: get a dog. Enter Julio, a greyhound on
whom Flaubert dotes, even when the dog's unstriven-for serenity makes him
envious. Julio lies on Flaubert's famous bearskin rug, sleeps in his bed,
gives him fleas. "Send me immediately by the Union (the Rouen-La
Bouille steamer, which stopped at Croisset) some of that magic saponaire."
This is one of the unlikeliest sentences to find in Flaubert's handwriting.
The soap (is it a plant or a commercial product?) arrives; he washes his
dog. The artist as reluctant homemaker: he also, in the course of these
pages, finds himself dealing with the locksmith, the tinsmith, the roofer,
the builder; he considers wallpaper and the rival virtues of carpet versus
plaster on the floor; he asks Caroline to buy curtains in Paris because
they're cheaper than in Rouen; he shops for a meat safe; he buys dusters and
socks; he loses and finds the sugar-bowl; he worries about the size of the
jam bill; he buys a pair of iron fire-dogs. "Le menage m'assomme!"
he complains. His stance is one of theatrical ruefulness. "I bought a
hat. That's all the news." Writing to Caroline, he begins with a
high-toned quotation - "Macbeth hath murdered sleep" - before
getting down to his pressing, underlined concern: "My cider bill appals
me." Lacking an income of his own, he is constantly applying to the
Commanvilles for money, in tones which are variously baffled, peremptory and
piteous. Caroline subsequently destroyed all her letters to her uncle, along
with most of those from his women friends, so we can only guess at her
replies. But the regular reminder demands make it more understandable that
she and her husband gave Flaubert the one nickname with which he never
signed himself: The Consumer.
The other "lesser" letters are pre-occupied with the day-to-day
details of his professional life; or at least, those aspects of it which
require letters. His prose work in progress (La Tentation de saint Antoine,
the start of Bouvard et Pecuchet, Saint Julien l'Hospitalier) is referred to
sketchily, since for critical response he relies on reading the manuscript
aloud to friends. But there are a number of letters to his publishers, first
Levy, then Charpentier; and an even greater number dealing with his
theatrical ventures and the exploitation of Bouilhet's estate. These display
a dogged, at times fanatical, devotion to projects which mostly fail. There
is the posthumous staging of Bouilhet's Mademoiselle Aasse (which, after a
successful premi re, played to empty houses); Flaubert's own Le Candidat
(taken off after four performances when the male lead came off stage with
tears in his eyes); Le Sexe faible (Bouilhet's prose comedy, finished by
Flaubert), which after interminable negotiations, and talismanic repetition
by Flaubert of a producer's careless phrase ("un grand succ s d'argent"),
was withdrawn at the last minute; the publication of Bouilhet's Derni res
Chansons (a commercial disaster, provoking Flaubert's acrimonious break with
Levy) and of a collected Bouilhet (which finally appeared in 1880, the year
of Flaubert's death). There is also Flaubert's long campaign to have a
memorial statue to his dead friend erected on the streets of Rouen, which
involves counterproductive pamphleteering against the municipal authorities.
Flaubert's failure as a dramatist, understandable enough from reading his
plays (which are either too literal and novelistic, or else too whimsical),
becomes more so, given the condescending attitude to the theatre revealed
here. He doesn't seem to enjoy the medium in itself (calling himself "heroic"
for seeing two plays in a single week); it is, he decides, a "false"
art, in which it is impossible to say anything "complete". He
seems not to understand that "completeness" is different in the
theatre - just as the novel, for its part, has its own necessary "falseness".
His way of dealing with theatrical managers was probably misconceived (Sand
was characteristically more phlegmatic about the inevitable vicissitudes and
overheated optimism of this world); but there's no denying his assiduity.
In countless letters, he badgers and cajoles, bullies and flatters, while
fine-tuning the production of plays we now see as of only moderate merit.
This all ought to be fairly boring, except to the theatrical historian; and
on the surface it is. But each letter he writes about Bouilhet's plays,
crammed with forgettable instructions and proposals, can also be read and
felt as an act of love and mourning for his dead friend; also, an act of
duty and responsibility towards Bouilhet's adopted son, Philippe Leparfait
(who doesn't seem especially appreciative).
This is the advantage of letters over bio-graphy: letters exist in real time.
We read them at about the speed at which they were written. Biography gives
us the crane-shot, the time-elision, the astute selectivity. A biographer
might tell you that on the night Flaubert's mother died, April 6, 1872, her
son immediately wrote five letters (or five which have survived), two timed "the
night of", one timed at 12.30 am and two timed at 1 am. Since they
inevitably contain similar information and sentiments, the bio-grapher might
reasonably name the recipients and briefly quote. To read them all, however,
one after the other, five in a row (plus a sixth dated the following day,
and then replies from friends which imply others sent) is to feel more fully
the dull repetitiousness of grief and its expression; also, to experience
the very time that passes as Flaubert writes.
So letters draw strength and truth from what elsewhere might prove tedious
repetition. Here, in this primary form, we can observe the working out and
perfecting of a phrase or idea, we learn to recognize an intellectual or
emotional trope, a proof of stubbornness, confirmation of obsession, habit
of courtesy. When Flaubert tells George Sand, on June 3, 1874, that he has
read her book in one go, like downing "un bon verre de vin", we
note a friendly if possibly evasive compliment; when, in his very next
letter, written on the same day, he tells Zola that he has just read his
latest novel in one go, downing it like "un bon verre de vin", we
suspect a handy formula. Repetition implies approval. So, for instance, we
can tell how pleased he is with his identification of the three great stages
of human development - Paganism, Christianity, Muflisme (boorishness,
yobbery) - by the fact that he parades it four times between March 11 and
April 20, 1871; six weeks' use and he loses interest in the triplet, while
keeping muflisme in his vocabulary, enlarging it fourteen months later into
Panmuflisme.
Then there is his chosen self-image as a writer over the period 1871-3. He
floats this first to Princesse Mathilde in April 1871. Amid the strife and
stupidity of the world, he tells her, he carries on turning out his phrases
as before; it is an activity as innocent and useful as that of turning out
napkin rings on a lathe. This is a reference back fifteen years to Binet,
the tax-collector in Madame Bovary, the drone of whose lathe breaks the
village silence on Sundays. (Binet, we recall, works away "with the
jealousy of an artist and the egoism of a bourgeois": a provocative
reversal of epithets.) Pleased with this heroically unheroic comparison -
and perhaps also with the play on the verb tourner - Flaubert repeats it in
September of that year to George Sand, in May 1872 to Edma Roger des
Genettes, in January 1873 to Marie Regnier, and finally the next month to
Mme Roger des Genettes again. The image drones in his ear as persistently as
the lathe; and its domestic nature inclines him (unless there are uses I
have missed) to employ it only with female correspondents. Equally, we can
follow the exact construction of a famous declaration (or at least seem to
do so: letters are inclined to make us forget that writers also go around
talking a lot of the time). Thus in November 1872, Flaubert writes to
Turgenev, "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of
shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it." This
appears to come, very precisely, from two previous letters. The first to
Princesse Mathilde in September 1871, where he says that now, more than
ever, he needs to live in an ivory tower above the mire in which humanity
paddles; and the second to Caroline in October 1872, where he reports that
the spectacle of the Rouen bourgeoisie, combined with his memory of
Gautier's artistic sacrifices, makes him feel as if he is drowning in "une
maree d'immondices". The following month, he combines the two ideas,
with the genteeler "maree d'immondices" giving way to "une
maree de merde" in his letter to Turgenev.
The full, fully expressed and insistent presence of Flaubert, our closeness to
the ground, our closeness to the hand that holds the quill pen (he despised
the newfangled steel nib) makes us forget that there might be other views of
Flaubert than his own. If diaries often alert us to the fact that they might
be written at the same time of day and in the same prevailing mood, if they
confess their partiality, the variety of a correspondence, and the normal
metamorphoses of tone and personality a letter-writer adopts (courtly to
Princesse Mathilde, lubricious to Laporte, fraternal to Turgenev,
flirtatious to Mme Brainne, profoundly sympathetic and resolutely sceptical
to George Sand), half-convince us that we have seen the full roundedness of
the writer's character. It comes as a genuine narrative shock, therefore,
after a thousand pages of Flaubert's thrilling intellectual company, to read
a ten-page appendix of entries from the Goncourt Journal covering the same
period. Flaubert's letters to Edmond de Goncourt have throughout 1869-75
been unanimously bonhomous; while in writing to other correspondents, his
only criticism has been an aesthetic one (of Goncourt's tendency to pick up
a phrase from the street and simply shove it into a novel, rather than use
reality's details as a means to a greater goal). Goncourt's diary entries
about Flaubert are both caustic and patronizing. Flaubert is portrayed as a
boastful, vulgar provincial, full of false exaggeration; he claims to be a
passionate man, yet women count for little in his life, just as he claims to
be a spendthrift, yet sudden fancies make no hole in his pocket; as for his
work, it relies on intelligent appropriation rather than any act of
originality; he chooses exotic locations, yet exhibits a profoundly
conventional humanity; and how strange, by the way, that such a famous man
should have so few friends. Can this, we wonder, possibly be the fellow
whose arm we have linked for so many pages and years? Was he putting it all
on? Have we been so blind?
Some part of Goncourt's hostility seems properly attributable to metropolitan
snobbery and professional envy; other aspects are less ignorable. There was
a boastful side to Flaubert (Goncourt judged him as much a Gascon as a
Norman) and at times a foolish one-upmanship. There may also be some truth
in Goncourt's claim that Flaubert had "scorn for the qualities he lacked";
although Flaubert was probably bourgeois enough not to show his tender side
in the smoking-room; and this volume is increasingly filled with self-doubt,
with envy of the normal, non-artistic life. Arguing with Goncourt is like
arguing with any consistent misanthrope or cynic; after a while, their
refusal to ascribe virtue becomes corrosive. When Flaubert wrote to Goncourt
with morbid openness from Concarneau, he ended his death-wish confident of
his friend's endorsement that "je ne pose pas". But Goncourt did
think Flaubert was a poseur. "Though perfectly frank by nature,"
the Journal records elsewhere, "he is never wholly sincere in what he
says he feels or suffers or thinks."
The antidote to Goncourt's malice is to turn back a few pages and reread the
last exchange in this fourth volume of the novel of Flaubert's life. It is
December 1875; both Flaubert and Sand have been ill and discouraged; both
are getting back to work. Instead of New Year cards, they exchange serious,
long-meditated and deeply opposed professions de foi. For all her practical
friendship, her saintliness, her motherliness, for all that she can be
irritatingly benisseuse, Sand does not disguise her distaste for the
Flaubertian aesthetic; she is forceful and lucid. What are they each now
engaged on, she asks. He is as surely preparing a work of "desolation"
as she is one of "consolation". He claims not to allow his
personal feelings to show in his art, but they inevitably do; readers see
through his attempted objectivity and are depressed as a result. Anyway,
isn't this doctrine of authorial absence less an aesthetic principle than a
cover for a lack of real convictions? What is missing in Flaubert (as, for
that matter, in Turgenev and Zola) is a fixed and extensive view of life;
Flaubert's school looks only at the surface of things; art must be more than
just criticism and satire; he writes for an elite, and his concentration on
form results in lack of depth. The weakness of L'Education sentimentale was
that its characters did not act, but submitted to events without taking
control. Her friend is currently re-reading Shakespeare? Good; there is a
lot to learn from him.
Flaubert's reply is baffled yet firm. A lack of real convictions? He is
stuffed with convictions; but their importance, and his, is as nothing
compared to that of the work itself. A school? He hasn't got a school: he is
associated with Realism, but for him, realism is a mere path towards Beauty.
Satire and criticism? When has he ever aimed for them, or for just them? He
is a firm believer in "pas de monstres, et pas de Heros!" Against
Sand's accusations, Flaubert reasserts his great principle of the artist's
invisibility; the creator is nothing, the work everything; the creator's
personal opinions, and their relief by artistic expression, are worse than
irrelevant. As for a fixed and extensive view of things, he finds all dogma
spiritually false, be it Religion or Progress, Catholicism or Democracy. Her
notion of Equality is disproved by Physiology and History. He quotes at her
Littre's terse summary of the human condition: "Man is an unstable
compound and the Earth a decidedly inferior planet." As for her
Sunny-George advice that literature should be an act of consolation, he
replies, "I cannot change my eyes." It is the perfect letter on
which to end this volume, wise, desolate and magnificent. It is also a
rebuttal which contains not the slightest element of contempt for the person
rebutted. Flaubert ends by warmly embracing his "ch re bon maitre
adorable" and expressing the wish that 1876 should be carefree ("leger")
for her and her family.
He still hadn't learnt about dramatic irony. 1876 was the year in which George
Sand was to die.
