The First Madame Bovary
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By ANTHONY BURGESS
GUSTA \ E FLAUBERT was the protomartyr of fiction but, the world being what it is, there have been plenty of people ready to regard his self-sacrifice to artistic perfection as a kind of beastly self-indulgence. There is something in- human (and hence beastly—like the college rooms of Sir Anthony Gloster's son) about such devotion to art. Flaubert, the sedentary bachelor, rejecting even love for literature, agonising in unnatural seclusion over the mot haste, blue- printing his books like complex pieces of machinery—is it not right that life should take revenge on such a man and refuse to lodge in his works? And so, while Emma Bovary is ad- mired, it is with the admiration proper to a wonderfully made automaton : she is not, we are told (by Mr Priestley, for one), comparable with Anna Karenina. The big bouncing Balzac took less care, but how instinct with life (presumably precisely because he took less care) all his charac- ters are! Henry James never sold out an edition, but Hugh Walpole was knighted for services to the best-seller. Art is bunk. Flaubert may have been a martyr, but the lost cause is the damned cause. It is sinful to take the novel too seriously.
Another reprehensible attribute of Flaubert is his unwillingness to preach, but that naturally follows out of his primal fault : art ceases to be art once it becomes didactic. In any case, Flaubert had nothing to preach about, except the badness of the Second Empire bourgeoisie. Born into that coarse and hypocritical society, he saw it was unredeemable: there was only‘cone thing to do and that was get out. This was not the way of Dickens or Hugo or Balzac or Dostoievsky or Tolstoy, and there is a hint of justice about the accusations levelled at Flaubert: one does not mind disengagement, but isn't it likely to lead to failure of love, and can one possibly write well without love? Isn't there also something very nastily bourgeois about a writer who rejects his class and yet portrays it and expects it to buy his books? Flaubert,,after all, wasn't just writing for himself or for the Goncourts.
The careful objectivity of Flaubert's novels is one of their great virtues, but it often strikes as a limitation—or, rather, something made per- force out of a limitation. He was scared of being too involved in his characters. He was scared of committing himself to enthusiasms, scared even of the romantic element in his own make- up. He looks forward to Mr Prufroa. The Shelleyan aspirations and golden dreams of his youth were tacitly mocked by bourgeois society, but it was essential that he also should mock them. Jean-Paul said something about `yam baths of sentiment followed by cold showers of irony,' and that was precisely Flaubert's recipe for artistic cleanliness.
`Madame Bovary, c'est moi,' he tells us, and we can see why. The hopeless appetite of his heroine symbolises Flaubert's own desperate romanticism, in which longing subsisted in a void, grossly exceeding any possible object. In Madame Bovary this has to be punished, though in terms of art, not of morality. Irony is art's vengeance, and so is death. If we want the genesis of the whole process, we had better read Flaubert's first novel—published posthumously and, in English, only just back in print.* I have not read it in French, and so I have to take the word of Francis Steegmuller, who has edited Frank Jellinek's translation and written a preface, that Flaubert's prose (at the age of nineteen) is full of Chateaubriand-like beauties. The English is decent enough, and one can trust its rhythms. The content is pure sensibility, and The Sorrows of Werther is positively restrained in comparison with this exophthalmic exhibition of self-pity, ardour, narcissism.
November has very little story. The young narrator recounts his 'ardent aspirations towards a wild and turbulent existence'; the torments and ecstasies of pubescence find most florid expres- sion for the first half of the book. Then comes action. The boy visits a prostitute, Marie, and she displays a passion for him too great for pro- fessional simulation: 'How beautiful you are, my angel! You are as beautiful as the day! Kiss me, ah, love me! A kiss, quick, a kiss!' And then : 'Where did you come from, oh angel of love, of desire, of delight? Who was your mother? What were her thoughts when she con- ceived you? Did she dream of the strength of African lions?'—and so on. This is good boy's dream stuff, but it is something more. After a page-shaking orgasm or so, we come to Marie's life-story—highly literary and sturdily erotic— and her Bovaryesque search for supreme love. It is the boy's own search. And yet she is not there when he next calls; he never sees her again; the two have confronted each other as in a mirror, no more. The boy is ruined: 'In the beginning, before Marie, my melancholy had some fire, some grand quality: now it is stupid, the melancholy of a man soaked in cheap brandy, the sleep of a dead drunk.' He longs for Malabar, the Ganges, Andalusia; he wishes to die of cholera in Calcutta or plague in Constantinople; he cries out finally for love. But who (in Rilkean phrase) will hear him among the angelic orders?
We now discover that we have been reading a manuscript preserved by a man who knew its author. The great romantic cantilenas are over, and we are given a rigorous analysis of the defects of character of that young narrator and a cold account of his end: 'At length, last December, he died; but slowly, little by little, solely by the force of thought, without any organic malady, as one dies of sorrow—which may seem incredible to those who have greatly suffered, but must be tolerated in a novel, for the sake of our love of the marvellous.' And then a single paragraph which breathes pure mature Flaubert: 'He asked that his body be opened, for fear of being buried alive, but he absolutely * NOVEMBER. By Gustave Flaubert. Translated by Frank Jellinek. Edited, with an introduction, by Francis Steegmuller. (Michael Joseph, 21s.). refused to be embalmed.' We end on a cold douche, as in Herodias and Madame Bovary itself.
We can regard November as filleted Flaubert— segments of what is to be complex and organic laid out for inspection on a pathologist's slab. A young Madame Bovary is presented, but she is androgynous: we are in a dream region, easier for the immature artist to function in than an exactly rendered provincial town. The irony needed to chill the exaggerated ardour is still to be generated; in the meantime we must make do with a whole separate compartment devoted to the case for the prosecution. The technique is one of juxtaposition—more legalistic than aesthetic—and we are reminded that Flaubert, the son of a doctor, was himself to become a lawyer. He never lost the cold clinical attitude, but he learned an objectivity more dramatic than any judicial summing-up. November is not really a novel at all, but Flaubert has, through writing it, learned how a novel can be made.
A man may learn tricks and skills, but he cannot learn to change his true nature. The real Flaubert is present, in November, in all his facets. There is the observant eye which seems too exact to be true, as though the author were fabricating reality rather than describing it: `The cows slipped in the mud as they went down the slope, crushing a few apples left in the grass.' There is an embryonic fascination with the dis- tasteful, later to be worked into the great horrible art of Salammbo: 'Old men fouled me with their decrepit enjoyments, and I would awake to find them wheezing and rheumy-eyed beside me.' Also there is the phantasmagoric: !On Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked woman standing there with rolling eyes; she was quite a hundred feet tall, but she moved, growing longer and thinner as she went, and finally dissolved, each limb remaining there apart; the head flew off 'first while the rest still moved.'
One could argue that the quintessential Flaubert is a fantasist more than a realist, and that the details of the world are observed only that they may be manipulated into a highly sub- jective music. The man in Madame Bovary who loses his leg does so in order that his wooden stump may orchestrate Emma's dying con- sciousness with a 'son sec.' Fdlicite, in Un Coeur Simple, sees a 'perroquet gigantesque' hovering over her own deathbed, the apocalyptic end of her sailor brother's very ordinary parrot. La Tentation de Saint Antoine is a super-Goethean Walpurgisnacht, crammed with learned visions but also dishes of solidifying gravy. The story of St Julien L'Hospitalier is a miraculous fable with a lep.ous embrace in it. At the end of Herodias, the carriers of John the Baptist's head have to take it in turns because it is so heavy. The notation of reality gives weight, and hence horror, to dreams. The naturalistic novel does not really derive from Flaubert, unless by naturalism we mean the gratuitous poring over gangrene and caries. He remained a romantic but had to qualify his romanticism with exact notation of the exterior world. He was very like Shelley, who had a yearning spirit and a clinical mind.
Flaubert's obsession with the problems of his art may be regarded as morbid: 'Quelle lourde machine a construire qu'un livre, et compliquee surtout: But he remains the great example of devotion, the true witness or martyr by whose tears of blood a less exacting world of literary endeavour is sustained. He had nothing to say, and his art illuminates only his own tempera- ment. But, as this piece of juvenilia shows, that temperament was a very solid donna.
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