Portrait of the invisible man

Caroline Moore

FLAUBERT by Frederick Brown Heinemann, £25, pp. 628, ISBN 0434007692 Any biographer of Flaubert is faced with a fundamental irony: he or she will be writing the personal life of the literary high priest of the doctrine of Impersonality. A writer, Flaubert maintained, should withdraw himself from his writings, self-annihilating, invisible. Like God in his creation, he may be felt everywhere, but should nowhere be seen. Perversely, of course, one has a stronger sense of Flaubert’s thoroughly individual, controlling, writerly presence in his fiction than of any other great novelist; and there is a correspondingly potent biographical mythology surrounding the personal agonies that went into producing this ‘impersonal’ landmark in European fiction.

In his lifetime, Flaubert was fiercely camera-shy (which may be a mark equally of diffidence or vanity), and almost never allowed himself to be photographed or caricatured (‘I reserve my face for myself’). One wonders what he would have made of Frederick Brown’s superb, full-length portrait. Even he, one suspects, could not have rejected it as a cliché — even in its other French sense of a mere snapshot.

Such paradoxes of biography and creative life are, of course, meat and drink to any good biographer. The problem is that they may offer easy opt-out clauses to the third-rate. Any one who has ever taught undergraduates will know how quickly ‘ironically’ and ‘paradoxically’ become paperingover shorthand either to disguise ‘I’m contradicting myself here’, or to signal ‘something interesting may be going on that I don’t have time to try to understand’.

Biography, too, I sometimes feel, is now in thrall to the shallow-rooted paradox: we have swung from all-comprehending biography, which ironed out contradictions in pursuit of knowable character, to the belief that inconsistencies and unknowability are the true essence of humanity — which may in practice mean that complexities are elevated rather than explored.

And every student of literature can reel off paradoxes in Flaubert’s life and work. Here is the thoroughly bourgeois selfproclaimed ‘bourgeoisophobus’, who vigorously and indeed obsessively loathed the middle classes to which he belonged: his superlative work charts the life and death of a bourgoise wife, whose every pretension and sentimental impulse he profoundly despises, yet with whom readers then, as now, deeply and perversely sympathised. And the creator of Madame Bovary, too, was notoriously racked with creative ambivalence. The writer who exalted god like distance was sucked into the very guts of his own imaginings, so that after describing Madame Bovary’s death he tasted ‘such a strong taste of arsenic’ in his own mouth that he vomited his ‘entire dinner’.

Flaubert, indeed, is the bibliophile who wrote Bibliomanie; the brilliant autodidact whose last work satirises the futility of self-taught learning; the worshipper of a ‘Platonic ideal of style’ who can nevertheless be, in this biographer’s phrase, ‘flagrantly uncouth’. He is the writer who passionately advocated monkish self-denial in the cause of Art, yet plundered the brothels of Paris and boasted from Egypt that in 17 hours he ‘had survived five rounds of copulation and three more of oral sex, with coffee breaks and longer intermissions for meals’ and time for a spot of sightseeing. Revolting ‘chancres’ on his member were the inevitable aftermath of extremely energetic sex-tourism. (‘Self-denial’, in this context, meant that he refused to marry or even maintain close domestic relationships with the women he went to bed with, which is, in a way, a thoroughly backhanded compliment to the powers of domesticity.) Flaubert despised money and lived highmindedly off his mother; he loathed fame, since this anti-clerical elitist could not bear to pander to the masses; yet he demanded an exorbitant 30,000 francs for his second novel — ten times the usual rate for a wellknown author, which would have been a bit steep had he truly believed that he was writing, as he claimed, for an elite audience of at most ‘20 well-educated people’. Flaubert seems to have been thoroughly insulated against economic realism. In the first part of 1847, he squandered 10,000 francs of his recently widowed mother’s money; his sybaritic trip to Egypt and the Near East in 1849-51 cost Madame Flaubert ‘some 28,000 francs (what a customs officer, or some other minor government functionary, might expect to earn over 13 or 14 years)’. Towards the end of his life, however, he nearly beggared himself, bailing a muchloved niece out of debt.

Paradoxes like these might tempt a biographer either into insouciance (writing them off as the creative contradictions within a man of genius) or morality (drearily exposing the hypocrisy underlying highminded art). Brown maintains impartiality, the biographer’s version of Flaubertian impersonality. He rarely intrudes his own opinions: it is rather a shock when he does so. After reporting, without too overt disapproval, many of the foul-mouthed riffs or gueulades of Flaubert and his friends, Brown suddenly condemns as ‘fatuous’ Flaubert’s attack on ‘women’s deep-seated immorality’ (‘Where Man has an Eminence, they have a Hole!’).

Brown’s usual unobtrusive policy, however, works well and subtly. He draws extensively and deeply upon Flaubert’s own writings, rather than flourishing his own formulations, so that Flaubert is not pigeon-holed in shallow paradox. As a result, the reader is given room to shift opinions; inconsistencies are allowed to breathe, and come alive.

For much of the book, I found Flaubert oddly charmless, even though I am a devotee of sorts. I have devoured all his works, in my time, but feel no desire to re-read some, though I do, in the wake of this biography, remember how much I once enjoyed the excesses of Salammbo. (Eat your heart out, Cecil B. de Mille: Flaubert musters more snakes and sex and elephants and jewels and sadism than Hollywood could ever encompass.) The somewhat parallel career of Robert Louis Stevenson came to mind, not always to the greater novelist’s advantage: both men were the sons of loving, middle-class parents (Flaubert’s father was a respected hospital physician); both had nurses who stirred their infant imaginations; both were precocious yet remarkably late in learning to read (Flaubert was eight, which should offer hope to all parents of late developers). Both made friends at university with similarly wild spirits, posturing, posing, and inventing fictitious characters upon which to project their pranks and rebellions; and both were shunted into the uncongenial drudgery of studying for the law, from which both received a welcome aegrotat. Ill health gave both the licence to travel and escape from stifling provincialism, at their longsuffering parents’ expense.

Stevenson coughed blood; Flaubert, on 1 January 1844, suffered his first epileptic fit. His accounts of it are terrifyingly vivid: from the sense that his vision was ‘littered’ with hallucinatory ‘clumps of hair’, through the ‘indeterminate anguish’ and ‘vague malaise, a painful sensation of waiting ... comparable only to that of the fornicator feeling his sperm well up just before discharge’ through to the torrential ‘invasion’ in which ‘one feels images escaping like torrents of blood’. Scarcely less terrifying is the list of contemporary ‘cures’:

Wild valerian, peony root, mistletoe, digitalis, quinine, white dittany, rue, narcissus, opium, asafoetida, garlic, camphor, cantharides, copper, zinc, lead, antimony, mercury, iron, silver, carbonic acid, or phosphorus. In extreme cases, physicians might recommend castration.

Flaubert was

bled, purged and drained, which meant that leeches were regularly placed behind his ears, syringes thrust up his rectum, and setons applied to the nape of his neck.

But the potassium bromide that he was prescribed, though inducing nausea, was at least less drastic in effect than castration, or, indeed, the cure described in one of my favourite of Wilkie Collins’ novels, Poor Miss Finch, in which doses of nitrate of silver turn an epileptic identical twin irreversibly dark blue (startling, but apparently medically accurate).

Uncastrated and merely increasingly florid in complexion, Flaubert was able to continue his amorous career. Like Stevenson, he enjoyed the company of whores, and fell in love with older, married women with a bit of a past. But here the comparison draws apart. Stevenson, more quixotic and more ebulliently charming, impetuously married and for the rest of his life passionately defended an apparently unsuitable older divorcee; Flaubert, more cynical and more coarsely expressed, offers no such sentimental satisfactions. He continued visiting brothels, and offered his more established mistresses only ‘distant intimacy’.

His behaviour could be seen as that of the perpetual adolescent: indeed, he continued, at least part time, sharing the house of his neurotically over-protective mother until her death, which meant living in just the bourgeois milieu he affected to loathe. (‘Two things sustain me,’ he boasted, even towards the end of his life, ‘love of Literature and hatred of the Bourgeois’). After a time, however, one does begin to notice strong redeeming features. His penchant for older women means that he is not exploitative of obvious vulnerability or innocence. He seems always to have chosen women who knew the score. Indeed, his most long-term mistress (and the one who seems vainly to have hoped for the most commitment from him) was the publicityseeking poet Louise Colet, whose past was already interestingly lurid. Married, but nine months pregnant with a child by her then lover, she had attempted to stab a scandalmonger of the day, albeit in so ‘theatrical’ a manner (‘lifting her arm high over her head in a tragedian’s gesture’, as her victim recalled) that she only gave him a slight flesh wound. A bit of a health warning for future lovers, one would have thought; but Flaubert took her on, only retreating behind his mother’s skirts when she became too pressing.

‘Marriage,’ he told George Sand (another older woman, with whom he enjoyed a rich and tender friendship) he found ‘preposterous. Why that is I have no idea; that’s just how things are. Figure it out for me.’ And that is what Brown, sympathetic and wellinformed but never intrusive, allows us to do.

Flaubert is a superb biography, not least because it gives us the portrait of a man embedded in his country and his age even as he rebels against its values and mores. Brown is masterly at drawing the background to his subject, social and political, writing with authority and an eye for the telling detail that compel fascination as well as respect. It is typical of him that he can chart Louis-Napoleon’s rise ‘from megalomaniac nuisance to princepresident’ with admirable succinctness, yet slip in that the aspirant emperor wore ‘tight shoes’ and that ‘his recommendation of a chiropodist named Eisenberg for the removal of painful corns appeared in a London Times advertisement’. Yet he never loses his way in the wealth of trivia at his command: whether leading us through the potentially bewildering changes of régime, evaluating the contemporary social standing of lawyers and doctors, sketching in the aesthetic and economic effects of Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, or anatomising the theatre of the period, his touch is sure. It is against the solidity of this background that the paradoxes of Flaubert’s personality shimmer into life.