"Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page," Gustave Flaubert wrote in 1847, when he was 25. "I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph."
The Flaubert who wrote those words to his mistress, Louise Colet, was a work in progress with very uncertain prospects. Madame Bovary lay more than a decade ahead. Behind stretched a miserable trail of false starts. He had a sense of mission but no real plan.
One of the virtues of Frederick Brown's quietly persuasive biography is its careful documentation of Flaubert's always agonized search for a literary idea to match his aesthetic ideals. Another is its sensitivity to the complexities of his artistic personality. Flaubert was both defiant and desperate, contemptuous of fame and eager to attain it, supremely certain on questions of art yet tormented by self-doubt, an aesthetic hermit and a fixture in the Paris salons, a realist who described himself to the critic Sainte-Beuve as "an old romantic mad dog."
Brown, the author of well-received biographies of Jean Cocteau and Emile Zola, has no overarching thesis to offer in Flaubert. There are no surprises. In his own sweeping biography of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, Sartre proposed that Flaubert's epilepsy was hysterical, an unconscious strategy to free him from his impending career as a lawyer. Brown, examining the medical evidence, concludes that Flaubert was, in fact, epileptic. He is content with the data, and, accordingly, has put together a judicious work that sticks to the record and relies on expertly chosen passages from Flaubert's brilliant letters and the works of his contemporaries to develop a convincing portrait, brushstroke by brushstroke.
The Flaubert who emerges is much less isolated than the aloof ascetic of popular imagination, the cool disciple of absolute form, drawn, as he once put it, "to the pure line, the prominent curve, the loud color, the ringing note."
Flaubert did an excellent job of advertising his distaste for modern life, contemporary politics and the thousand and one vulgarities that he captured in his fiction with scientific precision.
Yet, as Brown shows, Flaubert was an effective operator when it came to pulling strings and working the government for favors, usually on behalf of deserving friends. He was capable of pulling off a business deal. And he cut an impressive figure in the Parisian social world populated by writers, artists, powerful court-esans and government officials. "Action has always revolted me," he once wrote. "But when I have had to, or chosen to, I have acted decisively, quickly and well."
Flaubert, a grand narcissist, did as he pleased. When he required solitude, he retired to his study in rural Croisset, near Rouen, in Normandy. When he yearned for companionship, he took the train to Paris, where he kept an apartment and presided over a salon. A lifelong bachelor, he showed an uncanny knack for keeping women on the string, but at a safe distance. A lover of solitude, he nevertheless surrounded himself with admiring friends, to whom he insisted on reading his works aloud for hours at a stretch. ("He reads me three hundred excellent pages," George Sand confided to her diary in 1868. "I'm entranced.")
RSS