Flaubert's Parrot Read online

  10 The penultimate sentence of Gustave’s life, uttered as he stood feeling dizzy but not at all alarmed: ‘I think I’m going to have a kind of fainting fit. It’s lucky it should happen today; it would have been a great nuisance tomorrow, in the train.’

  11 At the buffers. Croisset today. The vast paper factory was churning away on the site of Flaubert’s house. I wandered inside; they were happy to show me round. I gazed at the pistons, the steam, the vats and the slopping trays: so much wetness to produce something as dry as paper. I asked my guide if they made the sort of paper that was used for books; she said they made every sort of paper. The tour, I realised, would not prove sentimental. Above our heads a huge drum of paper, some twenty feet wide, was slowly tracking along on a conveyor. It seemed out of proportion to its surroundings, like a piece of pop sculpture on a deliberately provoking scale. I remarked that it resembled a gigantic roll of lavatory paper; my guide confirmed that this was exactly what it was.

  Outside the thumping factory things were scarcely quieter. Lorries bullied past on the road that had once been a tow-path; pile-drivers banged on both sides of the river; no boat could pass without hooting. Flaubert used to claim that Pascal had once visited the house at Croisset; and a tenacious local legend maintained that Abbé Prévost wrote Manon Lescaut there. Nowadays there is no one left to repeat such fictions; and no one to believe them either.

  A sullen Normandy rain was falling. I thought of the horse’s silhouette on the far bank, and the quiet splosh as the eel-fishermen cast off. Could even eels live in this cheerless commercial conduit? If they did, they would probably taste of diesel and detergent. My eye moved upriver, and suddenly I noticed it, squat and shuddering. A train. I’d seen the rails before, a set laid between the road and the water; the rain was now making them glisten and smirk. I’d assumed without thinking that they were for the straddling dock cranes to run on. But no: he hasn’t even been spared this. The swaddled goods train was drawn up about two hundred yards away, ready to make its run past Flaubert’s pavilion. It would doubtless hoot derisively as it drew level; perhaps it was carrying poisons, enema pumps and cream tarts, or supplies for chemists and mathematicians. I didn’t want to see the event (irony can be heavy-handed as well as ruthless). I climbed into my car and drove off.

  9

  The Flaubert Apocrypha

  It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.

  It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.

  It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets

  that no longer exist.

  But it’s also what they didn’t build. It’s the houses they dreamed and sketched. It’s the brusque boulevards of the imagination; it’s that untaken, sauntering path between toupeed cottages; it’s the trompe l’oeil cul-de-sac which bluffs you into the belief that you’re entering some smart avenue.

  Do the books that writers don’t write matter? It’s easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn’t be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they’ve been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn’t always abandoned because it fails some quality-control test. The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

  With Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to the brothel which doesn’t come off, perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

  Of course, the published works themselves aren’t immutable: they might now look different had Flaubert been awarded time and money to put his literary estate in order. Bouvard et Pécuchet would have been finished; Madame Bovary might have been suppressed (how seriously do we take Gustave’s petulance against the overbearing fame of the book? a little seriously); and L’Education sentimentale might have had a different ending. Du Camp records his friend’s dismay at the book’s historical misfortune: a year after publication came the Franco-Prussian war, and it seemed to Gustave that the invasion and the débâcle at Sedan would have provided a grand, public and irrebuttable conclusion to a novel which set out to trace the moral failure of a generation.

  ‘Imagine’, Du Camp reports him as saying, ‘the capital one might have made out of certain incidents. Here, for instance, is one which would have been excellent in calibre. The capitulation has been signed, the army is under arrest, the Emperor, sunk back in a corner of his large carriage, is gloomy and dull-eyed; he smokes a cigarette to keep himself in countenance and, though a tempest is raging within him, tries to appear impassive. Beside him are his aides-de-camp and a Prussian General. All are silent, each glance is lowered; there is pain in every heart.

  ‘Where the two roads cross the procession is stopped by a column of prisoners guarded by some Uhlans, who wear the chapska perched on their ear, and ride with couched lances. The carriage has to be stopped before the human flood, which advances amid a cloud of dust, reddened by the rays of the sun. The men walk dragging their feet and with slouched shoulders. The Emperor’s languid eye contemplates this crowd. What a strange way to review his troops. He thinks of previous reviews, of the drums beating, of the waving standards, of his generals covered with gold lace and saluting him with their swords, and of his guard shouting, “Vive l’Empereur!”

  ‘A prisoner recognises him and salutes him, then another and another.

  ‘Suddenly a Zouave leaves the ranks, shakes his fist and cries, “Ah! There you are, you villain; we have been ruined by you!”

  ‘Then ten thousand men yell insults, wave their arms threateningly, spit upon the carriage, and pass like a whirlwind of curses. The Emperor still remains immovable without making a sign or uttering a word, but, he thinks, “Those are the men they used to call my Praetorian Guards!”

  ‘Well, what do you think of that for a situation? It is pretty powerful, is it not? That would have made rather a stirring final scene for my Education! I cannot console myself for having missed it.’

  Should we mourn such a lost ending? And how do we assess it? Du Camp probably coarsened it in the retelling, and there would have been many Flaubertian redraftings before publication. Its appeal is clear: the fortissimo climax, the public conclusion to a nation’s private failing. But does the book need such an ending? Having had 1848, do we need 1870 as well? Better to let the novel die away in disenchantment; better the downbeat reminiscing of two friends than a swirling salon-picture.

  For the Apocrypha proper, let us be systematic.

  1 Autobiography. ‘One day, if I write my memoirs – the only thing I shall write well, if ever I put myself to the task of doing it – you will find a place in them, and what a place! For you have blown a large breach in the walls of my existence.’ Gustave writes this in one of his earliest letters to Louise Colet; and over a seven-year period (1846–53) he makes occasional references to the planned autobiography. Then he announces its official abandonment. But was it ever more than just a project for a project? ‘I’ll put you in my memoirs’ is one of the handier clichés of literary wooing. File it alongside ‘I’ll put you in motion pictures’, ‘I could immortalise you in paint’, ‘I can just see your neck in marble’, etc, etc.

  2 Translations. Lost works, rather than strict apocrypha; but we might note here: a) Juliet Herbert’s translation of Madame Bovary, which the novelist oversaw, and which he proclaimed �
��a masterpiece’; b) the translation referred to in a letter of 1844: ‘I have read

  Candide twenty times. I have translated it into English …’ This does not sound like a school exercise: more like a piece of self-imposed apprenticeship. Judging from Gustave’s erratic use of English in his letters, the translation probably added a layer of unintentional comedy to the intentions of the original. He couldn’t even copy English place-names accurately: in 1866, making notes on the ‘coloured Minton tiles’ at the South Kensington Museum, he turns Stoke-upon-Trent into ‘Stroke-upon-Trend’.

  3 Fiction. This section of the Apocrypha contains a large amount of juvenilia, useful mainly to the psychobiographer. But the books a writer fails to write in his adolescence are of a different nature from the books he fails to write once he has announced his profession. These are the not-books for which he must take responsibility.

  In 1850, while in Egypt, Flaubert spends two days pondering the story of Mycerinus, a pious king of the fourth dynasty who is credited with reopening temples closed by his predecessors. In a letter to Bouilhet, however, the novelist characterises his subject more crudely as ‘the king who fucks his daughter’. Perhaps Flaubert’s interest was encouraged by the discovery (or indeed the memory) that in 1837 the king’s sarcophagus had been excavated by the British and shipped back to London. Gustave would have been able to inspect it when he visited the British Museum in 1851.

  I tried to inspect it myself the other day. The sarcophagus, they told me, is not one of the Museum’s more interesting possessions, and hasn’t been on display since 1904. Though believed to be fourth dynasty when it was shipped, it later turned out to be twenty-sixth dynasty: the portions of mummified body inside might, or equally might not, be those of Mycerinus. I felt disappointed, but also relieved: what if Flaubert had continued with his project, and inserted a meticulously researched description of the king’s tomb? Dr Enid Starkie would have been given the chance to swat another Mistake in Literature.

  (Perhaps I should award Dr Starkie an entry in my pocket guide to Flaubert; or would that be unnecessarily vindictive? S for Sade, or S for Starkie? It’s coming along well, by the way, Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. All you need to know about Flaubert to know as much as the next person! Only a few more entries and I’ll be finished. The letter X is going to be a problem, I can see. There’s nothing under X in Flaubert’s own Dictionary.)

  In 1850, from Constantinople, Flaubert announces three projects: ‘Une nuit de Don Juan’ (which reaches the planning stage); ‘Anubis’, the story of ‘the woman who wants to be fucked by a god’; and ‘My Flemish novel about the young girl who dies a virgin and a mystic … in a little provincial town, at the bottom of a garden planted with cabbages and bulrushes …’ Gustave complains in this letter to Bouilhet about the dangers of planning a project too thoroughly: ‘It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough actually to father them.’ In the present cases, Gustave didn’t get horny enough; though some see in his third project a vague forerunner of either Madame Bovary or Un cœur simple.

  In 1852–3 Gustave makes serious plans for ‘La Spirale’, a ‘grand, metaphysical, fantastical and bawling novel’, whose hero lives a typically Flaubertian double life, being happy in his dreams and unhappy in his real life. Its conclusion, of course: that happiness exists only in the imagination.

  In 1853, ‘one of my old dreams’ is resuscitated: a novel about chivalry. Despite Ariosto such a project is still feasible, Gustave declares: the additional elements he will bring to the subject are ‘terror and a broader poetry’.

  In 1861: ‘I’ve long been meditating a novel on insanity, or rather on how one becomes insane.’ From about this time, or a little later, he was also meditating, according to Du Camp, a novel about the theatre; he would sit in the green room jotting down the confidences of over-candid actresses. ‘Only Le Sage in Gil Blas has touched upon the truth. I will reveal it in all its nakedness, for it is impossible to imagine how comic it is.’

  From this point on, Flaubert must have known that any full-length novel would probably take him five to seven years; and therefore that most of his back-burner projects would inevitably boil themselves dry in the pot. From the last dozen years of his life we find four main ideas, plus an intriguing fifth, a sort of roman trouvé.

  a) ‘Harel-Bey’, an Eastern story. ‘If I were younger and had the money, I’d go back to the Orient – to study the modern Orient, the Orient of the Isthmus of Suez. A big book about that is one of my old dreams. I’d like to show a civilised man who turns barbarian, and a barbarian who becomes a civilised man – to develop that contrast between two worlds that end up merging … But it’s too late.’

  b) A book about the Battle of Thermopylae, which he planned to write after finishing Bouvard et Pécuchet.

  c) A novel featuring several generations of a Rouen family.

  d) If you cut a flatworm in half, the head will grow a new tail; more surprisingly, the tail will grow a new head. This is what happened with the regretted ending to L’Education sentimentale: it generated an entire novel of its own, called first ‘Under Napoleon III’, and later ‘A Parisian Household’. ‘I will write a novel about the Empire [Du Camp reports him saying] and bring in the evening receptions at Compiègne, with all the ambassadors, marshals and senators rattling their decorations as they bend to the ground to kiss the hand of the Prince Imperial. Yes indeed! The period will furnish material for some capital books.’

  e) The roman trouvé was found by Charles Lapierre, editor of Le Nouvelliste de Rouen. Dining at Croisset one evening, Lapierre told Flaubert the scandalous history of Mademoiselle de P—. She had been born into the Normandy nobility, had connections at Court, and was appointed reader to the Empress Eugénie. Her beauty, they said, was enough to damn a saint. It was certainly enough to damn her: an open liaison with an officer of the Imperial Guard caused her dismissal. Subsequently she became one of the queens of the Parisian demi-monde, ruling in the late 1860s over a loucher version of the Court from which she had been excluded. During the Franco-Prussian War, she disappeared from sight (along with the rest of her profession), and afterwards her star waned. She descended, by all accounts, to the lowest levels of harlotry. And yet, encouragingly (for fiction as well as for herself), she proved able to rise again: she became the established mistress of a cavalry officer, and by the time she died was the legal wife of an admiral.

  Flaubert was delighted with the story: ‘Do you know, Lapierre, you’ve just given me the subject of a novel, the counterpart of my Bovary, a Bovary of high society. What an attractive figure!’ He copied down the story at once, and began to make notes on it. But the novel was never written, and the notes have never been found.

  All these unwritten books tantalise. Yet they can, to an extent, be filled out, ordered, reimagined. They can be studied in academies. A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel. The same is true with these stubs of books.

  But what of the unled lives? These, perhaps, are more truly tantalising; these are the real apocrypha. Thermopylae instead of Bouvard et Pécuchet? Well, it’s still a book. But if Gustave himself had changed course? It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them. A phrenologist – that careers master of the nineteenth century – once examined Flaubert and told him he was cut out to be a tamer of wild beasts. Not so inaccurate either. That quote again: ‘I attract mad people and animals.’

  It is not just the life that we know. It is not just the life that has been successfully hidden. It is not just the lies about the life, some of which cannot now be disbelieved. It is also the life that was not led.

  ‘Am I to be a king, or just a pig?’ Gustave writes in his Intimate Notebook. At nineteen, it always looks as simple as this. There is the life, and then there is the not-life; the life of ambiti
on served, or the life of porcine failure. Others try and tell you about your future, but you never really believe them. ‘Many things’, Gustave writes at this time, ‘have been predicted to me: 1) that I’ll learn to dance; 2) that I’ll marry. We’ll see – I don’t believe it.’

  He never married, and he never learned to dance. He was so resistant to dancing that most of the principal male characters in his novels take sympathetic action and refuse to dance as well.

  What did he learn instead? Instead he learned that life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty; that there are swinish kings and regal hogs; that the king may envy the pig; and that the possibilities of the not-life will always change tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life.

  At seventeen, he announces that he wants to spend his whole life in a ruined castle by the sea.

  At eighteen, he decides that some freakish wind must have mistakenly transplanted him to France: he was born, he declares, to be Emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke 36-fathom pipes, to have 6,000 wives and 1,400 catamites; but instead, displaced by this meteorological hazard, he is left with immense, insatiable desires, fierce boredom, and an attack of the yawns.

  At nineteen, he thinks that after he’s finished his legal studies he’ll go off and become a Turk in Turkey, or a muleteer in Spain, or a cameleer in Egypt.

  At twenty, he still wants to become a muleteer, though by now the Spanish location has been narrowed to that of Andalusia. Other career possibilities include the life of a lazzarone in Naples; though he’d settle for being the driver of the coach which plies between Nîmes and Marseilles. Yet is any of this rare enough? The ease with which even the bourgeois travel nowadays comes as an agony to one who has ‘the Bosphorus in the soul’.