Something to Declare Read online

  Va-t'en, messager, il n'importe Par le tram, le coche ou le bac Rue, et 2, Gounod à la porte De notre Georges Rodenbach*

  The poet of “L'Après-midi d'un faune” was also editor of the fashion magazine La Dernière Mode and wrote sixty-one little verse offerings to accompany gifts of glacé fruit at the New Year. This playful aspect is given visual corroboration by two of the strangest literary photographs ever taken. They show Mallarmé, in three-piece suit, floppy butterfly tie, and broad black hat, posing as a French peasant against a painted rustic backdrop. In one shot he is wearing clogs, carries a hay rake over his shoulder with lunch pail attached, and is trying to look like a jaunty farm labourer. The poet of ultimate refinement playing at “real life”:

  Exclus-en si tu commences Le réel parce que vil …

  “I need men, Parisian women friends, paintings, music …” While still marooned in the provinces, Mallarmé criticized Taine for his view that “an artist is merely man raised to his greatest possible power, whereas I believe that it is perfectly possible to have a human temperament utterly distinct from one's literary temperament.” This notion—so baffling to the reductive biographer—is confirmed by Mallarmé's own case. Where the work is erudite and abstruse, the man was courtly and accessible. Such a mix is often a powerful social aphrodisiac: Mallarmé became one of the most admired and loved writers of his day, the familiar of Manet and Degas, Whistler and Swinburne; the young Gide testified to his enormous charm.

  After he was elected Prince of Poets in 1896,* the newspapers had a label to stick on him, “a kite's tail with which I try to escape in the streets, having no other means of hiding myself than by joining the Mardi Gras parade.” Celebrity meant that the press was free “to make the hermit a buffoon,” and the poet of “intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader” was approached for his views on the bicycle, and for his contribution to a symposium on whether or not the top hat was ugly. He obliged good-humouredly, indeed seriously: “A bicycle,” he told readers of Le Gaulois, “is not vulgar when wheeled out of the garage, and soon becomes sparkling in its rapidity. Yet whoever mounts it, man or woman, reveals something disgraceful, that of human being reduced to mechanical object, with a caricatural movement of the legs. Too bad!”

  “Among these exquisites, these dandies of word and syntax, there is a madman madder than the rest, and that is the nebulous Mallarmé, who maintains that one should never begin a sentence with a monosyllable.” Edmond de Goncourt can always be relied on for the contrary view, and his splenetic exasperation in the Journal is comical, but not absurd. Mallarmé wasn't mad—few writers can have been so high-minded and purposeful—but his extreme refinement, his ethereal costiveness, strained vitality from his work. The more poetry moves towards music, the farther it moves away from life; though of course Mallarmé's aesthetic is well defended, and one person's “life” may be another person's “unpoetic vulgarity.” In the middle of an aesthetically anguished and grammatically contorted letter to Cazalis, for instance, after announcing his “Work” as the third great beauty to follow the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa, Mallarmé drops in this paragraph:

  Since we've reached these heights, let's go on and explore them, then we 'll do our best to descend from them. This is what I heard my neighbour say this morning, as she pointed to the window on the opposite side of the street from her: “Gracious me! Madame Ramaniet ate asparagus yesterday.” “How can you tell?” “From the pot she's put outside her window.” Isn't that the provinces in a nutshell? Its curiosity, its preoccupations, and that ability to see clues in the most meaningless things—and such things, great gods! Fancy having to confess that mankind, by living one on top of the other, has reached such a pass!!

  The poet's nose-holding fastidiousness extends equally to sex. When Cazalis is fretting over whether or not to marry an English girl called Ettie Yapp, Mallarmé, the connoisseur of renunciation, recommends the acquisition of a “tea-maker” but rebukes his friend for overemphasizing the physical: “You see it [marriage] too much in terms of lingam fiction.” Not just the statement, but the phrasing, is significant; sex is one of those things best left to people in hot climates.

  Huysmans, via Des Esseintes, praised Mallarmé's “lofty scorn.” A refined aesthetic which declares itself above the battle is intrinsically conservative. In 1863 the poet went to a meeting in support of Poland (where the rebellion against Russia had recently been crushed) and was primarily struck by the way in which the workers applauded frenetically when addressed as “gentlemen.” “I don't like workers: they are vain.” What of the bourgeoisie? “They are hideous, and it's quite plain that they have no soul.” Which leaves the aristocracy, by which he means “the nobility and the poets.” “As long as the former have money and the latter have beautiful statues, everything will be fine.”

  The poet, for Mallarmé, is a statue owner rather than an indulger in lingam fiction, and his answer to the old poser about what you would save from your burning house is predictable: “Henri, don't you think that the man who made the Venus de Milo is greater than the one who saves a race, and wouldn't it be preferable that Poland should fall rather than see that eternal marble hymn to Beauty lying in pieces?” Happily, such choices don't often arise (and if they did twenty-one-year-old aesthetes would probably not be consulted). Polish freedom against the Venus de Milo? Shouldn't the Poles have a vote in it?

  The “lofty scorn,” combined with a topographical preference for “the purest glaciers of Aesthetics,” produced moments of farcical solemnity, especially when Mallarmé was in league with Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, whose grip on reality wasn't always tenacious. In 1867 they planned an attack on that reliable enemy, the bourgeois, to show him

  that he has no existence independently of the Universe—from which he thought he could separate himself—but that he is one of its functions, and one of the vilest at that—and I'll show him what he represents in that Development. If he understands it, his joy will be forever poisoned.

  The plan seems to have been to write a book which the bourgeois would gobble up but then choke on (the scheme has zoomed off into metaphor already): “I'm eagerly awaiting your sugary mixture, which will make him feel so nauseated he'll vomit himself: you're right, we'll avoid the courts, all the art will lie in making him judge himself unworthy of living.” The idea that Mal-larmé and Villiers (of all duos) might come up with something to make the bourgeois auto-destruct with self-loathing must be filed in the most arcane section of the Department of Empty Threats.

  Poets, in order to write great poetry, don't need to see as much as novelists must in order to write great novels. If literature is a spectrum (and Hugo hogs the rainbow), then Mallarmé is working in ultra-violet. Nowadays we probably honour him more in the breach than in the observance. Anthropologists, we hunch over the wise-looking magician, and take what he does much at his own estimation; but capturing a sacred wind with an array of hempen knots is only one of poetry's skills. If the Mona Lisa ate asparagus, it would show in her urine; and this would make her richer, both as a woman and as a subject for art.

  * It is now in public hands: “Courbet's oil, L'Origine du monde, was owned / by Madame Jacques Lacan and through some tax / shenanigans became the Musée d'Orsay's. / Go see it there. Beneath the pubic bush— / a matted Rorschach blot—beneath blanched thighs / of a fat and bridal docility, / a curved and rosy closure says, ‘Ici!' ” From John Updike's characteristically titled “Two Cunts in Paris” (American and Other Poems, 2001).

  * Flaubert's maxim: “Honours dishonour, titles degrade, office-holding ossifies.” By the time he wrote this, however, he had already accepted the Légion d'honneur.

  * “For a start leave out / The real, because it's cheap / Too much precision will wreck / The dreaminess of what you write.”

  * “Hence, messenger / by tram, coach or ferry—it doesn't matter— / And take this to No. 2, rue Gounod / Home of our friend Georges Rodenbach.”

  * They ordered these
things more efficiently in France. In Britain, thirteen years later, Yeats had to make his own pronouncement on the death of Swinburne: “I'm the King of the Cats now.” Compare Berryman's uncertainty on the death of Robert Frost: “Who's Number One?”

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  Flaubert's Death-Masks

  Flaubert's death-mask

  (a) Biographer

  Alcoholism softens the flesh—or at least, it did in nineteenth-century France. When Verlaine died, Mallarmé watched a cast being taken of the face of this staunchly self-destructive drinker. He reported to the poet Georges Rodenbach that he would never forget “the wet, soggy sound made by the removal of the death-mask from his face, an operation in which part of his beard and mouth had come away too.”

  After the morticians, along come the biographers: they, too, carefully mould the wax to preserve every last tuck and wrinkle, aiming to convey the final, decisive expression on the lips; but sometimes the flesh is soft, and the reverent process proves destructive. Bits of Flaubert's moustache, for instance, have been coming away for a century. When he died in 1880, the Times obituarist confused him with his brother Achille and said he had once trained as a surgeon (the Paper of Record also retitled his last novel Bouvard et Peluchet). The first proper study of Flaubert, by Emile Faguet (1899; Englished in 1914), firmly and misleadingly declared that the writer's affair with Louise Colet “may be considered as the only sentimental episode of any importance in Flaubert's life.” In 1967 Enid Starkie prefaced her two-volume account with a portrait of “Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter”—thereby managing to rip off his entire face in one go, since the picture was in fact of Louis Bouilhet. Sartre was less of an impression-taker, more an imposer. In L'Idiot de la famille he seared the novelist with a terrifying theoretical grid—like an imperious chef branding false scorch-marks on to a steak after it's been cooked.

  In 1859, Ernest Feydeau wrote to Flaubert asking for biographical details to pass on to a journalist. It was an inept request. “I have no biography,” Flaubert replied, and went on to complain:

  As soon as you become an artist, it seems that grocers, legal registrars, customs clerks, bootboys and others feel themselves obliged to take a personal interest in your life. And there are others to inform them whether you are dark or fair, witty or melancholic, how many summers you have lived, and whether you are a devotee of the bottle or keen on playing the mouth-organ. I, on the other hand, believe that a writer should leave behind him nothing but his works.

  It was a vain hope; and it would be little comfort to Flaubert that the disobedient pursuit of every detail of his life has on the whole been carried out by scholars and critics. They were, for him, the moral equivalent of bootboys and customs clerks; all his life he trawled their work for idiocies high and low to include in the “Copie” of Bouvard et Pécuchet.

  Yet to a certain extent Flaubert might still be able to say today, “I have no biography.” There was no early fact-dredging, no tracking-down of the faithful servant, the reticent mistress, the garrulous supplier of cabbages. So the interpreters, the dreamers, and the wonky theorists got in there without the sifters and sorters having first done their business. The best biographers in English either stopped half-way (like Francis Steegmuller) or were too brief (like Philip Spencer).

  Now comes Herbert Lottman, the diligent biographer of Camus. Pre-eminently a dredger and sifter, an archive-pounder and source-badgerer, Mr. Lottman arrives approximately a hundred years too late, yet still needed. He arranges the known facts about Flaubert's life, and the known opinions of his contemporaries, with an effi ciency that has not been seen before. As against this, he writes badly, translates awkwardly, has no apparent opinion on Flaubert's works, and has little feel for the nineteenth century; he alternates stretches of drab invisibility with outbursts of perkily certain judgement, and is often crassly up-to-date. When Flaubert gets the pox, Lottman comments pompously: “The modern reader will be struck by the absence of respect for personal prophylactics …” Given the messy history of Flaubertian biography, this book has a certain value. But its formidable irritations confirm that the chuckling curse Flaubert put on his biographers hasn't lost its power.

  He was modern literature's archetypal rewriter; he told us that prose is like hair—it shines with combing. Mr. Lottman's text is a tangle of nits and knots, a flour-bomb of dandruff, a delta of split ends. Flaubert, to begin with (line one), isn't a great writer but “a seminal figure.” His family roots in Champagne are swiftly outlined—perhaps too swiftly, Lottman worries: “Indeed, we have hardly made this Champagne region seem attractive. It is a countryside of chalky soil whose perfect grape, when dealt with in a certain way, becomes that fizzy wine.” Gustave grew up in Rouen: “One would love to be able to see the world as this child saw it.” At the age of six or seven, he passed a recently-employed guillotine and saw bloodied cobbles: “Surely every child can call up at least one unbearable memory, even if guillotines and heads in baskets are harder to find now.” Later, his education began: “Gustave went to school during the tail end of romanticism, which explains how romanticism was able to enter the classroom.” And so on.

  Having reassured the timid reader that champagne comes from Champagne, Lottman similarly tickets and dockets the French nineteenth-century literary scene. Les Fleurs du mal is an example of “the liveliest modern writing”; Musset was once “a young star of French letters” (who also lacked the proper respect for prophylactics); Juliette Adam is “this premodern feminist”; the European phenomenon of Byronism is reduced to “Byron's works in French translation were among the best-selling books in the country in the decade preceding Flaubert's schooling”; while Louise Colet is jauntily characterized as “the poetry hustler.” This last phrase indicates the comparative shallowness of Lottman's depth of field: what strikes him as “hustling” was normal behaviour then (and still hasn't exactly died out). If Louise Colet was a hustler, so were Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

  Then we come to the books. “The novel can be read for the story,” Lottman tells us of Madame Bovary, and this is, alas, his most incisive remark. His one-paragraph plot-summary also includes the sentence: “Meanwhile, Charles moves from one professional humiliation to another, despite the paternal counselling of the village pharmacist, Homais.” Perhaps “because of” would have been apter than “despite”; though this would, of course, mean something entirely different. Similar plonkingness affects Lottman's brief account of Bouvard et Pécuchet. Trois contes is “a book of three remarkable short stories”; and the third chapter of Saint Julien l'Hospitalier is summarized as follows: “When he discovers that he has indeed slain his parents, he abandons everything to beg, then befriends a leper and goes to Heaven.” Rarely can the process of attaining sanctity have been made to sound so jog-a-jogly routine; presumably Mr. Lottman thinks that the process of “befriending” a leper normally involves lying naked on top of him, chest to pustulated chest, mouth to mouth, warming him up with your body. Wisely in the circumstances, Lottman doesn't try too ambitious a plot-summary of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine. He also gets by without any mention of style indirect libre.

  Nor for that matter does he quote the Flaubertian motto ne pas conclure—no doubt advisedly. On the contentious topics of Flaubert's private life—such as epilepsy, homosexuality, and anti-Semitism—Lottman is briskly conclusive when brisk conclusion is not just unwise but impossible. Zola was disappointed on first meeting the author of Madame Bovary because (inter alia) he found his hero had a taste for paradox; and Lottman has a similar aversion to the unresolved, the ambiguous, the self-contradictory—the human, in other words. For instance, Flaubert is famously reported by Amélie Bosquet as having said: Madame Bovary, c'est moi. Lottman, in his pertly titled chapter “Louise Takes a Ride,” refers us to Flaubert's letter to Louise Colet of 6 July 1852, in which he mocks Musset and the idea of making art by setting one's personal feelings to music. This, Flaubert conceded, had been his failing in La Tentation: “In the place of Saint Antony,
you find me.” Lottman at this point comments: “He would not make that mistake again. (So much for one remark attributed to Flaubert, that Madame Bovary, c'est moi.)” So much for … The comment must therefore have been invented, QED. Alternative factors Mr. Lottman might have considered: 1) Writers are frequently inconsistent in their statements about their art, and a gap is common between theory and practice; 2) The remark was intended to describe the almost psychopathic closeness which sometimes develops between novelist and character (Flaubert felt nauseous when Emma took poison);3) It was a joke, the wearily ironic response of a writer fed up with being pestered for the “real” identity of his most famous creation;4) It was a reference to Cervantes's supposed remark on his deathbed, declaring himself to be the original of Don Quixote; 5) All of these at the same time.

  The toughest part of Lottman's book to read is the first half, since what is known of Flaubert's life up to about 1860 has been much-repeated, and there is little for him to add: but after this point, he grinds a grudging recognition from his victim. He is particularly informative on the non-artistic aspects of Flaubert's life: on his exact financial position at various times, his relationship with his publishers, his “hustling” to promote his niece's career as a painter, and his own fiasco in the theatre. If you want to know where Flaubert was at a particular time, what he was doing, what he wrote to friends, and what those friends were saying behind his back, then this is the first book you should turn to. And if Mr. Lottman doesn't always make the desired point, he at least provides the facts from which the point can be made. For instance, Edmond de Goncourt, leaving an ill-attended Sunday afternoon chez Flaubert, discussed with Zola the “lack of radiance” around their host, for all his bonhomie and fame. Was this just a typical bit of Goncourt depreciation? How might this “lack of radiance” be quantified? Later, when Flaubert dies, Zola estimates the number of mourners at about three hundred. This may remind us of another funeral in the same city 120 pages earlier, that of Bouilhet (fellow Rouennais but a far less successful writer): it was attended by two thousand mourners. Lottman allows us to make such comparisons simply by including everything he knows.