Something to Declare Page 26

  When I saw the film, I thought I picked up two moments of Chabrolian invention, even if neither seemed much of a betrayal. Isabelle Huppert shows us her tongue on only two occasions—the first time, very early on, when she licks out the bottom of a wineglass as a coarse come-on to Charles, and the second, right at the end, when the tongue is burgundy with blood and she is dying. This subtle linking of eroticism and death was, it turned out, in the novel all along (though more strongly accentuated by being made visual). The other was a tiny moment as Charles and Emma are leaving their wedding feast: Charles, bumbling along beside his bride, manages to drop his hat and then awkwardly pick it up. Apart from being in character, this also seemed to predict the probable maladroitness of the wedding night. Pressed, Chabrol admits to not exactly an invention but rather a trouvaille. “We did the scene three or four times. In only one of them Charles dropped his hat. It was the best take. But let's call it a trouvaille that comes from Flaubert.”

  The problem with film is that it must always find, and state, at a basic level; it cannot not be specific. Flaubert builds up Emma's physical presence in the novel with a kind of delicate fétichisme, in allusions to her hair, the tips of her fingers, her shoes, touching and tickling her extremities like a boy whipping a top to get it spinning. Chabrol has to show us Huppert complete, from her first appearance. There are also things the writer sees, but forbears to mention. In a letter to Taine a decade after the novel was published, Flaubert explained how he might picture to himself an entire room in which the action was taking place, with all its furnishings, and yet never mention such surroundings in his text. “There are many details that I don't write down; for instance, in my own mind, Homais is lightly marked with smallpox.” What do you do about something like that? Chabrol says that you use only what is in the novel, not what is in the extraneous material. (You can also blur matters by giving Homais a beard.)

  Even so, Chabrol did go back to Flaubert's original scenarios. These are succinct summaries, often robustly expressed, of key actions or attitudes; they are not unlike a screenwriter's jottings. It was here, for instance, that Chabrol found guidance on the film's sexual tone. The novel makes the point that in Emma's relationship with Léon, he is more her mistress than she his. The scenario puts it more brutally: “La garce le chevauche”—the bitch bestrides him—an annotation Chabrol follows literally when the couple get to bed. On the other hand, he understandably jibbed at some of Flaubert's earthier indicators, like the description of Emma after one of her encounters with Rodolphe: “She came back from the garden with her hair full of spunk.”

  If Chabrol's film marks the high point of fidelity in treating the original text, with Flaubertistes straining to identify this or that minor invention, Vincente Minnelli's 1949 version seems free-associative by comparison. Is there a single line of original dialogue, a single line of authorial prose, which makes it through to the final cut? The film opens with Flaubert's trial: the prosecuting counsel demands a conviction while banging the rail in front of him with a bound copy of Madame Bovary. Pedants may immediately mock: there could have been no bound copy of the novel at the trial, since the supposed outrage to public morals had been provoked by serialization in the Revue de Paris. James Mason, as Flaubert, then addresses the court in reply—something the novelist was far too canny to do in reality—offering a defence of the book which, while plausible to modern ears, was far from that presented by his advocate in 1857.

  Such minor adjustments—and major restructuring—are typical, guiltfree, and, in a way, blameless. A property is homogenized by a production process into an entertainment whose psychology must be plausible to its makers and comprehensible to its customers. Or, to put it in Chabrol's words, “It's a Western.” And as such, seriously and properly made. Thus the ball scene is spectacular; Emma is the whirling belle, the cynosure, and Charles the drunken dolt who spoils her fun and gets humiliated; when Emma seems about to faint, servants are sent with chairs to break some windows. The novel's point, of course, is that it was all much more ordinary than this: what glowed in Emma's anticipation, experience, and memory was mere jolly routine to the other party-goers, who scarcely noticed the unimportant doctor's unimportant wife. Similarly, when Rodolphe ducks out of running away with Emma, it looks well and Hollywood to have her standing with packed trunks outside Homais's pharmacy while the coach thunders heartbreakingly past; but Rodolphe's betrayal was never so grand. Like a true, authentic coward, he merely slipped away. Such differences between film and book unwittingly endorse one of the novel's greatest lines. When Emma goes to see Lucia di Lammermoor in Rouen, she guilelessly compares opera's emotions and lifestyle with her own. “And now she knew the paltriness of the passions that art exaggerates.” Minnelli's film, in this respect, is operatic.

  Irritation at such “betrayal” of the book is short-lived and pointless. It's more interesting to compare what Hollywood presents as human motivation with what Flaubert faultlessly observed to be the case. Hollywood generally prefers the cause-and-effect of human behaviour to be a lucid unit: if a, then b. What provokes Emma's dissatisfaction and boredom? Reading all those Romantic novels; nothing more, nothing less. In this simplification, MGM revealingly puts itself on exactly the same level as Charles and his mother, who both try to stop Emma reading such fiction; the elder Mme Bovary argues that one has the right to alert the police if a bookseller persists in his trade as a poisoner. More creative is the adjustment Minnelli makes with the operation on Hippolyte 's clubfoot. The problem is how to retain sympathy for Charles: if, as in the novel, he botches the operation so badly that the little fellow's leg has to come off, won't this terminally disenchant popcorn-munchers who place their faith in the medical profession? The solution is as follows: at the last minute Charles declines to operate on Hippolyte, pleading lack of experience. For this honourable decision he is mocked by the assembled village, peering in at the apothecary's window. Such unfair, public scorn helps us retain sympathy for Charles. However—if a, then b—because Charles has failed to become a famous (and potentially rich) person by performing the operation, Emma goes off for the first time with Rodolphe. This, in turn, helps retain sympathy for Emma: everyone can understand how you might be driven to a bit on the side if your husband turns out to be a low-achieving wimp. While Flaubert and Chabrol follow the more brutal and complex realities of human behaviour, Hollywood worries about sympathy rather than truth.

  But fidelity has a downside too. Once you realize that little is being invented, then (presuming you know the book), you also realize that little, except perhaps the acting, is going to surprise you. Oh, you feel, well if we're here in the novel now, then we've got about five minutes on that bit, ten on the next, then such-and-such happens, and so on. Furthermore, prose narrative and film narrative inevitably pull against one another. One of the novel's climactic moments, still shocking to read, comes when Emma and Léon fuck in the closed cab as it careers around the streets of Rouen. It is a key moment in Emma's degradation, a vortex of lust, desperation, and snobbery (“They do it like this in Paris” is Léon's seducing phrase). The scene lasts a long time in the book, even if it occupies only a page of prose, and its effect is the more powerful because Flaubert never goes inside the cab but lets us deduce events by annotating the vehicle's route, its changing destination and period of hire; also by evidencing, at one point, the remnants of a torn-up letter being thrown from the window. In Chabrol's film— the director admits it—this scene doesn't work (it doesn't work for Renoir either). It can't be long enough, and it somehow can't be shocking (“Oh, now they're doing it in a cab instead of in a bed,” you think). And because film always pulls towards the specific, Chabrol feels obliged to show us a tangle of Emma and Léon inside the cab, just to confirm that they aren't playing Scrabble. If there are moments when cinematic specificity enhances—for instance, in the goriness of the doctoring—mainly the effect of the medium is to iron out the book, to flatten its rhythms.

  French Flaubertistes gen
erally applauded Chabrol's film; French film critics had their doubts. “Too academic,” some said, blaming the very fastidiousness others praised. “They accept fidelity in minor works,” Chabrol muses. “Hitchcock was very faithful to Rebecca—no one denounced him for his fidelity. Besides, I always believed that cinema and literature were going in the same direction, were companions.” This may be true in the widest sense, but Chabrol's film, by its very scrupulousness, forces the question of Book Into Film. What do we want of it, what is it for, whom is it for? Though cinema has been raiding literature high and low for an entire century, there's still unease about the collaboration, or exploitation. A Shakespeare play may become a Verdi opera without disturbing the theatrical or operatic communities (perhaps in part because Shakespeare was himself intensely parasitical on other sources). But cinephiles tend to feel that a book-based film is less authentic, less purely a film, whereas the book-devoted are wary of … what? Vulgarization, simplification, loss of subtlety, for a start; loss of control over how you as reader recreate the characters and action; loss of the experience happening inside you, and in your own time of choosing, rather than out there, publicly, for a period of time imposed by someone else. Is the film an easy point of access for those daunted by a Classic Novel, or a way of avoiding it altogether? And for those who know the book, is the film a parallel experience, an extension, or an alternative? I used to suspect filmic infidelity, and would snort at anachronisms, misquotations, non-quotations, hair-colour changes, and so on. The director's principal task, I assumed, was to protect the integrity of the book against the producer's and money-men's instinctive desire to coarsen and banalize. Now I am much less sure. In part, this comes from the experience of having a couple of my own novels turned into films. One was made by the French director Marion Vernoux. I kept away from the process and only met her—appropriately enough, aboard a cross-channel ferry— half an hour after shooting had finished. The first thing I found myself saying was, “I hope you have betrayed me.” “Of course,” she replied, with a complicit smile. Neither of us exactly meant it, though we knew what we meant—and what the other meant—all the same.

  Chabrol maintains that if Flaubert had lived in the age of cinematography, he might well have made films. This is true: he did, after all, write for the theatre. But if so, he wouldn't have made Madame Bovary. Not just in the sense that he wouldn't have adapted it from its prose form; but in the wider sense that were he to decide on recounting the story of Delphine Delamare with story-board and lens rather than quill pen, he would from the very start necessarily imagine it differently. He would think about the external eye rather than the internal; he would know that screen dialogue doesn't work like page dialogue; he would imagine the impersonating actor alongside the character; he would think differently about time, and light. So is this what the loyal film maker should do? Are faithful adaptations inherently unfaithful; indeed, the more faithful, the more unfaithful?

  At the end of my visit to Chabrol, we sit over breakfast, the scented Anjou air lightly polluted by a miasma of burnt toast. The morning radio is preparing the French for their annual lemming dash to beach, second home, or up-country pension. A bland voice reports the findings of a survey into national expectations in the matter of holiday romance. Fifty per cent of French women apparently hope that the amorous encounter will extend beyond the duration of the holiday. By contrast, only fifteen per cent of French men want such affairs to continue after bag-packing time. Chabrol shrugs. “They need a survey to tell us that?” Another summer, another heartbreak. Today's Emmas murmuring, “I have a lover.” Today's Rodolphes thinking, “She's not bad, the doctor's wife, I think I'll have her.” They should read the novel before their holidays. Or at least see one of the films.

  (17)

  Justin: A Small Major

  Character

  Justin: A Small Major Character

  Imagine you're sitting down to write a novel of village life—a nineteenth-century novel, when villages were more enclosed and self-sufficient. You have your story—an old one you heard some years before, a dramatic, even melodramatic tale of the wife of a health officer, who takes one lover, then a second, who is filled with romantic fantasies, who is extravagant and scandalous, and who finally poisons herself. All this takes place in a village; therefore you have villagers. The heroine is of a certain social standing; therefore she has a servant. Pretty soon you find that mere fidelity to truth has dealt you a deck of inevitable characters: squire, clergyman, groom, shopkeeper, gravedigger, and so on. You have an inn, therefore you have an innkeeper; your characters ride horses, therefore a blacksmith must exist somewhere. You are stuck with most of these characters—or at least, stuck with their theoretical existence, even if you choose to deny them real fictional existence. Some novelists might find the inevitability and the discipline attractive; though imagine having to invent a new innkeeper every time you wrote PAGE ONE at the top of a sheet of paper. In this respect the modern novelist seems to have the advantage. You think you need the present-day equivalent of a blacksmith, that's to say a garage mechanic, in your story? Simple: give your hero or heroine the sort of car that's expected to break down. You don't need a garage mechanic? Give him or her a nice reliable Japanese motor.

  So you have your main story, and you have your surrounding minor characters, some pre-dealt, some personally picked. What, then, are these minor characters for? What are they up to? At a basic level, they are facilitators, they are there to make life go more smoothly for the major characters: they run errands, they run shops, they run baths; they steal dogs if you want your heroine to cry, they rescue dogs if you want your heroine to smile. They are there for plausibility, for colour, for decoration, for incidental humour, for a change of tone, for a change of focus.

  And beyond this? Beyond this lies a point of divide among novelists. Do you want your minor characters just to “be themselves,” or do you want them to bear weight, to be “significant”? Having minor characters who are “significant,” emblematic or symbolic, is a high-risk strategy: the risk is that of over-organization, also of giving the reader too close an awareness of the author's guiding hand. Edith Wharton admired and loved Henry James, but even she had difficulty with what she saw as the airlessness and over-planning of the later work. She thought he had become too theoretical, too geometrical, and that in the process he risked losing what she tellingly described in her autobiography as the “irregular and irrelevant movements of life.”

  Here she identifies one of the novelist's central preoccupations, and one which can often be seen working itself out among the minor characters. Life has its irregular and irrelevant movements, granted. But a novel is not life, or even an equally weighted representation of life. If you reproduced all life's irregular and irrelevant movements, you would have a novel boring and picaresque to the point of unreadability This is the fundamental battle between structure and vivacity, which novelists settle according to their temperaments and their theories.

  In terms of demonstrating the irregularity of life through his minor characters, the archetypal novelist is Dickens: profligate, virtuosic, carefree, careless. Virginia Woolf, writing about David Copperfield, described his unmatched ability to conjure up secondary figures almost without thought or effort. “Dickens made his books blaze up not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people on the fire. The interest flags, and he creates Miss Mowcher, completely alive, equipped in every detail as if she were to play a great part in the story whereas, once the dull stretch of road is passed, by her help, she disappears.” This cavalier way with minor characters no doubt sprang mainly from the nature of Dickens's genius; but it must have been accentuated by a technical aspect, the fact that he wrote for serial publication. Imagine that you are on the eighth of twenty monthly episodes; the previous seven are published, unalterable, tyrannical; and however far you plan ahead, the last ten or so episodes are fluid in your mind—in such circumstances even the greatest ge
nius is likely to concentrate on the major characters and use the lesser ones as Polyfilla, as one-offs, or as rather loosely controlled running gags. Imagine a painter being given a large canvas, told to start painting rightwards from the left, and instructed to complete in its final varnished form exactly one-twentieth of the canvas each month, before moving on to the next one-twentieth. We should, I think, be amazed at any formal success the resultant picture might have. Henry James's judgement on the Victorian novel is well known: he called it “a treasure-house of detail but an indifferent whole.”

  Flaubert stands at the opposite end of the fictional spectrum to Dickens. He never sullied himself with journalism; he never performed his work in public; he never allowed his books to be illustrated; he published comparatively little; and, most importantly in the present context, he never allowed any part of a novel to appear before the whole was complete. The Revue de Paris, when it serialized Madame Bovary, was not dealing, as the British serializers of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Eliot were, with an author inventing against the clock. Flaubert's good fortune came partly from just that—a good fortune, or at least a helpful private income; but it mainly came from an artistic obduracy rare at that time. Dickens was a novelist who flung another handful of people on to the fire to make it blaze; Flaubert stacked his kindling with obsessive care so that the main blaze would come from the logs.