Julian Barnes
FLAUBERT’S PARROT
When you write the biography of a friend, you must do it as if you were taking
I am grateful to James Fenton and the Salamander Press for permission to reprint the lines from ‘A German Requiem’ on this page. The translations in this book are by Geoffrey Braithwaite; though he would have been lost without the impeccable example of Francis Steegmuller.
1
Six North Africans were playing
Let me start with the statue: the one above, the permanent, unstylish one, the one crying cupreous tears, the floppy-tied, square-waistcoated, baggy-trousered, straggle-moustached, wary, aloof bequeathed image of the man. Flaubert doesn’t return the gaze. He stares south from the place des Carmes towards the Cathedral, out over the city he despised, and which in turn has largely ignored him. The head is defensively high: only the pigeons can see the full extent of the writer’s baldness.
This statue isn’t the original one. The Germans took the first Flaubert away in 1941, along with the railings and door-knockers. Perhaps he was processed into cap-badges. For a decade or so, the pedestal was empty. Then a Mayor of Rouen who was keen on statues rediscovered the original plaster cast – made by a Russian called Leopold Bernstamm – and the city council approved the making of a new image. Rouen bought itself a proper metal statue in 93 per cent copper and 7 per cent tin: the founders, Rudier of Chatillon-sous-Bagneux, assert that such an alloy is guarantee against corrosion. Two other towns, Trouville and Barentin, contributed to the project and received stone statues. These have worn less well. At Trouville Flaubert’s upper thigh has had to be patched, and bits of his moustache have fallen off: structural wires poke out like twigs from a concrete stub on his upper lip.
Perhaps the foundry’s assurances can be believed; perhaps this second-impression statue will last. But I see no particular grounds for confidence. Nothing much else to do with Flaubert has ever lasted. He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound. This, as it happens, is precisely what he would have wanted; it’s only his admirers who sentimentally complain. The writer’s house at Croisset was knocked down shortly after his death and replaced by a factory for extracting alcohol from damaged wheat. It wouldn’t take much to get rid of his effigy either: if one statue-loving Mayor can put it up, another – perhaps a bookish party-liner who has half-read Sartre on Flaubert – might zealously take it down.
I begin with the statue, because that’s where I began the whole project. Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone? Why aren’t the books enough? Flaubert wanted them to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written text and the insignificance of the writer’s personality; yet still we disobediently pursue. The image, the face, the signature; the 93 per cent copper statue and the Nadar photograph; the scrap of clothing and the lock of hair. What makes us randy for relics? Don’t we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson died, his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling hair which she claimed to have cut from the writer’s head forty years earlier. The believers, the seekers, the pursuers bought enough of it to stuff a sofa.
I decided to save Croisset until later. I had five days in Rouen, and childhood instinct still makes me keep the best until last. Does the same impulse sometimes operate with writers? Hold off, hold off, the best is yet to come? If so, then how tantalising are the unfinished books. A pair of them come at once to mind:
I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that. Being a doctor was what I did well. My wife… died. My children are scattered now; they write whenever guilt impels. They have their own lives, naturally. ‘Life! Life! To have erections!’ I was reading that Flaubertian exclamation the other day. It made me feel like a stone statue with a patched upper thigh.
The unwritten books? They aren’t a cause for resentment. There are too many books already. Besides, I remember the end of
I spent my first day wandering about Rouen, trying to recognise parts of it from when I’d come through in 1944. Large areas were bombed and shelled, of course; after forty years they’re still patching up the Cathedral. I didn’t find much to colour in the monochrome memories. Next day I drove west to Caen and then north to the beaches. You follow a series of weathered tin signs, erected by the Ministere des Travaux Publics et des Transports. This way for the Circuit des Plages de Debarquement: a tourist route of the landings. East of Arromanches lie the British and Canadian beaches – Gold, Juno, Sword. Not an imaginative choice of words; so much less memorable than Omaha and Utah. Unless, of course, it’s the actions that make the words memorable, and not the other way round.
Graye-sur-Mer, Courseulles-sur-Mer, Ver-sur-Mer, Asnelles, Arromanches. Down tiny sidestreets you suddenly come across a place des Royal Engineers or a place W. Churchill. Rusting tanks stand guard over beach huts; slab monuments like ships’ funnels announce in English and French: ‘Here on the 6th June 1944 Europe was liberated by the heroism of the Allied Forces.’ It is very quiet, and not at all sinister. At Arromanches I put two one-franc pieces into the Telescope Panoramique (Tres Puissant 15/60 Longue Duree) and traced the curving morse of the Mulberry Harbour far out to sea. Dot, dash, dash, dash went the concrete caissons, with the unhurried water between them. Shags had colonised these square boulders of wartime junk.
I lunched at the Hotel de la Marine overlooking the bay. I was close to where friends had died – the sudden