Mortals

In a state of developing shock, he examined the paperback. It was the 1943 Pocket Book Eleanor Marx Aveling translation. The translator had been a suicide, Marx’s daughter, one of his daughters. Where was his Modern Library Milton? Why had Iris left that out and why had she put this, this, this bomb in his net bag?

Iris was not cruel. She lacked the capacity for it. So why this book, now, lying in wait for him?

He had to digest his shock. He got out of his umbrella-tent and laid it carefully aside so that he could reenter it when he had gotten the Coleman lantern going. He needed light. He needed more light. He had to understand this or die.

He was ready. The lantern was going. He was back in the umbrella-tent. He had put a pillow on the seat of the camp stool. It was necessary to keep the shank of the umbrella clamped between his knees and he had to hold the paperback at a difficult angle to catch the lantern light. He was not comfortable. His back had begun to hurt already. But he had a water bottle. He would be fine.

He thought he knew how she could have innocently put Bovary in with his other reading matter. It could be there because she was scrupulous about keeping her eye out at jumble sales for cheap copies of classics that he had admitted to her he hadn’t for one reason or another gotten around to finishing earlier in his reading life. She had found a Vanity Fair, for him, for example, and either Bleak House or Dombey and Son. She loved him. She wanted him not to have lacunae, was what was behind it. And he had, he knew, mentioned that he had started Madame Bovary and not finished it. It must have been in the early years of their marriage. He hadn’t said why he hadn’t finished the book. He wasn’t sure she’d asked. But he knew why. Partly it was because the idea of a wife committing adultery was upsetting to him. But he hadn’t liked the book for other reasons. He had concluded that the main character was an idiot, and that what the book looked like was a beautifully written sequence of repetitions to show how stupid she, and any woman like her, had to be, any woman captured by romantic sentiments. He remembered thinking how smug the book was. He was sure that Bovary was from ovary, not that he could prove it. The book was against women. A woman had given Flaubert syphilis, thus his attitude. The men were fools, too. He had gotten as far as the liaison with Rodolphe and given up.

He began paging along, reacquainting himself with what he had read, the part he remembered. The school business was still vivid to him. Charles Bovary’s first marriage, that too he had clear. His eye snagged on the last paragraph on page 36.

Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

His heart was beating too hard. The struggle was going to be to find out if Iris was speaking to him through this book, and if so, if so, if so, then what she was saying, exactly?

He was going to have to speed-read the rest of this thing, because he had to understand. He had to verify that the story was what he had assumed or picked up through his reading it was.

Emma had been put in a convent where she read contraband romantic novels and poetry. Then she had married a clod who became a successful country doctor doing his best and she had hardly been able to wait to betray him, first platonically, so to speak, with a young clerk, as he recalled. She was always waiting for something to happen. She has a child by her husband but sends it off to a wet nurse. She had hated the child for being female. She had gone to live in a provincial town, Yonville, inhabited exclusively by fools and jackasses. Over and over human stupidity was presented against landscapes of terrific natural beauty.

Ah, page 116, “What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish.” And there was no sex in the fucking thing, no described sex. He wasn’t up to Rodolphe yet. Leon, the first guy, had been a tease. Was it possible Iris was saying she was at the Leon stage and she needed to be stopped before Rodolphe? That was probably insane. He didn’t know. He was up to Rodolphe. Rodolphe was introduced as a cad. Could Iris be saying Morel was a cad, using Rodolphe, making a cry? He would hold the thought. He had reached the point at which he’d stopped years ago, he was pretty sure. He mustn’t seize on details prematurely. He had to conclude on the basis of themes, or something. He had to finish reading this thing, at once.

By page 196 she was well into it with Rodolphe.

Everything in Charles irritated her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his existence, in fine. She repented of her past virtue as a crime, and what still remained of it crumbled away beneath the furious blows of her pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came back to her with dazzling attractions; she threw her whole soul into it, borne away toward this image with a fresh enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much removed from her life, as absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he had been about to die and were passing under her eyes.

He was reading furiously.

Rodolphe ditches her. Every line in his farewell letter is a lie.

Madame goes into a collapse. Rodolphe is gone but Leon is back and this time it’s not platonic.

Emma was bankrupting her husband and trying to borrow money from Leon… and then there was this, page 316…

“Morel is to come back to-night; he will not refuse me, I hope” (this was one of his friends, the son of a very rich merchant)…

Morel. Morel!… but it could mean nothing.

Back to Rodolphe. She is desperate for money and can’t get any.

Then death. She takes poison out of remorse at what she had been, a fool. Her daughter ends up in child labor. She leaves a ruin.

He had no idea what to think. His mind was all over the place. There were no checkmarks or underlinings or nota benes anywhere in the volume, no page corners turned down. What was the signal, the message? Was he Bovary, a fool distinguished by the fact he believed every lie she told? Was he on page 363?

Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe.

In the scene prompting that characterization Charles has construed an explicit love letter from Rodolphe to his wife as probably suggesting a platonic relationship only.

Was Madame Bovary a communication to him, was the question. He had to assume it was, since even if she’d put it in his pack by accident initially something would have gone off in her mind to say stop, halt, this will cause Ray to freak, what was I thinking?

So there it was. She was neither stupid nor cruel. So there it was. How he took Madame Bovary was critical. What kind of book was it? You could take it as a Christian homily if you wanted to, a tract saying marriage is an ordeal but violating your stupid vows is even worse. But that was farfetched. He had learned something by suffering through this book, which was that the TLS could be wrong. He remembered reading someone very authoritative writing in it that there was only one major novel, a thing called The Golovlyov Family, a nineteenth-century Russian novel Ray hadn’t read, in which every character presented, without exception, was loathsome. Surely Madame Bovary belonged in that category, if you didn’t count the poor child. Every adult in the book was vile.

He had to know if he was supposed to see himself in Charles Bovary. Every detail seemed to answer in the