Flaubert's Parrot

genius and an adolescent beach holiday? But perhaps it wasn’t. Gustave and Gertrude kept in distant touch along the decades. He sent her a copy of Madame Bovary (she thanked him, pronounced the novel ‘hideous’, and quoted at him Philip James Bailey, author of Festus, on the writer’s duty to give moral instruction to the reader); and forty years after that first meeting in Trouville she came to visit him at Croisset. The handsome, blond cavalier of her youth was now bald and red-faced, with only a couple of teeth left in his head. But his gallantry remained in good health. ‘My old friend, my youth,’ he wrote to her afterwards, ‘during the long years I have lived without knowing your whereabouts, there was perhaps not a single day when I did not think of you.’

During the course of those long years (in 1847, to be precise, the year after Flaubert was recalling his Trouville sunsets to Louise) Gertrude had promised to love, honour and obey someone else: an English economist called Charles Tennant. While Flaubert slowly attained European fame as a novelist, Gertrude was herself to publish a book: an edition of her grandfather’s journal, called France on the Eve of the Great Revolution. She died in 1918 at the age of ninety-nine; and she had a daughter, Dorothy, who married the explorer Henry Morton Stanley.

On one of Stanley’s trips to Africa, his party got into difficulties. The explorer was obliged gradually to discard all his unnecessary belongings. It was, in a way, a reverse, real-life version of ‘Desert Island Discs’: instead of being equipped with things to make life in the tropics more bearable, Stanley was having to get rid of things to survive there. Books were obviously supernumerary, and he began jettisoning them until he got down to those two which every guest on ‘Desert Island Discs’ is furnished with as a bare, civilised minimum: the Bible and Shakespeare. Stanley’s third book, the one he threw out before reducing himself to this final minimum, was Salammbo.

3 THE SNAP OF COFFINS

The weary, valetudinarian tone of Flaubert’s letter to Louise Colet about the sunsets was not a pose. 1846, after all, was the year when first his father and then his sister Caroline had died. ‘What a house!’ he wrote. ‘What a hell!’ All night Gustave watched beside his sister’s corpse: she lying in her white wedding-dress, he sitting and reading Montaigne.

On the morning of the funeral, he gave her a last farewell kiss as she lay in her coffin. For the second time in three months he heard the battering sound of hobnailed boots climbing the wooden stairs to fetch a body. Mourning was scarcely possible that day: practicalities supervened. There was a lock of Caroline’s hair to be cut, and plaster casts of her face and hands to be taken: ‘I saw the great paws of those louts touching her and covering her face with plaster.’ Great louts are necessary for funerals.

The trail to the cemetery was familiar from the time before. At the graveside Caroline’s husband broke down. Gustave watched as the coffin was lowered. Suddenly, it got stuck: the hole had been dug too narrow. The gravediggers got hold of the coffin and shook it; they pulled it this way and that, twisted it, hacked at it with a spade, levered at it with crowbars; but still it wouldn’t move. Finally, one of them placed his foot flat on the box, right over Caroline’s face, and forced it down into the grave.

Gustave had a bust made of that face; it presided over his study all his working life, until his own death, in the same house, in 1880. Maupassant helped lay out the body. Flaubert’s niece asked for the traditional cast of the writer’s hand to be taken. This proved impossible: the fist was too tightly clenched in its terminal seizure.

The procession set off, first to the church at Canteleu, then to the Cimetiere Monumental, where the picket of soldiers fired its ludicrous gloss on the last line of Madame Bovary. A few words were spoken, then the coffin was lowered. It got stuck. The width had been correctly judged on this occasion; but the gravediggers had skimped on the length. Sons of louts grappled with the coffin in vain; they could neither cram it in nor twist it out. After a few embarrassed minutes the mourners slowly departed, leaving Flaubert jammed into the ground at an oblique angle.

The Normans are a famously stingy race, and doubtless their gravediggers are no exception; perhaps they resent every superfluous sod they cut, and maintained this resentment as a professional tradition from 1846 to 1880. Perhaps Nabokov had read Flaubert’s letters before writing Lolita. Perhaps H.M. Stanley’s admiration for Flaubert’s African novel isn’t entirely surprising. Perhaps what we read as brute coincidence, silky irony, or brave, far-sighted modernism, looked quite different at the time. Flaubert took Monsieur Humbert’s business-card all the way from Rouen to the Pyramids. Was it meant to be a chuckling advertisement for his own sensibility; a tease about the gritty, unpolishable surface of the desert; or might it just have been a joke on us?

6 Emma Bovary’s Eyes

Let me tell you why I hate critics. Not for the normal reasons: that they’re failed creators (they usually aren’t; they may be failed critics, but that’s another matter); or that they’re by nature carping, jealous and vain (they usually aren’t; if anything, they might better be accused of over-generosity, of upgrading the second-rate so that their own fine discriminations thereby appear the rarer). No, the reason I hate critics – well, some of the time – is that they write sentences like this:

Flaubert does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that on one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15); and on another blue eyes (16).

This precise and disheartening indictment was drawn up by the late Dr Enid Starkie, Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Flaubert’s most exhaustive British biographer. The numbers in her text refer to footnotes in which she spears the novelist with chapter and verse.

I once heard Dr Starkie lecture, and I’m glad to report that she had an atrocious French accent; one of those deliveries full of dame-school confidence and absolutely no ear, swerving between workaday correctness and farcical error, often within the same word. Naturally, this didn’t affect her competence to teach at the University of Oxford, because until quite recently the place preferred to treat modern languages as if they were dead: this made them more respectable, more like the distant perfections of Latin and Greek. Even so, it did strike me as peculiar that someone who lived by French literature should be so calamitously inadequate at making the basic words of the language sound as they did when her subjects, her heroes (her paymasters, too, you could say), first pronounced them.

You might think this a cheap revenge on a dead lady critic simply for pointing out that Flaubert didn’t have a very reliable notion of Emma Bovary’s eyes. But then I don’t hold with the precept de mortuis nil nisi bonum (I speak as a doctor, after all); and it’s hard to underestimate the irritation when a critic points out something like that to you. The irritation isn’t with Dr Starkie, not at first – she was only, as they say, doing her job – but with Flaubert. So that painstaking genius couldn’t even keep the eyes of his most famous character a consistent colour? Ha. And then, unable to be cross with him for long, you shift your feelings over to the critic.

I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine’s rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (though what they might have been I can’t for the moment think)? Put it another way: is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr Starkie’s reading of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book, and then add a whole lot more, so that my reading is in a way pointless? Well, I hope not. My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it’s not pointless in terms of pleasure. I can’t prove that lay readers enjoy books more than professional critics; but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget. Dr Starkie and her kind are cursed with memory: the books they teach and write about can never fade from their brains. They become family. Perhaps this is why some critics develop a faintly patronising tone towards their subjects. They act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn’t said anything new for years. Of course, it’s her