Flaubert's Parrot

l’oeil cul-de-sac which bluffs you into the belief that you’re entering some smart avenue.

Do the books that writers don’t write matter? It’s easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn’t be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they’ve been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn’t always abandoned because it fails some quality-control test. The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

With Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to the brothel which doesn’t come off, perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

Of course, the published works themselves aren’t immutable: they might now look different had Flaubert been awarded time and money to put his literary estate in order. Bouvard et Pecuchet would have been finished; Madame Bovary might have been suppressed (how seriously do we take Gustave’s petulance against the overbearing fame of the book? a little seriously); and L’Education sentimentale might have had a different ending. Du Camp records his friend’s dismay at the book’s historical misfortune: a year after publication came the Franco-Prussian war, and it seemed to Gustave that the invasion and the debacle at Sedan would have provided a grand, public and irrebuttable conclusion to a novel which set out to trace the moral failure of a generation.

‘Imagine’, Du Camp reports him as saying, ‘the capital one might have made out of certain incidents. Here, for instance, is one which would have been excellent in calibre. The capitulation has been signed, the army is under arrest, the Emperor, sunk back in a corner of his large carriage, is gloomy and dull-eyed; he smokes a cigarette to keep himself in countenance and, though a tempest is raging within him, tries to appear impassive. Beside him are his aides-de-camp and a Prussian General. All are silent, each glance is lowered; there is pain in every heart.

‘Where the two roads cross the procession is stopped by a column of prisoners guarded by some Uhlans, who wear the chapska perched on their ear, and ride with couched lances. The carriage has to be stopped before the human flood, which advances amid a cloud of dust, reddened by the rays of the sun. The men walk dragging their feet and with slouched shoulders. The Emperor’s languid eye contemplates this crowd. What a strange way to review his troops. He thinks of previous reviews, of the drums beating, of the waving standards, of his generals covered with gold lace and saluting him with their swords, and of his guard shouting, “Vive l’Empereur!”

‘A prisoner recognises him and salutes him, then another and another.

‘Suddenly a Zouave leaves the ranks, shakes his fist and cries, “Ah! There you are, you villain; we have been ruined by you!”

‘Then ten thousand men yell insults, wave their arms threateningly, spit upon the carriage, and pass like a whirlwind of curses. The Emperor still remains immovable without making a sign or uttering a word, but, he thinks, “Those are the men they used to call my Praetorian Guards!”

‘Well, what do you think of that for a situation? It is pretty powerful, is it not? That would have made rather a stirring final scene for my Education! I cannot console myself for having missed it.’

Should we mourn such a lost ending? And how do we assess it? Du Camp probably coarsened it in the retelling, and there would have been many Flaubertian redraftings before publication. Its appeal is clear: the fortissimo climax, the public conclusion to a nation’s private failing. But does the book need such an ending? Having had 1848, do we need 1870 as well? Better to let the novel die away in disenchantment; better the downbeat reminiscing of two friends than a swirling salon-picture.

For the Apocrypha proper, let us be systematic.

1 Autobiography. ‘One day, if I write my memoirs – the only thing I shall write well, if ever I put myself to the task of doing it – you will find a place in them, and what a place! For you have blown a large breach in the walls of my existence.’ Gustave writes this in one of his earliest letters to Louise Colet; and over a seven-year period (1846–53) he makes occasional references to the planned autobiography. Then he announces its official abandonment. But was it ever more than just a project for a project? ‘I’ll put you in my memoirs’ is one of the handier cliches of literary wooing. File it alongside ‘I’ll put you in motion pictures’, ‘I could immortalise you in paint’, ‘I can just see your neck in marble’, etc, etc.

2 Translations. Lost works, rather than strict apocrypha; but we might note here: a) Juliet Herbert’s translation of Madame Bovary, which the novelist oversaw, and which he proclaimed ‘a masterpiece’; b) the translation referred to in a letter of 1844: ‘I have read

Candide twenty times. I have translated it into English…’ This does not sound like a school exercise: more like a piece of self-imposed apprenticeship. Judging from Gustave’s erratic use of English in his letters, the translation probably added a layer of unintentional comedy to the intentions of the original. He couldn’t even copy English place-names accurately: in 1866, making notes on the ‘coloured Minton tiles’ at the South Kensington Museum, he turns Stoke-upon-Trent into ‘Stroke-upon-Trend’.

3 Fiction. This section of the Apocrypha contains a large amount of juvenilia, useful mainly to the psychobiographer. But the books a writer fails to write in his adolescence are of a different nature from the books he fails to write once he has announced his profession. These are the not-books for which he must take responsibility.

In 1850, while in Egypt, Flaubert spends two days pondering the story of Mycerinus, a pious king of the fourth dynasty who is credited with reopening temples closed by his predecessors. In a letter to Bouilhet, however, the novelist characterises his subject more crudely as ‘the king who fucks his daughter’. Perhaps Flaubert’s interest was encouraged by the discovery (or indeed the memory) that in 1837 the king’s sarcophagus had been excavated by the British and shipped back to London. Gustave would have been able to inspect it when he visited the British Museum in 1851.

I tried to inspect it myself the other day. The sarcophagus, they told me, is not one of the Museum’s more interesting possessions, and hasn’t been on display since 1904. Though believed to be fourth dynasty when it was shipped, it later turned out to be twenty-sixth dynasty: the portions of mummified body inside might, or equally might not, be those of Mycerinus. I felt disappointed, but also relieved: what if Flaubert had continued with his project, and inserted a meticulously researched description of the king’s tomb? Dr Enid Starkie would have been given the chance to swat another Mistake in Literature.

(Perhaps I should award Dr Starkie an entry in my pocket guide to Flaubert; or would that be unnecessarily vindictive? S for Sade, or S for Starkie? It’s coming along well, by the way, Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. All you need to know about Flaubert to know as much as the next person! Only a few more entries and I’ll be finished. The letter X is going to be a problem, I can see. There’s nothing under X in Flaubert’s own Dictionary.)

In 1850, from Constantinople, Flaubert announces three projects: ‘Une nuit de Don Juan’ (which reaches the planning stage); ‘Anubis’, the story of ‘the woman who wants to be fucked by a god’; and ‘My Flemish novel about the young girl who dies a virgin and a mystic… in a little provincial town, at the bottom of a garden planted with cabbages and bulrushes…’ Gustave complains in this letter to Bouilhet about the dangers of planning a project too thoroughly: ‘It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough actually to father them.’ In the present cases, Gustave didn’t get horny enough; though some see in his third project a vague forerunner of either Madame Bovary or Un c?ur simple.

In 1852–3 Gustave makes serious plans for ‘La Spirale’, a ‘grand, metaphysical, fantastical and bawling novel’, whose hero lives a typically Flaubertian double life, being happy in his dreams and unhappy in his real life. Its conclusion, of course: that happiness exists only in the imagination.

In 1853, ‘one of my old dreams’ is resuscitated: a novel about chivalry. Despite Ariosto such a project is still feasible, Gustave declares: the additional elements he will bring to the subject are ‘terror and a broader poetry’.