death? ‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’ This from the man that most people, for most of this century, believed most thoroughly understood the human heart. It is a little embarrassing, is it not?
But come, it’s time for you to be rather more specific.
2
The main point is this: Flaubert thought democracy merely a stage in the history of government, and he thought it a typical vanity on our part to assume that it represented the finest, proudest way for men to rule one another. He believed in – or rather, he did not fail to notice – the perpetual evolution of humanity, and therefore the evolution of its social forms: ‘Democracy isn’t mankind’s last word, any more than slavery was, or feudalism was, or monarchy was.’ The best form of government, he maintained, is one that is dying, because this means it’s giving way to something else.
3
I cite the twentieth century in his defence.
4
Interested ‘enough’? You admit, at least, that he was interested. You are suggesting, tactfully, that he didn’t like what he saw (correct), and that if he had seen more, he would perhaps have come round to your way of thinking in these matters (incorrect). I should like to make two points, the first of which I shall put into italics, since this seems to be your favourite mode of utterance.
Du Camp followed politics carefully, Flaubert sporadically. Which do you prefer? The former. And which of them was the greater writer? The latter. And what were their politics? Du Camp became a lethargic meliorist; Flaubert remained ‘an enraged liberal’. Does that surprise you? But even if Flaubert had described himself as a lethargic meliorist, I should make the same point: what a curious vanity it is of the present to expect the past to suck up to it. The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its political acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and told to keep up the good work. If this is what you understand by Monsieur Flaubert not being ‘interested enough’ in politics, then I’m afraid my client must plead guilty.
5
Well, what I’ve said above is part of the answer. But there is also this consideration, this incredible weakness of character on my client’s part: he was on the whole against people killing one another. Call it squeamishness, but he did disapprove. He never killed anyone himself, I have to admit; in fact, he never even tried. He promises to do better in future.
Permit me a short laugh. Ah. That’s better. I thought patriotism was a bad thing nowadays. I thought we would all rather betray our country than our friends. Is that not so? Have things turned upside down yet again? What am I expected to say? On September 22nd, 1870, Flaubert bought himself a revolver; at Croisset, he drilled his ragged collection of men in expectation of a Prussian advance; he took them out on night patrols; he told them to shoot him if he tried to run away. By the time the Prussians came, there was not much he could sensibly do except look after his aged mother. He could perhaps have submitted himself to some army medical board, but whether they would have enthused over the application of a 48-year-old epileptic syphilitic with no military experience except that acquired while shooting wild-life in the desert –
7
Oh, for Christ’s sake. We plead
8
‘You can depict wine, love, women and glory on the condition that you’re not a drunkard, a lover, a husband or a private in the ranks. If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much.’ This isn’t a reply of guilty, it’s a complaint that the charge is wrongly phrased. What do you mean by life? Politics? We’ve dealt with that. The emotional life? Through his family, friends and mistresses, Gustave knew all the stations of the cross. Marriage, you mean perhaps? A curious complaint, though not a new one. Does marriage produce better novels than bachelorhood? Are the philoprogenitive better writers than the childless? I should like to see your statistics.
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. Are we confident that our judgment in the matter is better than his? Flaubert was more ‘involved’, to use your term, than many: Henry James by comparison was a nun. Flaubert may have tried to live in an ivory tower –
8
but he failed. ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’
Three points need to be made. One is that the writer chooses – as far as he can – the extent of what you call his involvement in life: despite his reputation, Flaubert occupied a half-and-half position. ‘It isn’t the drunkard who writes the drinking song’: he knew that. On the other hand, it isn’t the teetotaller either. He put it best, perhaps, when he said that the writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
Secondly, when readers complain about the lives of writers – why didn’t he do this; why didn’t he protest to the newspapers about that; why wasn’t he more involved in life? – aren’t they really asking a simpler, and vainer, question: why isn’t he more like us? But if a writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer: it’s as uncomplicated as that.
Thirdly, what is the thrust of the complaint as far as the books are concerned? Presumably the regret that Flaubert wasn’t more involved in life isn’t just a philanthropic wish for him: if only old Gustave had had a wife and kiddies, he wouldn’t have been so glum about the whole shooting-match? If only he’d got caught up in politics, or good works, or become a governor of his old school, he’d have been taken out of himself more? Presumably you think there are faults in the books which could have been remedied by a change in the writer’s life. If so, I think it is up to you to state them. For myself, I cannot think that, for instance, the portrait of provincial manners in