Flaubert's Parrot

9 That he was a pessimist.

Ah. I begin to see what you mean. You wish his books were a bit more cheerful, a bit more… how would you put it, life-enhancing? What a curious idea of literature you do have. Is your PhD from Bucharest? I didn’t know one had to defend authors for being pessimists. This is a new one. I decline to do so. Flaubert said: ‘You don’t make art out of good intentions.’ He also said: ‘The public wants works which flatter its illusions.’

10 That he teaches no positive virtues.

Now you are coming out into the open. So this is how we are to judge our writers – on their ‘positive virtues’? Well, I suppose I must play your game briefly: it’s what you have to do in the courts. Take all the obscenity trials from Madame Bovary to Lady Chatterley’s Lover: there’s always some element of games-playing, of compliance, in the defence. Others might call it tactical hypocrisy. (Is this book sexy? No, M’Lud, we hold that it would have an emetic, not a mimetic, effect on any reader. Does this book encourage adultery? No, M’Lud, look how the miserable sinner who gives herself time and time again to riotous pleasure is punished in the end. Does this book attack marriage? No, M’Lud, it portrays a vile and hopeless marriage so that others may learn that only by following Christian instructions will their own marriages be happy. Is this book blasphemous? No, M’Lud, the novelist’s thought is chaste.) As a forensic argument, of course, it has been successful; but I sometimes feel a residual bitterness that one of these defence counsel, when speaking for a true work of literature, did not build his act on simple defiance. (Is this book sexy? M’Lud, we bloody well hope so. Does it encourage adultery and attack marriage? Spot on, M’Lud, that’s exactly what my client is trying to do. Is this book blasphemous? For Christ’s sake, M’Lud, the matter’s as clear as the loincloth on the Crucifixion. Put it this way, M’Lud: my client thinks that most of the values of the society in which he lives stink, and he hopes with this book to promote fornication, masturbation, adultery, the stoning of priests and, since we’ve temporarily got your attention, M’Lud, the suspension of corrupt judges by their earlobes. The defence rests its case.)

So, briefly: Flaubert teaches you to gaze upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe that Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills – literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, scepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. Is that the way you like writers to be described (I do not care for it much myself)? Is it enough? It’s all I’m giving you for the moment: I seem to be embarrassing my client.

11 That he was a sadist.

Rubbish. My client was a soft touch. Cite me a single sadistic, or even unkind, thing he did in his whole life. I’ll tell you the unkindest thing I know about him: he was caught being beastly to a woman at a party for no obvious reason. When asked why, he replied, ‘Because she might want to come into my study.’ That’s the worst thing I know about my client. Unless you count the occasion in Egypt when he tried to go to bed with a prostitute while suffering from the pox. That was a little deceitful, I admit. But he didn’t succeed: the girl, following the normal precautions of her profession, asked to examine him and, when he refused, sent him packing.

He read Sade, of course. What educated French writer doesn’t? I gather he is currently popular among Parisian intellectuals. My client told the Goncourt brothers that Sade was ‘entertaining nonsense’. He kept a few gruesome mementoes around him, it is true; he enjoyed recounting horrors; there are lurid passages in his early work. But you say he had a ‘Sadeian imagination’? I am puzzled. You specify: Salammbo contains scenes of shocking violence. I reply: do you think they didn’t happen? Do you think the Ancient World was all rose petals, lute music, and plump vats of honey sealed with bear fat?

11 a) That there are a lot of animals slaughtered in his books.

He isn’t Walt Disney, no. He was interested in cruelty, I agree. He was interested in everything. As well as Sade, there was Nero. But listen to what he says about them: ‘These monsters explain history for me.’ He is, I must add, all of seventeen at the time. And let me give you another quote: ‘I love the vanquished, but I also love the victors.’ He strives, as I’ve said, to be as much a Chinaman as a Frenchman. There is an earthquake in Leghorn: Flaubert doesn’t cry out in sympathy. He feels as much sympathy for these victims as he does for slaves who died centuries earlier turning some tyrant’s grindstone. You are shocked? It’s called having a historical imagination. It’s called being a citizen, not just of the world, but of all time. It’s what Flaubert described as being ‘brother in God to everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man’. It’s called being a writer.

12 That he was beastly to women.

Women loved him. He enjoyed their company; they enjoyed his; he was gallant, flirtatious; he went to bed with them. He just didn’t want to marry them. Is that a sin? Perhaps some of his sexual attitudes were pungently those of his time and his class; but who then in the nineteenth century shall escape whipping? He stood, at least, for honesty in sexual dealings: hence his preference for the prostitute over the grisette. Such honesty brought him more trouble than hypocrisy would have done – with Louise Colet, for instance. When he told her the truth it sounded like cruelty. But she was a pest, wasn’t she? (Let me answer my own question. I think she was a pest; she sounds like a pest; though admittedly we hear only Gustave’s side of the story. Perhaps someone should write her account: yes, why not reconstruct Louise Colet’s Version? I might do that. Yes, I will.)

If I may say so, a lot of your charges could probably be reclassified under a single heading: That he wouldn’t have liked us if he’d known us. To which he might be inclined to plead guilty; if only to see the expression on our face.

13 That he believed in Beauty.

I think I’ve got something lodged in my ear. Probably a bit of wax. Just give me a moment to grip my nose and blow out through my eardrums.

14 That he was obsessed with style.

You are babbling. Do you still think the novel divides, like Gaul, into three parts – the Idea, the Form and the Style? If so, you are taking your own first tremulous steps into fiction. You want some maxims for writing? Very well. Form isn’t an overcoat flung over the flesh of thought (that old comparison, old in Flaubert’s day); it’s the flesh of thought itself. You can no more imagine an Idea without a Form than a Form without an Idea. Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good, it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry. If you happen to write well, you are accused of lacking ideas.

All these maxims are by Flaubert, except for the one by Bouilhet.

15 That he didn’t believe Art had a social purpose.

No, he didn’t. This is wearying. ‘You provide desolation,’ wrote George Sand, ‘and I provide consolation.’ To which Flaubert replied, ‘I cannot change my eyes.’ The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it; continue this comparison. Do you want art to be a healer? Send for the AMBULANCE GEORGE SAND. Do you want art to tell the truth? Send for the AMBULANCE FLAUBERT: though don’t be surprised, when it arrives, if it runs over your leg. Listen to Auden: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French for life-jacket.

11 Louise Colet’s Version

Now hear my story. I insist. Look, take my arm, like that, and let’s just walk. I have tales to tell; you will like them. We’ll follow the quai, and cross that bridge – no, the second one – and perhaps we could take a cognac somewhere, and wait until the gas-lamps dim, and then walk back. Come, you’re surely not frightened of me? So why that look? You think I am a dangerous woman? Well, that’s a form of flattery – I accept the compliment. Or