Flaubert's Parrot

Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn’t; often, it doesn’t even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands.

Other people think you want to talk. ‘Do you want to talk about Ellen?’ they ask, hinting that they won’t be embarrassed if you break down. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don’t; it makes little difference. The words aren’t the right ones; or rather, the right words don’t exist. ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’ You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other people’s griefs. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn’t love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the syllables.

‘It may seem bad, Geoffrey, but you’ll come out of it. I’m not taking your grief lightly; it’s just that I’ve seen enough of life to know that you’ll come out of it.’ The words you’ve said yourself while scribbling a prescription (No, Mrs Blank, you could take them all and they wouldn’t kill you). And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

And still you think about her every day. Sometimes, weary of loving her dead, you imagine her back to life again, for conversation, for approval. After his mother’s death, Flaubert used to get his housekeeper to dress up in her old check dress and surprise him with an apocryphal reality. It worked, and it didn’t work: seven years after the funeral he would still burst into tears at the sight of that old dress moving about the house. Is this success or failure? Remembrance or self-indulgence? And will we know when we start hugging our grief and vainly enjoying it? ‘Sadness is a vice’ (1878).

Or else you try to sidestep her image. Nowadays, when I remember Ellen, I try to think of a hailstorm that berated Rouen in 1853. ‘A first-rate hailstorm,’ Gustave commented to Louise. At Croisset the espaliers were destroyed, the flowers cut to pieces, the kitchen garden turned upside down. Elsewhere, harvests were wrecked, and windows smashed. Only the glaziers were happy; the glaziers, and Gustave. The shambles delighted him: in five minutes Nature had reimposed the true order of things upon that brief, factitious order which man conceitedly imagines himself to be introducing. Is there anything stupider than a melon cloche, Gustave asks. He applauds the hailstones that shattered the glass. ‘People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.’

This letter always calms me. The function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along, and I am telling you a pure story.

She was born in 1920, married in 1940, gave birth in 1942 and 1946, died in 1975.

I’ll start again. Small people are meant to be neat, aren’t they; but Ellen wasn’t. She was just over five feet tall, yet moved awkwardly; she ran at things and tripped. She bruised easily, but didn’t notice it. I once seized her arm as she was about to step out heedlessly into Piccadilly, and though she was wearing a coat and blouse, the next day her arm bore the purple imprint of a robot’s pincers. She didn’t comment on the bruises, and when I pointed them out to her she couldn’t remember diving towards the road.

I’ll start again. She was a much-loved only child. She was a much-loved only wife. She was loved, if that’s the word, by what I suppose I must agree to call her lovers, though I’m sure the word over-dignifies some of them. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn’t love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. Perhaps she was sick of being loved. At twenty-four Flaubert said he was ‘ripe – ripe before my time, that’s true. But it’s because I’ve been reared in a hothouse.’ Was she loved too much? Most people can’t be loved too much, but perhaps Ellen could. Or perhaps her concept of love was simply different: why do we always assume it’s the same for everyone else? Perhaps for Ellen love was only a Mulberry harbour, a landing place in a heaving sea. You can’t possibly live there: scramble ashore; push on. And old love? Old love is a rusty tank standing guard over a slabby monument: here, once, something was liberated. Old love is a row of beach huts in November.

In a village pub, far from home, I once overheard two men talking about Betty Corrinder. Perhaps the spelling isn’t right; but that was the name. Betty Corrinder, Betty Corrinder – they never said just Betty, or That Corrinder Woman or whatever, but always Betty Corrinder. She was, it seems, a bit fast; though speed, of course, is always exaggerated by those standing still. Fast, this Betty Corrinder was, and pubmen sniggered enviously. ‘You know what they say about Betty Corrinder.’ It was a statement, not a question, though a question now followed it. ‘What’s the difference between Betty Corrinder and the Eiffel Tower? Go on, what’s the difference between Betty Corrinder and the Eiffel Tower?’ A pause for the last few moments of private knowledge. ‘Not everyone’s been up the Eiffel Tower.’

I blushed for my wife two hundred miles away. Were there places she prowled where envious men told jokes about her? I didn’t know. Besides, I exaggerate. Perhaps I didn’t blush. Perhaps I didn’t mind. My wife was not like Betty Corrinder, whatever Betty Corrinder was like.

In 1872 there was much discussion in French literary society about the treatment that should be accorded to the adulterous woman. Should a husband punish her, or forgive her? Alexandre Dumas fils, in L’Homme-Femme, offered uncomplicated advice: ‘Kill her!’ His book was reprinted thirty-seven times in the course of the year.

At first I was hurt; at first I minded, I thought less of myself. My wife went to bed with other men: should I worry about that? I didn’t go to bed with other women: should I worry about that? Ellen was always nice to me: should I worry about that? Not nice out of adulterous guilt, but just nice. I worked hard; she was a good wife to me. You aren’t allowed to say that nowadays, but she was a good wife to me. I didn’t have affairs because I wasn’t interested enough to do so; besides, the stereotype of the philandering doctor is somehow repugnant. Ellen did have affairs, because, I suppose, she was interested enough. We were happy; we were unhappy; I miss her. ‘Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?’ (1855).

What it’s hard to convey is how untouched by it all she was. She wasn’t corrupted; her spirit didn’t coarsen; she never ran up bills. Sometimes she stayed away a little longer than seemed right; the length of her shopping trips often yielded suspiciously few purchases (she wasn’t that discriminating); those few days in town to catch up on the theatres occurred more often than I would have liked. But she was honourable: she only ever lied to me about her secret life. About that she lied impulsively, recklessly, almost embarrassingly; but about everything else she told me the truth. A phrase used by the prosecutor of Madame Bovary to describe Flaubert’s art comes back to me: he said it was ‘realistic but not discreet’.

Did the wife, made lustrous by adultery, seem even more desirable to the husband? No: not more, not less. That’s part of what I mean by saying that she was not corrupted. Did she display the cowardly docility which Flaubert describes as characteristic of the adulterous woman? No. Did she, like Emma Bovary, ‘rediscover in adultery all the platitudes of marriage’? We didn’t talk about it. (Textual note. The first edition of Madame Bovary has ‘all the platitudes of her marriage’. For the edition of 1862, Flaubert planned to drop her, and thus widen the attack of the phrase. Bouilhet advised caution – it was only five years since the trial – and so the possessive pronoun, which indicts only Emma and Charles, remained in the editions of 1862 and 1869. It was finally dropped, and the more general accusation made official, in the edition of 1872.) Did she find, in Nabokov’s phrase, that adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional? I wouldn’t have imagined so: Ellen didn’t think in such terms. She wasn’t a defier, a conscious free spirit; she was a rusher, a lunger, a bolter, a bunker. Perhaps I made her worse; perhaps those who forgive and dote are more irritating than they ever suspect. ‘Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn’t love’ (1847).

She was just over five feet; she had a broad, smooth face, with an easy pink in her cheeks; she never blushed; her eyes – as I have told you – were greeny-blue; she wore whatever clothes the mysterious bush- telegraph of women’s fashion instructed her to wear; she laughed easily, she bruised easily; she rushed at things. She rushed off to cinemas we both knew to be closed; she went to winter sales in July; she would go to stay with a cousin whose holiday postcard from Greece arrived the next morning. There was a suddenness in these actions which argued more than desire. In L’Education sentimentale Frederic explains to Mme Arnoux that he took Rosanette as his mistress ‘out of despair, like someone committing suicide’. It’s crafty pleading, of course; but plausible.

Her secret life stopped when the children came, and returned when they went to school. Sometimes, a