Flaubert's Parrot

rough heart. I’m like a coconut which keeps its milk locked away beneath several layers of wood. You need an axe to open it, and then what do you find as often as not? A sort of sour cream.

1847: You had hoped to find in me a fire which scorched and blazed and illuminated everything; which shed a cheerful light, dried out damp wainscoting, made the air healthier and rekindled life. Alas! I’m only a poor nightlight, whose red wick splutters in a lake of bad oil full of water and bits of dust.

1851: With me, friendship is like the camel: once started, there is no way of stopping it.

1852: As you get older, the heart sheds its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms which break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

1852: What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

1852: I laugh at everything, even at that which I love the most. There is no fact, thing, feeling or person over which I have not blithely run my clownishness, like an iron roller imparting sheen to cloth.

1852: I love my work with a frantic and perverted love, as an ascetic loves the hair-shirt which scratches his belly.

1852: All of us Normans have a little cider in our veins: it’s a bitter, fermented drink which sometimes bursts the bung.

1853: As for this business of my moving at once to Paris, we’ll have to put it off, or rather settle it here and now. This is impossible for me now… I know myself well enough, and it would mean losing a whole winter, and perhaps the whole book. Bouilhet can talk: he’s happy writing anywhere; he’s been working away for a dozen years despite continual disturbances… But I am like a row of milk-pans: if you want the cream to form, you have to leave them exactly where they are.

1853: I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish clogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

1854: I pigeon-hole my life, and keep everything in its place; I’m as full of drawers and compartments as an old travelling trunk, all roped up and fastened with three big leather straps.

1854: You ask for love, you complain that I don’t send you flowers? Flowers, indeed! If that’s what you want, find yourself some wet-eared boy stuffed with fine manners and all the right ideas. I’m like the tiger, which has bristles of hair at the end of its cock, with which it lacerates the female.

1857: Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long- pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

1857: There is a Latin phrase which means roughly, ‘To pick up a farthing from the shit with your teeth.’ It was a rhetorical figure applied to the miserly. I am like them: I will stop at nothing to find gold.

1867: It’s true that many things infuriate me. The day I stop being indignant I shall fall flat on my face, like a doll when you take away its prop.

1872: My heart remains intact, but my feelings are sharpened on the one hand and dulled on the other, like an old knife that has been too often sharpened, which has notches, and breaks easily.

1872: Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for Beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.

1873: I still carry on turning out my sentences, like a bourgeois turning out napkin rings on a lathe in his attic. It gives me something to do, and it affords me some private pleasure.

1875: Despite your advice, I can’t manage to ‘harden myself’… My sensitivities are all aquiver – my nerves and my brain are sick, very sick; I feel them to be so. But there I go, complaining again, and I don’t want to distress you. I’ll confine myself to your mention of a ‘rock’. Know, then, that very old granite sometimes turns into layers of clay.

1875: I feel uprooted, like a mass of dead seaweed tossed here and there in the waves.

1880: When will the book be finished? That’s the question. If it is to appear next winter, I haven’t a minute to lose between now and then. But there are moments when I’m so tired that I feel I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.

3 Finders Keepers

You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

You can do the same with a biography. The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn’t catch: there is always far more of that. The biography stands, fat and worthy-burgherish on the shelf, boastful and sedate: a shilling life will give you all the facts, a ten- pound one all the hypotheses as well. But think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographee. What chance would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself?

I first met Ed Winterton when he put his hand on mine in the Europa Hotel. Just my little joke; though true as well. It was at a provincial booksellers’ fair and I had reached a little more quickly than he for the same copy of Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences. The conjunction induced immediate apologies, as embarrassed on his side as they were on mine. When we each realised that bibliophilie lust was the only emotion which had produced this laying on of hands, Ed murmured,

‘Step outside and let’s discuss it.’

Over an indifferent pot of tea we revealed our separate paths to the same book. I explained about Flaubert; he announced his interest in Gosse and in English literary society towards the end of the last century. I meet few American academics, and was pleasantly surprised that this one was bored by Bloomsbury, and happy to leave the modern movement to his younger and more ambitious colleagues. But then Ed Winterton liked to present himself as a failure. He was in his early forties, balding, with a pinky glabrous complexion and square rimless spectacles: the banker type of academic, circumspect and moral. He bought English clothes without looking at all English. He remained the sort of American who always wears a mackintosh in London because he knows that in this city rain falls out of a clear sky. He was even wearing his mackintosh in the lounge of the Europa Hotel.

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in a correct and acceptable fashion. At one point, when discussing the improbability of his Gosse biography ever being finished, let alone published, he paused and dropped his voice:

‘But in any case I sometimes wonder if Mr Gosse would have approved of what I’m doing.’

‘You mean…’ I knew little of Gosse, and my widened eyes hinted perhaps too clearly at naked laundresses, illegitimate half-castes and dismembered bodies.

‘Oh no, no, no. Just the thought of writing about him. He might think it was a bit of a… low blow.’

I let him have the Turgenev, of course, if only to escape a discussion about the morality of possession. I didn’t see where ethics came into the ownership of a second-hand book; but Ed did. He promised to be in touch if ever he ran down another copy. Then we briefly discussed the rights and wrongs of my paying for his tea.

I didn’t expect to hear from him again, let alone on the subject which provoked his letter to me about a year later. ‘Are you interested at all in Juliet Herbert? It sounds a fascinating relationship, judging by the material. I’ll be in London in August, if you will. Ever, Ed (Winterton).’

What does the fiancee feel when she snaps open the box and sees the ring set in purple velvet? I never asked my wife; and it’s too late now. Or what did Flaubert feel as he waited for the dawn on top of the Great