Literary biographies tend to be beset by a fairly serious flaw: their subjects do not, on the whole, get up to very much. Try to paint a picture of a writer's life, and what you will usually be met with is a Sahara of inactivity. Off they trudge to their studies, ready to spend yet another day in the company of dead-ends and false starts, worlds imagined and dispensed with, words conjured and erased. Eventually, with any luck, something of significance is produced: the biographer cheers. Repeat, mutatis mutandis, to fade.
The life of Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) is so relentlessly devoid of incident that it reads almost as a parody of this kind of existence. Certainly it was a way of being in which Flaubert found comfort. At the age of 17, he was already planning to embrace – and induce in others – a condition of stasis. “If I ever do take an active part in the world,” he remarked in a characteristically buoyant letter, “it will be as a thinker and demoralizer.” A few years later, while pretending to follow his freethinking father into medicine, he was questioned by his friend Ernest Chevalier about his aspirations.
Flaubert: “You tell me to tell you what my dreams are? – Not one! – My plans for the future! – None. What do I want to be? Nothing . . . I am tired of dreams, annoyed by plans, sick of thinking about the future. And as for being something, I will be as little as possible.” Chevalier, no doubt, was glad he asked.
The dying and the dead
Gustave’s upbringing and character had prepared him for such proclamations. His education at an austere school in Rouen supplied him with a surfeit of deprivation and misery; his childhood home in the Hôtel-Dieu, where his father practised medicine, enveloped him in an atmosphere that was thick with doctors, nuns and death. As a boy he liked to watch the sick and dying from his window, cultivating a lifelong preoccupation with mortality and the macabre.
“I have never seen a child without thinking of a grave,” he one wrote to his lover, poet Louise Colet. “The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.”
This predilection bred in Flaubert a sense of pessimism and futility that was relieved only by his devotion to the written word. In a godless and meaningless world (Flaubert regarded all religion with contempt), literature offered the only path to a kind of sublunary salvation. It could do everything. But to allow it to do everything, Flaubert concluded he would have to let everything go.
Accordingly, he set about divesting his life of all forms of activity and distraction. By 1844 he was enduring self-imposed chastity and a ban on “any lascivious act”, doing his best to isolate himself from love (“I am disgusted by it down to my very entrails”), and seeking an existence that was as static and undisturbed as possible. “What I dread is passion, movement,” he told Chevalier. “I believe that if happiness is to be found it is in stagnation. Ponds do not have storms.”
On the whole, Flaubert managed to keep the surface of his life free from ripples. He suffered the usual excruciations: death of father, who claimed throughout his life to be humiliated by his son's devotion to writing; death of sister, whose coffin had to be forced into its grave with a spade and crowbars; and occasional love affairs, first with Colet and later with the English governess Juliet Herbert, who produced a translation (now lost) of Madame Bovary.
He almost enjoyed travelling to Egypt, where he tried his hand (if that is the word) at sodomy. He attended soirées at the court of Napoleon III.
Humanity’s base instincts
Otherwise, Flaubert spent most of his life sequestered in a summerhouse overlooking the Seine, agonising over word choice, sentence structure and harmony, ditching almost everything he set down, and taking the occasional break to think about death and his hatred of humanity. (In his estimation, humanity was a clot of “mud and shit . .. equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig.”)
Author Michel Winock tries hard to make this dramatic. He fills his prose with plump exclamation marks to alert you to all the excitement taking place. But what his biography really affirms is that practically all of the life in Flaubert is to be found in his work. This he documents with care, industry and insight. His discussions of the novels and letters are especially valuable and informative, and offer a suggestive sense of the ways in which his subject’s character relates to and informs his work.
Flaubert would often ask himself why man’s heart felt so big when life felt so small. This book comes close to supplying an answer.
Matthew Adams is an arts journalist.
