Gustave Flaubert (1821- 1880) is remembered as the supreme French prose stylist of the 19th century. His latest English-language biographer is well-qualified: Geoffrey Wall, lecturer in French at York University, translated Madame Bovary, Flaubert's best-known novel.
Drawing on a vast array of sources, Wall's book relates the middle-class family circumstances of the young Flaubert, growing up in the H⌠tel-Dieu at Rouen, where his father was resident doctor. Mental and physical illness, pain and death surrounded the growing boy and his siblings, Achille and Caroline.
Achille followed the father into a medical career; Gustave was a rebel who was expelled from school in his final year and abandoned his legal studies. The story of his sudden collapse in a cabriolet on a dark January night in 1844 is graphically told. The event was decisive, leading to a prolonged convalescence in semi-retreat at the quiet house on the Seine at Croisset. Similar nervous attacks, perhaps indicating epilepsy, were to recur throughout the writer's life. His early adulthood was soon marked by greater sorrow: the spring of 1846 brought the death of his father, followed within weeks by that of his beloved sister after childbirth.
While Flaubert's father, a very important figure in the writer's life, is given a full chapter to launch the biography, the mother's character and background are less prominent. And yet the writer's relationship with his mother may have been equally influential. Apart from an extended journey to the Orient for more than a year and a half, and some shorter sojourns elsewhere, Flaubert lived his life under her roof. She appears to have exerted a huge emotional pull on him, and was his reason for burying himself in Croisset instead of settling down permanently in the Paris literary world.
The rural hermitage at Croisset offered an ideal oasis for cultivating his mind and his impassive style. The sheer hard labour of the task of writing and rewriting, bolstered by meticulous reading and note-taking, is clearly documented. He once filled almost 500 pages with notes on all 33 plays of Voltaire, a task which convinced him that authorial intrusions are to be avoided at all costs. Thus Wall: "Impersonality might mean not sounding like Voltaire."
The low pace of output is another Flaubertian phenomenon: painstakingly concerned to perfect his written style, he could spend days polishing a single sentence.
Some leitmotivs are found in both the life and the work: a love of travel, especially to exotic places (Flaubert's detailed travel journals are a treasure for biographer, anthropologist and historian alike); a preoccupation with ancient civilisations and with the "wilder varieties of religious experience"; financial difficulties; masculine friendships. An author's life may be deeply enmeshed in his or her writings, but the connections are often fraught with contradictions.
The case of Flaubert points to the danger of confusing art with life. It is odd, for instance, that this writer, best known for his empathetic portrait of an unhappy provincial French woman in the character of Emma Bovary, should have behaved in such an unimaginatively unsympathetic manner towards the women closest to him in real life - notably his niece, Caroline, whom he had brought up from infancy after her mother's death and her father's insanity. The way he bullied young Caroline into a loveless but lucrative marriage questions the writer's anti-conformist principles. She loved her impecunious drawing teacher; her uncle insisted that she marry a wealthy Rouen timber merchant. The uncle won: despite his aversion to Second Empire respectability, the bourgeois in Flaubert came to the fore when it was a question of preserving the family fortune. Ironically, the timber merchant later went bust.
With the exception of older women (his mother, or his friend in mature years, George Sand), females - his Paris cocottes, his erstwhile mistress Louise Colet - were to be kept at one remove from his house. Yet, had his relationship with Louise Colet been less troubled, and had it not been conducted at a distance, the correspondence between the two lovers would presumably not have been necessary. And the biography would have been poorer, for it was in his letters to Louise that Flaubert expounded many of his most quoted principles of style. That correspondence survives as an extraordinary testimony to an artist at work; Louise Colet herself, who was also the mistress of poets Musset and Vigny, incidentally survives as the statue representing Strasbourg on the Place de la Concorde.
Any new biography has to be considered against earlier attempts. Quite apart from the French-language versions - including Sartre's three-volume analysis - Enid Starkie's classic study in English (1967, 1971) is a hard act to follow. One reason for retelling the life is the emergence, over the past three decades, of hitherto unpublished sources, such as the complete correspondence. Biographers have to work with the available sources, but with Flaubert, who never threw anything out, there is an abundance of material. These sources are used carefully by Wall, and are keyed to 30 pages of references indicating their precise provenance; all documents appear in English translation.
The sources, however, are used perhaps excessively, to the exclusion of the biographer's own voice. On the whole, Wall keeps Flaubert's words centre stage, featuring direct quotations from the archives on almost every page. His own contributions show a certain restless style. Wall is anxious to give his reader the sounds, smells and colours of the time (for example, a passage which conjures up the dampness of Croisset during the writing of Madame Bovary). The text switches tone when you least expect it (as in a passage where the child's-eye view is woven into a sardonic description of the Rouen hospital; or a section where the icy month of January 1848 is evoked in a journalistic passage entirely in the present tense). It is hard to decide whether this yields refreshing variety or jarring discordance.
The volume is handsomely illustrated. However, some unfortunate errors mar the production: the captioned portrait of Louis Bouilhet facing page 264 is mistakenly replaced by a detail from an 1830 engraving of Rouen which has already appeared facing page 152. The running head of chapter 11, "French Revolutions" (pages 145 to 151), got deleted and is replaced by that of the previous chapter ("On the Road"). And there are at least a dozen misprints.
And yet this is a book that grows on you: it may be hard to tune in to the biographer's voice in the early chapters, but once you reach the subject's mid-career you can't put it down. At the very least, it is a must for Flaubert specialists, who will be able to trace the numerous quotations in their original French. As for Flaubert lovers (like this one), the biography does make you want to swap life for art, and turn once more to the fictions.
Phyllis Gaffney lectures in the French department at University College Dublin