BiographyGustave Flaubert is best known to most readers as the author of the 19th-century French novel, Madame Bovary. To mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of that once-controversial novel, American author Frederick Brown has written a monumental biography of Flaubert (1822-1880).
The reader of Brown's mammoth work is struck by three outstanding images of Flaubert's life and times: firstly, this is the leisured life story of a self-proclaimed "bourgeoisophobe" novelist who never had to earn his living; secondly, his was a century of political turmoil, with life punctuated by barricades and revolutions, whether heralding monarchy, empire, or republic; finally, if Flaubert had not been diagnosed as an epileptic in his youth, he might not have been at liberty to embrace the hermetic life he so favoured for writing his novels in the seclusion of Normandy. Due to this auspicious combination of circumstances, Flaubert was sheltered from financial worries, from political turmoil and from the potentially distracting social whirl of contemporary Paris.
Sparing few details, Brown's biography sketches Gustave's family where, as a talented middle child, he cherished the lifelong stability that his mother's country house and gardens at Croisset provided. The young Flaubert, craving escape, invented a subversive fictional persona called the Garçon (the Kid). He maintained this persona for decades, wishing to shock by providing a depraved and cynical running commentary on bourgeois society. A similar uncouth duality is reflected in the Egyptian tour that homebird Flaubert undertook with Maxime Du Camp, where the confirmed bachelor relishes haunting brothels, and indulging his dreams of the exotic Oriental female.
Brown gleans fascinating references to Flaubert's key literary and romantic ties from the writer's copious correspondence. During his turbulent, mainly epistolary relationship with the demanding Louise Colet, Flaubert's dutiful letters abound with literary theories that reveal a fastidious modus operandi. When not composing novels at Croisset, the pipe-smoking writer would move to his pied-à-terre in Paris, where he mixed in literary circles with iconic literary figures including Hugo, Zola, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers and more. Female encouragement came from many sources, including Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, or the maternal George Sand. While Turgenev would become his literary soulmate, his most crucial lifelong friendship was with Louis Bouilhet, a loyal fellow writer who must have literally spent weeks of his life listening to Flaubert reading aloud drafts of his latest novel chapters.
In his exquisitely composed novels, Flaubert sketches gripping characters. In Madame Bovary, the dizzy, provincial Emma Bovary engages in adulterous relationships in order to live her dream life of a princess-like socialite. Young Frédéric Moreau of L'Éducation Sentimentale drops his law studies when he becomes besotted with an older married woman and he drifts along, wasting his life away in dreams and disappointments. Curiously, no Flaubertian characters learn from experience.
Avid readers of Flaubert's writing encounter a fastidious author who not only champions style over story, but who phased out authorial interventions in the narrative of his novels. Introducing "style indirect libre" (free indirect speech), where the character's voice becomes inserted into the very texture of the narrative discourse, Flaubert was one of the first modern writers to conceive a novel free of the opinionated authorial voices that steered the narrative in the past. For Flaubert, who rejected overt affiliation to any literary fashions such as realism, style is art.
Brown's biography is not a Flaubertian novel. It is, however, an astounding work of literary biography that scrupulously avoids critical commentary, allowing the documentary evidence speak for itself. Unfortunately for the uninitiated, it starts slowly and lacks clear direction in places. Experts on Flaubert and 19th-century literary Paris will doubtless comb through this encyclopedic work with great pleasure and satisfaction. Although Brown does not always pinpoint the overlap that he clearly sees between Flaubert's life and work, there are many such coincidences to be savoured and treasured. Brown himself writes in rich, lyrical prose, although not as sparse as Flaubert's. Most unusually, he provides informative snapshot histories of post-revolutionary medicine, of law school, of Parisian streets, of railroads, of Rouen cotton manufacturing, or of the complex politics of the various revolutionary movements that dogged France throughout the century.
So should you bring this weighty biography on holidays? It is monumental. Imagine the thickest of books; the kind that pushes hand luggage into the realm of the overweight baggage fee. As Flaubert mused: "What do people read?" If you fancy discovering the motivation and inner world of this brilliant, if esoteric, French novelist; if you wish to gently acquaint yourself with the labyrinthine revolutions of French politics in the 19th century; if you like reading biographies of artists or great writers and you are curious to read about the overlapping lives of the literati in the social whirl of 19th-century Paris, then your toil will be richly rewarded.
Síofra Pierse is Research Fellow 2005-6, Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and is currently in Paris on research leave from UCD. She is editor of The City in French Writing, published by UCD Press
Flaubert: A Life By Frederick Brown William Heinemann, 628pp. £25