Flaubert

...To his friend Maxime du Camp he offered a summation of his feelings, during the time he was writing Madame Bovary: My youth (you knew only its latter phase) steeped me in an opiate of boredom, sufficient for the remainder of my days...

...What a heavy oar the pen is . . . " To see what was worth keeping, he would go over what he had written and shout it out...

...This enthusiasm [for war], unmotivated by any idea, makes me long to die, that I might witness it no longer...

...To a friend he wrote at the time: "You say you don't have a woman...

...Florida...

...He is a spectator who notes the odd and telling details: that reporters at the U.N...

...Reading Balzac's letters, Flaubert faulted him for being obsessed with money and fame, rather than with beauty...

...To George Sand he wrote, "The incorrigible barbarism of mankind fills me with black gloom...

...I don't know why I yielded that time...

...A long with his fairness and sense of detail, Mallon's kind disposition makes for characterizations that are humane and sometimes memorable...

...Ranging in length from four to forty-two pages, and in setting from Florida to Alaska, they amount to an eclectic survey of our country in the last decade, from the viewpoint of a perspicacious and sympathetic American spectator...

...Such is my morality...

...To the mother of his protégé Guy de Maupassant he wrote, "The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft, high above the bourgeois and democratic sloughs...

...He would work for seven hours at a stretch, and in a month might turn out twenty pages...

...To want more than it holds is her tragic fate...

...I want to arouse people's pity, to make sensitive souls weep, since I am one myself...

...But this, this life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north...

...Modern socialism reeks of pedantry...

...The life he conceives of far outstrips the life he actually leads...

...Helen can't act, and Ben can barely breathe...

...Mallon's description of a fair in Owosso, Michigan, evokes the poignant tensions of small-town life in the late twentieth century but suffers from a lack of focus...

...eight of the twelve pieces in this collection were originally published here...

...Authorities have considered stopping the executions for environmental reasons...

...As for the lower orders of society, you will never lift them up...

...He frequented prostitutes, and came down with syphilis...

...Of an animal-rights activist protesting a rodeo he quips: "one feels that if, as the song goes, he could talk to the animals, he'd bore them to death...

...he saw it as war for war's sake, and despaired at the soulless darkness that it revealed...

...Seeing her pet greyhound yawn, she is touched, and speaks aloud to the dog, "as if consoling one of the afflicted...

...Yes, life...

...It bores me to eat, to dress, to stand on my feet, etc...

...and everything that reminds me that life must be borne...

...H e used to write at night, beginning to work at ten o' clock, when his mother, whom he lived with until her death, went to bed...

...Most enjoyable are the portraits of the principals at a Manhattan criminal trial...

...After an evening at La Vaubyessard, home of the Marquis d'Andervilliers, she dreams of the splendid life of the wealthy: Everything in her immediate surroundings, the boring countryside, the imbecile petits bourgeois, the general mediocrity of life, seemed to be a kind of anomaly, a unique accident that had befallen her alone, while beyond, as far as the eye could see, there unfurled the immense kingdom of pleasure and passion...

...Thankful for the security that diplomats have brought to his East Side New York neighborhood, he allows that "if the U.N...

...The pattern is cut here for a life's work...

...At bottom, he knew himself unfit for the ordinary pleasures of life, and offered her an explanation for his refractoriness: I have passed the age when one loves as you would like me to...

...The very idea makes a chill run down my spine...

...To be a living creature, with all the limitations that entails, is hateful to Flaubert, this man of soaring imagination...

...Modern politics he loathed with a fury...

...The star turns out to be the hammy, merciful, and commonsensical judge...

...A book has never been anything for me but a way of living in a particular milieu...

...This is the gentle lead-in to a disillusioning tour of the Old World Order's most grandiose symbol...

...Three years later he finally got hold of a woman, a hotel-keeper in Marseilles and 35 years old...

...Art remained his only solace, and he devoted himself to it with singular tenacity...

...There: I have said it...

...The production values have a willful, ascetic shoddiness: this is the kind of movie in which you can't make out the dialogue, but in which the movement of a piece of silverware is deafening...

...Flaubert spoke true when he said, "Madame Bovary is me...

...As for the scenery, one wishes the actors would chew it...

...His friend Theophile Gautier observed that "There is one thing for which he feels a remorse that poisons his life...

...I am so exasperated by the Right that I wonder if the Communards weren't correct in wanting to burn Paris, because raving madmen are less abominable than idiots...

...the reality we find disgusting...

...the polished, charming, angry activist of a defense lawyer...

...But Mallon generally avoids such easy targets...

...Besides, their reign is always shorter...

...The courtroom piece is the longest in the book, but there are others that read more slowly...

...At 18 he wrote, "Someday I must buy myself a slave in Constantinople, a Georgian girl—a man who doesn't own a slave is a blockhead...

...Living is impossible without the consolations of art...

...Nothing in her life was as rich as her hopes for herself—for love, for excitement, for grandeur...

...When George Sand tried to sell him on the "pleasure of doing nothing," he replied with heat: "As soon as I am no longer working on a book or thinking about writing one, I am seized with such boredom I could scream...

...Upon my word, I think that's very sensible, seeing that I regard the species as rather stupid...

...Emma Bovary, young wife of a provincial doctor, is eaten alive by boredom...

...has failed in its aim to make the world safe, it can at least be credited with having done that for Turtle Bay...

...With boredom as a leitmotif in Flaubert's life, an examination of Madame Bovary, his classic study R eaders of TAS already know the work of Thomas Mallon...

...and the dreadlocked, Koran-toting defendant himself, who never says a word but laughs from time to time—all gradually emerge from a patient account of the inefficient proceedings...

...The delusions and deceptions of others can exasperate this good-natured author, and they do on the campaign trail...

...After an execution in San Quentin's gas chamber, cyanide gas is let into the atmosphere and sulfuric acid into San Francisco Bay...

...Watching her nurse the child she had had by her middle-aged lover was as close as Flaubert came to sexual fulfillment, and as much as he could stand...

...Egalitarian hopes and promises were chimerical...

...Mallon savors the ironies, and is more than merely amused by them...

...The querulous, nitpicking prosecutor...

...use manual typewriters (or did, as late as 1989), that Secret Service agents pay cash for their lunch aboard Air Force Two...

...Working ferociously was his lifelong evasion, saving him from the pains of boredom.of boredom, would have been enlightening...

...In his adolescence Flaubert did seek happiness elsewhere, in love...

...I have within me, deep inside, a fundamental, intimate, bitter, and never-ending boredom that prevents me from enjoying anything and that fills my soul to bursting...

...It seems to me that life is tolerable only if one evades it...

...The acids of boredom ate deep into the spirit as well as the flesh...

...0 ne wishes that Henri Troyat had written more about Flaubert's works than the perfunctory remarks he offers...

...I'll not take it back...

...At 15 he became heartsick over a woman of 26 whom he met on summer vacation at the beach...

...Sincerely yours, G.F...

...But Mallon is hardly ever hostile, and when he is, it's not ugly but entertaining...

...The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 inspired him to countless outpourings of disgust...

...She wanted to bear his child, and he could not bear the thought of fatherhood: That I, who have sworn never to join anyone's existence to my own, I should give birth to another life...

...There are days when the love of the very angels could not satisfy him, and he wearies in an hour of all the caresses on earth...

...Immersing himself in ancient glories, he made himself proof against intolerable modernity...

...the much vaunted masses were never to amount to anything: What is important in history is a little band of men (three or four hundred in each century, perhaps) which has never varied from Plato's time to our own...

...by the time he passes sentence he has grown on the reader in a way that is rare outside of fiction...

...he also traveled to Tunisia...

...The only happiness the world offers is to be had in the writer's study...

...When the parrot dies she has him stuffed, and when she herself is dying, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost...

...Why is the heart of man so large and life so small...

...Doing research for The Sentimental Education, he steeped himself in Fourier and Saint-Simon: "What despots and what boors...

...I have a horror of everything that lures me back and plunges me into it again...

...And, fearing that if you persist in this way I shall be obliged to offer you repeated affronts, I am bound by the rules of courtesy to warn you that I shall never be in...

...When he fell for the married and promiscuous poetess Louise Colet—he was 25, she 36—almostimmediately he began back-pedaling to escape her ruthless pursuit...

...Of course, he saw to it that sexuality was banal, not to say frightful...

...In Memoirs of a Madman, written months later, Flaubert rhapsodized this unconsummated passion: "Dear angel of my youth, you whom I saw in the freshness of my emotions, you whom I loved with a love so sweet, so full of perfume, of tender daydreams, adieu...

...I shrink from everything that belongs to life...

...Nothing real can compare to the mind's invention...

...It's that in Madame Bovary he put two genitives one on top of the other: une couronne des fleurs d'oranger [a crown of orange blossoms...

...Woman is a commonplace animal that man has over-idealized...

...Ultimately, Emma finds adultery as boring as marriage: "Every smile concealed the yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every satisfaction brought its nausea, and even the most perfect kisses only leave upon the lips a fantastical craving for the supreme pleasure...

...When he broke off with Louise Colet, the rupture was an act of reptilian coldness: Madame: I am told that you took the trouble to call on me three times last evening...

...To create a character for whom the world is equal to her love for it, Flaubert seized on a woman of the utmost purity, in the story "Un Cceur simple" (A Simple Heart): She loves successively a man, her mistress's children, a nephew, an old man she is taking care of, then her parrot...

...you attracted me—me, who so distrust attractive things...

...With Eulalie Foucaud he had a four-day erotic idyll and a correspondence, passionate at first, then increasingly polite...

...We have somehow been trapped in a seventy-two-minute Warhol film set in San Diego and possessed of what it thinks is a political consciousness...

...I hate life...

...The dog runs away all the same...

...His assessment of another movie (a "superb, repellent" treatment of the Leopold and Loeb thrill killing) is at once balanced and strongly felt, and he picks the director as "somebody to watch out for in every sense of the term...

...It was the mark of his superiority to all he encountered, and made him capable of extreme cruelty...

...The way tonight's speakers go on about the Pell Grants," he reports from Rhode Island, "one would almost think they were golden guineas extracted from the velvet bag of the senator's personalfortune...

...I was not in...

...This is spiritual disorder of a fatal variety, reminiscent of the Englishman Goethe writes of in Poetry and Truth, who killed himself because he was tired of having to get dressed every morning...

...and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart...

...He hated the Communards and the reactionaries alike...

...Only the novel he is writing delivers him from the world's crushing stupidity...

...I no longer think of anything but Carthage, and that is what is necessary...

...Here is the essential complaint of a lifetime...

...Mallon's eye for this sort of thing can lead him into the realm of the absurd, for which he also has a taste...

...His account of a rocket •launching never takes off, weighed down not only by technical data...

...In another youthful novel, November, he was to write of his affair, "Why have we such aspirations and such disappointments...

...However, rebellion in Paris unleashed demons of its own, and Flaubert became preoccupied with the events taking place around him...

...To write Salammbb, his novel about ancient Carthage, he read Polybius, Appian, Diodorus Siculus, Isidorus, Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon, and many others...

...they are the ones who have done everything and who are the conscience of the world...

...life and a bullet would long since have delivered me from this crude joke called life...

...is there anything more stupid than equality...

...The world is not made in such a way as to satisfy her desires...

...The liking for statuary inclines us to masturbation...

...And if, in order to prevent that life from coming into the world, it were necessary for me to leave it, the Seine is here, and I would throw myself into it at this very moment with a 36-pound cannonball attached to my feet...

...one can never have too much of it...

...It's not at all ironic, as you suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad...

...He would select the ugliest woman in the brothel, and have sexual intercourse in front of his friends while smoking a cigar...

...To save himself from the war's spiritual ruin, he worked on The Temptation of Saint Anthony, about a holy ascetic beleaguered by swarms of demons...

...She suffers the fatal desire to live beyond her emotional means, conjures romance from the stories she read as a girl...

...The cult of Art gives one pride...

...Aching fOr the momentous and rare, he could not but be disappointed by the banality of sexual love...

...His review of an experimental movie is worthy of John Simon at his most vitriolic: This is the kind of movie that grips you by the eyelids and won't let go until you've fallen asleep...

...At the age of twelve, the precocious Flaubert is already playing the misanthrope in a letter to an older friend: "If I didn't have a fifteenth-century queen of France in my head and at the tip of my pen, I should be totally disgusted with Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Boynton Beach...