The family idiot

...And finally, with even more lacerating cruelty: "I have always tried (but I think I have failed) to turn you into a sublime hermaphrodite...

...to Art which transcends and indeed reproaches the trivial aestheticism of his own and a later generation—is, as it develops in the great letters of the 1850s, principally those to Louise Colet, recognizably modern and more than that constitutive of central attitudes of literary modernism, just as the Bovary letters are among its central documents...

...From the beginning he was marked: slow to learn his letters, in fact (Sartre's huge, unfinished, apparently abandoned book on Flaubert, remember, is whimsically titledL'idiot delafamille...

...there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects...

...At age 14, after informing his friend that he is "working like a demon, getting up at half-past-three in the morning," he writes: "I see with indignation that theater censorship is going to be reintroduced and the freedom of the press abolished...

...Two great coups at one stroke The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857 Selected, edited & translated by Francis Steegmuller...

...Early, the very context is literary, in a once-familiar, now (I suppose) extinct way: as if he had leapt from illiteracy into literature in a single bound, he is writing "plays" intended for performance by himself, his siblings, their friends before an audience of family, relatives, neighbors—in an age when gifted children, encouraged by parents, governesses, teachers and other benevolent presences, did such things—pay heed, Mothers of America...

...best known, of course, because Flaubert wrote them throughout the years 1851-56, the Madame Bovary years, as a kind of contrapuntal accompaniment to the novel, a record for posterity, as it turned out, of the tortured progress of the novel that would forever alter the history of the genre and of modern literature and sensibility...

...29 August 1980:471...

...And again—he is thirty-four at the time and still working on Bovary: "I confess I no longer have any sexual urge, thank God...

...At age nine, in the first of the letters published here, which may also have been the first he wrote that someone thought worth keeping, he is already burdened with an artist's self-consciousness, unnaturally concerned with matters of style, not in the crude sense of flourish and "refinement" but in some serious literary sense...

...I want you to be a man down to the navel...

...but once he has turned that corner it was as if he had been born clutching a pen...

...Luckily, oh how luckily, for us, Flaubert much preferred to conduct his affair with Louise Colet by mail, she in Paris, he in Croisset, the small town outside his native Rouen, where he jived with his mother sealed up against the world for much of his life, engaged in the making of perfect sentences, sometimes shouting them—literally shouting them!—at the top of his lungs as he composed...

...Allow the boy who was father to the man to continue in his own voice...

...The deep abiding nausea with life, the profound devotion SAUL maloff, a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor to Commonweal and other magazines...

...At present they are depriving the man of lettersx)f his conscience, his artist's conscience...

...Abruptly he breaks off in a spasm of self-criticism: "I'm not writing this letter well" and accounts for his failure by adding "because I'm expecting a box of sweets" from relatives...

...If you'd like us to work together at writing, I'll write comedies and you can write your dreams, and since there's a lady who comes to see papa and always says stupid things I'll write them too...

...But first, for better or worse, that turning-point in his life, the grand tour of the real, imagined, fantasied Orient, that region of the mind...

...in any case ours as a nation did: "Perish the United States, rather than a principle...

...Jules de Goncourt, Maupassant, Baudelaire, an untold number of others, were destined to die horribly of paresis—it is an immense relief to have him back at his desk in Croisset, bloated with the gorgeous pyrotechnic imagery that would go into Salammbo and other later work...

...May I die like a dog rather than hurry by a single second a sentence that isn't ripe...

...Friend," he writes grandly to a boy his senior by a year, himself all of ten, like some Norman senator and member of the Academy, "I'll send you some of my political and constitutional liberal speeches...

...It is also to Louis Bouilhet that he will cry out of the making of a work of art: "We're good at sucking, we play a lot of tongue games, we pet for hours: but—the real thing...

...These are the celebrated letters, a selection of them, the best known of the entire archive of his correspondence, the first volume * of a projected two based on the definitive Pleiade edition now in progress...

...Oh no it's a sad thing, criticism, study, plumbing the depths of knowledge to find only vanity, analyzing the human heart to find only egoism, and understanding the world only to find in it nothing but misery...

...Flaubert, in his letters home, principally to LePoittevin's successor as his dearest male friend, whom he will soon designate official "midwife" to the novel about to be conceived and in agony brought to fruition—to Louis Bouilhet he counts (actually, literally counts) the precise number of orgasms scored (mot juste, I think, though it is mine not his) upon or against whatever bodies wherever located, a form of body count long before the phrase was invented for another perverse colonial war...

...he cried out, mystifyingly, in a literary letter to a friend...

...And with the same sort of crazy pride—as if in some magnificent, unprecedented achievement—brandishing the number of chancres incurred during his royal progress...

...be written, and his progress through its agonies as a result of their severed relations is left largely unrecorded...

...yes, this law will be passed, for the representatives of the people are nothing but a filthy lot of sold-out wretches, they see only their own interests, their natural bent is toward baseness, their honor is a stupid pride, their soul a lump of mud...

...A year or so later the son of Dr...

...but by then he was, on the evidence of the most casual of them, simply incapable of writing a bad, halfconsidered, ill-fashioned sentence if his life depended on it...

...a sovereign priapism on the one side, total availability on the other...

...kings' heads will roll, there will be rivers of blood...

...A "thousand warm caresses" he is glad to bestow upon demand, along with a thousand kisses here, there, everywhere...

...It is a rampant quest for polymorphous sensation of every variety along a sexual spectrum from boy to beast, in an alien atmosphere and foreign climes, imperial Europe striding the "backward" colonies mired in the brackish backwaters of history: all the elements of sexual imperialism...

...It is awesome: his life did depend on it—literally, one feels...

...Flaubert took a fierce pleasure in telling her (and his male friends, for that matter) of his decided preference always for whores and brothels, the seamier the better...

...And much more: the surviving letters from those years throb with the quivering intensities of Romantic adolescence...

...The letters conclude with the brief, moving exchange with Baudelaire (himself suffering similar prosecution for Les Fleurs du Mai), the two meeting in recognition each of the other, each the author of a supreme masterpiece after which nothing would ever be the same, not merely for a generation or movement but for a culture, which is as close as we need to come to defining a classic...

...The first series of letters to Louise Colet, beginning with their first meeting in 1846 and ending with what was intended as a final parting in 1848, is of considerable human and literary interest as a spawning ground for Flaubert's developing ideas about art, the artist's life, his own powerfully sensed destiny—and his deep ambivalence toward Louise in particular and the life of the flesh in general...

...Adieu, au revoir, and let us continue to devote ourselves to what is greater than peoples, crowns and kings: to the good of Art, who is everpresent, wearing his diadem, his divine frenzy merely in abeyance...

...To ejaculate, beget the child...

...but some day, a day will come before long, the people will unleash a third revolution...

...so to speak: the masterpiece he knew he was writing as he was writing during working hours (except when he was hating life and cursing fate at the end of a bad day's work: "I feel waves of hatred for the stupidity of my age," he wrote his dearest friend, Louis Bouilhet...

...and writing Louise those lines which never cease to move us: "Last night I began my novel...

...If she insists that he protest his love, and she does insist, all the time, he is almost always glad enough to oblige the lady: he knows the rules of the rite and, besides, it provides him with opportunities for some fine, resounding sentences in the conventional mode as leavening for the never ending bookishness that drove her to frenzies of rage and jealousy...

...Now I foresee difficulties of style, and they terrify me...

...BelknapVHarvard...

...YOUR MANIA FOR SENTENCES HAS DRIED UP YOUR HEART' The family idiot SAUL MALOFF Incomparable Romantic operatics, nineteenth-century French version: art, death, rapturous if brief reconcilations, a very strange affair from its beginnings fairly bursting with the seeds of its own annihilation...

...Invincible power confronting absolute powerlessness...

...but he wants her to know that nothing gives him pleasure as rich, deep and abiding as those provided inexhaustibly by the works of the illustrious dead, and that the "three finest things God ever made are the sea, Hamlet, and Mozart's Don Giovanni...

...12.50, 250 pp...

...At the beginning of his career Flaubert seems almost to foreshadow his end in the Dictionary of Received Ideas and one unfinished Bouvard et Pecuchet, where at the time of his death in 1880 he was trying to catalogue all the "stupid things" said, thought'and committed in the nineteenth century—indeed the stupidities of the species before he him29 August 1980: 469 self drowned in them...

...They choke me...

...When her insistence became intolerable, he simply closed her put of his life with a brutal abruptness, Celling her, in a brief, icy note, that he would never be "in" to her if she were to visit...

...nor would he dissemble...

...Thus the letters progress from boyhood and adolescence, to the years of suffering the hated study of law at his father's insistence, and his escape from it into sickness, slow convalescence and so to speak selective retreat from the world, to the devastating loss in quick succession of his father and sister and dearest friend and more than friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, who had betrayed him after a fashion by marrying in the usual way and producing a child by conventional means—the loss he was always to consider the most annihilating of his life...

...I am like the tiger," he furiously tells her, "who has bristles of hair at the tip of his glans, which lacerate the female...

...there wasn't time for that: presumably he wrote them rapidly, at night, often on successive nights...

...below that, Commonweal: 470 you get in my way, you disturb me— your female element ruins everything...

...At the time of the final break, at the end of the second series of letters, in a letter, one of several which Steegmuller regrettably decided to exclude, Flaubert is past all dissembling...

...Steegmuller—to whom we're all so greatly indebted for his masterly translation of Madame Bovary, and whose translations of the letters are beyond praise—organizes the letters chronologically and "selects" them thematically so that, with the support of wonderfully illuminating notes and running commentary, they compose in themselves a kind of biography in small scale, all of it building with seeming inevitability toward the Bovary years and the aftermath of publication, prosecution (on grounds of outraging religion and public morals) and vindication...

...Yes, our century is rich in bloody peripeties...

...Shit keeps coming into my mouth, as from a strangulated hernia . . . I want to make a paste of it and daub it over the nineteenth century . . .")—and the great book he wrote late at night out of some mysterious source of unexpended energy miraculously available to him when by rights he should have lain drowned in drugged sleep: these letters to the inconsequential versifier who performed the supreme repository function of receiving and replying to them...

...The lady's importunings could not possibly avail against his resolve to preserve himself...

...When, not long after, now launched upon the novel, he writes...

...The irrevocable break with Louise Colet came at what may have been a good time for him but it was a bad one for literary history: perhaps a third of the novel remained to...

...It is no small thing to be simple...

...He really could...

...Flaubert, his mother, knew where her peculiar son's true passion lay: "Your mania for sentences," she told him, to his immense pleasure, "has dried up your heart," which he himself spoke of as his "impotent heart...

...No matter how often one reads them—and we've grown up on them, they are among the sacred texts of our literary cultures—each time they're as startlingly fresh as if just conceived, yet Flaubert could not have deliberated endlessly over them as he did over each phrase, each word, of the novel...

...Flaubert is confidently telling his friend that the "most beautiful woman is scarcely beautiful on the table of the dissecting-room, with her bowels draped over her nose, one leg minus its skin, and half a burnt-out cigar on her foot...

...from the standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things . . ."we know we are listening to something new under the sun, and are hearing it still...

...I'll also send you some of my comedies...

...Across the notepaper she wrote "poltroon, coward, cur" — and there it ended...

...and this is the Flaubert who not long before, in the interval between the first series of letters to Louise and beginning work on Bovary (and resuming the correspondence with Louise), made his progress through the Orient, senses reeling, a triumphal tour, it often seems, of picturesque ruins, crumbling antiquities and exotic, reeking, verminous whorehouses, his inhibitions dissolved by distance from home and mother...

...Could the youth (he was ten years her junior) really prefer art to her arms...

...But having made all manner of allowance for the characteristic rhetoric of his age and Age, his posturing and bombast and so on, one nevertheless must acknowledge that permanent features of the inner landscape are fixed in place along with attitudes that will undergo refinement and elaboration but not essential change...