Recluse of Croisset

...Recluse of Croisset FLAUBERT: THE MAKING OF THE MASTER By Enid Staikie Atheneum 403 pp $8 50 Reviewed by DONALD SUTHERLAND Author, "Geitiude Stein A Biography of Her Work" Yeats opined that "The intellect of man is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work " That no longer seems true As biography grows ever less reticent, insistently telling all it can dig up, the lives of many writers and artists are getting to be as interesting as their work, if not more so One quite expects a perfect writer to have also been a perfect monster And Flaubert, as presented by Enid Starkie, starts out with promise, given his syphilis, some early homosexual attachments, and his long inept affair with Louise Colet, a beauty but surely the phoniest woman of her epoch Unhappily, though, Flaubert emerges m the end about as he was before the recluse of Croisset whose life was primarily and essentially at his desk His adventures away from it can hardly compete with those of Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or other eminences of the time But if you feel you need a meticulously researched and equably considered account of Flaubert's outward or secondary life, along with traces of his literary formation, here it is—as far as 1857, the year of the trial of Madame Bovary After 1857, Miss Starkie abandons biography for a set of critical essays about Madame Bovary and the Flaubertian esthetic in general The scheme, shapely enough so far as it goes, is a makeshift to replace an original project covering all the works and, presumably, the rest of Flaubert's life and his death m 1880 The omission of so very much is discouraging, especially when the later works, and the last work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, may well be more to contemporary taste than Bovary Miss Starkie says bad luck has pursued this volume from the outset I have no idea what she means by that, but even within the vast amount she has after all succeeded in domg, a number of things have gone appreciably wrong The very subject, a life lived mamly m writing, is one for literary criticism rather than biography, and Miss Starkie is far more biographer than critic She does command a scholarly side of criticism the tracing of sources and influences, yet, even there, the intrepid imagination required for accurately registering the quality of feeling and expression in the great Romantics, whose pitch conditioned Flaubert, is limited by her sheer good sense I do not know who could do it these days, but Miss Starkie does not recreate enough of the reality and scope of Romanticism to present at the proper heroic intensity Flaubert's emotional and intellectual struggle with it Indeed, only when quotmg Flaubert himself does she come close The essential drama of the subject is badly undertreated And an essential idea in Flaubert is rendered largely inoperative "He had admired [Don Quixote's] idealism and heroism, while seeing clearly their falseness " "Falseness" is here trivial and not le mot juste Flaubert was rarely, if ever, not clear that the aspirations of Don Quixote, or of Emma Bovary, or of himself as an artist, or of anybody at all, are "realities of feeling," and not false, senseless or futile emotions as they often seem when confronted with "objective" realities Miss Starkie quotes Flaubert "A soul is measured by the extent of its aspirations " That is not a remark in passmg, but a conclusion from the heart of the matter She is only intermittently clear about Flaubert's use of his great instruments, tragicomedy and irony "The mam characters—Charles and Emma—are drawn fully, in the round, with no irony and always with compassion " She writes as if irony and compassion excluded each other, though presently she nearly contradicts herself quoting Flaubert a book making fun of its leading lady and juvenile lead The irony doesn't dimmish the pathos, on the contrary, it enhances it" In spite of her apparent inattention to general ideas, which were vital to Flaubert Miss Starkie is a good practical cntic of narrative construction which Flaubert could fumble rather badly She can correct the less knowing opmions of other critics on characterization and motive She can mistake a manner and indulge very mappositely in morals, but she has an impulsive kmd of human sympathy which gives her an ultimate advantage in reading Romantic sentiments The major expression of critical issues, however?again in a scholarly way—she leaves to copious quotations from Flaubert, from his friends and contemporaries, and from critics up to the present time This material, interwoven throughout the book, makes fascinating incidental reading and is beautifully varied, from fatuities by Louise Colet and Francois Maunac to shrewd comments by Guy de Maupassant and captious ones by Emile Faguet Unfortunately, it does not gather to a main issue Miss Starkie does her best, and not badly, to make her concluding essays a sort of culmination m which she belatedly notes and discourses upon Flaubert's central aspiration, a nearly religious one, of course never realized an absolute style sustaining a book "about nothing " But the preceding account of his life and loves and early work, not being explicitly oriented to< that absolute, remams dispersed and directionless Even so, the scattered facts have been chosen for their high intrinsic interest The occasional pursuit of dubious fact down to the last particles of evidence is entertaining, though the fact itself is often of interest only to Flaubert scholars The prose is unaspiring It is easy on the mind and readable, with a few pedagogical foibles like redundancy, a resolute assertion of idees regues, and a certain impertinence "Anna Karemna in Tolstoy's novel of the same name " One is not Reader Emeritus m French at Oxford unscathed And as a lady, Miss Starkie considers one would not want to know Emma Bovary personally Such oddities make for a personal flavor and enjoyable reading, though not for more than ordinary writing and criticism In general, Miss Starkie eulogizes her subject With Flaubert under attack by Sartre and others on political and philosophical grounds, so simple a holding action is m order Moreover this monumental portrait "in the round" of the artist as a young man does confirm his case on human grounds, clarifying the arduous and ambiguous morality of his quite saintly calling His work, not always miraculous, and his ideas, Quixotic or not, should now be much easier to defend...