The Energy of Ennui
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers &Writing THE ENERGY OFENNU by daphne merkin T he rMAGrNATrvELY venturesome, as if to maintain the delicate balance of human nature, are often socially withdrawn. It is difficult to...
...The next two-and-a-half years' worth of letters??mainly to Louise Colet??record the slow, assiduous composition of Madame Bovary...
...One quarter is garrisoned with girls who stand in their doorways: it's like the antique world, a real Suburra...
...Such pure and innocent tastes...
...The only thing left is eating, and that I do for hours on end...
...Madame Bovary was completed in April 1856 and serialized in Maxime DuCamp's Revue de Paris...
...I am so harassed by it all," he writes Chevalier in 1842, "that the other night I dreamed of the law...
...Where to start out from...
...there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects...
...From 1849-51 Flaubert traveled through the then-called Orient (Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Italy) with Maxime DuCamp...
...saw in Bovary its author's undisguised contempt for 19th-century society...
...They were emphatically not the gentil tourists of Henry James' novels: The high points of their journey were at least as likely to occur in brothels as at the viewing of architectural splendors...
...My throat is raw from it...
...That society now honored the harsh portraitist who, in true fashion, wanted only to be rid of its attentions: "I long to return, and forever, to the solitude and silence I emerged from...
...All summer I spent boating and reading Shakespeare, and since we returned from the country I have been reading and working a certain amount, studying Greek and reviewing my history...
...The novel was charged with "immorality...
...I felt ashamed at having so dishonored dreaming...
...Freed at last from the odious pursuit of a Vocation, he now immersed himself in a daily round of muted, inward activities that were for him the only kind of pleasure...
...The only things that exist for me in the world are splendid poetry, harmonious, well-turned, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlight, pictures, ancient sculpture, and strongly marked faces...
...Baudelaire, whose poetry Flaubert had congratulated...
...Where to go...
...Aired as well was his astonishingly forward-looking conception of relaxed literary perimeters...
...Francis Steegmuller, the Flaubert scholar who translated and edited an earlier selection of correspondence, has put together this volume, the first of a projected two-volume edition...
...Tobacco...
...After receiving his degree from the local College Royal de Rouen, Flaubert traveled with a family friend to Corsica, stopping en route in Provence...
...me happiness is in the idea, nowhere else," so Flaubert's grief was deflected from the real onto the hypothetical...
...He has also provided an intermittent narrative that fills in contextual details, and a series of unusually graceful footnotes...
...My illness has brought one benefit, in that I am allowed to spend my time as I like, a great thing in life...
...Hounded by doubts ??those "deep discouragements" that underlay his "great elans"??Flaubert inched ahead, airing all the while his famous thoughts regarding the lineaments of fiction: "Form, in becoming more skillful, becomes attenuated...
...For me I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well-heated room, with the books one loves and the leisure one wants...
...This period at home," Steegmuller notes, "seems to have been one of extensive daydreaming...
...But underneath the vitality of observation??the agility of thought that was Flaubert's native endowment??ran his strangely raging lethargy, the aggressive passivity of one who constantly espied the end thumbing its nose at the means...
...Now I foresee difficulties of style, and they terrify me...
...Where is the heart, the verve, the sap...
...The death of Flaubert's father in 1846 was followed shortly afterward by that of his sister, Caroline, during childbirth...
...they give constant evidence of a piercing, undeluded intelligence...
...Yet if he is curiously unmoved by appeals to his sentiment, in the way that Romantics often are, he is also curiously attuned to implications of the worn and tragic...
...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...
...How well you understand the boredom of existence...
...Magnier [a professor] gets on my nerves, history I find oppressive...
...These letters, too, are frantic and perverted, shot through with a queer-colored beauty??the reflections of that "literary lizard" who slithered his way beyond the pieties of his time into eternal verities...
...A year later Flaubert was stricken by acute epileptic attacks and returned home to his father's care...
...Flaubert regaled his friend, the poet Louis Bouilhet, with exultantly graphic accounts of cross-cultural sexual enticements: "Naples is a charming city thanks to its great numbers of pimps and whores...
...to publish nothing...
...I admire tinsel as much as gold: indeed, the poetry of tinsel is even greater, because it is sadder," he observed to Louise Colet, his sometime mistress and literary confidant...
...Traveling doesn't make one gay...
...We were in a carriage, and the coachman, holding his reins and slowing the horse, tried to flick the tip of his whip into the cunt of one of them...
...The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857 (Belknap Press, Harvard, 250 pp., $12.50) comprise a document of surpassing interest...
...I am pickled in it...
...It is strange how sorrows in fiction flood me with facile emotion, while actual sorrows remain hard and bitter in my heart, crystallizing there as they come...
...he paled and shrank from whatever might deflect his cerebral energies...
...The book opens with some letters from the youthful Flaubert to his school chum, Ernest Chevalier...
...there is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator...
...Flaubert was tried and acquitted...
...A letter of 1839 to Chevalier finds an 18-year-old Gustave complaining of a savage world-weariness??the "atrocious ennui," as he later called it??that would plague him spasmodically throughout his life: "I went to the brothel for some fun and was merely bored...
...And later in the same letter: "We take notes, we make journeys: emptiness...
...Gustave Flaubert's was consumingly intellectual...
...With the mention of this unfortunate visitor one already glimpses the fascinated disdain for bourgeois mentality that would evolve, more than 20 years later, into the attentive notation of romantic inanity that is Madame Bovary...
...I rarely leave my room," he wrote a friend in 1845...
...the prospect of pure feeling, unbuttressed by the stratagems of perception, seems more than he could bear to consider...
...When next we hear from Gustave he is very unhappily studying in Paris...
...He was allowed to postpone entering law school for two years...
...it leaves behind all liturgy, rule, measure...
...F JLm laubert came back to Croisset and in a letter of September 20,1851, wrote Louise Colet: "Last night I began my novel...
...If you participate actively in life," he wrote to his mother, "you don't see it clearly: You suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much...
...Strange lands and new experiences did not alter his conviction of ultimate futility: "Something??the eternal 'what's the use?'??sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis," he wrote from the Mediterranean...
...He would return to the scrubbing and polishing of sentences, to the work that he loved "with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly...
...This preference is a pose like any other, a fact I am well aware of...
...It is difficult to conceive of certain literary men without their supremely protective domestic arrangements ??the alembic wherein finely-strung nerves became finely-strung novels...
...Always in Flaubert there is a tendency??a mixture, undoubtedly, of genuine obdurateness and genuine fear??to disassociate himself from a state of immediate emotional responsiveness...
...I see nobody except Alfred LePoittevin...
...What is the good of all that...
...The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature...
...And the more singular the passion, it would seem, the more exacting its toll...
...What is striking about these observations is their suggestion of a precociously fatigued quality to Flaubert's sense of himself and of life??as though the disiilusionments of maturity had skipped a decade or two and landed, rather heavily, on the shoulders of a mere stripling...
...As you go down the street, they hoist their dresses up to their armpits and show you their behinds to earn a penny or two...
...Such is the point I have reached...
...If you'd like us to work together at writing," declares the ambitious nine-year-old, "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...
...They run after you in that state...
...Just as he had come to believe that "for people like...
...He returned to Rouen three months later even more dissatisfied with his humdrum existence, longing for "perfumed shores and blue seas": "I'm disgusted to be back in this damned country where you see the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig's asshole...
...The ensuing few years bear witness to Flaubert's system of passive resistance??by means of his "nervous illness"??to the vocational plans his father, an eminent physician, had in mind for him...
...I live alone, like a bear...
...Alcohol...
...It was the rawest bit of prostitution and cynicism I've seen yet...
...We become scholars, archaeologists, historians, doctors, cobblers, people of taste...
...emptiness...
...never to be talked of again...
...My own eyes are dry as marble," he wrote Max-ime DuCamp...
...With all my heart I could love a beautiful, ardent woman with the soul??and the fingers??of a whore...
...In another letter from approximately the same period Flaubert alludes, somewhat derisively, to his resolutely unhigh-mind-ed sexual leanings: "No, 1 much prefer the ignoble that doesn't pretend to be anything else...
Vol. 63 • March 1980 • No. 5
