Ten Novels And Their Authors (25 page)

His deliberate intention was to choose a set of characters who were thoroughly commonplace, and devise incidents that would inevitably arise from their nature and their circumstances; but he was well aware of the possibility that no one would be interested in persons so dull, and that the incidents he had to relate would prove tedious. How he proposed to deal with this I will come to later. Before doing so, I want to consider how far he succeeded in his attempt. The characters are drawn with consummate skill. We are persuaded of their truth. We no sooner meet them than we accept them as living creatures, standing on their own feet, in the world we know. We take them for granted, as we take our plumber, our grocer, our doctor. It never occurs to us that they are figures in a novel. Homais, to mention one, is a creature as humorous as Mr. Micawber, and he has become as familiar to the French as Mr. Micawber is to us; and we believe in him as we can never quite believe in Mr. Micawber, for, unlike Mr. Micawber, he is always consistently himself. But Emma Bovary is not by any means the ordinary farmer’s daughter. That there is in her something of every woman and of every man is true. We are all given to extravagant and absurd reveries, in which we see ourselves rich, handsome, successful, the heroes or heroines of romantic adventures; but most of us are too sensible, too timorous or too unadventurous to let our day-dreams seriously affect our behaviour. Emma Bovary
was exceptional in that she tried to live her fantasies; she was exceptional in her beauty. As is well known, when the novel was published author and printer were prosecuted on the charge that it was immoral. I have read the speeches of the public prosecutor and of the defending counsel. The prosecutor recited a number of passages which he claimed were pornographic: they make one smile now, they are so restrained in comparison with the descriptions of sexual intercourse to which modern novelists have accustomed us; but one cannot believe that even then (in 1875) the prosecutor was shocked by them. The defending counsel pleaded that the passages were necessary, and that the moral of the novel was good because Emma Bovary suffered for her misconduct. The judges accepted this view, and the defendants were acquitted. It is evident, however, that if Emma came to a bad end, it was not, as the morality of the time demanded, because she had committed adultery, but because she ran up bills that she hadn’t the money to pay, and if she had had the notoriously thrifty instincts of the Norman peasant, there was no reason why she should not have gone from lover to lover without coming to harm.

On publication, Flaubert’s great novel was enthusiastically received by readers and immediately became a bestseller, but the critics were, when not hostile, indifferent. Strange as it may seem, they were more inclined to attach importance to a novel called
Fanny
by a certain Ernest Feydeau, which was issued about the same time; and it was only the deep impression that
Madame Bovary
made on the public, and the influence it had on subsequent writers of fiction, that obliged them in the end to take it seriously.

Madame Bovary
is a hard-luck story rather than a tragedy. I should say that the difference between the two is that in a hard-luck story the events that occur are brought about by chance, whereas in a tragedy they are the result of the characters of the persons engaged. It was
bad luck that, with her good looks and charm, Emma should have married such a dull fool as Charles Bovary. It was bad luck that when she was pregnant and wanted a son to make up for the disillusionment of her marriage, she should have a daughter. It was bad luck that Rodolphe Boulanger, Emma’s first lover, was a selfish, brutal fellow who let her down. It was bad luck that her second was mean, weak and timorous. It was bad luck that when she was desperate, the village priest, to whom she went for help and guidance, should be a callous and fatuous dolt. It was bad luck that when Emma found herself hopelessly in debt and, threatened with proceedings, so far humiliated herself as to ask Rodolphe for money, he couldn’t give it her, though we are told he would have been ready to do so, because he didn’t happen to have any by him. It was bad luck that it never occurred to him that his credit was good and his lawyer would immediately have given him the required sum. The story Flaubert had to tell necessarily ended in Emma’s death, but it must be confessed that the means by which he brought it about strains the reader’s credulity to the breaking-point.

Some have found it a fault that, though Emma is the central character, the novel begins with an account of Bovary’s early youth and his first marriage, and ends with his disintegration and death. I surmise that Flaubert’s idea was to enclose the story of Emma Bovary within that of her husband, as you enclose a painting in a frame. He may have felt that thus he rounded off his narrative and gave it the unity of a work of art. If this was his intention, it would have been more evident if the end were not hurried and arbitrary. Throughout the book, Charles Bovary has been shown to be weak and easily led. Flaubert tells us that after Emma’s death he changed utterly. That is very summary. Broken as he was, it is hard to credit that he should have become quarrelsome, self-willed and obstinate. Though a stupid man, he was conscientious, and it seems strange that he should have neglected his
patients. He badly needed their money. He had Emma’s debts to pay and his daughter to provide for. The radical change in Bovary’s character requires a good deal more explanation than Flaubert has given it. Finally he dies. He was a robust man in the prime of life, and the only reason one can give for his death is that Flaubert, after fifty-five months of exhausting labour, wanted to be done with the book. Since we are expressly told that Bovary’s memories of Emma with time grew dim, and so presumably less poignant, one cannot but ask oneself why Flaubert did not let Bovary’s mother arrange a third marriage for him, as she had arranged the first. It would have added one more note of futility to the story of Emma Bovary, and accorded well with Flaubert’s ferocious sense of irony.

A work of fiction is an arrangement of incidents devised to display a number of characters in action and to interest the reader. It is not a copy of life as it is lived. Just as in a novel conversations cannot be reproduced exactly as they take place in real life, but have to be summarised so that only the essential points are given, and then with clearness and concision, so facts have to suffer some deformation in order to accord with the author’s plan and to hold the reader’s attention. Irrelevant incidents must be omitted; repetitions must be avoided – and, heaven knows, life is full of repetitions; isolated occurrences and events that in real life would be separated by a passage of time may often have to be brought into proximity. No novel is entirely free of improbabilities, and to the more usual ones readers have become so accustomed that they accept them as a matter of course. The novelist cannot give a literal transcript of life, he draws a picture for you which, if he is a realist, he tries to make life-like; and if you believe him he has succeeded.

On the whole,
Madame Bovary
gives an impression of intense reality, and this arises, I think, not only because Flaubert’s characters are eminently lifelike, but because he has described detail with extreme accuracy. The first
four years of Emma’s married life were passed in a village called Tostes; she was hideously bored there, but for the balance of the book this period had to be described at the same pace and with the same detail as the rest. Now, it is difficult to describe a boring time without boring the reader; yet you read the long passage with interest. Flaubert has narrated a series of very trivial incidents, and you are not bored because you are reading something fresh all the time; but since each little incident, whether it is something Emma does, feels or sees, is so commonplace, so trivial, you do get a vivid sensation of her boredom. There is a set description of Yonville, the little town in which the Bovarys settled after leaving Tostes, but it is the only one; for the rest, the descriptions of country and town, beautifully done all of them, are interwoven with the narrative and enforce its interest. Flaubert introduces his characters in action, and we learn of their appearance, their mode of living, their setting, in a continuous process; as, in fact, we come to know people in real life.

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I remarked a few pages back that Flaubert was aware that in setting out to write a book about commonplace people he ran the risk of writing a dull one. He desired to produce a work of art, and he felt that he could only surmount the difficulties presented by the sordid nature of his subject and the vulgarity of his characters by means of beauty of style. Now, I do not know whether such a creature exists as the natural born stylist; certainly Flaubert was not; his early works, unpublished in his lifetime, are said to be verbose, turgid and rhetorical. It is generally stated that his letters show little sign that he had a feeling for the elegance and distinction of his native tongue. I don’t think that is true. They were, for the most part, written late at night, after a hard day’s work, and sent to their recipients uncorrected. Words are misspelt and the grammar
is often faulty; they are slangy and sometimes vulgar; but there are in them brief descriptions of scenery so real, so rhythmical, that they would not have seemed out of place in
Madame Bovary
; and there are passages, when he was moved to fury, that are so incisive, so direct, that you feel no revision would have served to improve them. You hear the sound of his voice in the short, crisp sentences. But that was not the way in which Flaubert wanted to write a book. He was prejudiced against the conversational style, and was blind to its advantages. He took for his models La Bruyère and Montesquieu. His aim was to write a prose that was logical, precise, swift and various, rhythmical, sonorous, musical as poetry, and yet preserving the qualities of prose. He was of opinion that there were not two ways of saying a thing, but only one, and that the wording must fit the thought as the glove fits the hand. ‘When I find an assonance or a repetition in one of my phrases,’ he said, ‘I know that I am ensnared in something false.’ (As examples of assonance, the Oxford Dictionary gives man and hat, nation and traitor, penitent and reticent.) Flaubert claimed that an assonance must be avoided, even if it took a week to manage it. He would not allow himself to use the same word twice on a page. That does not seem sensible: if it is the right word in each place, it is the right word to use, and a synonym or a periphrase can never be as apt. He was careful not to allow the sense of rhythm which was natural to him, as it is to every writer, to obsess him (as George Moore in his later works was obsessed) and took pains to vary it. He exercised all his ingenuity to combine words and sounds to give an impression of speed or languor, lassitude or intensity; in short, of whatever state he desired to express.

When writing, Flaubert would sketch out roughly what he wished to say, and then work on what he had written, elaborating, cutting, re-writing, till he got the effect he wanted. That done, he would go out on his terrace and
shout out the words he had written, convinced that if they did not sound well, there must be something wrong with them. In that case, he would take them back and work over them again till he was satisfied. Théophile Gautier thought that Flaubert attached too great a value to the cadence and harmony with which he sought to enrich his prose; they were, according to him, only evident when Flaubert in his booming voice read them aloud; but a phrase, he added, is made to read to oneself, not to be bellowed. Gautier was inclined to mock at Flaubert’s fastidiousness: ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the poor chap suffers from a remorse that poisons his life. You don’t know what the remorse is; it’s to have put two genitives together in
Madame Bovary
, one on the top of the other:
une couronne de fleurs d’oranger
. It tortures him, but however hard he tried, he found it impossible to avoid.’ It is fortunate for us that by means of our English genitive we can escape this difficulty. We can say: ‘Where is the bag of the doctor’s wife’; but in French you would have to say: ‘Where is the bag of the wife of the doctor.’ It must be confessed that it is not pretty.

Louis Bouilhet would come to Croisset of a Sunday; Flaubert read to him what he had written during the week, and Bouilhet criticised. Flaubert stormed and argued, but Bouilhet held his ground, and in the end Flaubert accepted the emendations, the elimination of superfluous incidents and irrelevant metaphors, the correction of false notes, which his friend insisted on. No wonder the novel proceeded at a snail’s pace. In one of his letters Flaubert wrote: ‘The whole of Monday and Tuesday was taken up with the writing of two lines.’ This does not mean that he wrote only two lines in two days, he may well have written a dozen pages; it means that with all his labour he only succeeded in writing two lines to his satisfaction. Flaubert found the strain of composition exhausting. Alphonse Daudet believed that this was attributable to the bromide that his malady obliged
him to make constant use of. If there is anything in this, it may account for the effort it evidently was to him to set down on paper in coherent order the huddle of ideas in his mind. We know how laborious a task he found it to write the well-known scene in
Madame Bovary
of the agricultural show. Emma and Rodolphe are seated at a window of the local inn. A representative of the
préfet
has come to deliver a speech. What Flaubert wanted to do he told in a letter to Louise Colet: ‘I have to situate together in the same conversation five or six people (who talk), several others (of whom one hears), the spot where this occurs, the feel of the place, while giving physical descriptions of people and things, and to show in the midst of all a man and a woman who begin (by their common sympathies of taste) to feel a little attracted to one another.’ That does not seem a very difficult thing to do, and Flaubert has in fact done it extremely well, but, though it was only twenty-seven pages long, it took him two solid months. Balzac would have written it in his own way no less well in the inside of a week. The great novelists, Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy, had what we are accustomed to call inspiration. It is only in a scene here and there that you feel that Flaubert had it; for the rest he seems to have depended on sheer hard work, the advice and suggestions of Bouilhet, and his own acuteness of observation. This is not to depreciate
Madam Bovary
; but it is strange that so great a work should have been produced, not as we feel
Le Père Goriot
or
David Copperfield
was produced in the free flow of an exuberant fancy, but by almost pure ratiocination.