The soul moved the pen, and broke it.

Flaubert's emotional style.

The disturbed artist

Flaubert lost his virginity by raping a servant after the sight of a woman breastfeeding in the park drove him so crazy that he kissed the woman’s dog, whispered to the animal what he wished he could whisper to her, and then burst into tears. He frequently collapsed unconscious, suffering from a mysterious condition that his doctor father couldn’t diagnose. As a young man, he deliberately dropped those friends whose Romanticism wasn’t deep and genuine, but was instead a mere expression of their youthful exuberance. When he saw Breughel’s Temptation of Saint Anthony he fell into such a long, unresponsive rapture, his sister became nervous and wondered if she should bring him round. She didn’t, because such raptures were common for Flaubert, who often spent hours staring out of windows.

In short, Flaubert was intense to the point of being disturbed—and that disturbance is essential to the way he worked. When he sent an early work to his compeer Alfred Le Poittevin, he wrote in the cover note: “the soul moved the pen, and broke it.”

Flaubert’s letters, translated by Francis Steegmuller and recently reissued by nyrb are full of the crazed, suffering elements of Flaubert’s genius—his cruelty, his mania, and his devotion to art. Along with Steegmuller’s classic biography Flaubert and Madame Bovary, A Double Portrait, they are essential to understanding this deeply personal novelist.

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Madame Bovary, c’est moi

What can criticism do for an artist like Flaubert? At 116,000 words, written over four years and seven months, Madame Bovary was produced, if such a calculation can mean anything, at a rate of fewer than seventy words a day. To perfect each sentence like a line of verse, Flaubert wept and howled, collapsed in palpitations and wrote in spurts of joy; many of his sentences, he shouted out loud to himself. He called his study his gueuloir, his bellowing place. (He is not known as the bear of Croisset for nothing.) The novel has only just been born, he declared in a letter, and it awaits its Homer. To make himself worthy of that great task, Flaubert felt what seems to have been every possible feeling. He exhausted himself living out the emotional life of his novel so that he might perfect his sentences. He used to tell people, Madame Bovary, c’est moi. And he meant it. Truly, the soul moved the pen, and broke it.

Flaubert claimed not to write about himself, but this is disingenuous: Flaubert worked hard not to be a personal writer, but he cultivated the feelings of his characters within himself. It is little wonder that the man who wrote Madame Bovary, which is a tragedy of cynicism, used to choose the ugliest prostitute in the brothel, not even putting down his cigar during the act, because of his cynical attitude towards transient beauty. “I have violent sensual appetites,” he wrote, “yet I cannot give a kiss that is not ironic.” How else is one able to write such a book?

Madame Bovary is a perfect novel: page by page, line by line, it shows no flaws. The risk of realism is to carefully delineate true details but for no purpose, and to thus produce a dull, cluttered book. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert makes every small detail, even the movement of toes within silk slippers, tell as part of the story. Everything plays a part in establishing the conditions of Emma’s downfall, of showing the tension, of indicating the characters’ psychologies.

We react so strongly to Madame Bovary (many people cannot stand it because they cannot stand her) because of Flaubert’s close realism. We live through the story as closely as a novel can make you live through something. We see it and hear it, and feel it, just as Emma does.

It was with cynical detachment that such art (or Art, as Flaubert always insisted) was made. To know Madame Bovary (and Madame Bovary) is therefore to know Flaubert; and to know Flaubert’s life is to know just how strongly meant is the darkness and hatred of that novel. The despair of unrealised dreams, un-lived life, of the conquering sense of desire for all things, of the dangers of the imagination, are full-blooded and unrelenting in both the novel and its author.

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One must be able to make oneself feel it

Flaubert’s letters are so fascinating because they are full of his writing advice. “If having sensitive nerves were sufficient qualification for being a poet, I would be better than Shakespeare,” he told his lover, the poet Louise Colet. But our own passions are insufficient. “The more personal you are, the weaker.” This later became a dictum of aestheticism, as in Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”

But in the letter where he wrote that, Flaubert wasn’t merely setting out principles of literature. He was critiquing the inadequacies of his lover’s poetry. His detachment for the sake of art knew no boundaries, especially not the feelings of Louise Colet.

The less you feel a thing, Flaubert told Colet, the more capable you are of expressing it. To merely write out your emotions, is, to Flaubert, hardly to write at all. It is not to make Art, not to prioritise style, not to make sacral the aesthetic. Everything is style, he insisted.

But, as we saw, Flaubert often did write in great tempests of emotion. That is because, he told Louise, “one must be able to make oneself feel it.” To create style, you must not have the raw material guttering out onto the page, but you must be able create or summon the material, so that you can capture it, stylise it. You don’t need feelings but “the ability to see, to have the model posing there before you.”

Flaubert’s manic mood cycles enabled him to see, so that he might create a new style. This new style “would be as rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame; a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger.”

Sometimes when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy. Last Wednesday I had to get up and fetch my handkerchief; tears were streaming down my face.

Poor Louise must have felt much of Flaubert’s erratic genius. She had every right to feel ignored and used. The manias might have seemed exhaustingly selfish—“So what the devil do you want me to talk to you about if not Shakespeare, if not what lies closest to my heart?”, Flaubert asks at the start of one letter—and perhaps it was scant redress that Louise was receiving some of literature’s greatest letters. We can marvel from a safe distance at lines like, “If you knew all the invisible nets that keep my physically inactive, all the mists that float in my brain!” and wonder what it was, exactly, what strange maltemperament of the mind that made Flaubert as he was.

For Louise, unvisited, alone, ignored, it must have been grim, simultaneously fascinating and repellent. Though Flaubert wrote Louise one hundred letters, he only visited her six times. He was busy studying Greek, he told her, or had just received some new translations, or had a boil on his neck… In truth, Madame Bovary came first.

Beauty, as he constantly said, is attained only by sacrifice.

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We cannot always live with our noses pointed at the stars

The most Flaubertian modern critic was Susan Sontag, who wrote that “what is inevitable in a work of art is the style.” Style is art; style is what makes art “an experience of the qualities or forms of human consciousness.” In full Flaubertian mode, Sontag wrote, “Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.”

This is the heart of the argument about books like Madame Bovary: whether style is a moral good, by provoking what Sontag called “the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness”, or whether the content has to be judged morally, irrespective of style. For Sontag, “the experience of works of art… transcends judgement.” It represents consciousness, the highest literary virtue.

That representation was precisely Flaubert’s aim. Consciousness had expanded, he believed, since the days of Homer, and new forms were needed. He was especially pleased when a local dignitary said something, almost word for word, that he had only recently written into the mouth of a minor character. That was the scientific precision he sought. But to represent consciousness, he had to pull so much out of himself. In his mania for sentences, his mother told him, he had dried up his heart.

It would be trite to say that Flaubert was his own sacrificial victim, though that may have been his view. In a long justification, and celebration, of his practice of visiting prostitutes, he told Louise that it was a meeting point of lechery, frustration, the total lack of any human relation, physical frenzy, and the clink of gold.

A glance into its depths makes one giddy… It fills you with such sadness! And it makes you dream of love!

Sontag wrote about the artist as exemplary sufferer, talking of Simone Weil’s “tireless courting of affliction”, and something similar is true of Flaubert, in his own cruel way. To not have known the pure disgust of life the day after the brothel visit, the feeling of wanting to throw yourself from the bridge, Flaubert said, was to miss something of life. “We cannot always live with our noses pointed at the stars.” Sending himself into a loop of despair to make himself dream of love was what allowed Flaubert to write Bovary.

And yet, to read Flaubert’s letters is to feel the strongest sort of human relation on every page. Yes, they are a repository of insights into the production of literature, yes they are full of writing advice, and therefore assigned on reading lists, but more than that, they are full of consciousness. Flaubert would have hated the idea, but his letters are some of his best work, full of the detachment, cynicism, honesty, brutality, observation, and psychological acuity that make Madame Bovary so compelling. Critics sometimes say that Bovary was Flaubert’s only truly great novel. The letters make another masterpiece.

Flaubert’s letters are so fascinating, to be regarded with Sontag’s mixture of “revulsion, pity, and reverence”, because of his constant courting of affliction, because he had so much sorrow for life and himself the day after he slept with the prostitute, but none for Louise, none for the prostitute. Because they show us that to write so movingly and intensely about other people’s lives is sometimes the result of the opposite of empathy.

It was not just Flaubert’s suffering that his art demanded. Someone else was always involved in his “total lack of any human relation.”