In a letter dated New Year’s Day 1831, Gustave Flaubert suggested to his friend Ernest Chevalier that they “work together at their writing” of plays to be staged at the Flaubert family’s house in Rouen. Flaubert planned to write about a lady who “always says stupid things.” Although the plays were well-received by small local audiences, Flaubert admitted in a letter dated February of the next year that he would not write the plays he and Chevalier had planned but would instead work on novels on exotic topics — a beautiful Andalusian, a masked ball, a Moorish woman—and on archetypes exemplary of folly — “the impertinent eavesdropper” and “the prudent husband.” This period of Flaubert’s career ended when he was sent to board at the Collège Royal de Rouen. He was then 11 years old.
The youthful letters from Flaubert to Chevalier are the earliest extant epistles from the author’s voluminous correspondence included in Francis Steegmuller’s The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, first published in 1980 and 1982 as two volumes and now, thanks to New York Review of Books, back in print as a single paperback edition. The Letters forms something of a companion to, and significant expansion of, Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, a biography covering Flaubert’s life through the publication of Madame Bovary, first published in 1939 and now republished by NYRB. The double portrait quotes extensively from the letters to cover Flaubert’s life from birth in 1821 through the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, with its primary focus on that novel’s genesis in the 1850s, and thus there is overlap of coverage for those three and a half decades. The Letters, however, covers all of Flaubert’s life, from the first letters to school chum Chevalier through correspondence with Ivan Turgenev and Guy de Maupassant written only days before Flaubert’s death in May, 1880, with explanatory passages and appendices from Steegmuller. While Flaubert is the author of much of the included correspondence, many letters and published writings by Flaubert’s interlocutors — including friend and erstwhile rival Maxime Du Camp, paramour and literary confidante Louise Colet, George Sand, disciples Émile Zola (“You are our teacher and father”) and Guy de Maupassant (who dedicated his first volume of poetry to “the irreproachable master whom I admire above all others”), Victor Hugo, and Ivan Turgenev — are also included. For the reader with moderate curiosity in Flaubert and Madame Bovary, Double Portrait will likely suffice; for the hardcore Flaubertian, the scholar, or the fiction writer driven to better understand literary method and the heritage of modern fiction, Double Portrait is the prelude to the rich, expansive Letters and the prolonged intimacy with Flaubert it provides.
Where nine-year old Flaubert lists premises of intended novels, the seeming hodgepodge reveals his bifurcated imaginative capacities. Romanticism, especially its exotic and orientalist variations set in antiquity, captured his youthful imagination and continued to fascinate him throughout his life. Flaubert’s own favorite works, The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Salammbo, are of this kind. In 1846, Flaubert wrote to Alfred Le Poittevin: “I have seen a picture by Breughel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which made me think of arranging the subject for the theatre.” Instead of a play, Flaubert wrote a novel of gargantuan proportions that, in September 1849, he read aloud to Le Poittevin and Louis Bouilhet in several hours-long sessions totaling 32 hours. Flaubert considered this, his first large-scale writing endeavor, a masterpiece that would surely make his name; his long-suffering friends advised him to “throw it in the fire and never speak of it again.” He did no such thing, continuing, for the next 25 years, to work and rework the manuscript, eventually publishing the third, and shortest, version in 1874. Salammbo, a novel set in Carthage during the 3rd-century BC, grew out of this same fascination. The letters, too, bear out a predilection for the florid, the baroque, the extravagant.
Flaubert’s interest in realism (a term he never applied to himself: “And please note that I execrate what is commonly called ‘realism,’ even though I am regarded as one of its high priests”) came not from his own inclinations, but from a prompting by Louis Bouilhet. Believing in Flaubert’s potential, if not that of his prolix attempts at exotic historical fiction, Bouilhet informed his friend in 1851 of a bit of Norman gossip about a recently deceased officer of health (a medical practitioner with a more limited education and license than a doctor) and his second wife, herself the subject of some scandalous speculation. From this unremarkable, banal event, with considerable assistance and encouragement from friends Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet and sometime lover and frequent correspondent Louise Colet over the next six years, developed Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners. The letters, especially those to Colet, record much of this process and its attendant difficulties.
The first letter mentioning Bovary, though not by name, in September 1851: “… Last night I began my novel. I foresee difficulties of style, and they terrify me. It is no small thing to be simple.” To Colet in July of the next year: “The books I am most eager to write are precisely those for which I am least endowed. […] Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.” And again to Colet in January 1854: “Do you know how many pages I have written this week? One, and I cannot even say a good one.” In his correspondence with Colet, most of which is concurrent with the creation of Madame Bovary, Flaubert seems more interested in recording the progress of the novel, bemoaning the difficulty of writing, and positing philosophies of capital-A Art (“there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; 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”) than meeting with her or professing love, or even affection. “I should like to make of you something entirely apart — neither friend nor mistress,” Flaubert wrote her in September, 1846, shortly after their first tryst. “What I want, in short, is that, like a new kind of hermaphrodite, you give me with your body all the joys of the flesh and with your mind all those of the soul.” The letters included in Steegmuller’s volume suggest that Flaubert used Colet, as the editor/translator himself puts it, as “a repository” and “convenient receptacle” for his thoughts on Bovary and writing in general. Whether Flaubert did so consciously cannot be said, but the affair largely coincides with the composition of Madame Bovary, ending with a curt rebuff (“And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.”) as the novel’s publication date neared.
Where Flaubert saw Colet as a receptacle, another friend acted, in Flaubert’s own description, as his literary “midwife.” Louis Bouilhet became one of Flaubert’s frequent correspondents during his and Maxime Du Camp’s trip to Egypt and Greece from 1849-1851. During his travels, Flaubert wrote to his friend, often of the genital happenings (“As for me, my frightful chancres have closed. The induration is still hard, but it seems to be disappearing”) but also of his burgeoning literary ambitions, which, during that journey, evolve from a September, 1850 vow never to make “‘the presses groan’ with any elucubration of [his] brain” to the audacious “I feel the need of a success,” appended to the end of a letter about the “ideal atmosphere” of Greece and Rome and the art there (“I feel overwhelmed by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment”) from April of the following year. And after Bouilhet, a “gifted and sensitive reader and editor,” gave Flaubert the premise for Madame Bovary, he met his friend and his mother for dinner each Sunday, providing indispensable guidance on composition and revision. The meetings themselves are not preserved except in remarks such as those to Louise Colet in October, 1852: “On Sunday I read to Bouilhet the 27 pages (just about finished) that are the work of two long months. He didn’t dislike them, and that means much, as I was afraid they might be execrable.” Bouilhet provided the same level of support to Flaubert for Salammbo and Sentimental Education. When he died in 1869 at age 48, Flaubert wrote: “For me it is an irreparable loss. What I buried two days ago was my literary conscience, my judgment, my compass — not to count the rest.”
To read Flaubert’s letters, especially those to Colet and Bouilhet, prompts some consideration of authorship, achievement, and credit. It was Flaubert who moved the inked nib across blank pages to create — or, to maintain the midwife metaphor, to conceive and birth — all the works that bear his name. Yet what would these works have been had Flaubert labored in the ursine solitude (“I live alone, like a bear” and “I shall continue to live like a bear, not giving a damn about my country, about critics, or anyone at all” and “I’ve spent two and a half months absolutely alone, like a bear in its cave”) he claimed was his life? Without Du Camp as editor of Revue de Paris, would Madame Bovary have been published? Without Bouilhet to provide the premise of that novel and to act as what would now be called its developmental editor, would there have been a Madame Bovary? Without Du Camp and Bouilhet advising against The Temptation of Saint Anthony, might Flaubert have spent his life on florid exoticism rather than the proto-modernism of Bovary and Sentimental Education? Without an accommodating mother, with whom he lived until her death only a few years before his own, might Flaubert’s literary precocity been thwarted by the career in law he had been expected to make? This is not to diminish Flaubert’s accomplishments, which were stupendous and continue to be so, but only to consider the necessity of fecund community for the sprouting and flowering of individual brilliance.
It is in the letters that the scope of that brilliance’s legacy becomes apparent. The published works enjoyed varying levels of commercial success in their own time — immense enough for Madame Bovary to grant Flaubert entrée into the circles of royalty for a few years in the 1860s, his letters of that period full of embarrassing fawning — but the conception of prose fiction, articulated in letters and executed in the novels, continues to inform standards of good realist writing and conceptions of the author. “An Author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere,” he wrote to Colet in December 1852. “What one does is not for oneself, but for others. Art is not interested in the personality of the artist. So much the worse for him if he doesn’t like red or green or yellow: all colors are beautiful, and his task is to use them … An author is not at all free to write this or that. He does not choose his subject.” As for subject, “there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects.” The unifying power of style, the equal treatment of subjects regardless of moral standards, the impersonal author at a remove from his own work — all such ideas strongly influenced the modernists of the early 20th-century and constitute the central principles of what is now classified as literary fiction. Curiously, though, many of Flaubert’s letters, even those containing pithy pronouncements on the need for “clear, sharp sentences” that “stand erect, erect while running,” are written in the sumptuous, excessive style he loved best, long and filled with colorful comparisons (“The sky is dirty gray, like a chamber-pot long uncleaned, and even more stupid-looking than ugly”), sometimes to such a surfeit as to bother Flaubert and his correspondents alike (“I am devoured by comparisons as one by lice”).
And all this hardly begins to do justice to the treasures within The Letters of Gustave Flaubert. It offers insight into the man’s personal life and work habits as well as his times. Many of the Madame Bovary period’s letters constitute the bulk of Steegmuller’s earlier Flaubert and Madame Bovary, making the latter the better choice for an overview of about the first 40 years of the man’s life with a focus on the 1850s. The Letters, though, gives the same attention to the two dozen and odd years after Bovary as well as a more complete record of the first four decades, a completeness that may be excessive for the casual reader except as a reference, but welcome to the devotee for its very vastness stretching on for nearly 700 pages. The collection will prove of especial value to the writer, who may take consolation from Flaubert’s frequent self-doubts and progress always slower than he wishes, and inspiration from the transmutation of inconsequential scraps into literature: a bit of asinine local gossip into Madame Bovary; a vague notion about a modern Parisian novel into Sentimental Education; a long-running fascinated frustration with people who “[say] stupid things” into Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary of Received Ideas.
As with a study of any artist, that evasive and unclassifiable species of human, the more one knows about his comings and goings, the more clear his contradictions (Romantic and realist, bourgeois man and individualist, acerbic critic of social custom and flatterer of high society), the more opaque his underlying motives. If instead of conclusions, though, sustenance for intellectual and artistic life are sought, Flaubert’s letters will never fail to nourish with a beautiful image or well-balanced phrase, especially if on the topic of art itself. “Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.”
[Published by New York Review Books on September 26, 2023, 720 pages, $24.95 US paperback]