Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

2003

November. ‘When the trees have shed their leaves, when the sky still keeps in twilight the russet tint that gilds the faded grass, it is sweet to see extinguishing itself all that not long ago still burned in you.’

Autumn. And it is with a man’s recall of that season of life that there begins the most beautiful, unsparing, shaming and unashamed, emotionally and morally pitiless evocation of its antithesis, the season of fires ignited. Flaubert’s novella is an unsurpassed testament of adolescence.

Gustave Flaubert was barely twenty years old when he completed it in 1842. He was the one burning. ‘The puberty of the heart precedes that of the body.’ As a schoolboy aged fifteen he fell worshipfully in love with somebody’s wife. On his first travels beyond Rouen, where he was born, and still a virgin at eighteen despite tortuous sexual desires, he was made love to by the daughter of the proprietor of the hotel where he lodged in Marseille. He did not forget either conquest the women made of him, soul or body; they were transposed into one, the woman Marie, in this book.

This I learn from reading the many biographies of the author. Flaubert, more than any other fiction writer I can cite, including Marcel Proust, has been subjected to the process of taking the writer’s creation as a kind of documentary basis for what is more interesting to explore: his/her life. It’s not what you write, it’s who you are. This guesswork on the processes of the imagination is surely a denigration, if scholarly unconscious, of literature: the act of creation itself. Fiction cannot be ‘explained’ by autobiography; it remains, like the composition of music, a profound mystery while a source of human understanding only the arts can offer.

I give the hotel-keeper’s daughter simply as an example of the still fashionable literary methodology — not outdated along with the psychological novel but somehow reinforced by post-modern theory that anything pertinent to the author, even childhood snaps reproduced in the text, belongs in his/her fiction. I don’t care, and frankly, I think Flaubert’s reader won’t care whether or not the transporting experience of this book is really that of the author’s young life. All that counts is that it is a work of genius written by a twenty-year-old. Genius: as always on that extremely rare level of mind and spirit, the exploration of human motivation, action and feeling remains relevant, becomes again and again astonishingly contemporary in generations long after that within which it was conceived.

The years on which the narrator looks back from his November were the reign of King Louis Philippe, 1830–1848, years of post-Napoleonic disillusion, when revolutionary change as an agent to bring about justice, end privilege and corruption, create values to replace those shabbily glittering, seemed impossible. There was nothing to believe in, secular or religious, that was not a sham in relation to deep needs. Nothing to aspire to beyond materialism; and if resigned to this, no youth had the chance of access without sponsorship in high places. There are many countries in our twenty-first century where young people today experience the same frustration, malaise, updating the nineteenth-century escape to absinthe and opium by whatever alcoholic concoction at hand, and shooting up heroin.

Flaubert’s reluctant law student, from a provincial bourgeois family with unrealised Voltairean ideas, has no name as narrator, drawing one without intermediary breath-to-breath into his life. He dispenses with his study assignments summarily in favour of poetry, unlikely ambitions in the arts, and fantasies: ‘I would go as far as I could into my thought, revolve it in all its aspects, penetrate to its farthest depths … I built myself palaces and dwelt in them as an emperor, plundered the mines of all their diamonds and strewed them in bucketsful over the road I was to traverse.’

The awakening of the imagination comes through the evocative power of words, and so does the sexual awakening. ‘ Woman, mistress especially … bowled me over … the magic of the name alone’ threw the adolescent ‘into long ecstasies’. This is the genesis of an erotic narrative, an achievement that has nothing to do with pornography and everything to do with acknowledgement of the sexual drive in symbiosis with the spirit and intellect.

The ‘mystery of woman’ obsesses him in the streets with small details enchantingly described, from which he creates for himself the whole woman, tries to attach to each passing foot ‘a body, a body to an idea, all these movements to their purposes, and I asked myself where all these steps were going’. Out of unsatisfied desires comes the revenge of rejection of what’s denied. He’s taken pleasure in watching prostitutes and seeing rich beauties in their carriages. This turns to savage disgust for them all, and extends to both levels of society they represent. The rebel without a cause, an empty heart, wants to lose himself in crowds. ‘What is this restless pain, that one is proud of … and that one hides like a love?’ (We’d diagnose depression, today.) His desperate plunges into commune with nature are no consolation; forces as erotic as sexual fantasies are what he enjoys there, only reinforcing his sexual frustration.

‘Nothing but a great love could have extricated me.’

Unable to act, suffocated by youthful arrogance and fantasy — the young man not only has not realised the love, sexual and ideal, he places at the centre of being; he still looks for the sign that will beckon him to it. Seeking distraction, he responds to a sign that would seem to have no relation to this depth of need; he accepts the invitation in the eyes of a prostitute. If he has no name of his own he cares to give the reader, she has called herself Marie. Relieved of his virginity with a voluptuousness beyond the conceptions of his fantasies, he goes home with self-repulsion and returns with renewed desire. What would be described too inadequately as an affair, begins. She is older than him, in every way, years and breadth of experiences; a beauty in whom we recognise some of the characteristics of the unapproachable women he has idealised. The complexity of what we glibly term sexual satisfaction is conveyed subtly, marvellously, as something that truly can be read . Hyperbole has to be revaluated, in this prose. The professionally uncalled-for passion that has come about between her and this young initiate bonds the paradox of the situation into a communion of melancholy and sensuality. Love?

He has not known love. She has been used by many men but not known love; both despair of ever knowing it yet while doubting its existence within the morals and mores of their time, continue tortuously to seek it. From her, the woman who belongs to every man, he hears ‘the first words of love I had heard in my life’. With her body lying upon him, in exquisitely described awareness of her physicality he is led to receive her in her whole being, not a means, a substitute for the unattainable. ‘Contemplating this woman so sad in pleasure … I divined a thousand terrible passions that must have riven her … to judge from the traces left, and then I thought I would enjoy hearing her tell her life, since what I sought in human existence was its vibrant pulsating side.’ He begs her for her story. Marie is aware that a prostitute’s life outside the bed is not a story clients want to be reminded of. But as often throughout this book the flow of intimacy, irony, contemplation and self-scrutiny is suddenly stoppered: there’s a curt statement that switches your mind to a new possibility of revelation.

‘To you I can.’

And in her four words there’s unspoken nuance on the strange nature of their closeness. Why ‘to him’?