Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

I thought this was quite neatly put, indeed rather amusing. The only trouble is, there’s no such thing as a ‘first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary’ . The novel, as I should have thought was tolerably well known, first appeared serially in the Revue de Paris ; then came the prosecution for obscenity; and only after the acquittal was the work published in book form. I expect the young novelist (it seems unfair to give his name) was thinking of the ‘first, suppressed edition’ of Les Fleurs du mal . No doubt he’ll get it right in time for his second edition; if there is one.

Eyes of brown, eyes of blue. Does it matter? Not, does it matter if the writer contradicts himself; but, does it matter what colour they are anyway? I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes: there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler. How can you escape all this without some haversack of a parenthesis about the lady’s character? Her eyes are mud-coloured; her eyes changed hue according to the contact lenses she wore; he never looked her in the eye. Well, take your pick. My wife’s eyes were greeny-blue, which makes her story a long one. And so I suspect that in the writer’s moments of private candour, he probably admits the pointlessness of describing eyes. He slowly imagines the character, moulds her into shape, and then – probably the last thing of all – pops a pair of glass eyes into those empty sockets. Eyes? Oh yes, she’d better have eyes, he reflects, with a weary courtesy.

Bouvard and Pécuchet, during their investigations into literature, find that they lose respect for an author when he strays into error. I am more surprised by how few mistakes writers make. So the Bishop of Liège dies fifteen years before he should: does this invalidate Quentin Durward? It’s a trivial offence, something tossed to the reviewers. I see the novelist at the stern rail of a cross-Channel ferry, throwing bits of gristle from his sandwich to the hovering gulls.

I was too far away to observe what colour Enid Starkie’s eyes were; all I remember of her is that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious French accent. But I’ll tell you another thing. The Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, who was ‘well known for her studies of the lives and works of writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gautier, Eliot and Gide’ (I quote her dust-wrapper; first edition, of course), who devoted two large books and many years of her life to the author of Madame Bovary , chose as frontispiece to her first volume a portrait of ‘Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter’. It’s the first thing we see; it is, if you like, the moment at which Dr Starkie introduces us to Flaubert. The only trouble is, it isn’t him. It’s a portrait of Louis Bouilhet, as everyone from the gardienne of Croisset onwards and upwards will tell you. So what do we make of that once we’ve stopped chuckling?

Perhaps you still think I’m merely being vengeful towards a dead scholar who can’t answer for herself. Well, maybe I am. But then, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And I’ll tell you something else. I’ve just reread Madame Bovary .

On one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15); and on another blue eyes (16).

And the moral of it all, I suppose, is: Never take fright at a footnote. Here are the six references Flaubert makes to Emma Bovary’s eyes in the course of the book. It is clearly a subject of some importance to the novelist:

1 (Emma’s first appearance) ‘In so far as she was beautiful, this beauty lay in her eyes: although they were brown, they would appear black because of her lashes…’

2 (Described by her adoring husband early in their marriage) ‘Her eyes seemed bigger to him, especially when she was just waking up and fluttered her lids several times in succession; they were black when she was in shadow and dark blue in full daylight; and they seemed to contain layer upon layer of colours, which were thicker in hue deep down, and became lighter towards the enamel-like surface.’

3 (At a candlelit ball) ‘Her black eyes appeared even blacker.’

4 (On first meeting Léon) ‘Fixing him with her large, wide-open black eyes’.

5 (Indoors, as she appears to Rodolphe when he first examines her) ‘Her black eyes’.

6 (Emma looking in a mirror, indoors, in the evening; she has just been seduced by Rodolphe) ‘Her eyes had never been so large, so black, nor contained such depth.’

How did the critic put it? ‘Flaubert does not build up characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that…’ It would be interesting to compare the time spent by Flaubert making sure that his heroine had the rare and difficult eyes of a tragic adulteress with the time spent by Dr Starkie in carelessly selling him short.

And one final thing, just to make absolutely sure. Our earliest substantial source of knowledge about Flaubert is Maxime du Camp’s Souvenirs littéraires (Hachette, Paris, 1882–3, 2 vols): gossipy, vain, self-justifying and unreliable, yet historically essential. On page 306 of the first volume (Remington… Co., London, 1893, no translator credited) Du Camp describes in great detail the woman on whom Emma Bovary was based. She was, he tells us, the second wife of a medical officer from Bon-Lecours, near Rouen:

This second wife was not beautiful; she was small, had dull yellow hair, and a face covered with freckles. She was full of pretension, and despised her husband, whom she considered a fool. Round and fair in person, her small bones were well-covered, and in her carriage and her general bearing there were flexible, undulating movements, like those of an eel. Her voice, vulgarised by its Lower Normandy accent, was full of caressing tones, and her eyes, of uncertain colour, green, grey, or blue, according to the light, had a pleading expression, which never left them.

Dr Starkie appears to have been serenely unaware of this enlightening passage. All in all, it seems a magisterial negligence towards a writer who must, one way and another, have paid a lot of her gas bills. Quite simply, it makes me furious. Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage.

Listen. Rattarattarattaratta . And then – shhh – over there. Fattafattafattafatta . And again. Rattarattarattaratta – fattafattafattafatta . A soft November swell has set the tables rattling metallically at one another across the bar. An insistent approach from a table close at hand; a pause while some unheard throb shifts across the boat; and then a softer reply from the other side. Call and response, call and response; like a pair of mechanical birds in a cage. Listen to the pattern: rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta . Continuity, stability, mutual reliance, it says; yet a change of wind or tide could end it all.

The curving windows at the stern are freckled with spray; through one of them you can make out a set of fat capstans and a listless macaroni of sodden rope. The seagulls have long since given up on this ferry. They cawed us out of Newhaven, had a look at the weather, noted the lack of sandwich packs on the rear promenade, and turned back. Who can blame them? They could have followed us the four hours to Dieppe in the hope of picking up trade on the way back; but that makes for a ten-hour day. By now they will be digging worms on some damp football pitch in Rottingdean.