Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

At twenty-nine, inspired by Humboldt, he wants to go off and live in South America, among the savannahs, and never be heard of again.

At thirty he muses – as he did throughout his life – on his own previous incarnations, on his apocryphal or metempsychotic lives in the more interesting times of Louis XIV, Nero and Pericles. Of one preincarnation he is certain: he was, at some point during the Roman Empire, the director of a troupe of travelling comedians, the sort of plausible rogue who bought women in Sicily and turned them into actresses, a rowdy mixture of teacher, pimp and artist. (Reading Plautus has reminded Gustave of this previous life: it gives him le frisson historique .) Here we should also note Gustave’s apocryphal ancestry: he liked to claim that he had Red Indian blood in his veins. This seems to have been not quite the case; though one of his ancestors did emigrate to Canada in the seventeenth century and become a beaver-trapper.

Still thirty, he projects a seemingly more probable life, but one which proves equally to be a not-life. He and Bouilhet play at imagining themselves old men, patients in some hospice for incurables: ancients who sweep the streets and babble to one another of that happy time when they were both thirty and walked all the way to La Roche-Guyon. The mocked senility was never attained: Bouilhet died at forty-eight, Flaubert at fifty-eight.

At thirty-one, he remarks to Louise – a parenthesis to a hypothesis – that if he had ever had a son, he would have taken great pleasure in procuring women for him.

Also at thirty-one, he reports a brief, untypical lapse to Louise: the desire to chuck in literature. He will come and live with her, inside her, his head between her breasts; he is fed up, he says, with masturbating that head of his to make the phrases spurt. But this fantasy is also a chilling tease: it’s recounted in the past tense, as something which Gustave, in a moment of weakness, fleetingly imagined himself doing. He would always rather have his head between his own hands than between Louise’s breasts.

At thirty-two, he confesses to Louise the manner in which he has spent many hours of his life: imagining what he would do if he had an income of a million francs a year. In such dreams servants would ease him into shoes studded with diamonds; he would cock an ear to the whinny of his coach-horses, whose splendour would make England die of jealousy; he would give oyster banquets, and have his dining-room surrounded by espaliers of flowering jasmine, out of which bright finches would swoop. But this, at a million a year, was a cheap dream. Du Camp reports Gustave’s plans for ‘A Winter in Paris’ – an extravaganza incorporating the luxury of the Roman Empire, the refinement of the Renaissance, and the faerie of the Thousand and One Nights. The Winter had been seriously costed, and it came out at twelve thousand million francs ‘at the most’. Du Camp also adds, more generally, that ‘when these dreams took possession of him, he became almost rigid, and reminded one of an opium-eater in a state of trance. He seemed to have his head in the clouds, to be living in a dream of gold. This habit was one reason why he found steady work difficult.’

At thirty-five, he reveals ‘my private dream’: to buy a little palazzo on the Grand Canal. A few months later, a kiosk on the Bosphorus is added to the real estate in his head. A few months more, and he is ready to leave for the East, to stay there, to die there. The painter Camille Rogier, who lives in Beirut, has invited him. He could go; just like that. He could; he doesn’t.

At thirty-five, however, the apocryphal life, the not-life, begins to die away. The reason is clear: the real life has really begun. Gustave was thirty-five when Madame Bovary came out in book form. The fantasies are no longer needed; or rather, different, particular, practical fantasies are now required. For the world, he will play the Hermit of Croisset; for his friends in Paris, he will play the Idiot of the Salons; for George Sand he will play the Reverend Father Cruchard, a fashionable Jesuit who enjoys hearing the confessions of society women; for his intimate circle he will play Saint Polycarpe, that obscure Bishop of Smyrna, martyred in the nick of time at the age of ninety-five, who pre-echoed Flaubert by stopping up his ears and crying out, ‘Oh Lord! Into what an age you have caused me to be born!’ But these identities are no longer lurid alibis towards which he might credibly escape; they are playthings, alternative lives issued under licence by the celebrated author. He does not run off to become a bandit in Smyrna; instead, he summons the useful Bishop of Smyrna to live within his skin. He has proved not a tamer of wild beasts, but a tamer of wild lives. Pacification of the apocryphal is complete: writing can begin.

What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love’s favourite perversion?

For some, this curiosity operates as baleful fantasy. I had a patient once, a respectable nine-to-fiver otherwise untouched by imagination, who confessed that while making love to his wife he liked to picture her spread blissfully beneath mountainous hidalgos, sleek lascars, rummaging dwarfs. Shock me, the fantasy urges, appal me. For others, the search is real. I have known couples to take pride in one another’s tawdry behaviour: each pursuing the other’s folly, the other’s vanity, the other’s weakness. What were they really after? Something, evidently, which lay beyond what they appeared to seek. Perhaps some final confirmation that mankind itself was ineradicably corrupt, that life was indeed just a gaudy nightmare in the head of an imbecile?

I loved Ellen, and I wanted to know the worst. I never provoked her; I was cautious and defensive, as is my habit; I didn’t even ask questions; but I wanted to know the worst. Ellen never returned this caress. She was fond of me – she would automatically agree, as if the matter weren’t worth discussing, that she loved me – but she unquestioningly believed the best about me. That’s the difference. She didn’t ever search for that sliding panel which opens the secret chamber of the heart, the chamber where memory and corpses are kept. Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love, I maintain.

It’s similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar. If you quite enjoy a writer’s work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don’t mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow. They say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school of carp? Oh no, I’m sure he didn’t: sound fellow, good chap. But if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him – despite edicts to the contrary – then it’s impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did he have their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he ascended the scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah? And that he bequeathed his carp pond to the local Boy Scouts?

But here’s the difference. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst – be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark – you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? With a writer you love, the instinct is to defend. This is what I meant earlier: perhaps love for a writer is the purest, the steadiest form of love. And so your defence comes the more easily. The fact of the matter is, carp are an endangered species, and everyone knows that the only diet they will accept if the winter has been especially harsh and the spring turns wet before St Oursin’s Day is that of young minced Wolf Cub. Of course he knew he would hang for the offence, but he also knew that humanity is not an endangered species, and reckoned therefore that twenty-seven (did you say twenty-eight?) Wolf Cubs plus one middle-ranking author (he was always ridiculously modest about his talents) were a trivial price to pay for the survival of an entire breed of fish. Take the long view: did we need so many Wolf Cubs? They would only have grown up and become Boy Scouts. And if you’re still mired in sentimentality, look at it this way: the admission fees so far received from visitors to the carp pond have already enabled the Boy Scouts to build and maintain several church halls in the area.