Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

8 That he didn’t involve himself in life .

‘You can depict wine, love, women and glory on the condition that you’re not a drunkard, a lover, a husband or a private in the ranks. If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much.’ This isn’t a reply of guilty, it’s a complaint that the charge is wrongly phrased. What do you mean by life? Politics? We’ve dealt with that. The emotional life? Through his family, friends and mistresses, Gustave knew all the stations of the cross. Marriage, you mean perhaps? A curious complaint, though not a new one. Does marriage produce better novels than bachelorhood? Are the philoprogenitive better writers than the childless? I should like to see your statistics.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. Are we confident that our judgment in the matter is better than his? Flaubert was more ‘involved’, to use your term, than many: Henry James by comparison was a nun. Flaubert may have tried to live in an ivory tower –

8 That he tried to live in an ivory tower .

but he failed. ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’

Three points need to be made. One is that the writer chooses – as far as he can – the extent of what you call his involvement in life: despite his reputation, Flaubert occupied a half-and-half position. ‘It isn’t the drunkard who writes the drinking song’: he knew that. On the other hand, it isn’t the teetotaller either. He put it best, perhaps, when he said that the writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

Secondly, when readers complain about the lives of writers – why didn’t he do this; why didn’t he protest to the newspapers about that; why wasn’t he more involved in life? – aren’t they really asking a simpler, and vainer, question: why isn’t he more like us? But if a writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer: it’s as uncomplicated as that.

Thirdly, what is the thrust of the complaint as far as the books are concerned? Presumably the regret that Flaubert wasn’t more involved in life isn’t just a philanthropic wish for him: if only old Gustave had had a wife and kiddies, he wouldn’t have been so glum about the whole shooting-match? If only he’d got caught up in politics, or good works, or become a governor of his old school, he’d have been taken out of himself more? Presumably you think there are faults in the books which could have been remedied by a change in the writer’s life. If so, I think it is up to you to state them. For myself, I cannot think that, for instance, the portrait of provincial manners in Madame Bovary is lacking in some particular aspect which would have been remedied had its author clinked tankards of cider every evening with some gouty Norman bergère .

9 That he was a pessimist .

Ah. I begin to see what you mean. You wish his books were a bit more cheerful, a bit more… how would you put it, life-enhancing? What a curious idea of literature you do have. Is your PhD from Bucharest? I didn’t know one had to defend authors for being pessimists. This is a new one. I decline to do so. Flaubert said: ‘You don’t make art out of good intentions.’ He also said: ‘The public wants works which flatter its illusions.’

10 That he teaches no positive virtues .

Now you are coming out into the open. So this is how we are to judge our writers – on their ‘positive virtues’? Well, I suppose I must play your game briefly: it’s what you have to do in the courts. Take all the obscenity trials from Madame Bovary to Lady Chatterley’s Lover : there’s always some element of games-playing, of compliance, in the defence. Others might call it tactical hypocrisy. (Is this book sexy? No, M’Lud, we hold that it would have an emetic, not a mimetic, effect on any reader. Does this book encourage adultery? No, M’Lud, look how the miserable sinner who gives herself time and time again to riotous pleasure is punished in the end. Does this book attack marriage? No, M’Lud, it portrays a vile and hopeless marriage so that others may learn that only by following Christian instructions will their own marriages be happy. Is this book blasphemous? No, M’Lud, the novelist’s thought is chaste.) As a forensic argument, of course, it has been successful; but I sometimes feel a residual bitterness that one of these defence counsel, when speaking for a true work of literature, did not build his act on simple defiance. (Is this book sexy? M’Lud, we bloody well hope so. Does it encourage adultery and attack marriage? Spot on, M’Lud, that’s exactly what my client is trying to do. Is this book blasphemous? For Christ’s sake, M’Lud, the matter’s as clear as the loincloth on the Crucifixion. Put it this way, M’Lud: my client thinks that most of the values of the society in which he lives stink, and he hopes with this book to promote fornication, masturbation, adultery, the stoning of priests and, since we’ve temporarily got your attention, M’Lud, the suspension of corrupt judges by their earlobes. The defence rests its case.)

So, briefly: Flaubert teaches you to gaze upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe that Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills – literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, scepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. Is that the way you like writers to be described (I do not care for it much myself)? Is it enough? It’s all I’m giving you for the moment: I seem to be embarrassing my client.

11 That he was a sadist .

Rubbish. My client was a soft touch. Cite me a single sadistic, or even unkind, thing he did in his whole life. I’ll tell you the unkindest thing I know about him: he was caught being beastly to a woman at a party for no obvious reason. When asked why, he replied, ‘Because she might want to come into my study.’ That’s the worst thing I know about my client. Unless you count the occasion in Egypt when he tried to go to bed with a prostitute while suffering from the pox. That was a little deceitful, I admit. But he didn’t succeed: the girl, following the normal precautions of her profession, asked to examine him and, when he refused, sent him packing.

He read Sade, of course. What educated French writer doesn’t? I gather he is currently popular among Parisian intellectuals. My client told the Goncourt brothers that Sade was ‘entertaining nonsense’. He kept a few gruesome mementoes around him, it is true; he enjoyed recounting horrors; there are lurid passages in his early work. But you say he had a ‘Sadeian imagination’? I am puzzled. You specify: Salammbô contains scenes of shocking violence. I reply: do you think they didn’t happen? Do you think the Ancient World was all rose petals, lute music, and plump vats of honey sealed with bear fat?

11 a) That there are a lot of animals slaughtered in his books .

He isn’t Walt Disney, no. He was interested in cruelty, I agree. He was interested in everything. As well as Sade, there was Nero. But listen to what he says about them: ‘These monsters explain history for me.’ He is, I must add, all of seventeen at the time. And let me give you another quote: ‘I love the vanquished, but I also love the victors.’ He strives, as I’ve said, to be as much a Chinaman as a Frenchman. There is an earthquake in Leghorn: Flaubert doesn’t cry out in sympathy. He feels as much sympathy for these victims as he does for slaves who died centuries earlier turning some tyrant’s grindstone. You are shocked? It’s called having a historical imagination. It’s called being a citizen, not just of the world, but of all time. It’s what Flaubert described as being ‘brother in God to everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man’. It’s called being a writer.