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Narrated by John Lee
Geoffrey WallUnabridged — 15 hours, 12 minutes
Narrated by John Lee
Geoffrey WallUnabridged — 15 hours, 12 minutes
A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor's voice, Gustave Flaubert was perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century. He lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his novels at the rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall's stylish and compelling new biography weaves together Flaubert's provincial life with his escapes to Paris, where he participated in all the important literary and social milieus, and his passionate travels put him in company with courtesans, actresses, acrobats, gypsies, and simpletons of every stripe. Wall is especially good at showing how Flaubert's outwardly calm, inwardly turbulent life inspired the complex settings and unforgettable characters of his imperishable novels.
Geoffrey Wall, a British english professor and Flaubert translator, presents a look at the author of Madame Bovary that will amaze and edify. How did the many contradictions that made up Flaubert's personality play out in his works? Wall has done new and exciting research for this biography, making it an indispensable resource for any Flaubert fan.
This exemplary biography of French novelist Gustave Flaubert is almost impossible to put down. Wall seems infatuated with his subject, and he gives us the man entire, discussing Flaubert's scatological fascinations as well as his literary ambitions. We learn of the Frenchman's love life and his love/hate attachment to his widowed mother. Wall lays out, in vivid detail, the genesis for Madame Bovary, the writing of which entirely consumed its author. He paints a compelling portrait of nineteenth-century France—its various intrigues, its rural and salon life. A brilliant critic, Wall is careful in examining the themes of Flaubert's fiction. He is even better at telling Flaubert's own story, which, like this book, is remarkable.
—Paul Evans
The great French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) has a reputation as an ivory-towered, art-for-art's-sake writer, but there was another Flaubert, one Wall inclines toward in this briskly readable and welcome new biography. This Flaubert visible in his letters to his friend and publisher Maxime Du Camp, his difficult lover Louise Colet and his peer (and rival) George Sand was mercurial, passionate, vivacious, even Rabelaisian. Wall (who translated Madame Bovary and other works for Penguin Classics), like Flaubert himself, downplays the Realist writer for the Romantic who appreciated Victor Hugo (and de Sade). At the outset of his career, Flaubert was enjoying himself in Paris, neglecting his legal studies and writing his first novel, which would become A Sentimental Education. His first nervous attack, which occurred while visiting his family in provincial Rouen and which Wall diagnoses as epilepsy, not only cut off Flaubert's legal career and curtailed his love of travel, but it partly accounted for his sedentary reclusiveness. Though Flaubert quarantined himself for years at his family home to write, Wall gives full attention to the enterprising episodes in which the writer broke free of his self-imposed routine: his extensive travels in Egypt and his later socializing in Paris's Second Empire salons. While the novelist famously detested the bourgeoisie, politics and modernity, Wall argues that his father's eminently bourgeois success as a doctor shadowed his younger son's work habits and even his aesthetic, and that the events of the Revolution in 1848 and the Commune were barely checked on the margins of Flaubert's life and art. Wall's first book, this was short-listed for England's prestigious Whitbread Award last year. 16 pages of b&w illus. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Why do we need a new biography of Flaubert? The two great standard Flaubert biographies those by Henri Troyat and Herbert Lottman have elegantly and exhaustively mined the details of Flaubert's life and work. Yet Wall's lively chronicle of the writer who gave us the greatest 19th-century French novel, Madame Bovary, provides enough new insight to make us turn once again to Flaubert's life. Using letters, journal entries, and various drafts of Flaubert's fiction, Wall offers an engaging narration of Flaubert's development as a writer. After taking a stab at law, Flaubert cast his fate upon the winds of authorship, struggling mightily in his youth to discover his voice and a writing style that would reflect his belief in the artist's spiritual vocation. Wall narrates the often miserable fits and starts that culminate in Flaubert's masterpiece and splendidly re-creates Flaubert's fiery relationship with Louise Colet, his dependence on George Sand, and his friendships with Turgenev, the Goncourts, and de Maupassant. In a biography that is more psychological and cultural than critical, Wall deftly portrays the life of an artist who was continually "pestered, isolated, tormented, and bewildered" by his visions and whose fate prompts our "pity, fear, and laughter." Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/02; see p. 107 for an interview with Wall. Ed.] Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Designed more for the popular than the scholarly reader, this biography of the great author focuses on the details of his personal life, drawing closely on primary sources, especially letters. Wall (English, U. of York), despite an awfully jaunty style, gets under Flaubert's skin to give the reader an intimate view of his life, worries, illnesses, travels, professional friends, and private life. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The French master receives serviceable though not sterling biographical treatment from a translator of Flaubert's works for Penguin Classics. Everything about Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) was outsized: roaring voice, whoring, debts, and, most important, literary ambitions. The latter were nourished secretly while he was an indifferent law student (a period likely ended by an epileptic attack), then brought to fruition in a small but painstakingly written corpus of four novels, three short stories, and an abortive attempt at a play. The son and brother of surgeons, he used his pen like a scalpel to anatomize the stultifying provincial bourgeoisie in his masterpiece, Madame Bovary. (Ironically, he avoided Parisian mistress Louise Colet by pleading the need to stay in the provinces to care for his widowed mother and orphaned niece, admitting that he was temperamentally incapable of committing to anything but intellectual freedom.) While not as spectacularly self-destructive as other writers, Flaubert offers a dazzling prospect for a literary biographer: complex, divided personality; battles against epilepsy and syphilis, censorship, penury, and self-doubt; and a vast archive of Waspish, self-pitying, often erotic letters. Wall (Univ. of York) doesn't drop his opportunity, but he doesn't exploit its grand possibilities. To his credit, the biographer sometimes offers piercing insights into Flaubert's methods and themes, noting, for instance, that Madame Bovary represented a "dynamic form of self-multiplication" in which the author's personality permeated all of his characters. But he does not deal as trenchantly as Herbert Lottman's Flaubert (1989) with the novelist's friendships with Turgenev,Maupassant, George Sand, boon-companion Louis Bouilhet, and editor Maxime du Camp. Moreover, Wall could have taken a cue from Flaubert's restrained style to prune his own melodramatic excess (the affair with Colet was "an ideally imaginative, superstitious, ceremonious, frustrated love"). Like so much of its subject's work, a chronicle of the progression from youthful romanticism to middle-aged disillusionment, but narrated without Flaubert's style and bent for psychological realism. (30 b&w illustrations)
| BN ID: | 2940169517194 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2009 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
CHAPTER ONE
The Family Name
Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, doctor of medicine and father of Gustave Flaubert, was a man whose whole life could be read as an illustration of the bourgeois virtues. Born in 1784, he survived the heroic high-mortality decades of Revolution and Empire by cultivating a modest public rectitude. He worked hard and won prizes, and soon accumulated a large fortune in the pursuit of his profession. Achille-Cléophas Flaubert became one of the princes of the new realm of scientific medicine. It would surely have dismayed the good doctor if anyone had ventured to tell him that he would be remembered principally as the father of a boy whose only obvious talents were for writing odd, disreputable novels, spending other people's money, and generally satirising the bourgeois virtues.
Being Gustave, the younger son of such an eminent and irreproachably successful man, was a complicated destiny. Gustave was given wealth and comfort and a certain social importance, but he was expected, in return, to live a life that would add lustre to the family name. Prolonged exposure to moralising tales of his father's exemplary youth, even when they were recited in a gentle, well-meaning tone, may have had an unexpectedly dismal effect on the young listener's mind.
On the evidence of the journal that he kept when he was eighteen, Flaubert loved his father passionately, even in adolescence. And yet all the awkward old Oedipal questions arise from the shadows. How can a boy challenge such a perplexingly powerful figure? How is it possible not to turn into that father? What do you have to do to become Gustave Flaubert? Disheartening questions. No wonder that Flaubert liked to boast of the Iroquois Indian blood that supposedly flowed in his veins, courtesy of an audacious seventeenth-century ancestor. No wonder that fathers are swept aside so effortlessly in Flaubert's writings. They generally die before the story begins, or else they are despatched to an obscure grave.
Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues, that wonderfully dubious compendium of nineteenth-century attitudes, has the following entry under the topic of 'Father': 'You say "My late father . . . " as you take off your hat.' If only the gesture had such power to seal up the chambers of memory. Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the real father, was not quite so easy to lay to rest. This tender, troublesome, disobligingly dead character must be summoned back to life if we are to understand the time and the place and the family from which Gustave Flaubert sprang forth with the great raucous wounded howl of laughter, wonder and fear that echoes all through his earliest writings. Where did Flaubert begin? How did he find his way, under such a prodigious hereditary burden, to the marvellous places of his imagination? And how did he find his way back again from that remote and bewildering country, back to the indisputably prosaic world of a nineteenth-century provincial city in which he was referred to, if at all, as cet original de Monsieur Flaubert.
The story of Achille-Cléophas is a lumpy mixture of biographical fact and family legend. I shall tell it now, to draw you into the bizarre, heroic world of early nineteenth-century medicine in which the son first came to consciousness. Religion and Science, to be conceived in the person of a priest and a doctor, are the superbly opposed heroes of this tale. Unintimidated by these thunderingly quarrelsome characters, the son will eventually find his way, after great tribulation, towards Literature.
Even as a child Achille-Cléophas Flaubert was possessed by a fiercely competitive spirit. Whether he was playing with the other boys down by the river, or learning his letters from an indolent priest, Achille-Cléophas simply excelled. The modest country town of Nogent-sur-Seine, where his father doctored the cows and the horses, was far too small an arena for energy and talent such as his. Everyone agreed that Achille-Cléophas was a boy who might go far. Those of a more critical disposition, such as his two elder brothers, might well have added, under their breath, that such damned superiority would be sure to end miserably.
Trouble came upon this modest, respectable family in January 1793, when Achille-Cléophas was nine years old. Nicolas Flaubert, his father, was arrested in a local inn. He had been observed weeping as he read in his newspaper that the foul tyrant Louis Capet, formerly known as Louis XVI, had recently been beheaded using the scientific 'instrument of separation' devised by Dr Joseph Guillotin. These were anxious days. England had just declared war on France in response to the execution of the King. The authorities of the besieged infant republic had imposed a ferocious revolutionary vigilance. The political opinions of vociferous royalists like Nicolas Flaubert could no longer be ignored. Here was an educated man with a significant local influence. He had to be silenced.
The Société populaire de Nogent-sur-Seine, the local republican committee, voted to send Citizen Flaubert to face the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. He would probably be sentenced to death or deportation. But Nicolas Flaubert was rescued by the intervention of his youngest son, Achille-Cléophas. Tutored by his mother, the nine-year-old boy delivered a speech which swayed the hearts of the Société populaire. We may pause to imagine this scene. It has all the ingredients of a genre painting in the elevated political-sentimental style of the 1790s. The pure-hearted and precocious eloquence of the child prevails upon the moral sympathies of his father's accusers. Rescuing his father from death was undoubtedly the formative experience of Achille-Cléophas's childhood, and it duly became a cherished family legend. As an image of the dark days of the Revolution, as a story passed down from father to son, it offered a sharply memorable lesson in the perils of political enthusiasm.
However, there was worse to come. Citizen Nicolas Flaubert, so evidently unreliable, so lacking in public virtue, was arrested once again in February 1794 and carted to Paris to receive sentence. This was not the moment to step forward as an enemy of the people. The country was at war. Political hatred was in full flood. La patrie, the fatherland itself, was in danger. Patriots were stripping the lead from the roofs of churches and melting it down to make bullets to fire at invading Prussians. Nicolas Flaubert was duly sentenced to death. His wife came to Paris to plead for his life, equipped with 'certificates' from influential persons in Troyes and Nogent. The sentence was commuted to deportation, a kind of civic death, with a good chance of actual death from hardship and tropical diseases.
Nicolas Flaubert now languished in prison. He was one of 8500 political prisoners being held during that fearful summer of 1794. The guilty were now so numerous that they had to be herded into dungeons improvised in convents, hospitals and barracks. The prison regime was harsh: no visitors, no letters, no newspapers, one clean shirt a week and daily roll-call of those listed for the guillotine. Young men awoke to find their hair turning grey. In mortal terror, many committed suicide; but Nicolas Flaubert was one of the fortunate survivors. He walked from prison in the month of Thermidor, August 1794, saved by the fact that Robespierre and his faction had been ousted from power, thus bringing the most radical phase of the revolution to its close.
Nicolas Flaubert, like a man rising from the grave, made his way back to the village of Nogent and set about planning his family's future. He resolved to send his youngest son, Achille-Cléophas, to the best school that he could afford. It was a shrewd investment. All the exclusive old careers were opening up. Though there was little to spare, the family saved up what they could and in the autumn of the year 1794, a little before his tenth birthday, this promising child was accordingly transported the thirty-odd miles from the scene of his boyhood to the neighbouring town of Sens. A slow and fatiguing day's journey, it pitched the boy into the dangerous, quickening flow of national life. His brilliant career was about to begin.
Achille-Cléophas was educated, for the next eight years, as pensionnaire, a boarding pupil, at the Collège de Sens. Sens was an ancient cathedral town standing on the river Yonne. Seven centuries of archbishops and cardinals had built their palaces and town houses around the main square. The results were monumental, opulent, and exquisitely ecclesiastical.
For all its tranquil historic dignity, Sens was not cut off from the larger world. The old road from Paris to the south passed through the town. Travellers came to the coaching inns on the square, bringing the news from the great cities of Dijon, Lyon, and Geneva. In the summer of 1792 the boisterous ragged army of the Revolution, the fédérés, had marched through Sens on their way from Marseille to Paris, raising a giant cloud of dust and singing the fiery new anthem of the republic, the 'Marseillaise'. In 1793, at the height of the revolutionary campaign to de-Christianise everyday life, the town's ancient cathedral of Saint Stephen had been stripped of the great company of stone saints that had adorned its west front ever since the twelfth century. Only Saint Stephen himself, holding the book of the law in his hand, had escaped the hammer.
Image-breaking was an unmistakable sign of the times. Militant anti-clericalism was in the ascendant. When he arrived in Sens the youthful Achille-Cléophas could see the great fact of the Revolution written all over the cathedral. The young priests from the local seminary had prudently fled the wrath of the infant French Republic and a godless new college was now officially housed in their abandoned residence. Here, in a handsome old building set into the medieval city walls, embedded in the old, but instructed in the new, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert observed the slightly quieter closing years of the eighteenth century.
Already we may discern the larger historical pattern of his life. The ardent young men of science pursued their enlightened trade in premises recently vacated by the somnolent old men of faith. The principal scenes of Dr Flaubert's life would all be set in buildings that had once been church property. Priests could be expropriated and ridiculed. Catholic rituals could be abolished by decree. But the ancient poetry of religion could scarcely be erased from the national mind for ever, even by the most stern and conscientious efforts. It was exasperating for the rationalist. Something archaic and inexplicable, some little superstition from the past always survived. So it is no surprise that the baffling, seductive, ridiculous, stubborn experience of the sacred was to be one of Gustave Flaubert's major themes.
*Endnotes have been omitted.
Copyright (c) 2002 Geoffrey Wall
