The Book of Lost Books (34 page)

Herman Melville

{1819–1891}

THERE ARE A great many novels that remain unwritten: the spark of inspiration might fail to kindle, the work might warp in being molded, the nib might be split by mortality.
Agatha,
however, is unique, in that two men of genius failed to write it. The original idea that the life story of Mrs. Agatha Robertson, née Hatch, was worthy of some novelistic transfiguration belongs to an elderly lawyer from New Bedford whom Herman Melville met in Nantucket, in July 1852.

The story of Agatha Hatch (“but you must give her some other name,” Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne) has a moment of high drama, many years of patient, though ferociously painful, suffering, and a denouement of sorts. Setting aside chronology momentarily, the catalyst that unveils the whole story is a Mr. Janney of Missouri, who had become the executor of his mother-in-law's second husband's $20,000 estate. He tried to locate the descendants of Mr. James Robertson, and discovered in the process that his real name was Mr. Shinn. However, these assiduous researches bore less fruit than the unexpected arrival of a letter addressed to the deceased. It was from a woman called Rebecca Gifford of Falmouth, Massachusetts, and it called him “Father.”

Cut back twenty years. Shipwrecked by a sudden tempest, James Robertson is washed up on the shore at Pembroke, Massachusetts, and is nursed back to health by a local girl, Agatha Hatch. The confluence of care, relief, and a brush with death slowly evolves into something like love, and Agatha and James are duly married. He undertakes two further sea voyages, and together they have a daughter, Rebecca. Robertson leaves again in search of employment, and does not return.

Over the next seventeen years, Agatha is left in limbo. That she does not remarry might indicate she believes her husband is still alive; she has certainly never had any confirmation that he has died. The sea, supposedly, can wait a long time to recapture those that managed to elude a watery destiny. How long does it take for hope to shade into resignation, for acquiescence to crumble into despondency? The fact that would allow grief is endlessly deferred. She makes a living through nursing and struggles to send Rebecca to the foremost Quaker school. Then he comes back.

He sends a message through her father that he will understand if she does not want to see him, but would like to be allowed to see his daughter. He is cagey about where he has been, and somehow manages to convince them that trying to follow or find him is unwise, possibly even dangerous. He promises to return for good within a year, and settles on them a handsome sum of money.

Robertson does return, the day before Rebecca's wedding. But he disappears again, and sends letters asking the whole family to move to Missouri. He sends shawls that seem to have been worn by someone beforehand. Eventually, he confesses to Rebecca's husband what had prevented him from being with Agatha and his wife. Mrs. Irvin, a widow, became the second Mrs. Robertson, and their daughter married Mr. Janney. Janney mentioned later that his stepfather-in-law had been an oddly suspicious man, who would always wait to find out who visitors were before agreeing to see them. Agatha maintained that she had “no wish to make either of them unhappy,” and that to expose his bigamy would only have driven him further away. Neither Agatha nor Rebecca pressed to have his settlement on the Janneys annulled.

Melville wrote to Hawthorne, saying that he had considered using the story himself, “but, thinking again, it has occurred to me that this thing lies very much in a vein, with which you are peculiarly familiar. To be plump, I think that in this matter you would make a better hand at it than I would.” Given the rapturous applause that had greeted Hawthorne's 1850 study of Puritan hypocrisy,
The Scarlet Letter,
and his subtle characterization of the self-sacrificing, infinitely patient Hester Prynne, one can see why Melville gravitated toward thinking
Agatha
should be written by Hawthorne.

Melville was most likely still smarting from many of the less positive reviews of his 1851 novel,
Moby-Dick.
“So much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature,” thundered the
Athenaeum.
“Sheer moonstruck lunacy”—the
London Morning Chronicle.
“Mr. Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon . . . the very ultimatum of weakness . . . bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English”—the
New York
United States Magazine and Democratic Review.
Having, it seemed, failed so spectacularly with his metaphysical romance of whaling, monomania, and masculine camaraderie, Melville might have thought a stoic, feminine domestic tragedy would certainly be a departure.

Melville's letter to Hawthorne reveals the extent to which he was seriously shaping his own
Agatha.
Her father is made a former mariner and lighthouse keeper who has made her swear never to marry a sailor. The mailbox Agatha walks to each day is described in a stop-frame sequence of deterioration and moldy decrepitude; an opening long-shot pans across the land and seascape, the cliffs from which she will not fling herself in despair. Her faithless husband is treated empathetically: “the whole sin stole upon him insensibly—so that it would perhaps have been hard for him to settle upon the exact day when he could say to himself, ‘Now I have deserted my wife.'” Nonetheless, it was Hawthorne who should “build about with fulness & veins & beauty” this “skeleton of actual reality”: “And if I thought I could do it as well as you, why, I should not let you have it.”

Hawthorne started to write an
Agatha,
but soon tired of it. In October 1852, Melville wrote again, suggesting plot lines, specifically that Robertson's bigamy might “be ascribed to the peculiarly latitudinarian notions, which most sailors have of all tender obligations of that sort,” an idea Melville is sure that Hawthorne has already pondered.

By November, Hawthorne has decided against
Agatha,
and encourages Melville to write the novel himself. Melville agrees, asks permission to use the “Isle of Shoals” name Hawthorne had woven into his fragment, and declares he “shall begin it immediately upon reaching home; and so far as in me lies, I shall endeavor to do justice to so interesting a story of reality.” With that,
Agatha
vanishes from literary history.

Hawthorne and Melville's friendship cooled around 1856. “I have just about made up my mind to be annihilated,” Melville wrote. Although he lived for another thirty years, he ceased to publish fiction completely: after the brilliant, darkly ironic study in illusion and bad faith,
The Confidence Man
of 1857, Melville the novelist disappeared as completely as James Shinn Robertson. When he died, the unfinished manuscript of
Billy Budd, Sailor
was found among his papers. The manuscript of
Agatha
was not.

Gustave Flaubert

{1821–1880}

HAD HE HAD his once-upon-a-time wish for obliteration, there would be very little to say about Gustave Flaubert. In 1851 he was thirty years old, living at home with his quarrelsome mother and a cupboard crammed with jottings, scribbles, and juvenilia. His only major previous attempt at a serious and sustained literary composition was a High Romantic phantasmagoria,
La Tentation de Saint-Antoine,
a work inspired by Brueghel's painting, which he had seen in Genoa some years before. The anguished prose poem had baroqued like a shot plant from his initial note on the picture: “Naked woman lying down, Love in one corner.”

Flaubert read it to his friend Louis Bouilhet, whose critical response was succinct—“I think you ought to throw it in the fire and never mention it again.” He did not throw it in the fire.

Dispirited, he left, and listlessly trudged around North Africa, gazed at the face of the Sphinx and the navel of a stripper whose arms were adorned with Koranic tattoos. He meandered back to France, unsure, but in the knowledge he would have to do something. He should begin what Louis had suggested: “a down-to-earth subject, some little incident from bourgeois life.” Furthermore, Louis had prompted a plot—“the story of Delphine Delamare,” a local adulteress, driven to suicide. The idea had obviously pushed tentative roots into Gustave's mind: at the summit of Djebel Abousir, above the seething Nile, he had exclaimed, “Eureka! I'm going to call her Emma Bovary!”

But back at home with his mother, it was going less well. Beginnings never did go well for Flaubert; the conception might have been sudden and exhilarating, but when pen reached paper, it bled an agonizing parturition. The corpulent author sprawled, prostrate, on his settle, taunted by blank pages. He indulged himself in torrents of tears and tantrums of masturbation. Writing disgusted him, it was like “having to drink up an ocean and then piss it all out again,” publishing was a horrific faux pas, “like letting someone see your bum.” At the height of this, he fantasized that the ideal would be “to be buried in an enormous tomb, with all my never-published manuscripts, like a savage buried alongside his horse.” Had he had his way, all of Flaubert's works would be lost within some off-road sepulchre.

Eventually, finally, after five years of writing and revising,
Madame
Bovary: The Story of a Provincial Education
(1857) appeared in
La Revue
de Paris,
initially advertised as the work of one Monsieur G. Faubert. The editor, his erstwhile friend Maxime Du Camp, had required further cuts. Even so, the printed version was sprinkled with demure dashes to protect easily offended eyes from gutter words. These absences were material evidence in its eventual trial, where the wily defending lawyer, Sénard, insisted that the considerate blanks had merely inflamed the suspicions of the dirty-minded prosecution, who obviously knew far worse words than the blanks suppressed.

The
scandale
ensured healthy sales. The reclusive, overweight de Sade aficionado had commenced a career that would take him even as far as being welcomed into the bosom of the imperial family.
Madame
Bovary
was followed by a Carthaginian orgy,
Salammbô
(1862), the “moral history of . . . my generation”;
L'Education sentimentale
(1867), which the ever-helpful Du Camp thought should rightly be called
Mediocrities;
the thrice-revised
Saint-Antoine
(1874), and the late, luminous
Trois contes
(1877). A relatively slight corpus from a self-confessed behemoth. But there were other writings, planned novels, aborted projects, unfinished epics. . . .

Flaubert had written since infancy. He had colored in an illustrated copy of
Don Quixote.
He had demanded his nursemaid take dictation. While he was still in school, family friends gathered some of his youthful works, including a comedy entitled
The Miser,
an elegy on a local dog, and a treatise replete with puerile mischief,
The Splendid Explanation of
the Famous Constipation,
and bound them in a volume. As a student, he had written to a schoolteacher, claiming he was working on three stories, a lifetime before the appearance of the
Trois contes.
At the same time as he was struck by the nightmare vision of Brueghel's painting, he was sketching a version of
Don Juan.

Flaubert was notorious for hoarding his manuscripts, unable to discard the slightest inked scrap. We know that in 1871, with the Prussian army sweeping across France, a wary Flaubert buried a box full of letters—and, perhaps, other papers?—in his garden. Did it also contain more on his proposed satire on socialism, or the working drafts of
Harel-Bey,
his novel on the contemporary Orient, where the Europeans degenerated as the Arabs improved? The year after his death, the house at Croisset was demolished. The box, as far as anyone knows, remained beneath the soil. As one biographer speculates, a treasure trove of Flaubertiana might lie beneath the concrete dockland development of Rouen.

More tantalizingly, he took copious notes for a novel on French society under the Second Empire, whose highest echelons had embraced him so wholeheartedly. The work was schemed out after the political upheavals of 1870–71, and the extant remarks reveal a skewed hindsight: Babylon is mapped on a decaying Paris. The planned work would be a counterpart to his equally dyspeptic
L'Education sentimentale,
a tale that would expose “the great lie that we lived by,” a novel teeming with “a fake army, fake politics, fake literature, fake credit and even fake whores.” If the impersonal psychology of
Madame Bovary
heralded Modernism, would the unwritten Second Empire novel, replete with illusion and delusion, have intimated what came after? Another work would certainly be claimed to do just that.

Bouvard et Pécuchet
occupied most of the remainder of Flaubert's life: a bittersweet, encyclopedic, ultimately unfinished, and potentially impossible-to-finish book. Two clerks, with a comfortable income, run through the gamut of human knowledge. Flaubert's
Dictionnaire des
idées reçues
catalogued the inanity of bourgeois opinion in all its various forms. In
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
Flaubert gave his triumphant celebration of the manic compulsion to observe the world.

The two fictional obsessives and guileless eccentrics attempt to taxonomize the universe, much as the eighteenth-century philosophes had done. Like a frock-coated double act, they are unraveled at every turn, unable to discern the distinction between an old wives' tale masquerading as wisdom and the proverbial pearl.

Flaubert himself abandoned and restarted the work constantly, and read over 1,500 books researching it. The work, he claimed, was like “trying to put the ocean into a bottle.” Was it a quixotic venture from the outset? Perhaps, although he was prone to begin each venture with a fathomless fear of its conclusion: as he hobbled through the opening chapters of
L'Education sentimentale,
he had griped it was as difficult as “fitting the sea into a carafe.” In note form, Flaubert imagined one possible ending: having exhausted every field of human knowledge, the two former copyists joyfully purchase “register and instruments, erasers, sandarach, etc.,” and order the construction of a double-sided desk. They return to being clerks, having rid themselves of the terrible “desire for concluding.” Tentatively, they even attempt to make amends to Mélie, the young woman embroiled in their fantastical schemes.

Flaubert may have declared, “Madame Bovary, c'est moi,” but he never started the novel that might have touched on the dark secret of his own life. He described
La Spirale
as “a large fantastical metaphysical loudmouth novel” which advanced the proposition that “happiness is in the imagination”—a strange elision: did he mean that true happiness is achieved, in Romantic-poet style, through an act of imagination? Or that all happiness is a mere figment of the fancy? Although the initial impetus toward the novel was his reading of Dante's
Inferno
in 1852 and the vagaries of his relationship with the flighty and none too faithful Louise Colet, its wellspring was buried deeper and earlier in himself.

During his early twenties, while traveling home with his more respectable brother Achille, Flaubert suffered a debilitating and inexplicable attack. It seemed to be sparked by the complex relationship between a fixed light in a distant inn and the swinging lantern on an oncoming carriage. These points created an indeterminate triangulation with something in his mind. The event caused a psychic dislocation, as if trying to focus on the shapes wrenched the brain's equivalent of a muscle. As a child he had faded and phased out of conversations; this was more serious. It was a “golden fire,” an “irruption of
memory,
” a “yellow cloud,” “a thousand fireworks,” “Bengal lights.” He collapsed, frothed at the mouth, babbled. In retrospect, it seems likely that Flaubert suffered from some form of epilepsy.

La Spirale
was “a novel about madness, or rather about
the way
in which you go mad.” Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the novelist's father, had founded the Rouen Hospital, and the young Gustave had witnessed autopsies and operations, wandered among the imbeciles and the insane. He, more than many, had the material from which to construct a scientifically accurate fiction on illness. But, as he said, “it is a subject that frightens me.”

La Spirale
remained locked in Flaubert's body, never to be manifested on the page. Corruption, insanity, a foreboding that these knots and flaws were not only in the grain of the self, but striated through society, traumas walking abroad: Flaubert did not dare embark on such an investigation. How could he? When his cult of authorial impersonality demanded that the author must love, fight, and drink without being a lover, soldier, or drunk—under such strictures, how could the tortured elucidate torment? In the hateful hiatus between each completed work and the dreaded embarkation on another, the idea glimmered, taunted, and was deferred. “I shall have to wait until I am far enough away from those experiences,” he wrote. He never did acquire such distance.