Writing on the Wall (10 page)

Winter, 1964

*
The name of John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, could now be added to the list of Gentiles who attacked Miss Arendt. His unsigned review came out in the London Times Literary Supplement, after my article was written, and included me in the attack. Anybody interested in studying this controversy is referred to Partisan Review, Summer 1963, Fall 1963, and Spring 1964. He will find articles and letters, pro and con, by Lionel Abel, Marie Syrkin, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Robert Lowell, William Phillips, and Harold Weisberg. My own piece, an answer mainly to Abel, appeared in the Winter 1964 number. Since it is part of a now historical debate, I have made only minute revisions.

**
A different version of this episode was given by Irving Howe in a letter to the magazine, Spring 1964.

On
Madame Bovary

W
HEN FLAUBERT MADE HIS
famous statement—“Madame Bovary is me”—he was echoing one of his favorite authors, Cervantes. Cervantes, on his deathbed, so the story goes, was asked whom he meant to depict in Don Quixote. “Myself,” he answered. In Cervantes’ case, this must have been true, quite simply and terribly, whether or not he ever said it. In Flaubert’s, the answer was an evasion. He was tired of being asked about the “real-life original” of his heroine. According to tradition, there
was
one; in fact, there may have been two or even three. First and most important was Delphine Delamare, née Couturier, the wife of a public-health officer in the Bray region of Normandy, not far from where Flaubert lived. In 1848, aged twenty-seven, she killed herself, leaving behind her a little girl, Alice-Delphine. Among her effects, it was said, was an unpaid bill from a circulating library in Rouen, Flaubert’s friends had suggested her case to him as the subject for a novel, on the writing-course principle of “Write about what you know.” What better source than a mother-in-law? Old Madame Delamare, the doctor’s widowed mother, used to come to see old Madame Flaubert and lament his marital unhappiness, his untimely death; Flaubert’s niece remembered her well and was convinced that the old lady’s complaints about her daughter-in-law’s misconduct were the basis for
Madame Bovary.
In an inventory of Delamare’s property and papers, made on his decease, an I.O.U. of three hundred francs to “Madame Flaubert” has recently been found.

Dr. Delamare had died, presumably of grief, like Charles Bovary, long before
Madame Bovary
appeared, in 1857; he survived his wife by only twenty-one months. But other principals in the Delamare drama (rumor gave her many lovers) and a chorus of commentators were still living. And many years later, in the village of Ry—which advertises itself as the original of Yonville l’Abbaye—Delphine Delamare’s smart double curtains, yellow and black, were still talked about by her neighbors, like her blue-and-silver wallpaper. Today her house is gone (two different houses have competed for that title), her tombstone has been lost or stolen, but her garden is there, the property of the village pharmacist, who displays in his shop what purports to be Monsieur Homais’ counter.

The real Monsieur Homais was probably legion. Flaubert is said to have spent a month at Forges-les-Eaux studying the local pharmacist, a red-hot anti-clerical and diehard republican, whom he had already spotted and banded, but he is also thought to have had his eye on other atheistical druggists, birds of the same feather, in the neighborhood.

In short,
Madame Bovary
revived and spread a scandal (a second suspected Rodolphe was uncovered at Neufchâtel-en-Bray) that had been a nine-days’ wonder in the locality, and Flaubert was no doubt sick of the gossip and somewhat remorseful, like most authors, for what he had started, tired too maybe of hearing his mother tax him with what he had “done” to poor Delamare’s memory. At the same time, as an author, he must have resented the cheapening efforts of real life to claim for itself material he had transmuted with such pain in his study; even in her name, “Delphine Delamare” sounds like a hack’s alias for Emma Bovary.

The gossip was not silenced by his denials. Indeed, it proliferated, breeding on the novel itself—impossible to know how much elderly witnesses, interviewed in Ry forty years later, had had their memories refreshed by contact with the novel. Was the Delamares’ elegant furniture really sold at auction to satisfy her creditors? And the unfortunate doctor’s “two hundred rose stocks
de belle variété”?
What about the “mahogany Gothic prie-dieu embroidered in subdued blue and yellow gros point?” by Delphine Delamare? In 1890, on the word of one authority, it could be seen in Rouen, the cushion considerably faded. In 1905, the servant Felicité (her real name was Augustine), aged seventy-nine, was still talking to visitors about her mistress, differing stoutly with others who remembered her on the color of her hair. “No. Not blond. Chestnut.” After
Madame Bovary,
figures in the Delamare story, real or fancied, must have spent their lives as marked men. The rumored “Rodolphe,” a veritable Cain, was said to have emigrated to America, then come back and shot himself on a Parisian boulevard. If that happened to an actual country gentleman of the vicinity named Louis Campion (and there is no record of such a suicide), it cannot have been part of Flaubert’s intention. And the gossip, as always, must have been wrong quite a bit of the time. Even given Flaubert’s passion for documentation, he cannot have set out to make an exact copy of the village of Ry and its inhabitants. How well, in fact, he could have known it, except as the site of the Delamare drama, is a matter of doubt.

He must have passed through it, on his way from Rouen, and certainly the village, even now, shows correspondences with the décor of the novel, though, as in a dream, nothing is in quite its right place: the church, the cemetery, the market place, Monsieur Homais’ pharmacy, the Lion d’Or. The “river” behind Madame Delamare’s garden has shrunk to a feeble stream, more of a ditch or drain, really, and the real river runs past the village, not through it. But there are the outlying meadows, the poplars, the long single street, which is an extended
place
in the novel; “Rodolphe’s château” is pointed out on a nearby road, and along the river there are many cow-crossings made of old planks reminiscent of the one Emma used, at the foot of her garden, going by the wet-nurse’s house to meet her lover. In the courtyard of the Hôtel de Rouen, identified by a marker as the “Lion d’Or,” a suggestible person can believe himself to be in the setting of
Madame Bovary.

Human suggestibility, obviously, has magnified and multiplied correspondences in a way no doubt undreamed of by Flaubert. The fame of the novel caused dubious and even false claimants to be presented or present themselves as the genuine originals. A notary in the Oise named Louis Bottais (or Léon Bottet; there is some confusion) pretended to have served as the model for Léon; he was unmasked as an impostor. The progressive pharmacist at Ry, toward the end of the century, modeled
himself
on Monsieur Homais, who he insisted had been drawn from his father—as though this were reason for family pride.

The net has been cast wider. A second—or third—model for Emma has been found in the wife of Flaubert’s friend the sculptor Pradier, who made the pretty ladies, Lille and Strasbourg, that sit on pedestals like halted patriotic floats on the Place de la Concorde. A “memoir” of this woman, written out in an illiterate script by her confidante, a carpenter’s wife, had fallen into Flaubert’s hands. Did he use it? Louise Pradier was good-looking, silly, extremely unfaithful to her husband, and up to her neck in debt. In the “memoir,” where she is called “Ludovica,” she is being driven to suicide by her debts and adulterous anxieties; her husband, like Charles Bovary, dies of the shock dealt him by the discovery of his wife’s infidelities and the bills she had run up. In reality, Pradier long outlived his separation from Louise, and Louise herself, though she may have talked of it, never threw herself in the Seine. She was living when
Madame Bovary
came out and she and her Bohemian friends may have been persuaded, whatever the truth was, that she had “sat for” Flaubert.

This endless conjecturing on the part of the public is the price paid by the realistic novelist for “writing about what he knows.” With
Salammbô
and
The Temptation of Saint Anthony,
there was no occasion for Flaubert to issue denials. But
Madame Bovary
was fraught with embarrassment for its author, who foresaw, while still writing it, the offense he was going to give his neighbors by the heavy dosage of Norman “local color” he had put in. And as often happens, whatever he did to change, combine, disguise, invent, probably made matters worse, purely fictive episodes being taken as the literal truth.

There may also have been correspondences with reality invisible to ordinary provincial readers but suspiciously visible to his immediate family: “I know where you got
that!”
an author’s relations cry, in amusement or reproach. Take the following, as a guess. Dr. Delamare studied under Flaubert’s father, a well-known surgeon, at the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen; whether he was a poor student or not is uncertain. In any case, being dead, he could not be hurt by the book. But there was someone else who conceivably could be: Flaubert’s brother, Achille, also a doctor, highly regarded in local medical circles. He operated on their father; gangrene developed, and Dr. Flaubert died. It is thought that he may have had a diabetic condition, always dangerous for a surgical patient. In any case, the outcome was fatal. A little later, Flaubert’s sister Caroline died of puerperal fever. Whether Achille was in attendance is not clear. But the two deaths, coming so close together, greatly affected Flaubert. In a letter, he described sitting up with Caroline’s body while her husband and a priest snored. Just like Emma’s wake. Flaubert remembered those snores. Did he remember the operation performed on his father when he wrote about Charles’ operation on the clubfooted inn boy—the most villainous folly in the book? Or did he fear that Achille remembered and would draw a parallel, where none had been intended? A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must claim to forget.
*

On the one hand, Flaubert declared
he
was Emma. On the other, he wrote to a lady: “There’s nothing in
Madame Bovary
that’s drawn from life. It’s a
completely invented
story. None of my own feelings or experiences are in it.” So help him God. Of course, he was fibbing, and contradicting himself as well. Like all novelists, he drew on his own experiences, and, more than most novelists, he was frightened by the need to invent. When he came to do the ball at Vaubyessard, he lamented. “It’s so long since I’ve been to a ball.” If memory failed, he documented himself, as he did for Emma’s school reading, going back over the children’s stories he had read as a little boy and the picture books he had colored. If he had not had an experience the story required, he sought it out. Before writing the chapter about the agricultural fair, he went to one; he consulted his brother about club foot and, disappointed by the ignorance manifest in Achille’s answers, procured textbooks. There is hardly a page in the novel that he had not “lived,” and he constantly drew on his own feelings to render Emma’s.

All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen, the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe seduces Emma in the woods. “What a delicious thing writing is—not to be you any more but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion.” It is hard to imagine another great novelist—Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Balzac—who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity. Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion—to be their mistress’ sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined in a gigantic, throbbing
partouze
while Flaubert’s pen flew. He was writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was
reading
one. “What a delicious thing reading is—not to be you any more but to flow through the whole universe you’re reading about...” etc., etc.

Compare this, in fact, to the rapt exchange of platitudes between Léon and Emma on the night of their first meeting, at dinner at the Lion d’Or. “‘...is there anything better, really, than sitting by the fire with a book while the wind beats on your window panes and the lamp is burning?’ ‘Isn’t it so?’ she said, fixing him with her large black eyes wide open. ‘One forgets everything,’ he continued. ‘The hours go by. Without leaving your chair you stroll through imagined landscapes as if they were real, and your thoughts interweave with the story, lingering over details or leaping ahead with the plot. Your imagination confuses itself with the characters, and it seems as if it were your own heart beating inside their clothes.’ ‘How true! How true!’ she said.”

The threadbare magic carpet, evidently, is shared by author and reader, who are both escaping from the mean provincial life close at hand. Yet
Madame Bovary
is one of a series of novels—including
Don Quixote
and
Northanger Abbey
—that illustrate the evil effects of reading.
All
reading, in the case of
Madame Bovary,
not simply the reading of romances. The books Emma fed on were not pure trash, by any means; in the convent she had read Chateaubriand; as a girl on the farm, she read
Paul et Virginie.
The best sellers she liked were of varying quality: Eugène Sue, Balzac, George Sand, and Walter Scott. She tried to improve her mind with history and philosophy, starting one “deep” book after another and leaving them all unfinished. Reading was undermining her health, according to her mother-in-law, who thought the thing to do was to stop her subscription to the lending library in Rouen. It ought to be against the law, declared the old lady, for circulating libraries to supply people with novels and books against religion, that mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. Flaubert is making fun of Madame Bovary, Senior, and yet he too felt that Emma’s reading was unhealthy. And for the kind of reason her mother-in-law would give: books put ideas in Emma’s head. It is characteristic of Flaubert that his own notions, in the mouths of his characters, are turned into desolate echoes—into clichés.