Memoirs of a Madman and November Read online

  Memoirs of a Madman

  and

  November

  Gustave Flaubert

  Translated by Andrew Brown

  ALMA CLASSICS

  ALMA CLASSICS LTD

  London House

  243-253 Lower Mortlake Road

  Richmond

  Surrey TW9 2LL

  United Kingdom

  www.almaclassics.com

  ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ first published in French in 1901

  ‘Bibliomania’ first published in French in 1837

  ‘November’ first published in French in 1910

  This translation of ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ and ‘Bibliomania’ first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2002

  This translation of ‘November’ first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2005

  This edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2013

  Translation, Introduction and Notes © Andrew Brown, 2002, 2005

  Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd

  Cover design: Jem Butcher

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  ISBN: 978-1-84749-325-5

  All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Memoirs of a Madman

  November

  Note on the Texts

  Notes

  Extra Material

  Gustave Flaubert’s Life

  Gustave Flaubert’s Works

  Select Bibliography

  Introduction

  FLAUBERT: Spent days labouring over a single sentence. – But some say his works lack vitality. – Don’t forget to mention Flaubertian irony, with a knowing look.

  For most of his life as a writer, Flaubert collected materials for a sottisier, a book of remarks, culled from his reading and things overheard in everyday life, that he thought distinguished by their incorrectness, platitude or stupidity. Many of these ended up in the Dictionary of Received Ideas that he planned to append to his last, unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, as a grotesque sample of the clichés and commonplaces to which all the world’s wisdom was degraded in the mouths of the bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century France. The above is an imaginary entry on Flaubert himself: the three components of stylistic perfection, a perhaps deficient or frozen sensibility, and an irony all the more unremitting for being finally undecidable, are all part of the legend of Flaubert as it was already developing in his own time and as it has not really changed a great deal since. But the reader aware of the legend, or coming to the short pieces in this volume after encountering the Flaubert of Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education, is in for a surprise. The immaculate stylist here seems capable of producing work distinguished by diffuseness, repetition, and odd errors of fact (he thinks a pug dog has a thick white coat). The Flaubert who would be capable of calculating with millimetric precision the position of a comma here shows a remarkable disregard for the elementary rules of punctuation (breathless strings of nouns, as when the protagonist of the ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ claims to have loved “chariots horses uniforms of war the beat of the drums…”). The Flaubert whose subtle handling of tenses was one of the reasons for which he was hailed by Proust as renovating our perception of the world in the same way as Kant’s categories here slips casually and confusingly from tense to tense with no apparent rationale, and at times produces sentences that are bafflingly ungrammatical. Where his main work is rigorously in the third person, and notoriously impersonal in tone, here we have a first-person narrative (the “memoirs”) that seems at times uncomfortably close to autobiography: it launches into metaphysical speculation, expresses opinions on everything under the sun (and several things over it), and indulges in a direct and at times emotional lyricism, while any irony is confined to a recognition of the fact that it is an adolescent who is talking, and all adolescents feel this way (while also being convinced that they are alone in their mood swings between idealistic élan and nihilistic tædium vitæ) – for the narrator acknowledges that even at his most intensely world-weary, he cannot avoid striking a pose common to all the other cynical and romantic young men of nineteenth-century France.

  The reader who finds the result un-Flaubertian in its clumsiness and, at times, its opacity, can lay part of the blame at the feet of the translator: but only part, for the author’s contribution to the pervasive sense of stylistic infelicity cannot be denied. But he had an excuse that the translator does not: when he wrote the ‘Memoirs’ and ‘Bibliomania’, he was still in his mid-teens. These are both Œuvres de jeunesse, and have to be read as such, for while Flaubert started writing young, he was not otherwise precocious in terms of talent or achievement. In these early works, Flaubert is as yet far removed from the heroically dedicated seeker after le mot juste he was to become: ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ was not even published in his lifetime, and shows several traces of incompleteness, while ‘Bibliomania’, his first published work, although quite effective as a piece of storytelling, is a world away from the narrative and descriptive scruples of the major novels or even, for all their (perfectly contrived) air of innocence, the late Three Tales. And yet if in one sense his mature work (from Madame Bovary onwards) was to be a rejection of all that is stylistically unrefined in these early pieces, the themes they handle were to preoccupy him throughout his career. ‘Memoirs’, in particular, is a compendium of material that he was to rework ceaselessly – verbose but swarming with inchoate life, it is the primordial soup from which the mature writer was to crawl laboriously onto dry land.

  One aspect of the ‘Memoirs’ that was to persist in Flaubert’s Œuvre is its visionary quality. Its adolescent hero is prone to cosmic fantasies of an intensity that goes some way beyond those of most teenagers. (It is unsure to what extent the hero really is adolescent – the text, with its circularity, its anticipations of what life will be like, its premonitions of how the protagonist will feel when he is the old man he already half seems to be and looks back on a life lived largely in the imagination, creates the sense of a chronological haze bordering on complete incoherence, or perhaps simply reports perfectly accurately the strangely timeless stasis, the sense of an anachronistic self without narrative bearings or forward momentum, that afflicts adolescents, and some artists, in particular). If there is a madness in the text, it lies in these visions – periods from the historical past are hallucinated in impressionistic but compelling intensity, and the narrator’s imaginings spin round in metaphysical vortices and apocalyptic fantasies of a prophetic, vengeful quality. Flaubert rings the changes on the ambivalent status of madness – boon and bane, privilege and curse, the mark of the solitary, alienated, singular being removed almost entirely from human communication (not only is this adolescent seen to be a misanthropic daydreamer by his fellows, but the disjunction between the words he shares with them and the particular things and emotions he is striving to express is a leitmotiv of the work) and yet the most universal of characteristics (is the narrator’s soul his own, or someone else’s, he asks; he talks of
the world itself as a howling, slobbering madman; and all language risks being in demented excess of an unknowable reality). Still, it is hard to see him as really mad. His story was contemporary with Nikolai Gogol’s similarly-titled ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1834), and the romanticism of which the young Flaubert and Gogol were both in their idiosyncratic and dissident ways exemplars paid eloquent homage to madness as not just an escape from but a critique of a world in which industrialization and mechanization seemed increasingly to privilege calculative rationality (or simply, for Flaubert, “the bourgeois”) above all else. But while Gogol’s lonely, downtrodden clerk really does go mad (he imagines that he can hear dogs conversing, he obsessively speculates on the problems that will be caused when the earth lands on the moon, and finally decides that he is in fact the King of Spain), Flaubert’s character is too lucid to do more than mimic the stereotypes of madness: however powerful the cosmic visions, they too often verge on the vacuous rather than the prophetic. But this is part of Flaubert’s point, and one of the many ways in which the text anticipates his major works: given a world derelict of passion, glamour, or at times any significant meaning whatsoever, the ‘Memoirs’ open up various escape routes which offer, if only for a moment, some transcendence. But each of them turns out to be a dead end. Madness turns out to no exit from the humdrum Weltschmerz of an unusually articulate but otherwise unremarkable teenager. Chapter 2 evokes childhood and its enticing dreams, only to reflect bitterly on the hours spent wasted mulling over them by the fireside. The hero recounts how his poetic musings gave way to what he calls “meditation”, in other words philosophy, only immediately to cast doubt on the value of endlessly dissecting hypotheses and setting out “in geometrical style the emptiest words” (the reference to geometry may allude to Spinoza’s Ethics, a work drawn up in Euclidean deductive style, and a lifelong inspiration to Flaubert – though one that he would again distance himself from in that encyclopedia of disenchantment, Bouvard and Pécuchet). Chapter 3 pits the narrator against his philistine schoolteachers and boorish schoolmates, and shows him escaping into dreams of fame, travel (especially to the East), and history (especially that of the Middle Ages and the ancient world), all themes to which the author would repeatedly return – travelling to the Orient in his late twenties; ceaselessly writing and revising his Temptation of Saint Anthony, that visionary, phantasmagoric catalogue of the sensual allurements and heresies besetting the hermit Anthony of Egypt (251–356 CE); composing Salammbô, his account of ancient Carthage shortly after the First Punic War; and his depiction in the Three Tales of both the medieval St Julian the Hospitaller, and Palestine at the time of the execution of John the Baptist. Some readers have found the disjunction between this wide range of reference and the apparent narrowness of sensibility disconcerting: all those saints (Anthony, Julian, John) and so little real transcendence; all those encounters with otherness both geographical and historical, and so little sense of a real dynamic interplay between self and other. This is an unnecessarily negative appraisal of Flaubert’s career – but it is one that his narrator in the ‘Memoirs’ seems to anticipate. His metaphysical and religious speculations are so intense as to induce vertigo in him, but they constantly relapse into a yawn accompanied by a shrug. The fate of all dreams of knowledge is scepticism, and transcendence, even through art, is withheld. With one exception. Love is the mode of attempted transcendence that the ‘Memoirs’ treat most seriously, and it is here that the autobiographical reference is most specific: the narrator’s encounter with “Maria” is a variation on the fourteen-year-old Flaubert’s calf love for the twenty-five-year-old Elisa Schlésinger, whom he met at Trouville: she was to be fictionalized into the shadowy, unknowable Madame Arnoux, love object of Frédéric Moreau in Sentimental Education, demure yet tantalizing, perfectly ordinary but ardently longed for, maternal but distant. This first love makes Frédéric’s later affairs “insipid”, and a similar claim has been made about the paralysing effect on Flaubert of his youthful infatuation for Elisa/“Maria” (the hero’s flirtation with Caroline, in the ‘Memoirs’, seems designed to show precisely how little any other woman will mean to him in comparison with Maria). But this love at least survives the corrosive nihilism that undermines so many of the other values the text entertains. If nihilism is, as so often in Flaubert, the response to the realization that human beings cannot have it all, cannot encompass – as his Faustian dreams desired – the All (Flaubert was reading Goethe’s Faust just before his fateful holiday in Trouville), the text holds out, against the vague immensities of sea and sky, the cosmic longing to range through all of space and time, and the adolescent all-or-nothing apocalypticism, minute particulars – the Italian tune Maria hums as she breast-feeds her child, her white foot with its pink toenails sinking into the sand, her husband’s ability to walk three leagues to get a decent melon. Love for Maria, even if “unrealized”, makes the narrator what so far in the ‘Memoirs’ he has not been: a potential realist novelist, someone capable of love of the real as realized in language (even if the reality that is the pretext of that language can at times be infuriatingly obtuse or withdrawn). Maria is the birth of realism.

  ‘Bibliomania’ is a short fable whose kernel Flaubert took from a (probably fictitious) newspaper story. Its hero, Giacomo, is a passionate book-collector: the fact that he is barely able to read makes of him a Borgesian blind librarian avant la lettre. And as in Borges the story is suffused with paranoia and a sense of malediction: an obsessive devotion to books can be murderous or suicidal, as the mysterious epidemic of deaths in Barcelona, that seems particularly to afflict bibliophiles, suggests. Giacomo is a hoarder of words, of curios and rarities and cultural riches that in their objectified, commodified form add up to no significant meaning for him. He is put on trial by a suspicious society that scapegoats eccentric solitaries like him, and he dies because of his refusal to accept that the prized possession for which he has risked his life is not in fact the only copy in Spain. The fifteen-year-old Flaubert, who years later would be brought before the courts for the “immoral” book he had sacrificed himself to, the laboriously composed Madame Bovary, and who was haunted all life long by the fear that what we think of as most unique may in fact be just one of many copies, has here written a strangely prophetic tale.

  * * *

  Towards the end of Manhattan, the hapless, indecisive Woody Allen character, Isaac, is lying on the couch in his apartment talking into a tape recorder in a bout of self-analysis as he tries to find some meaning in his unsatisfying existence. What is it that makes life worth living? With many “ums” and “ahs”, he comes up with a list: Groucho Marx, baseball player Willie Mays, the second movement of the “Jupiter” symphony, Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘Potato Head Blues’, Swedish movies (by Ingmar Bergman, presumably), Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, “those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne”, the crabs at Sam Wo’s. This list has become canonical; it is regularly trotted out as one of the great screen quotations, perhaps since the delights it catalogues chime in so well with the cultural proclivities of Allen’s target audience, who can all identify with (even if they do not share) his tastes – a nice mixture of “high” culture (Mozart and Cézanne) and “popular culture” (Armstrong and Sinatra), of comedy and sport, food and art. But not even these cultural riches seem able to overcome the note of loss and rancour pervading Manhattan (one of whose themes, after all, is the bickering and neurosis, the ego trips and anxieties inseparable from cultural life): at the end, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue sings out in elegiac distress over those beautiful but oddly bleak skyscrapers.

  There are certain analogies between the world of Woody Allen and that of Flaubert, and they are made clear in a particularly succinct way in ‘November’. Flaubert’s narrator is dreamy and indecisive, like so many of Allen’s schleppers and schlemiels, overburdened with introspection and just as unable to find an ostensible reason for living. Flaubert’s unnamed protagonist (let us call him the Narrator, in anticipat
ion of his quasi-anonymous and even more radically indeterminate avatars in the modernist fictions of Proust and Beckett) is not going through a mid-life crisis as is Allen’s Isaac, but he is afflicted by its youthful equivalent, puberty. He is a young man with all the advantages attendant on being born into the bourgeoisie; he is, in addition, intelligent, imaginative, untrammelled; he has everything to live for. And that is one of the problems: everything. Every possibility lies open to him; no social obligations weigh him down; the world lies all before him, where to choose… He is (as was the young Flaubert) gently eased into studying law, like so many other young Frenchmen of his generation, but is quite without vocation or ambition (why study law when there are so many other things he could do equally well?); he refuses to adopt any determinate personality because this would mean limiting himself and betraying the countless other opportunities the world offers him. These opportunities do not free him, but paralyse him. When there are so many possibilities for experience and travel, why choose to do, or be, this rather than that? Why fall for this woman rather than that one? Any finite choice is bound to be arbitrary and derisory in the face of the infinitude of life that will always ironically transcend it. This is the dilemma of a certain romanticism: it tries to keep faith with the infinite by refusing to endorse the definitive value of anything finite, in case the latter becomes an idol. This attitude may be mistaken (in that it fails to see how the finite and the infinite are dynamically interrelated, so that faith with the infinite may best be kept by those who focus strenuously on what is defined and limited), but it is what gives many of Flaubert’s protagonists (from the Narrator of ‘November’ to Emma Bovary, or the Frédéric of Sentimental Education), their divine – or all-too-human – discontent.

  Flaubert’s Narrator has his moments of enjoyment: sitting round the stove on a cold winter’s day chatting with his school chums, or walking ecstatically by the sea. But he would probably not come up with a list of the good things in life, like Isaac’s, with its pleasingly fetishistic character (Isaac lives in a world that is so much more orientated to cultural commodification); what makes life worth living for Flaubert’s Narrator is, rather, something much less particular – an occasional but intensely epiphanic sense of pantheistic absorption in the world as a whole, rather than the connoisseur’s delight in any one manifestation of it. But in both Allen and Flaubert, there is something that at least provisionally goes beyond this panoramic survey of the Garden of Earthly Delights, whether it is couched in Isaac’s list of desiderata, or in the Narrator’s sense of fusion with all creation. At the end of his litany of the things that save life from meaninglessness, Isaac pauses, and then adds: “Uh… Tracy’s face.” Whereupon he rises from his couch and runs through the grainy, black-and-white streets of bustling, indifferent New York to see Tracy – but too late, as she is just about to set off to London for six months, no doubt never to return (at least, not as the Tracy he loves, though the film leaves the question open). And in ‘November’, the Narrator’s sudden passion for Marie, which begins as lust for the one woman who happens to be available and starts to metamorphose into something slightly closer to the obsessive and particular possessiveness of love, also seems to offer a transcendence of the catalogue, only for this hope too to be dashed by her disappearance. A loved person is never just yet another item, thing or object in the world, but a subject, a world in itself: Tracy’s face, for Isaac, and Marie for the Narrator. With Tracy and Marie, “I like” (as in liking Mozart and Sinatra and Sam Wo’s) becomes “I love”.