Behind the Book- A New View of a Great Writer

William Faulkner claimed that he read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary every year. Henry James wrote that "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone." Even contemporary Southern writer Harry Crews acknowledges that he reads Flaubert often, drinking in the perfectly crafted writing.

Yet, writer's writer that Flaubert is, he has never been the subject of a truly great biography, argues Geoffrey Wall from his office at the University of York, where he is senior lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literatures. That great biography is precisely what Wall has succeeded in writing with Flaubert: A Life , a lively psychological portrait that was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in December 2001 and will be published here this May (see review this issue).

Most famous for Madame Bovary and the indecency trial that followed its publication in 1857, Flaubert is perhaps the greatest writer of 19th-century France. When the novel appeared, it introduced a new style—realism—into French literature that ultimately issued in the naturalism of Emile Zola. But as Wall looked at the standard biographies, he felt that this great writer had been ill served. Francis Steegmuller's Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Life (1947; revised 1968) provides real insight into Flaubert, he says, but it stops with Madame Bovary. He finds Herbert Lottmann's Flaubert: A Biography (1989) "plodding" and Henri Troyat's Flaubert (1988) "not very inward. It shows that Troyat hasn't spent much time with his subject."

Still, Wall did not set out immediately to write a biography himself. Instead, he turned to such tasks as translating Madame Bovary (1992) and editing Flaubert's Selected Letters (1998). But when he read Richard Holmes's Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1996), which recounts Holmes's adventures as he retraced the footsteps of his subjects, Wall became convinced of biography's vitality.

"I thought biographies had to be cluttered with facts," Wall says. "But Holmes taught me that the best biographies have a strong narrative line and re-create a sense of the time and place of the subject." Thus, as he worked Wall sought to "seize upon the detail that defines, evokes the person, the place, the moment in history."

To gather such details about Flaubert's life, Wall spent several months following Flaubert's movements through Egypt and Corsica as well as Rouen, where he lived. "I did a lot of walking around the streets, looking at maps, finding the 19th-century city in the contours of 20th-century Rouen. I clambered about the immediate vicinity of the Hôtel-Dieu—the religious hospital where Flaubert's father practiced medicine and which is still standing."

Wall's attention to details and his use of the unexpurgated versions of Flaubert's letters distinguish his biography from the others now available. The letters contain "lots of passages that are sexually explicit and in which Flaubert gossips about his friends," he explains. "I learned how to read between the lines of what he says about himself and his life when he's exaggerating."

Wall uses these letters to good effect when discussing Flaubert's novels. He also shows that previous biographies relied on earlier editions of the letters to "take far too literally the priestly cult of the artist that emerges from Flaubert's comments about solitude and the spirit of writing." Instead, Wall's Flaubert is a gregarious globetrotter, hungry for experience but also aware of the physical limitations imposed on him by his epilepsy, which developed in childhood and often sent him into self-induced hallucinations out of which he produced his writing.

Wall's discoveries on his travels helped him to re-imagine Flaubert's world, including his family life; he is to be commended for providing a newly researched account of Flaubert's doctor father. "When I began, I wrote so much material on the father that I realized I was writing a biography of Achille-Cléophas rather than Gustave, and I had to start over," Wall observes. His biography stands out in other ways as well. He provides colorful chapters on Flaubert's many travels and includes new details of Flaubert's sexual and medical history drawn from the uncensored versions of the letters.

What makes Flaubert an interesting subject for the early 21st century? "He was somewhere beyond Romanticism but deeply rooted in it," says Wall, "and having lived through the Revolution of 1848 he shows us from his experience how revolutionary idealism can fail." But perhaps Flaubert's greatest contribution is to show us "how our desires are entangled in objects," the theme of Madame Bovary.

Flaubert remains important for us today because he is so adept at showing how deeply we are shaped by the choices we make. And, like Emma Bovary, we objectify our desires in the men or women we love, the physical objects—cars, houses, DVD players—we accumulate, and even the spiritual objects—crucifixes, altars, icons—that supposedly help us transcend this world. Emma eventually kills herself because she cannot disentangle herself from her things—her lovers, her physical properties, her middle-class stature itself. In one way, then, Emma's suicide is an act of liberation, yet it is also an act of despair. At the same time, Flaubert teaches us that idealism that lacks some ground in reality is doomed to fail.

"Our sense of a great writer needs updating," concludes Wall. He has accomplished this task by writing what he calls a picaresque biography and investing it with all the knowledge and affection he has derived from his study of Flaubert. What makes the result especially appealing is that it grows out of Wall's conviction of "the possibility that we can know and feel other lives and take from that experience a richer and a subtler sense of a common humanity."