Now that Flaubert’s prose for his 200th birthday has long been available, extensively commented, edited and completed with important sources – most recently with Elisabeth Edl’s wonderful transcriptions (Memoirs of a madman or Apprenticeship in masculinity, both published by Hanser-Verlag) – so now would be the ideal time as a reader to put together their own biography about the life and work of Gustave Flaubert. About a writer who remarks in one of his innumerable letters: “It is one of my principles that one should not describe oneself. In his work, the artist must be like God in creation, invisible and omnipotent; you should feel it everywhere, but not see it anywhere. “
That may of course be his Madame Bovary which is perhaps more famous than its creator. But does this anonymity also apply to the passionate letter writer Flaubert? Probably not, because in this activity the otherwise so controlled “lets the pen run,” it doesn’t scratch around for days – barely making any progress – as it does on the pages of the novel. The novelist is finally allowed to write the forbidden “I”, express feelings, think playfully or analytically about his own work and that of others, grate licorice for the beloved, become vulgar and abusive, on occasion also miserable, cynical, noisy and (for posterity) visionary.
The construction kit for this individual biography in Germany is already well stocked with hundreds of thin print pages – you have to pick up some antiquarian items: including the correspondence with Louise Colet, his long-time older lover and literary colleague who is far from equal, of course with the Nice friend Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert’s pupil, and with his equal friend, the “dear master” George Sand. Or with the dandy and salon writers, the Goncourt brothers and, most recently, with the Russian heavyweight Ivan Turgenev – these letters show the deepest bond between two moles “who dig their passages in the same direction”. There are still some best-of collections and speckled bonus material in various prose volumes that have other addressees ready, such as the childhood friend Maxime Du Camp, with whom the broken law student Flaubert traveled through Brittany and the Orient.
It is stimulating fun to happen to join one of the written chats that we have long since irretrievably lost in our own human exchange. The reader does not have to worry about the lack of key biographical data that briefly explains Flaubert’s current life situation: You can find them in the appendix.
Flaubert was lazy
So you learn that the solitary and lazy Flaubert would have preferred to move into an “ivory tower” isolated. The latter, by the way, is now only a “battle concept and cliché”, as the style critic Michael Maar said in his great book The snake in wolf’s clothing aptly noted in another context.
But in his correspondence with Turgenev, Flaubert had to realize sadly that moving in must remain an unfulfilled wish, because “a flood of shit hits its walls, threatening to collapse”. On January 16, 1852, he wrote one of his most famous letters, in which it says: “What seems beautiful to me, what I want to do, is a book about nothing, a book that does not depend on anything external, that only makes its way through inner strength of his style holds by itself, just as the earth holds itself in the air without being supported, a book that has almost no topic. Duktus came to the conclusion that there are unfortunately too many books “about nothing” today – and not even with style. Jean Améry also reflected on the incomparable Flaubert style exactly 50 years ago in his birthday article: this “adjectival highly precise prose”, this “majestic melancholy of metaphors”. And how Flaubert succeeded in turning the outside world “into an inner monologue itself”. Flaubert might have just cynically commented: “It is much easier to discuss than to understand.”
Among others, newly translated by Elisabeth Edl: Memoirs of a madman Gustave Flaubert Hanser 2021, 240 S., 28 €
.