High-Priced Literature

LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (248 pp.] Edited by Richard Rumbold--Philosophical Library ($3.75).

Gustave Flaubert was a great novelist, but a slapdash correspondent. These letters, most of them published in English for the first time, have none of the depth and polish of Madame Bovary. Often, in fact, they seem to have been written in tired irritation, as if his quest for the right word in his novels had sapped him of energy for anything else. They reflect a dull life but a dedicated one.

Flaubert's great passion was work: the endless quest for verbal perfection. Often he spent weeks on a single page. To his young protege, Guy de Maupassant, he wrote: "You must--believe me, young man--you must do more work. I am coming to suspect you of being somewhat of an idler. Too many tarts, too much rowing and too much exercise. A cultured man has not as much need of exertion as doctors pretend."

"Old from My Cradle." Flaubert was right about Maupassant, but he suffered from excesses of his own. At 25, he wrote with the weariness of a septuagenarian: "Beneath my youthful exterior lies a strange senility. I do not know what it was that made me old from my cradle, and disgusted me with happiness even before I had tasted it."

He never married, had only one important love affair: with Louise Colet, a literary beauty with considerable experience as the mistress of authors. A large part of the affair, for Flaubert, seems to have consisted in writing her dismally joyless letters: "Maybe it is my heart that is impotent. This deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my own doubts." He kept going back to the theme: "I have never been able to give myself up to love; there is something so ridiculous about it. Sometimes I have wanted to please some woman, but I have been so struck by the absurd figure I must be cutting that I have burst out laughing."

"Smutty Passages." A bourgeois himself, he hated the bourgeoisie. His displeasure buzzes through the letters, becomes almost shrill after the loss of part of his fortune in a family lumber venture. When the Paris censors declared Madame Bovary immoral, Flaubert was stung in his deepest selfesteem, hit back with fighting fury. As ammunition for the hearing, he collected "the greatest possible number of smutty passages drawn from ecclesiastical writers, particularly from contemporaries." Flaubert routed the prosecution, afterwards exulted in a visceral little report to his brother: "We gave it to them there, hot and strong."

Shortly before his death (in 1880), Flaubert seems to have realized that he had missed too much. After visiting an ordinary happy family, he remarked: "They are right." It was too late to change. To the end he remained true to his craft, but his letters make it clear that the price came high.

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