Before Bovary

FLAUBERT IN EGYPT

by FRANCIS STEEGMULLER

232 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $8.50.

Gustave Flaubert, the master of style, the father of realism, used to tweak his mighty mustaches and quiver his 19th century, man-of-letters jowls while he told interviewers, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Indeed she was, and this book documents it.

He made merciless fun of poor Emma Bovary, that silly little goose of a Norman schoolgirl, who dreamed in the convent of a mysterious East full of "sultans with long pipes, swooning under arbors in the arms of dancing girls . . . tigers . . . Tartar minarets on the horizon ... kneeling camels." But that was just the East that young Gustave, a dreamy, handsome, unpublished Norman author, a motherbound retarded adolescent of 27, went to see in 1849, the year before he began writing his novel.

His rich young friend Maxime du Camp had wangled a government mission to photograph the temples of the Nile, then half buried in sand and almost unknown to the European public. Flaubert went along. The two were in Egypt for nine months. They saw the sights and visited the local celebrities, joined caravans of pilgrims and slaves. They sailed up and down the Nile, shaved their heads and wore tarbooshes, sat up late at night smoking long Turkish pipes and comparing their notes and observations. They kept diaries and wrote letters home--chaste and respectful ones to Mme. Flaubert, wildly lubricious ones to a poor sex-starved friend named Bouilhet--and later Du Camp wrote a book about their travels. Out of these materials Francis Steegmuller has translated excerpts and strung them together with brief comments of his own to make a lively and intermittently hilarious narrative of a gawky young genius stumbling through the land of his dreams.

Flaubert's first sight of Egypt, as he wrote his mother, came "through, or rather in, a glowing light that was like melted silver on the sea." For all those months he remained plunged in a world of vivid color impressions: black earth, purple desert, the bleached bird droppings of 4,000 years running down obelisks and colossi, the deliriously blue sky. The official object of their expedition left him quite cold: he uttered a cry of conventional ecstasy at the first sight of the Sphinx and its "terrifying stare," but as for the temples, they "bore me profoundly." The living panorama of the voyage, however, made all his senses tingle with excitement. He responded to everything strange and savage and grotesque. Naked Coptic monks swam out to the young Frenchman's boat to beg for baksheesh and swam back with coins between their teeth. Stray cows poked their noses into ruins that Du Camp was conscientiously measuring. It was fun to discuss theology with prelates of obscure religions, or the technique of the bastinado with corrupt judges (it takes three months for the flesh of the rump to heal after 500 blows; feet never heal at all). Indiscriminate sex was even greater fun for the young men, though the reader may be slightly bemused by the amount of it included in the book. Flaubert's fleshly encounters--totally devoid of personal communication--satisfied him far more than what he got from the elderly literary nymphs he took for his mistresses back in France.

Apple-Shaped. All the while, under this gaudily and rather unprepos-sessingly romantic Flaubert, another Flaubert was straining to break out --the pointed, pitiless observer of reality whose ambition was to clear away the vapors of the romantic novel in the cold clear rays of le mot juste. Here he is, describing a dancing girl named Kuchuk as she begins her writhings: "A tall splendid creature . . . When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges . . . heavy shoulders, full apple-shaped breasts . . . She has one upper incisor, right, which is beginning to go bad."

That tarnished incisor was the herald of a literary revolution: the precise, unexpected, vivifying detail added to the general statement, which was to be the mark of serious fiction for the next century. While Flaubert was reveling in the exotic surroundings, he was mulling over a novel about life back in humdrum Normandy, where he knew the people and spoke the language. Accord ing to Du Camp (and Steegmuller tends to believe him) it was on a barren hill overlooking the Second Cataract of the Nile that he cried: "Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary."

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