Flaubert's Parrot

7 Cross Channel

Listen. Rattarattarattaratta. And then – shhh – over there. Fattafattafattafatta. And again. Rattarattarattaratta – fattafattafattafatta. A soft November swell has set the tables rattling metallically at one another across the bar. An insistent approach from a table close at hand; a pause while some unheard throb shifts across the boat; and then a softer reply from the other side. Call and response, call and response; like a pair of mechanical birds in a cage. Listen to the pattern: rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta. Continuity, stability, mutual reliance, it says; yet a change of wind or tide could end it all.

The curving windows at the stern are freckled with spray; through one of them you can make out a set of fat capstans and a listless macaroni of sodden rope. The seagulls have long since given up on this ferry. They cawed us out of Newhaven, had a look at the weather, noted the lack of sandwich packs on the rear promenade, and turned back. Who can blame them? They could have followed us the four hours to Dieppe in the hope of picking up trade on the way back; but that makes for a ten-hour day. By now they will be digging worms on some damp football pitch in Rottingdean.

Beneath the window is a bilingual rubbish bin with a spelling mistake. The top line says PAPIERS (how official the French sounds: ‘Driving licence! Identity card!’ it seems to command). The English translation underneath reads LITTERS. What a difference a single consonant makes. The first time Flaubert saw his name advertised – as the author of Madame Bovary, shortly to be serialised in the Revue de Paris – it was spelt Faubert. ‘If I make an appearance one day, it will be in full armour,’ had been his boast; but even in full armour the armpit and the groin are never completely protected. As he pointed out to Bouilhet, the Revue’s version of his name was only a letter away from an unwanted commercial pun: Faubet being the name of a grocer in the rue Richelieu, just opposite the Comédie-Française. ‘Even before I’ve appeared, they skin me alive.’

I like these out-of-season crossings. When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again. Or perhaps it’s just a way of admitting a preference for empty ferries.

There can’t be more than half a dozen people in the bar. One of them is stretched out on a banquette; the lulling rattle of the tables is coaxing its first snore from him. At this time of the year there are no school parties; the video games, disco and cinema are silent; even the barman chats.

This is the third time I’ve made the trip in a year. November, March, November. Just for a couple of nights in Dieppe: though I sometimes take the car and get down to Rouen. It’s not long, but it’s enough to make the change. It is a change. The light over the Channel, for instance, looks quite different from the French side: clearer, yet more volatile. The sky is a theatre of possibilities. I’m not romanticising. Go into the art galleries along the Normandy coast and you’ll see what the local painters liked to paint, over and over again: the view north. A strip of beach, the sea, and the eventful sky. English painters never did the same, clustering at Hastings or Margate or Eastbourne to gaze out at a grumpy, monotonous Channel.

I don’t just go for the light. I go for those things you forget about until you see them again. The way they butcher meat. The seriousness of their pharmacies. The behaviour of their children in restaurants. The road signs (France is the only country I know where drivers are warned about beetroot on the road: BETTERAVES, I once saw in a red warning triangle, with a picture of a car slipping out of control). Beaux-arts town halls. Wine-tasting in smelly chalk-caves by the side of the road. I could go on, but that’s enough, or I’ll soon be babbling about lime trees and pétanque and eating bread dipped in rough red wine – what they call la soupe à perroquet, parrot soup. Everyone has a private list, and those of other people quickly appear vain and sentimental. I read a list the other day headed ‘What I Like’. It went: ‘Salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay [would you read on?]… roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould…’ The list, which is by Roland Barthes, continues, as lists do. One item you approve, the next stirs irritation. After ‘Médoc wine’ and ‘having change’, Barthes approves of ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’. Good; fine; we’ll read on. What’s next? ‘Walking in sandals on the lanes of south-west France.’ It’s enough to make you drive all the way to south-west France and strew some beetroot on the lanes.

My list mentions pharmacies. They always seem more single-minded in France. They don’t stock beachballs or colour film or snorkelling equipment or burglar alarms. The assistants know what they are doing, and never try to sell you barley sugar on the way out. I find myself deferring to them as if they were consultants.

My wife and I once went into a pharmacie in Montauban and requested a packet of bandages. What was it for, they asked. Ellen tapped her heel, where the strap of a new pair of sandals had rubbed up a blister. The pharmacien came out from behind his counter, sat her down, removed her sandal with the tenderness of a foot-fetishist, examined her heel, cleaned it with a piece of gauze, stood up, turned to me gravely, as if there were something which really ought to be kept from my wife, and quietly explained, ‘That, Monsieur, is a blister.’ The spirit of Homais still reigns, I thought, as he sold us a packet of bandages.

The spirit of Homais: progress, rationalism, science, fraud. ‘We must march with the century’ are almost his first words; and he marches all the way to the Légion d’honneur. When Emma Bovary dies, her body is watched over by two people: the priest, and Homais the pharmacien. Representing the old orthodoxy and the new. It’s like some piece of nineteenth-century allegorical sculpture: Religion and Science Watching Together over the Body of Sin. From a painting by G. F. Watts. Except that both the cleric and the man of science manage to fall asleep over the body. United at first only by philosophic error, they quickly establish the deeper unity of joint snorers.

Flaubert didn’t believe in progress: especially not in moral progress, which is all that matters. The age he lived in was stupid; the new age, brought in by the Franco-Prussian war, would be even stupider. Of course some things would change: the spirit of Homais was winning. Soon everybody with a club foot would be entitled to a misconceived operation which would lead to an amputated leg; but what did that signify? The whole dream of democracy,’ he wrote, ‘is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.’

That line often makes people edgy. Isn’t it perfectly fair? Over the last hundred years the proletariat has schooled itself in the pretensions of the bourgeoisie; while the bourgeoisie, less confident of its ascendancy, has become more sly and deceitful. Is this progress? Study a packed cross-Channel ferry if you want to see a modern ship of fools. There they all are: working out the profit on their duty-free; having more drinks at the bar than they want; playing the fruit machines; aimlessly circling the deck; making up their minds how honest to be at customs; waiting for the next order from the ship’s crew as if the crossing of the Red Sea depended on it. I do not criticise, I merely observe; and I’m not sure what I would think if everyone lined the rail to admire the play of light on the water and started discussing Boudin. I am no different, by the way: I stock up on duty-free and await orders like the rest of them. My point is merely this: Flaubert was right.

The fat lorry-driver on the banquette is snoring like a pasha. I’ve fetched myself another whisky; I hope you don’t mind. Just getting braced to tell you about… what? about whom? Three stories contend within me. One about Flaubert, one about Ellen, one about myself. My own is the simplest of the three – it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence – and yet I find it the hardest to begin. My wife’s is more complicated, and more urgent; yet I resist that too. Keeping the best for last, as I was saying earlier? I don’t think so; rather the opposite, if anything. But by the time I tell you her story I want you to be prepared: that’s to say, I want you to have had enough of books, and parrots, and lost letters, and bears, and the opinions of Dr Enid Starkie, and even the opinions of Dr Geoffrey Braithwaite. Books are not life, however much we might prefer it if they were. Ellen’s is a true story; perhaps it is even the reason why I am telling you Flaubert’s story instead.

You expect something from me too, don’t you? It’s like that nowadays. People assume they own part of you, on no matter how small an acquaintance; while if you are reckless enough to write a book, this puts your bank account, your medical records, and the state of your marriage irrevocably into the public domain. Flaubert disapproved. ‘The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.’ For the religious, death destroys the body and liberates the spirit; for the artist, death destroys the personality and liberates the work. That’s the theory, anyway. Of course, it frequently goes wrong. Look what happened to Flaubert: a century after his death Sartre, like some brawny, desperate lifeguard, spent ten years beating on his chest and blowing into his mouth; ten years trying to yank him back to consciousness, just so that he could sit him up on the sands and tell him exactly what he thought of him.

And what do people think of him now? How do they think of him? As a bald man with a drooping moustache; as the hermit of Croisset, the man who said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’; as the incorrigible aesthete, the bourgeois bourgeoisophobe? Confident scraps of wisdom, hand-me-down summaries for those in a hurry. Flaubert would hardly have been surprised at the lazy rush to understand. It was an impulse out of which he made a whole book (or at least a whole appendix): the Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

At the simplest level, his Dictionary is a catalogue of clichés (DOG: Especially created to save its master’s life. A dog is man’s best friend) and cod definitions (CRAYFISH: Female of the lobster). Beyond this it’s a handbook of fake advice, both social (LIGHT: Always say Fiat lux! when lighting a candle) and aesthetic (RAILWAY STATIONS: Always go into ecstasies about them; cite them as models of architecture). At some times the manner is sly and teasing, at others so challengingly straight-faced that you find yourself half-believing it (MACARONI: When prepared in the Italian style, is served with the fingers). It reads like a confirmation present specially written by a malicious, rakehell uncle for a serious-minded adolescent with ambitions to get on in society. Study it carefully and you would never say anything wrong, while never getting anything right (HALBERD: When you see a heavy cloud, never fail to say: ‘It’s going to rain halberds.’ In Switzerland, all the men carry halberds. ABSINTHE: Extremely violent poison: a single glass and you’re dead. Always drunk by journalists while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouin).

Flaubert’s dictionary offers a course in irony: from entry to entry, you can see him applying it in various thicknesses, like a cross-Channel painter darkening the sky with another wash. It tempts me to write a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas about Gustave himself. Just a short one: a booby-trapped pocket guide; something straight-faced yet misleading. The received wisdom in pellet form, with some of the pellets poisoned. This is the attraction, and also the danger, of irony: the way it permits a writer to be seemingly absent from his work, yet in fact hintingly present. You can have your cake and eat it; the only trouble is, you get fat.

What might we say of Flaubert in this new Dictionary? We might set him down, perhaps, as a ‘bourgeois individualist’; yes, that sounds smug enough, dishonest enough. It’s a characterisation which always remains unshaken by the fact that Flaubert loathed the bourgeoisie. And how about ‘individualist’, or its equivalent? ‘In the ideal I have of Art, I think that one must not show one’s own, and that the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature. Man is nothing, the work of art everything… It would be very pleasant for me to say what I think and relieve Monsieur Gustave Flaubert’s feelings by means of such utterances; but what is the importance of the said gentleman?’

This demand for authorial absence ran deeper still. Some writers ostensibly agree with the principle, yet sneak in at the back door and cosh the reader with a highly personal style. The murder is perfectly executed, except that the baseball bat left at the scene of the crime is sticky with fingerprints. Flaubert is different. He believed in style; more than anyone. He worked doggedly for beauty, sonority, exactness; perfection – but never the monogrammed perfection of a writer like Wilde. Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought. The correct word, the true phrase, the perfect sentence are always ‘out there’ somewhere; the writer’s task is to locate them by whatever means he can. For some this means no more than a trip to the supermarket and a loading-up of the metal basket; for others it means being lost on a plain in Greece, in the dark, in snow, in the rain, and finding what you seek only by some rare trick such as barking like a dog.

In our pragmatic and knowing century we probably find such ambition a little provincial (well, Turgenev did call Flaubert naïve). We no longer believe that language and reality ‘match up’ so congruently – indeed, we probably think that words give birth to things as much as things give birth to words. But if we find Flaubert naïve or – more likely – unsuccessful, we shouldn’t patronise his seriousness or his bold loneliness. This was, after all, the century of Balzac and of Hugo, with orchidaceous Romanticism at one end of it and gnomic Symbolism at the other. Flaubert’s planned invisibility in a century of babbling personalities and shrieking styles might be characterised in one of two ways: as classical, or modern. Looking back to the seventeenth century, or forward to the late twentieth century. Contemporary critics who pompously reclassify all novels and plays and poems as texts – the author to the guillotine! – shouldn’t skip lightly over Flaubert. A century before them he was preparing texts and denying the significance of his own personality.

‘The author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.’ Of course, this has been keenly misread in our century. Look at Sartre and Camus. God is dead, they told us, and therefore so is the God-like novelist. Omniscience is impossible, man’s knowledge is partial, therefore the novel itself must be partial. That sounds not just splendid, but logical as well. But is it either? The novel, after all, didn’t arise when belief in God arose; nor, for that matter, is there much correlation between those novelists who believed most strongly in the omniscient narrator and those who believed most strongly in the omniscient creator. I cite George Eliot alongside Flaubert.

More to the point, the assumed divinity of the nineteenth-century novelist was only ever a technical device; and the partiality of the modern novelist is just as much a ploy. When a contemporary narrator hesitates, claims uncertainty, misunderstands, plays games and falls into error, does the reader in fact conclude that reality is being more authentically rendered? When the writer provides two different endings to his novel (why two? why not a hundred?), does the reader seriously imagine he is being ‘offered a choice’ and that the work is reflecting life’s variable outcomes? Such a ‘choice’ is never real, because the reader is obliged to consume both endings. In life, we make a decision – or a decision makes us – and we go one way; had we made a different decision (as I once told my wife; though I don’t think she was in a condition to appreciate my wisdom), we would have been elsewhere. The novel with two endings doesn’t reproduce this reality: it merely takes us down two diverging paths. It’s a form of cubism, I suppose. And that’s all right; but let’s not deceive ourselves about the artifice involved.

After all, if novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life’s possibilities, this is what they’d do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn’t select. That’s what I call offering the reader a choice of endings; but you may find me quite unreasonably literal-minded.

As for the hesitating narrator – look, I’m afraid you’ve run into one right now. It might be because I’m English. You’d guessed that, at least – that I’m English? I… I… Look at that seagull up there. I hadn’t spotted him before. Slipstreaming away, waiting for the bits of gristle from the sandwiches. Listen, I hope you won’t think this rude, but I really must take a turn on deck; it’s becoming quite stuffy in the bar here. Why don’t we meet on the boat back instead? The two o’clock ferry, Thursday? I’m sure I’ll feel more like it then. All right? What? No, you can’t come on deck with me. For God’s sake. Besides, I’m going to the lavatory first. I can’t have you following me in there, peering round from the next stall.

I apologise; I didn’t mean that. Two o’clock, in the bar, as the ferry sails? Oh, and one last word. The cheese shop in the Grande Rue: don’t miss it. I think the name’s Leroux. I suggest you get a Brillat-Savarin. You won’t get a good one in England unless you bring it back yourself. They’re kept too cold, or they have chemicals injected into them to delay the ripening, or something. That is, if you like cheese…

How do we seize the past? How do we seize the foreign past? We read, we learn, we ask, we remember, we are humble; and then a casual detail shifts everything. Flaubert was a giant; they all said so. He towered over everybody like a strapping Gallic chieftain. And yet he was only six feet tall: we have this on his own authority. Tall, but not gigantic; shorter than I am, in fact, and when I am in France I never find myself towering over people like a Gallic chieftain.

So Gustave was a six-foot giant, and the world shrinks just a little with that knowledge. The giants were not so tall (were the dwarfs therefore shorter too?). The fat men: were they less fat because they were smaller, and so you needed less stomach to appear fat; or were they more fat, because they developed the same stomachs, but had even less frame to support them? How can we know such trivial, crucial details? We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.

I have a small watercolour of Rouen on my wall by Arthur Frederick Payne (born Newarke, Leicester, 1831, working 1849–84). It shows the city from Bonsecours churchyard: the bridges, the spires, the river bending away past Croisset. It was painted on May 4th, 1856. Flaubert finished Madame Bovary on April 30th, 1856: there at Croisset, there where I can jab my finger, between two spreading and unknowing sploshes of watercolour. So near and yet so far. Is this history, then – a swift, confident amateur’s watercolour?

I’m not sure what I believe about the past. I just want to know if fat people were fatter then. And were mad people madder? There was a lunatic called Mirabeau in the Rouen asylum who was popular with doctors and medical students at the Hôtel-Dieu because of a particular talent: in exchange for a cup of coffee he would copulate on the dissecting table with a female corpse. (Does the cup of coffee make him more, or less, mad?) One day, however, Mirabeau was to prove a coward: Flaubert reports that he funked his task when faced with a woman who had been guillotined. No doubt they offered him two cups of coffee, extra sugar, a slug of cognac? (And does this prove him saner, or madder, this need for a face, however dead?)

Nowadays we aren’t allowed to use the word mad. What lunacy. The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words. Dead, I say, and dying, and mad, and adultery. I don’t say passed on, or slipping away, or terminal (oh, he’s terminal? Which one? Euston, St Pancras, the Gare St Lazare?), or personality disorder, or fooling around, bit on the side, well she’s away a lot visiting her sister. I say mad and adultery, that’s what I say. Mad has the right sound to it. It’s an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van. Terrible things are also ordinary. Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was ‘a most conventional way to rise above the conventional’.

Any history of adultery would doubtless quote Emma’s seduction in that careering cab: it’s probably the most famous act of infidelity in the whole of nineteenth-century fiction. Easy enough for the reader to imagine such a precisely described scene, and to get it right, you’d think. Yes indeed. But still easy enough to get it just a tiny bit wrong. I cite G. M. Musgrave, sketcher, traveller, memoirist, and vicar of Borden, Kent: author of The Parson, Pen and Pencil, or, Reminiscences and Illustrations of an Excursion to Paris, Tours, and Rouen, in the Summer of 1847; with a few Memoranda on French Farming (Richard Bentley, London, 1848) and of A Ramble Through Normandy, or, Scenes, Characters and Incidents in a Sketching Excursion Through Calvados (David Bogue, London, 1855). On page 522 of the latter work the Reverend Musgrave is visiting Rouen – ‘the Manchester of France’, he calls it – at a time when Flaubert is still flailing away at his Bovary. His account of the city includes the following aside:

So our view suddenly lurches: the famous seduction would have been even more cramped, and even less romantic, than we might previously have assumed. This piece of information is, as far as I am aware, hitherto unrecorded in the extensive annotations which have been inflicted on the novel; and I herewith offer it in a spirit of humility for use by professional scholars.

The tall, the fat, the mad. And then there are the colours. When he was researching for Madame Bovary, Flaubert spent a whole afternoon examining the countryside through pieces of coloured glass. Would he have seen what we now see? Presumably. But what about this: in 1853, at Trouville, he watched the sun go down over the sea, and declared that it resembled a large disc of redcurrant jam. Vivid enough. But was redcurrant jam the same colour in Normandy in 1853 as it is now? (Would any pots of it have survived, so that we could check? And how would we know the colour had remained the same in the intervening years?) It’s the sort of thing you fret about. I decided to write to the Grocers’ Company about the matter. Unlike some of my other correspondents, they replied promptly. They were also reassuring: redcurrant jam is one of the purest jams, they said, and though an 1853 Rouennais pot might not have been quite so clear as a modern one because of the use of unrefined sugar, the colour would have been almost exactly the same. So at least that’s all right: now we can go ahead and confidently imagine the sunset. But you see what I mean? (As for my other questions: a pot of the jam could indeed have survived until now, but would almost certainly have turned brown, unless kept completely sealed in a dry, airy, pitch-dark room.)

The Reverend George M. Musgrave was a digressive but observant fellow. He was more than a little inclined to pomposity (‘I am bound to speak in terms of high eulogium on the subject of Rouen’s literary reputation’), but his fussiness over detail makes him a useful informant. He notes the French love of leeks and the French abhorrence of rain. He interrogates everyone: a Rouen merchant who amazes him by not having heard of mint sauce, and a canon of Evreux who informs him that in France the men read too much, while the women read next to nothing (O rarer still Emma Bovary!). While in Rouen he visits the Cimetière Monumental the year after Gustave’s father and sister were buried there, and approves its innovative policy of allowing families to buy freehold plots. Elsewhere, he investigates a fertiliser factory, the Bayeux tapestry, and the lunatic asylum at Caen where Beau Brummell died in 1840 (was Brummell mad? The attendants remembered him well: un bon enfant, they said, drank only barley water mixed with a very little wine).

Musgrave also went to the fair at Guibray, and there among the freak shows was The Largest Fat Boy in France: Aimable Jouvin, born at Herblay in 1840, now aged fourteen, admission a penny farthing. How fat was the fat boy? Our rambling sketcher didn’t, alas, go in himself and record the young phenomenon with his pencil; but he waited while a French cavalryman paid his penny farthing, entered the caravan, and emerged mouthing ‘some very choice Norman phraseology’. Though Musgrave did not bring himself to ask the soldier what he had seen, his impression was ‘that Aimable had not been fattened up to the mark of the visitor’s large expectations’.

At Caen Musgrave went to a regatta, where seven thousand spectators lined the dockside. Most of them were men, and most of these were peasants wearing their best blue blouses. The mass effect was of a light but most brilliant ultramarine. It was a particular, exact colour; Musgrave had seen it only once before, in a special department of the Bank of England where they incinerated notes which had been taken out of circulation. Banknote paper was then prepared with a colouring agent made from cobalt, silex, salt and potash: if you set light to a bundle of money, the cinder would take on the extraordinary tint that Musgrave saw on the Caen dockside. The colour of France.

As he travelled on, this colour and its cruder associates became more apparent. The men’s blouses and hose were blue; three-quarters of the women’s gowns were blue. The horses’ housings and collar-decorations were blue; so were the carts, the name-boards of the villages, the agricultural implements, wheelbarrows and water-butts. In many of the towns the houses displayed the cerulean hue, both inside and out. Musgrave found himself compelled to remark to a Frenchman he met that ‘there was more blue in his country than in any region of the world with which I was acquainted.’

We look at the sun through smoked glass; we must look at the past through coloured glass.

Thank you. Santé. You got your cheese, I hope? You won’t mind a word of advice? Eat it. Don’t put it in a plastic bag in the fridge and save it for visitors; before you know where you are it’ll have swollen to three times its size and smell like a chemical factory. You’ll open the bag and be putting your face into a bad marriage.

‘Giving the public details about oneself is a bourgeois temptation that I have always resisted’ (1879). But here goes. You know my name of course: Geoffrey Braithwaite. Don’t miss out the l or you’ll start turning me into a Parisian grocer. No; just my joke. Look. You know those personal advertisements in magazines like the New Statesman? I thought I might do it like that.

You see the problem. But seeks… Do I? What do I seek? A tender fortyish div or wid for companionship stroke marriage? No. Mature lady for country walks, occasional dining? No. Bisexual couple for gleesome threesomes? Certainly not. I always read those pining paragraphs in the back of magazines, though I never feel like replying; and I’ve just realised why. Because I don’t believe any of them. They aren’t lying – indeed, they’re all trying to be utterly sincere – but they aren’t telling the truth. The column distorts the way the advertisers describe themselves. No one would think of himself as an active non-smoker inclined to melancholy if that wasn’t encouraged, even demanded, by the form. Two conclusions: first, that you can’t define yourself directly, just by looking face-on into the mirror; and second, that Flaubert was, as always, right. Style does arise from subject-matter. Try as they might, those advertisers are always beaten down by the form; they are forced – even at the one time they need to be candidly personal – into an unwished impersonality.

You can see, at least, the colour of my eyes. Not as complicated as Emma Bovary’s, are they? But do they help you? They might mislead. I’m not being coy; I’m trying to be useful. Do you know the colour of Flaubert’s eyes? No, you don’t: for the simple reason that I suppressed it a few pages ago. I didn’t want you to be tempted by cheap conclusions. See how carefully I look after you. You don’t like it? I know you don’t like it. All right. Well, according to Du Camp, Gustave the Gallic chieftain, the six-foot giant with a voice like a trumpet, had ‘large eyes as grey as the sea’.

I was reading Mauriac the other day: the Mémoires intérieurs, written at the very end of his life. It’s the time when the final pellets of vanity accumulate into a cyst, when the self starts up its last pathetic murmur of ‘Remember me, remember me…’; it’s the time when the autobiographies get written, the last boasts are made, and the memories which no one else’s brain still holds are written down with a false idea of value.

But that’s just what Mauriac declines to do. He writes his ‘Mémoires’, but they aren’t his memoirs. We are spared the counting-games and spelling-bees of childhood, that first servant-girl in the humid attic, the canny uncle with metal teeth and a headful of stories – or whatever. Instead, Mauriac tells us about the books he’s read, the painters he’s liked, the plays he’s seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his ‘memoirs’ is like meeting a man on a train who says, ‘Don’t look at me, that’s misleading. If you want to know what I’m like, wait until we’re in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.’ You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.

Well, you know I’ve got brown eyes; make of that what you will. Six foot one; grey hair; good health. But what matters about me? Only what I know, what I believe, what I can tell you. Nothing much about my character matters. No, that’s not true. I’m honest, I’d better tell you that. I’m aiming to tell the truth; though mistakes are, I suppose, inevitable. And if I make them, at least I’m in good company. The Times, in its obituary column, May 10th, 1880, claims that Flaubert wrote a book called Bouvard et Peluchet, and that he ‘at first adopted his father’s profession – that of surgeon’. My Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition (the best, they say), suggests that Charles Bovary is a portrait of the novelist’s father. The author of this article, a certain ‘E.G.’, turns out to have been Edmund Gosse. I snorted a bit when I read that. I have a little less time for ‘Mr’ Gosse since my encounter with Ed Winterton.

I’m honest, I’m reliable. When I was a doctor I never killed a single patient, which is more of a boast than you might imagine. People trusted me; they kept coming back, at any rate. And I was good with the dying. I never got drunk – that is, I never got too drunk; I never wrote prescriptions for imaginary patients; I never made advances to women in my surgery. I sound like a plaster saint. I’m not.

No, I didn’t kill my wife. I might have known you’d think that. First you find out that she’s dead; then, a while later, I say that I never killed a single patient. Aha, who did you kill, then? The question no doubt appears logical. How easy it is to set off speculation. There was a man called Ledoux who maliciously claimed that Flaubert had committed suicide; he wasted a lot of people’s time. I’ll tell you about him later. But it all goes to prove my point: what knowledge is useful, what knowledge is true? Either I have to give you so much information about myself that you are forced to admit that I could no more have killed my wife than Flaubert could have committed suicide; or else I merely say, That’s all, that’s enough. No more. J’y suis, j’y reste.

I could play the Mauriac game, perhaps. Tell you how I brought myself up on Wells, Huxley and Shaw; how I prefer George Eliot and even Thackeray to Dickens; how I like Orwell, Hardy and Housman, and dislike the Auden-Spender-Isherwood crew (preaching socialism as a sideshoot of homosexual law reform); how I’m saving Virginia Woolf for when I’m dead. The younger fellows? Today’s fellows? Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realise that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time. I could go on at great length on all these topics; it would be very pleasant for me to say what I think and relieve Monsieur Geoffrey Braithwaite’s feelings by means of such utterances. But what is the importance of the said gentleman?

I’d rather play a different version. Some Italian once wrote that the critic secretly wants to kill the writer. Is that true? Up to a point. We all hate golden eggs. Bloody golden eggs again, you can hear the critics mutter as a good novelist produces yet another good novel; haven’t we had enough omelettes this year?

But if not that, then many critics would like to be dictators of literature, to regulate the past, and to set out with quiet authority the future direction of the art. This month, everyone must write about this; next month, nobody is allowed to write about that. So-and-so will not be reprinted until we say so. All copies of this seductively bad novel must be destroyed at once. (You think I am joking? In March 1983, the newspaper Libération urged that the French Minister for Women’s Rights should put on her Index for ‘public provocation to sexist hatred’ the following works: Pantagruel, Jude the Obscure, Baudelaire’s poems, all Kafka, The Snows of Kilimanjaro – and Madame Bovary.) Still, let’s play. I’ll go first.

1 There shall be no more novels in which a group of people, isolated by circumstances, revert to the ‘natural condition’ of man, become essential, poor, bare, forked creatures. All that may be written is one short story, the final one of the genre, the cork in the bottle. I’ll write it for you. A group of travellers are shipwrecked, or airwrecked, somewhere, no doubt on an island. One of them, a large, powerful, dislikeable man, has a gun. He forces all the others to live in a sandpit of their own digging. Every so often, he takes one of his prisoners out, shoots him or her, and eats the carcass. The food tastes good, and he grows fat. When he has shot and eaten his final prisoner, he begins to worry what he will do for food; but fortunately a seaplane arrives at this point and rescues him. He tells the world that he was the sole survivor of the original wreck, and that he has sustained himself by eating berries, leaves and roots. The world marvels at his fine physical condition, and a poster bearing his photograph is displayed in the windows of vegetarian food shops. He is never found out.

You see how easy it is to write, how much fun it is? That’s why I’d ban the genre.

2 There shall be no more novels about incest. No, not even ones in very bad taste.

3 No novels set in abattoirs. This is, I admit, a rather small genre at the moment; but I have recently noticed increasing use of the abattoir in short stories. It must be nipped in the bud.

4 There is to be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford or Cambridge, and a ten-year ban on other university fiction. No ban on fiction set in polytechnics (though no subsidy to encourage it). No ban on novels set in primary schools; a ten-year ban on secondary-school fiction. A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed). A partial ban on novels written in the historic present (again, one per author). A total ban on novels in which the main character is a journalist or a television presenter.

5 A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America. The intention is to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony. Ah, the propinquity of cheap life and expensive principles, of religion and banditry, of surprising honour and random cruelty. Ah, the daiquiri bird which incubates its eggs on the wing; ah, the fredonna tree whose roots grow at the tips of its branches, and whose fibres assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner; ah, the opera house now overgrown by jungle. Permit me to rap on the table and murmur ‘Pass!’ Novels set in the Arctic and the Antarctic will receive a development grant.

6a) No scenes in which carnal connection takes place between a human being and an animal. The woman and the porpoise, for instance, whose tender coupling symbolises a wider mending of those gossamer threads which formerly bound the world together in peaceable companionship. No, none of that.

b) No scenes in which carnal connection takes place between man and woman (porpoise-like, you might say) in the shower. My reasons are primarily aesthetic, but also medical.

7 No novels about small, hitherto forgotten wars in distant parts of the British Empire, in the painstaking course of which we learn, first, that the British are averagely wicked and, second, that war is very nasty indeed.

8 No novels in which the narrator, or any of the characters, is identified simply by an initial letter. Still they go on doing it!

9 There shall be no more novels which are really about other novels. No ‘modern versions’, reworkings, sequels or prequels. No imaginative completions of works left unfinished on their author’s death. Instead, every writer is to be issued with a sampler in coloured wools to hang over the fireplace. It reads: Knit Your Own Stuff.

10 There shall be a twenty-year ban on God; or rather, on the allegorical, metaphorical, allusive, offstage, imprecise and ambiguous uses of God. The bearded head gardener who is always tending the apple tree; the wise old sea-captain who never rushes to judgment; the character you’re not quite introduced to, but who is giving you a creepy feeling by Chapter Four… pack them off into storage, all of them. God is permitted only as a verifiable divinity who gets extremely cross at man’s transgressions.

So how do we seize the past? As it recedes, does it come into focus? Some think so. We know more, we discover extra documents, we use infra-red light to pierce erasures in the correspondence, and we are free of contemporary prejudice; so we understand better. Is that it? I wonder. Take Gustave’s sex-life. For years it was assumed that the bear of Croisset broke out of his bearishness solely with Louise Colet–‘The only sentimental episode of any importance in the life of Flaubert,’ Emile Faguet declared. But then Elisa Schlesinger is discovered – the bricked-up royal chamber in Gustave’s heart, the slow-burning fire, the adolescent passion never consummated. Next, more letters come into view, and the Egyptian journals. The life begins to reek of actresses; the bedding of Bouilhet is announced; Flaubert himself admits a taste for Cairo bath-house boys. At last we see the whole shape of his carnality; he is ambi-sexual, omni-experienced.

But not so fast. Sartre decrees that Gustave was never homosexual; merely passive and feminine in his psychology. The byplay with Bouilhet was just teasing, the outer edge of vivid male friendship: Gustave never committed a single homosexual act in all his life. He says he did, but that was boastful invention: Bouilhet asked for salacities from Cairo, and Flaubert provided them. (Are we convinced by this? Sartre accuses Flaubert of wishful thinking. Might we not accuse Sartre of the same? Wouldn’t he prefer Flaubert the trembling bourgeois, joking on the edge of a sin he fears to commit, rather than Flaubert the daredevil, the subversive indulger?) And in the meantime, we are also being encouraged to shift our view of Mme Schlesinger. Current belief among Flaubertistes is that the relationship was consummated after all: either in 1848 or, more probably, in the early months of 1843.

The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.

Isn’t the sea calmer than the other day? And heading north – the light that Boudin saw. What does this journey seem like to those who aren’t British – as they head towards the land of embarrassment and breakfast? Do they make nervous jokes about fog and porridge? Flaubert found London scaring; it was an unhealthy city, he declared, where it was impossible to find a pot-au-feu. On the other hand, Britain was the home of Shakespeare, clear thinking and political liberty, the land where Voltaire had been welcomed and to which Zola would flee.

Now what is it? First slum of Europe, one of our poets called it not long ago. First hypermarket of Europe might be more like it. Voltaire praised our attitude to commerce, and the lack of snobbery which allowed the younger sons of the gentry to become businessmen. Now the day-trippers arrive from Holland and Belgium, Germany and France, excited about the weakness of the pound and eager to get into Marks… Spencer. Commerce, Voltaire declared, was the base on which the greatness of our nation was built; now it’s all that keeps us from going bankrupt.

When I drive off the boat, I always have a desire to go through the Red Channel. I never have more than the permitted amount of duty-free goods; I’ve never imported plants, or dogs, or drugs, or uncooked meat, or firearms; and yet I constantly find myself wanting to turn the wheel and head for the Red Channel. It always feels like an admission of failure to come back from the Continent and have nothing to show for it. Would you read this, please, sir? Yes. Have you understood it, sir? Yes. Have you anything to declare? Yes, I’d like to declare a small case of French flu, a dangerous fondness for Flaubert, a childish delight in French road-signs, and a love of the light as you look north. Is there any duty to pay on any of these? There ought to be.

Oh, and I’ve got this cheese, too. A Brillat-Savarin. That fellow behind me has got one too. I told him you always had to declare your cheese at customs. Say cheese.

I hope you don’t think I’m being enigmatic, by the way. If I’m irritating, it’s probably because I’m embarrassed; I told you I don’t like the full face. But I really am trying to make things easier for you. Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all. Not writing a tune is easier than writing one. Not rhyming is easier than rhyming. I don’t mean art should be as clear as the instructions on a packet of seeds; I’m saying that you trust the mystifier more if you know he’s deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.

But what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses. Directness also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He’s looking away so that you can’t catch his eye; he’s also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.

Directness confuses. I told you my name: Geoffrey Braithwaite. Has that helped? A little; at least it’s better than ‘B’ or ‘G’ or ‘the man’ or ‘the amateur of cheeses’. And if you hadn’t seen me, what would you have deduced from the name? Middle-class professional man; solicitor perhaps; denizen of pine-and-heather country; pepper-and-salt tweeds; a moustache hinting – perhaps fraudulently – at a military past; a sensible wife; perhaps a little boating at weekends; more of a gin than a whisky man; and so on?

I am – was – a doctor, first-generation professional class; as you see, there’s no moustache, though I have the military past which men of my age couldn’t avoid; I live in Essex, most characterless and therefore most acceptable of the Home Counties; whisky, not gin; no tweed at all; and no boating. Near enough, and yet not near enough, you see. As for my wife, she was not sensible. That was one of the last words anyone would apply to her. They inject soft cheeses, as I said, to stop them ripening too quickly. But they always do ripen; it’s in their nature. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.

I was going to put my photograph in the front of the book. Not vanity; just trying to be helpful. But I’m afraid it was rather an old photograph, taken about ten years ago. I haven’t got a more recent one. That’s something you find: after a certain age, people stop photographing you. Or rather, they photograph you only on formal occasions: birthdays, weddings, Christmas. A flushed and jolly character raises his glass among friends and family – how real, how reliable is that evidence? What would the photos of my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary have revealed? Certainly not the truth; so perhaps it’s as well they were never taken.

Flaubert’s niece Caroline says that towards the end of his life he regretted not having had a wife and family. Her account is, however, rather spare. The two of them were walking by the Seine after a visit to some friends. ‘“They got it right,” he said to me, alluding to that household with its charming and honest children. “Yes,” he repeated to himself gravely, “they got it right.” I did not trouble his thoughts, but remained silent at his side. This walk was one of our last.’

I rather wish she had troubled his thoughts. Did he really mean it? Should we take the remark as more than the reflex perversity of a man who dreamed of Egypt while in Normandy, and of Normandy while in Egypt? Was he doing more than praise the particular talents of the family they had just visited? After all, had he wanted to praise the institution of marriage itself, he could have turned to his niece and regretted his solitary life by admitting, ‘You got it right.’ But he didn’t, of course; because she got it wrong. She married a weakling who turned into a bankrupt, and in helping save her husband she bankrupted her uncle. The case of Caroline is instructive – gloomily so to Flaubert.

Her own father had been as much of a weakling as her husband subsequently became; Gustave supplanted him. In her Souvenirs intimes Caroline recalls her uncle’s return from Egypt when she was a small girl: he arrives home unexpectedly one evening, wakes her, picks her up out of bed, bursts out laughing because her nightdress extends far below her feet, and plants great kisses on her cheeks. He has just come from outdoors: his moustache is cold, and damp with dew. She is frightened, and much relieved when he puts her down. What is this but a textbook account of the absent father’s alarming return to the household – the return from the war, from business, from abroad, from philandering, from danger?

He adored her. In London he carried her round the Great Exhibition; this time she was happy to be in his arms, safe from the frightening crowds. He taught her history: the story of Pelopidas and Epaminondas; he taught her geography, taking a shovel and pail of water into the garden, where he would build for her instructive peninsulas, islands, gulfs and promontories. She loved her childhood with him, and the memory of it survived the misfortunes of her adult life. In 1930, when she was eighty-four, Caroline met Willa Cather in Aix-les-Bains, and recalled the hours spent eighty years earlier on a rug in the corner of Gustave’s study: he working, she reading, in strict but proudly observed silence. ‘She liked to think, as she lay in her corner, that she was shut in a cage with some powerful wild animal, a tiger or a lion or a bear, who had devoured his keeper and would spring upon anyone else who opened his door, but with whom she was “quite safe and conceited”, as she said with a chuckle.’

But then the necessities of adulthood arrived. He advised her badly, and she married a weakling. She became a snob; she thought only of smart society; and finally she tried to turn her uncle out of the very house in which the most useful things she knew had been inserted into her brain.

Epaminondas was a Theban general, held to be living proof of all the virtues; he led a career of principled carnage, and founded the city of Megalopolis. As he lay dying, one of those present lamented his lack of issue. He replied, ‘I leave two children, Leuctra and Mantinea’ – the sites of his two most famous victories. Flaubert might have made a similar avowal — ‘I leave two children, Bouvard and Pécuchet’ – because his only child, the niece who became a daughter, had departed into disapproving adulthood. To her, and to her husband, he had become ‘the consumer’.

Gustave taught Caroline about literature. I quote her: ‘He considered no book dangerous that was well written.’ Move forward seventy years or so to a different household in another part of France. This time there is a bookish boy, a mother, and a friend of the mother’s called Mme Picard. The boy later wrote his memoirs; again, I quote: ‘Mme Picard’s opinion was that a child should be allowed to read everything. “No book can be dangerous if it is well written.” ’ The boy, aware of Mme Picard’s frequently expressed view, deliberately exploits her presence and asks his mother’s permission to read a particular and notorious novel. ‘But if my little darling reads books like that at his age,’ says the mother, ‘what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them out!’ he replies. It was one of the cleverest retorts of his childhood; it went down in family history, and it won him – or so we are left to assume – readership of the novel. The boy was Jean-Paul Sartre. The book was Madame Bovary.

Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry? An hour from the English coast and the clear sky disappears. Cloud and rain escort you back to where you belong. As the weather changes, the boat begins to roll a little, and the tables in the bar resume their metallic conversation. Rattarattarattaratta, fattafattafattafatta. Call and response, call and response. Now it sounds to me like the final stages of a marriage: two separated parties, screwed to their own particular pieces of floor, uttering routine chatter while the rain begins to fall. My wife… Not now, not now.

Pécuchet, during his geological investigations, speculates on what would happen if there were an earthquake beneath the English Channel. The water, he concludes, would rush out into the Atlantic; the coasts of England and France would totter, shift and reunite; the Channel would cease to exist. On hearing his friend’s predictions, Bouvard runs away in terror. For myself, I do not think we need to be quite so pessimistic.

You won’t forget about the cheese, will you? Don’t grow a chemical plant in your fridge. I didn’t ask if you were married. My compliments, or not, as the case may be.

I think I shall go through the Red Channel this time. I feel the need for some company. The Reverend Musgrave’s opinion was that French douaniers behaved like gentlemen, while English customs officers were ruffians. But I find them all quite sympathetic, if you treat them properly.