The Letters of Gustave Flaubert? Jesse Must be Kidding. No, Jesse is not Kidding

Jesse Kornbluth

6 years ago

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Buy it on Amazon

The letters of Flaubert — so beyond boring, right? Ever been in a doomed romance? Then read on….

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Gustave Flaubert said, and ever since readers have imagined him as an intuitive artist who more or less channeled his legendary novel of a rural woman ruined by adultery. That is, however, exactly not the case — Flaubert worked like a demon, worrying over sentences as if a single error in cadence or word choice would condemn him to death. He was solitary, nocturnal, anti-social. “I want to live in a place where no one loves me or knows me, where the sound of my name causes only indifference,” he said.

Flaubert’s general idea was that if you were quiet and regular in your life, you could be wild and original in your work. He believed that this creative bliss — we’d call it being in a “zone” — was the best pleasure life can provide. He writes, “The burden of existence does not weigh on our shoulders when we are composing.” But like a lot of people who have ideas about life, he actually lived another way — and these letters are, in essence, a memoir of that untamed, unruly existence.

Students of literature and budding writers can find powerful insights about the craft of fiction in these pages, but that’s not why I’m commending them to you. For me, the heart of the book is a series of love letters. They take us so deeply into the mind and heart of a lover that it seems as if Flaubert has watched us fall in love and magically recorded all our thoughts. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here.]

The recipient of these historic letters was Louise Colet, a second-rate poet whose greatest talent was to annoy. Flaubert had recently watched his father and sister die. He was ill and celibate; she was beautiful and clearly available. Within days, they were lovers.

Colet lived in Paris; Flaubert lived in the country. Because of his dedication to his art, he was more interested in writing to her than seeing her, so he wrote. All in all, she received 200 letters from him. She was a groupie of sorts, so she saved them; her daughter needed money, so she sold them. And now, clever lovers can quietly crib from them.

We start with the brooding Flaubert:

I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton. As a result, joyful spectacles sadden me and sad ones affect me but little. I do too much inward weeping to shed outward tears — something read in a book moves me more than a real misfortune.

But soon comes the change:

You are the only woman to whom I have dared to try to give pleasure, the only one, perhaps to whom I have given it.

And then the nervous retreat:

Don’t you know that to love excessively brings bad luck to both? It’s like over-fondled children: they die young. Life is not made for that.

And then, again, surrender:

You would breathe love into a dead man. How can I not love you?

But the facts are what they are — in the first round of their affair, which lasted 18 months, Flaubert wrote Colet more than 100 letters, but spent less than six days with her. Eventually, he tired of the drama: “I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.” And he returned his attention to his work, which was then the composition of “Madame Bovary.”

“Writing this book I am like a man playing piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.” Boy, did I love reading that — and so will every other writer who undertakes the struggle of composition. That sentence (and there are hundreds just as quotable) makes me feel that Flaubert is not some remote giant. He’s a comrade.

In part, that’s the attraction of reading letters — they’re written in haste, for immediate consumption. But when the writer is a genius who feels deeply, we gain more than intimacy. Over the course of the 27 years of letters contained in Volume One of Francis Steegmuller’s exceptional translation, we meet a man who, again and again, touches a deep chord in us.

To get to know Flaubert in this way is to get to know ourselves better.

And, of course, to know Flaubert is this way is to gain access to great sentences we can adapt for our own romantic purposes.

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Previously published on The Head Butler.