One Vast Anguish

I read Madame Bovary because of de Maupassant and I read de Maupassant because of Maugham. I was not disappointed in Bovary. I’m not sure if everything of Flaubert’s is like this but Bovary was everything I hoped it would be and some things I didn’t expect. Some observations.

Madame Bovary is a surprisingly modern novel in that it identifies a problem familiar to modern readers. It’s about an unfulfilled woman, a woman who yearns for some kind of actualization but, denied this, seeks it instead first in fantasy, in “emotional affairs” and then in outright physical adultery. You can argue all you like if Emma Bovary does this because she is stupid or cruel, fed by romantic notions, confusing material affluence with intellectual and spiritual achievement or if, as I see it, her time and place, 1800s France, left her no options – Emma’s choices are to become a nun or a wife, and the maker of a modest home at that. Her husband, Charles, spends his days as a country doctor traversing the land helping people and being a figure o f importance. Emma sews.

Not the kind of plot I usually dig, but what really kept me turning the pages is what usually keeps me turning pages: the language. My God, the language! I don’t know how Flaubert reads in his original French but in the English translation of Lowell Bair it is…

Not too beautiful. It’s clear, has a nice flow, is relatively simple, makes terrific use of observation, of detail, of what I think is called le mot juste, “the right word.” Isn’t that how it’s done, whether you’re Flaubert or anyone else, whether you’re producing capital-L Literature or advertising copy? At times it is plain, at times soaring, Flaubert simply puts it together in a way that I love. He describes Emma:

Accustomed to peaceful sights, she was drawn to scenes of contrast and unrest. She liked the sea only because of its storms, and verdure only when it was scattered among ruins. She had to be able to extract some kind of personal benefit from things, and she rejected as useless anything which did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic and she sought emotion, not landscapes.

Again, with just the right detail, he so perfectly captures her character and state of mind:

Her carnal desires, her longing for money and the melancholy of her unfulfilled passion merged into one vast anguish, and instead of trying to distract herself from it she concentrated her attention on it, stirring up her pain and always looking for a chance to suffer.

It’s also wonderfully erotic in that restrained 19th century way. This is among its sexiest passages:

The bed was a large mahogany one, shaped like a boat. Red silk curtains, curved at the bottom, hung down very low from the ceiling beside the flaring headboard; and there was nothing in the world so lovely as her dark hair and white skin against that crimson background when, in a gesture of modesty, she brought her bare arms together and hid her face in her hands.

I think I also didn’t expect the book to be so wise. It’s full of knowing observations about the world and the psychology of its characters.

What next? An investigation into Zola. Then, perhaps, more Flaubert? More de Maupassant surely? And who are Flaubert’s great–grandchildren? Who is continuing to turn out prose and stories like that? Maybe what’s on display are the principles of writing and storytelling that I enjoy in anyone’s hands.

When you know.

By Charlie Kondek

Often, as I encounter writers whose work is new to me, there's a moment when I know, based on the prose, that this is a writer I want to spend more time with. Sometimes I'm fooled by a novel's opening paragraphs into investing more of my attention into something that, ultimately, does not please me. But more often, as I have sometimes noted in this very blog, there are little "Aha!" moments of prose where I feel I realize, significantly, "This is the beginning of a relationship, a relationship between me and your words."

Such as been the case, for me, with Guy de Maupassant, whom I am discovering through a tattered Bantam Classic paperback of selected stories, Pierre and Jean (and others). I folded the corner on one passage that arrested my attention with the express intention of writing it down in this blog. This is from the delightful short story "Mouche."

Then one Saturday evening N'a-qu'un-Oeil brought us a thin, lively, vivacious little creature. She was always joking, and she had the comical nature that takes the place of wit in those who grow up in the streets of Paris. She was sweet, not pretty, a sketch of a woman in which there was a little of everything, one of those silhouettes that an artist draws on the tablecloth after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes makes them like that.

That last part, that "nature sometimes makes them like that" is, for me, like the little extra howl that Marvin Gaye puts into a lyric, that something that just sinks it. Another, from "Marroca."

Her mind was as simple as two and two make four, and her loud laugh took the place of thought.

Instinctively proud of her beauty, she had a strong aversion to covering her body with even the thinnest veil; she walked, ran and frolicked in my house with bold, unconscious immodesty. When she was finally sated with love, exhausted from frenzied cries and movement, she would sleep placidly in my arms while the overpowering heat covered her sun-darkened skin with little beads of sweat and brought forth, from under her upraised arms and from all her secret recesses, that musky smell which pleases the male.

"That musky smell which pleases the male," that's a detail, a something special, a something specific, that weights an already finely-balanced sword of a sentence with a penetrating point. It's written with inside knowledge but also authority, and it's pretty, and truthful.

If I have any complaints about de Maupassant at all, at this point, it's that the stories I've encountered so far are mostly fixated on the frenzied sex lives of the 19th-century French sophistes which, in repetition, comes to sound like a literary excuse for telling a dirty joke, a dressed up version of "did you hear the one about the traveling salesman who spent the night in the farmer's barn?" But that's a minor quibble, and the point is, I know. I know I'll be spending more time with Guy de Maupassant and his vivacious creations.