'Flaubert' peels away writer's impersonality

Gustave Flaubert's famous cult of impersonality, the desire to create fictions without leaving on the page the slightest trace of the creator himself, has naturally served as a lure to biographers. Who in fact was this obsessively invisible author?

A number of biographies, Geoffrey Wall's being the latest, have shown that Flaubert had much to hide. The readers of "Madame Bovary" and "Sentimental Education" are fortunate that the author rigorously excluded himself, for the real Gustave Flaubert was in many ways a grossly unattractive person, physically and morally.

But if he kept himself out of the novels, he left behind, in his voluminous journals and letters, an immense paper trail of his actual life — one in which he is more censorious of himself than the most hostile biographer might be.

Flaubert is the greatest master of the French sentence ever to have lived, and he is all but unavoidable to modern novelists either as an example to be followed or as the very model of what not to do. The principal interest of his life, however, is in how literary talent of this magnitude could reside in a human envelope of such gross exterior, often tedious silliness, and stunted psycho-sexual maturity. Wall catalogues the "organized lechery" of brothels and, in between, the orgies of self-abuse.

Flaubert was almost nothing but a writer, and this from an astonishingly early age. Born into the family of a wealthy physician, he inherited a fortune that spared him the ennui of earning a living. Even the offer of making money on his books seemed to him at first distasteful.

He lived alone with his mother in a large country estate. The idea of marriage was repugnant. His famous affair with Louise Colet, a married woman, was a torment to both of them. Women for him were largely utensils, and his real emotional attachment, aside from that to his mother, was to two or three lifelong male friends.

It is not news that a continental gulf can often lie between the artist and the flesh-and-blood person, but it is worth noting that something of this split inheres in his great works. The artistic supremacy of "Madame Bovary" and "Sentimental Education" lies almost exclusively in the style. For all the interest that historians might find in the picture of the age, the actual characters and incidents of these works are little more than banal. That is why many astute readers, if they must read these books in some language other than Flaubert's French, cannot see what all the fuss is about.

No one can be sure of what it was that killed Flaubert, alone in his bedroom at Croisset. He was seriously overweight, afflicted at times with venereal disease, frequently covered with boils, and often clinically depressed. Most agree that it was probably the epilepsy from which he had long suffered.

He might have died from sheer disgust. His niece wished to have a cast made of the hand that had written the books, but it strikes me as emblematic of much in his life that no one could unclench the fist. The hand had only two modes: either it was holding a quill pen for hours in a debilitating struggle to find the single right French word, or it was clenched in revulsion against most of the French people of his day. The hand too seldom performed any other functions such as caressing or planting or building.

As a biographer, Wall is conscientious, encyclopedic and often exasperatingly tedious. Page after dutiful page seems to be paraphrase, summary, or actual translation of the journals and letters. He does offer valuable insights into how this or that person or incident found its way into the books.

If you want to know what Gustave Flaubert was up to during almost any given week between 1821 and 1880, this is the book for you.