by Stuart Kelly
Hawthorne and Melville’s friendship cooled around 1856. “I have just about made up my mind to be annihilated,” Melville wrote. Although he lived for another thirty years, he ceased to publish fiction completely: after the brilliant, darkly ironic study in illusion and bad faith, The Confidence Man of 1857, Melville the novelist disappeared as completely as James Shinn Robertson. When he died, the unfinished manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor was found among his papers. The manuscript of Agatha was not.
Gustave Flaubert
{1821–1880}
HAD HE HAD his once-upon-a-time wish for obliteration, there would be very little to say about Gustave Flaubert. In 1851 he was thirty years old, living at home with his quarrelsome mother and a cupboard crammed with jottings, scribbles, and juvenilia. His only major previous attempt at a serious and sustained literary composition was a High Romantic phantasmagoria, La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, a work inspired by Brueghel’s painting, which he had seen in Genoa some years before. The anguished prose poem had baroqued like a shot plant from his initial note on the picture: “Naked woman lying down, Love in one corner.”
Flaubert read it to his friend Louis Bouilhet, whose critical response was succinct—“I think you ought to throw it in the fire and never mention it again.” He did not throw it in the fire.
Dispirited, he left, and listlessly trudged around North Africa, gazed at the face of the Sphinx and the navel of a stripper whose arms were adorned with Koranic tattoos. He meandered back to France, unsure, but in the knowledge he would have to do something. He should begin what Louis had suggested: “a down-to-earth subject, some little incident from bourgeois life.” Furthermore, Louis had prompted a plot—“the story of Delphine Delamare,” a local adulteress, driven to suicide. The idea had obviously pushed tentative roots into Gustave’s mind: at the summit of Djebel Abousir, above the seething Nile, he had exclaimed, “Eureka! I’m going to call her Emma Bovary!”
But back at home with his mother, it was going less well. Beginnings never did go well for Flaubert; the conception might have been sudden and exhilarating, but when pen reached paper, it bled an agonizing parturition. The corpulent author sprawled, prostrate, on his settle, taunted by blank pages. He indulged himself in torrents of tears and tantrums of masturbation. Writing disgusted him, it was like “having to drink up an ocean and then piss it all out again,” publishing was a horrific faux pas, “like letting someone see your bum.” At the height of this, he fantasized that the ideal would be “to be buried in an enormous tomb, with all my never-published manuscripts, like a savage buried alongside his horse.” Had he had his way, all of Flaubert’s works would be lost within some off-road sepulchre.
Eventually, finally, after five years of writing and revising, Madame Bovary: The Story of a Provincial Education (1857) appeared in La Revue de Paris, initially advertised as the work of one Monsieur G. Faubert. The editor, his erstwhile friend Maxime Du Camp, had required further cuts. Even so, the printed version was sprinkled with demure dashes to protect easily offended eyes from gutter words. These absences were material evidence in its eventual trial, where the wily defending lawyer, Sénard, insisted that the considerate blanks had merely inflamed the suspicions of the dirty-minded prosecution, who obviously knew far worse words than the blanks suppressed.
The scandale ensured healthy sales. The reclusive, overweight de Sade aficionado had commenced a career that would take him even as far as being welcomed into the bosom of the imperial family. Madame Bovary was followed by a Carthaginian orgy, Salammbô (1862), the “moral history of . . . my generation”; L’Education sentimentale (1867), which the ever-helpful Du Camp thought should rightly be called Mediocrities;the thrice-revised Saint-Antoine (1874), and the late, luminous Trois contes (1877). A relatively slight corpus from a self-confessed behemoth. But there were other writings, planned novels, aborted projects, unfinished epics. . . .
Flaubert had written since infancy. He had colored in an illustrated copy of Don Quixote. He had demanded his nursemaid take dictation. While he was still in school, family friends gathered some of his youthful works, including a comedy entitled The Miser, an elegy on a local dog, and a treatise replete with puerile mischief, The Splendid Explanation of the Famous Constipation, and bound them in a volume. As a student, he had written to a schoolteacher, claiming he was working on three stories, a lifetime before the appearance of the Trois contes. At the same time as he was struck by the nightmare vision of Brueghel’s painting, he was sketching a version of Don Juan.
Flaubert was notorious for hoarding his manuscripts, unable to discard the slightest inked scrap. We know that in 1871, with the Prussian army sweeping across France, a wary Flaubert buried a box full of letters—and, perhaps, other papers?—in his garden. Did it also contain more on his proposed satire on socialism, or the working drafts of Harel-Bey, his novel on the contemporary Orient, where the Europeans degenerated as the Arabs improved? The year after his death, the house at Croisset was demolished. The box, as far as anyone knows, remained beneath the soil. As one biographer speculates, a treasure trove of Flaubertiana might lie beneath the concrete dockland development of Rouen.
More tantalizingly, he took copious notes for a novel on French society under the Second Empire, whose highest echelons had embraced him so wholeheartedly. The work was schemed out after the political upheavals of 1870–71, and the extant remarks reveal a skewed hindsight: Babylon is mapped on a decaying Paris. The planned work would be a counterpart to his equally dyspeptic L’Education sentimentale, a tale that would expose “the great lie that we lived by,” a novel teeming with “a fake army, fake politics, fake literature, fake credit and even fake whores.” If the impersonal psychology of Madame Bovary heralded Modernism, would the unwritten Second Empire novel, replete with illusion and delusion, have intimated what came after? Another work would certainly be claimed to do just that.
Bouvard et Pécuchet occupied most of the remainder of Flaubert’s life: a bittersweet, encyclopedic, ultimately unfinished, and potentially impossible-to-finish book. Two clerks, with a comfortable income, run through the gamut of human knowledge. Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues catalogued the inanity of bourgeois opinion in all its various forms. In Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert gave his triumphant celebration of the manic compulsion to observe the world.
The two fictional obsessives and guileless eccentrics attempt to taxonomize the universe, much as the eighteenth-century philosophes had done. Like a frock-coated double act, they are unraveled at every turn, unable to discern the distinction between an old wives’ tale masquerading as wisdom and the proverbial pearl.
Flaubert himself abandoned and restarted the work constantly, and read over 1,500 books researching it. The work, he claimed, was like “trying to put the ocean into a bottle.” Was it a quixotic venture from the outset? Perhaps, although he was prone to begin each venture with a fathomless fear of its conclusion: as he hobbled through the opening chapters of L’Education sentimentale, he had griped it was as difficult as “fitting the sea into a carafe.” In note form, Flaubert imagined one possible ending: having exhausted every field of human knowledge, the two former copyists joyfully purchase “register and instruments, erasers, sandarach, etc.,” and order the construction of a double-sided desk. They return to being clerks, having rid themselves of the terrible “desire for concluding.” Tentatively, they even attempt to make amends to Mélie, the young woman embroiled in their fantastical schemes.
Flaubert may have declared, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” but he never started the novel that might have touched on the dark secret of his own life. He described La Spirale as “a large fantastical metaphysical loudmouth novel” which advanced the proposition that “happiness is in the imagination”—a strange elision: did he mean that true happiness is achieved, in Romantic-poet style, through an act of imagination? Or that all happiness is a mere figment of the fancy? Although the initial impetus toward the novel was his reading of Dante’s Inferno in 18
52 and the vagaries of his relationship with the flighty and none too faithful Louise Colet, its wellspring was buried deeper and earlier in himself.
During his early twenties, while traveling home with his more respectable brother Achille, Flaubert suffered a debilitating and inexplicable attack. It seemed to be sparked by the complex relationship between a fixed light in a distant inn and the swinging lantern on an oncoming carriage. These points created an indeterminate triangulation with something in his mind. The event caused a psychic dislocation, as if trying to focus on the shapes wrenched the brain’s equivalent of a muscle. As a child he had faded and phased out of conversations; this was more serious. It was a “golden fire,” an “irruption of memory,” a “yellow cloud,” “a thousand fireworks,” “Bengal lights.” He collapsed, frothed at the mouth, babbled. In retrospect, it seems likely that Flaubert suffered from some form of epilepsy.
La Spirale was “a novel about madness, or rather about the way in which you go mad.” Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the novelist’s father, had founded the Rouen Hospital, and the young Gustave had witnessed autopsies and operations, wandered among the imbeciles and the insane. He, more than many, had the material from which to construct a scientifically accurate fiction on illness. But, as he said, “it is a subject that frightens me.”
La Spirale remained locked in Flaubert’s body, never to be manifested on the page. Corruption, insanity, a foreboding that these knots and flaws were not only in the grain of the self, but striated through society, traumas walking abroad: Flaubert did not dare embark on such an investigation. How could he? When his cult of authorial impersonality demanded that the author must love, fight, and drink without being a lover, soldier, or drunk—under such strictures, how could the tortured elucidate torment? In the hateful hiatus between each completed work and the dreaded embarkation on another, the idea glimmered, taunted, and was deferred. “I shall have to wait until I am far enough away from those experiences,” he wrote. He never did acquire such distance.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
{1821–1881}
“LIKE A RAT, slithering along in hate” was D. H. Lawrence’s verdict on the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Hatred did indeed motivate the author: hatred of socialists, anarchists, the corrupt aristocracy, the feckless peasants, Germans, Jews, the French (“they make me sick”), himself, the gaming tables of Baden-Baden, the “Baal” of London, Turgenev, publishers, critics, the complacent, and the radicals. “Let the nihilists and Westerners scream that I am a reactionary!” he boasted in the 1870s.
Yet this was the man who, in 1849, had stood before a firing squad, fully expecting to be shot for sedition. The sentence was commuted to four years’ imprisonment in Siberia, followed by four years as a private soldier: the whole ritual of blindfolding and waiting was part of an elaborate state ritual designed to bring the condemned to the brink of execution, before the tsar’s benevolence exiled them to the wastes of Omsk.
At the time of the capital-punishment charade, Dostoyevsky was a minor, but not unimportant, writer. His debut work, Poor Folk (1846), had caused quite a stir. The poet Nikolai Nekrasov had read the manuscript, and dashed to see the eminent critic Vissarion Belinsky, whose imprimatur guaranteed a book’s success. Nekrasov lauded the appearance of “a new Gogol,” to which Belinsky retorted, “Gogols sprout like mushrooms in your imagination.” The arch cultural arbiter, however, was won over, and praised the young novelist who had shown the garret-dwelling underclass to the pampered bourgeoisie, saying, “These men too are your brothers.”
Belinsky was to be tangentially responsible for Dostoyevsky’s Siberian incarceration. In 1847, the increasingly unstable Nikolai Gogol had shocked his friends and admirers by publishing an almost lunatic justification of tsarist autarchy, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Belinsky had responded with the so-called Gogol letter, condemning it as an “inflated and sluttish hullabaloo of words and phrases.” The censors acted quickly, and it became a crime to distribute the “felonious missive.”
Dostoyevsky was, at this juncture in his life, an ardent acolyte of Belinsky’s socialism and an uncommitted observer of his atheism; he was also involved with the Fourierist “Petrashevsky circle.” He was arrested, charged with “orally disseminating” and “failing to report the dissemination of” Belinsky’s letter. In the harsh conditions of his penal sentence in Siberia, Dostoyevsky’s views took a swerve similar to Gogol’s. He recanted his former allegiances, and excoriated his former friends. Belinsky was a “dung beetle . . . the shit,” “the most stinking, stupid and shameful phenomenon in Russian life.” It was this new, ultraconservative Dostoyevsky that would go on to write Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Devils (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
After his release, Dostoyevsky’s attempts to reenter literary life trapped him in a spiraling morass of debts and creditors. With his brother, Mikhail, he started a magazine, Vremya (Time), which serialized the novelization of his Siberian experience, Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Arguments with the censors forced the closure of Vremya, and the brothers started another journal, Epokha (Epoch). The death of Mikhail in 1864 not only left the periodical without a safe pair of financial hands, it left his brother with the responsibility for supporting Mikhail’s wife and children as well. Despite a grant from the Society for Assisting Needy Authors and Scholars, Dostoyevsky became entrapped by the unprincipled publisher Stellovsky, who had bought up his outstanding IOUs and strong-armed him into a decidedly inequitable contract.
Stellovsky had demanded a new work of at least 160 pages, by November 1866, which if not delivered would result in the forfeiture of copyrights on all writings past, present, and future. Dostoyevsky did not wish to hand over his work in progress, Crime and Punishment, and engaged a secretary to take dictation of what would become The Gambler for Stellovsky. At the same time, he was attempting to raise sufficient funds to quit Russia, and was consequently hawking a new novel, The Drunkards, around the editors of Homeland Notes and The Russian Herald, with a price tag of three thousand roubles. Neither was interested. Perhaps the meager conditions of the Siberian camp had taught Dostoyevsky how to cannibalize and recycle even ideas. The Drunkards, and its antihero Marmeladov, became incorporated into Crime and Punishment. As he fell in love with his stenographer Anna, and completed both The Gambler and Crime and Punishment, he prepared to escape with her from St. Petersburg.
Their married life in Continental Europe bounced from city to city like a roulette ball jumping the numbers. Apart from working on an essay on Belinsky, which never saw the light of day, Dostoyevsky plotted continually for a grand novel that would settle scores with his enemies and his former selves. In 1868 it was called Atheism, about a forty-five-year-old civil servant who loses his faith in God. “He gets mixed up with the younger generation, the atheists, Slavophils, and Europeans, Russian religious fanatics, monks and priests; gets deeply involved, among others, with a Jesuit propagandist, a Pole; sinks as low as the sect of flagellants and in the end—regains his faith in Christ as well as in Russia,” he wrote to the poet A. N. Maykov. “For God’s sake don’t tell anyone about it: so far as I am concerned, I am going to write this last novel if it kills me.” Elements of Atheism were eventually grafted into the character of Stavrogin in The Devils. But, he told his niece, he could not write Atheism in Europe.
By 1870 the masterpiece was to be called The Life of a Great Sinner, and would be “as long as War and Peace.” Dostoyevsky conceived of the work in three, then five interrelated but discrete novellas. The sinner was to be an illegitimate child, brought up by grandparents, whose noble family was “degenerate to the point of swinishness.” He detests the moral aberration of his kin, and is drawn to two individuals: a beatific crippled girl called Katya, whom he forces to worship him, and a family retainer, Kulikov, a member of the self-whipping Khristy sect. The first volume ended with the “wolf-child, nihilist” murdering a notorious brigand.
The second volum
e, after his confession, was set in a monastery school. There, the sinner befriends Albert, with whom he desecrates icons but whom he beats for blaspheming, and the debauched Lambert, whom Dostoyevsky scavenged into A Raw Youth (1875), as well as being influenced by a character based on the Russian mystic Tikhon Zadonsky, later transformed into Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov. The sinner would, by the last volumes, become an ascetic, be tempted by suicide, and be the founder of an orphanage.
The Life of a Great Sinner was variously renamed The Forties, A Russian Candide, A Book of Christ, and Disorder.
The whole idea of the novel is to show that universal disorder now reigns everywhere in society, in its affairs, in its leading ideas (which for that reason do not exist), in its convictions (which do not exist, either), in the disintegration of family life. If passionate convictions do exist, they are only destructive ones (socialism). There are no moral ideas left.
All these hypothetical novels would be synthesized into The Brothers Karamazov, a work as equally indebted to the falsely convicted parricide Dostoyevsky had met during his time in Siberia. Even that is an incomplete manifestation of the book he was trying to write.
The introduction to The Brothers Karamazov makes clear that we are learning the vast background, the inherited and acquired traits of a new kind of novelistic hero. “The trouble is,” he wrote,
that while I am dealing with one biography, I have two novels on my hands. The main novel is the second one—it deals with the activity of my hero in our own day . . . The action of the first novel, on the other hand, takes place thirteen years ago and is not really a novel but just a chapter out of my hero’s adolescence. It is quite impossible for me to dispense with the first novel because without it a great deal in the second novel would be unintelligible.
