Review: Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait by Francis Steegmuller

 

Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait by Francis Steegmuller

(First published 1939)

It’s been a long time since I read Madame Bovary but on finishing this enthralling story of the creation and publication of the novel, I can't wait to return to it. Re-published by New York Review of Books Classics, Francis Steegmuller’s biography charts the decade in which Flaubert made an abortive attempt at a first novel, embarked on a grand tour of Egypt and surrounding countries and then wrote his most famous book. Much of A Double Portrait comprises of letters from Flaubert to various important correspondents such as his wayward lover and muse, Louise Collet (who became a model for Madame Bovary herself) and his close friends, Alfred, Maxime du Camp and Louis Bouilhet.

Friendship is at the heart of this story with Flaubert’s friends proving to be essential guides on his route to ultimate success and he helping them in kind. After he completes his first novel, The Temptation of St Anthony, his three closest confidantes condemn it out of hand as a total failure, and urge him to write instead about reality as he knew it, and to pare back the rich imagery. Though initially depressed by their response, once he returns from the east, Flaubert gets to work on three new ‘realist’ stories, before deciding to stick with the one inspired by a recent case of an adulterous woman in his native Normandy. 

As he writes Madame Flaubert in his quiet home town of Croiset, Flaubert receives weekly visits from Louis Bouilhet, an exacting critic who drives Flaubert to greater heights. Flaubert later helps Bouilhet to attain success as a playwright by coaching him in how to flatter and coax the various grandees of the Parisian theatre scene. 

Prone to melodrama, Flaubert is often comically excessive, though the scheming and selfish Louise is perhaps the greatest source of comedy in the book. At one point, she describes habitual garlic-eater Bouilhet as smelling ‘like a whole coachload of Southerners’. 

After five years of doubt and exasperation, it’s hard not to feel happy for Flaubert when Madame Bovary is finally published to instant acclaim and commercial success in his friend Maxime's literary magazine in October 1856. His aim had been to create a ‘thunderclap’ and such was the noise that the novel created, it was still ringing in the author’s ears right up until his death in 1880, overshadowing all of his subsequent novels. 

    Steegmuller's biography makes superb use of Flaubert's intense and effusive letters: of particular note are the incredibly sensuous descriptions of North Africa that he includes in his correspondence with his mother.