The rake of Rouen

April 15, 2006 | In the spring of 1877, a young Henry James wangled an invitation to a regular Sunday literary gathering at an apartment on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. Although such luminaries as George Sand, Guy de Maupassant and Ivan Turgenev were among those in raucous attendance, James was most impressed by the salon's host. "Flaubert was huge and diffident, but florid too and resonant, and my main remembrance is of a conception of courtesy in him, an accessibility to the human relation, that only wanted to be sure of the way taken or to take." Readers who only know Flaubert through the cool, Olympian prose of "Madame Bovary" will be surprised and perhaps even distrustful of this description, with its suggestions of amiable grossness and bumbling insecurity. Readers of Frederick Brown's remarkable new book, however, will understand that James' description is spot on. It has been a long time since so evocative and revelatory a literary biography has come down the pike, one that brings an iconic author so grittily to life. Flaubert's literary stance might have been cache ta vie (hide your life), but after Brown is done with him, it is hard to imagine that anything about this extravagant, exacting, genial and very human author remains masked from our view.

This sort of exposition is particularly useful in the case of Flaubert, who has always been a high-calorie enigma wrapped in a delicate crust of mystery. Born into an eminently bourgeois provincial family, he fought a lifelong battle against his background while never moving out of his parents' house. Author of perhaps the most precisely realistic novel of its time, he was also capable of the Romantic flights of fancy contained in "Salambo" or the heady, crypto-religious philosophizing of "The Temptation of Saint Anthony." Creator of Emma Bovary, the most evocative of all female characters, he never married, and lived with his mother until her death. Supremely radical in his approach to literature, he turned his back on the liberal politics underlying the two revolutions of his lifetime, choosing instead to ally himself with the circle of the reactionary Louis Napoleon. As Brown observes, he was a man "whose sensibility perched at extremes of enchantment with both the material world and platonism, glorifying unruly, sociopathic, large-lunged genius or fussing over stylistic minutiae as obsessively as a Byzantine grammarian."

Flaubert was born in 1821 into a family preeminent among the "rich, inbred bourgeoisie" of Rouen, a market city Brown describes as encased in a permanently "malodorous penumbra." It was a deeply conservative time. France, still reeling from the Revolution and Napoleon, was ruled by the regime of the pious Charles X, "which strove to promote the 're-Christianization' of France." Because his father, Achille-Cléophas, was a doctor, young Flaubert's relationship with bourgeois propriety was undercut from an early age by an awareness of life's darker side. "Unlike other children of privilege, Gustave, born and bred in a city hospital, was exposed from the first to life's crueler dispensations." His education focused heavily on Latin, the language of the Catholic Church and the ruling classes, and there was little doubt that the gifted student was headed toward a career in law and a place among the nation's triumphantly conservative bourgeosie. In response to these oppressive expectations, Flaubert and his clever, rebellious friend Alfred Le Poittevin began to create stories featuring an alter-ego known as "The Kid," a scatological, witty forebear of Ubu and Rimbaud who provided a release valve for the social and sexual pressures building up in the young novelist. With The Kid, Flaubert was able to épater les bourgeois, to "ennoble the gutter and desecrate the temple." The author who would two decades later stand trial for outraging public morals was born.

After a tour of southern France and Corsica, notable for Flaubert's sexual initiation with an older woman in a Marseille hotel, young Gustave began his dreaded legal studies in Paris. Although he somehow managed to complete the course, it only served to confirm his growing belief that he was destined to pursue a career in literature. His final deliverance from a life at the bar came just after his final examinations, when he suffered the first of the epileptic seizures that were to plague him for the rest of his life. This only strengthened his artistic resolve. As with Proust, "sickness offered the possibility of a life in art" for the budding writer.

He soon began work on the first draft of his semiautobiographical novel "A Sentimental Education," though this early version would only vaguely resemble the novel it was to become two decades later. After the untimely deaths of his father and beloved sister, he started "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," even as the events of the 1848 revolution swirled around him. This, too, was left in raw form, and would not be completed and published for another quarter-decade. Although he was pushing 30, Flaubert appeared in no rush to make his name in the frantic Parisian literary scene.

Instead, he embarked on an epic grand tour of Egypt, the Middle East, Greece and Italy with his dear friend Maxime Du Camp. Brown's biography is absolutely riveting as it describes this journey, which combined a prolonged tutorial on the Oriental and classical worlds with "a saga of fornication" that would make even the most die-hard spring-break aficionado blanch. It was as if Flaubert and Du Camp, like so many other repressed 19th century affluent white boys, "had dropped anchor in a dreamworld innocent of moral constraints upon the imagination and of the taxonomical partitions segregating high culture from low in Europe." Indeed, "to judge by Flaubert's notes, no whorehouse between Cairo and Nubia was so low that they wouldn't stoop to enter it. On all fours they crawled into a thatched hut no more than chest high for sex with a belle laide whose furniture consisted of a straw mat and a dim lamp ... on hands and knees they crawled again at Siut, to lie in an even smaller, dimmer hut beside the Nile with a fifteen-year-old girl whom Flaubert found clever and winsome." This priapic tourism culminated with Flaubert's encounter with a legendary courtesan named Kuchiuk-Hanem. "With the deep blue sky as a backdrop, she looked splendid in her striped pink silk trousers and gauzy purple blouse -- a wide-shouldered, bosomy, coffee-colored Syrian with wiry black hair and kohl-lined eyes." After 20 months of this strenuous rutting, it is hardly surprising that Flaubert returned to France ready to settle down to his desk. Within a year, he began work on "Madame Bovary."

Next page: Flaubert's motto: "Live like a bourgeois but think like a demigod"