A question of pace

Geoffrey Wall's brisk biography of Gustave Flaubert is out of sympathy with his sluggish subject

Flaubert: A Life
Geoffrey Wall
Faber £25, pp413

Geoffrey Wall is an academic and also a translator, whose version of Madame Bovary appeared in 1992. His new life of Gustave Flaubert, though, takes care not to get bogged down in the details. These days, even literary biography must aim for pace (a quality to which Flaubert assigned no particular priority). The result is an oddly mercurial account of a personality in which the saturnine element predominated.

Flaubert's idea that the writer should be invisible in his work both won and lost him readers - the refusal of moralising made Madame Bovary scandalous and made Sentimental Education seem inert. In a rather coy footnote, attached to Flaubert's doctrinaire statement that 'the poor hate the rich and the rich hate the poor', Wall implies that he ordinarily keeps his own ideas out of the text: 'The biographer would like to point out to his subject, in the relative privacy of a footnote, that the heroic compassion of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert might be a significant exception to the rule he has just expounded.' In fact, Wall is free with his opinions, and the championing of Flaubert's 'critical, loving, disappointed' father is a real feature of the book.

Wall sees in the father, a doctor who built up the fortune that Flaubert did so much to dissipate, a man whose mind 'was disturbed by invisible currents of pity and horror. The same tension, between explicit impersonality and unspoken compassion, animates the mature style of his son'.

Fathers, as Wall is quick to point out, are largely absent from Flaubert's fiction and no doubt he is right to imagine an Oedipal struggle. At one point, Dr Flaubert accidentally poured boiling water over his son's right hand: 'The unconscious meaning of his painful "mistake" is all too evident.'

Gustave's posthumous idealisation of his father Wall attributes to guilt: 'Perhaps, at some deeper level, the prodigal son had been the death of the father.' Flaubert certainly enjoyed the fruits of Oedipal victory, in the form of unending intimacy with his mother. Sometimes his dependence on her was a tactic he could use to keep other women at the distance he preferred, but their relationship undoubtedly had some of the inertia of a marriage.

Wall's literary judgments are sometimes acute, but they are always brisk and definite. Consequently they often feel untrue to Flaubert's sluggish temperament. For Wall, things are either one way or another, while in Flaubert's fiction clarity is not so easily come by. Describing Flaubert's story 'Passion et vertu', written when he was 15 or so, Wall observes that, 'just as in Madame Bovary, Flaubert twists his tale to make it a vindication of the heroine, destroyed by the dark power of romantic love'. Flaubert didn't start to write Bovary for another 15 years, and if he had wanted anything as simple as the vindication of his heroine he could have written a much simpler book.

Wall doesn't have a lot of time for La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the work on which Flaubert laboured longest. 'In terms of literary history, Saint Antoine sits in a dusty corner labelled "closet drama [nineteenth century]" alongside Goethe's Faust, Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and Hardy's The Dynasts.' It's not that the verdict is necessarily unfair, but that it is delivered at a point when Flaubert is still 25 years away from finishing his book. It makes his persistence seem futile rather than heroic.

Literary biographies set out to make writers' lives and their work illuminate each other, but what happens here is almost the opposite. By treating the talent as a force that was bound to burst out sooner or later, while the life consists largely of doldrums and drifting, Wall makes Flaubert seem more than ever like a stupid genius, in whom the artist and the man co-existed without intimacy.