No larger than life

Flaubert: A Life.

By Geoffrey Wall.

Faber and Faber; 432 pages; £25

IN 1861 Gustave Flaubert threw a dinner party to celebrate the progress he was making on his novel, “Salammbô”. The menu, he promised, would include “human flesh, brain of bourgeois and tigress clitorises sautéed in rhinoceros butter”. This was perfectly in keeping with his dissolute, bourgeois-baiting public persona. George Sand, who met him in 1863, asked whether he really deserved this reputation. Far from it, he candidly replied. “I have dreamed much and done very little.”

Flaubert was born in 1821, the second son of a surgeon and professor of clinical medicine in Rouen. To satisfy his parents' upwardly mobile ambitions, he enrolled to read law in Paris. This was a disaster from the start. “The law”, he whined, “leaves me in a state of moral castration which is almost inconceivable.” After failing his second-year exams, bad health—some sort of “nervous” condition, compounded by epilepsy—led him to abandon his studies altogether.

Flaubert returned to the family's stately home at Croisset, a riverside village near Rouen, to recover. Soon he was struck down by further misfortune. In 1846, his father died; the death of his sister Caroline followed in less than a year. These events marked a turning point in Flaubert's life. Thereafter he would devote himself exclusively to literature. Well, almost exclusively. It was also at this time that he met Louise Colet. Their affair dragged on for years. Flaubert, though, was determined not to be tied down. The only woman who ever had a firm grip on him was his domineering mother, whom he called “my girl”.

Geoffrey Wall, a lecturer at the University of York and a translator of “Madame Bovary”, has little to say here about Flaubert's writing itself. Only his letters are quoted at any length. Mr Wall remains focused on the life; yet in doing so he manages to cast a good deal of light on the work. He notes, for instance, Flaubert's fondness for reading out loud. An obsessive stylist, he maintained that there is no such thing as a synonym, only le mot juste. Nothing pleased him more than declaiming his own exquisitely turned sentences until he was blue in the face. “The champion of impersonality needed a good pair of lungs, romantically bellowing, to bring the realist novel into the world.”

Mr Wall zooms in on Flaubert's health problems, which included epilepsy, boils and syphilis. Jules and Edmond de Goncourt encountered him in his 40s and dashed off a bitchy pen-portrait: “Very tall, very broad, large bulging eyes, swollen eyelids, heavy cheeks, untidy drooping moustache, battered complexion with red blotches.” (The toffee-nosed Goncourts, Mr Wall explains, saw Flaubert as a gauche, loud-mouthed provincial; Flaubert in turn gave them the nickname, les bichons: the lapdogs or little darlings.)

Mr Wall convincingly traces Flaubert's fascination with the physiological, the grotesque and the cruel back to his early exposure to the world of hospitals, operating theatres and anatomy classes. The biography ends with a wonderfully comic scene at Flaubert's funeral. Too wide to fit in the grave, the great man's coffin had to be left “stuck at an angle, headfirst, and only half way into the earth”. Mr Wall's relentlessly chatty style may annoy some readers. Otherwise, he has written an engaging and perceptive life of one of the defining figures of modern literature.