The intervention of someone who speaks in the first person singular, or even in the first person plural, can sometimes be even more surreptitious. In a work as objective as Madame Bovary, the first word is “we.” Who doesn’t remember poor Charles Bovary’s arrival at school? “We were in Study Hall, when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy . . . .”
But as soon as we leave the classroom, the novel begins its normal course in the third person, until the end.
Just as, at the beginning of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, a novel that will be narrated most of the time in the third person, another narrator appears (he won’t speak again until much later, and then only briefly): “Before describing the extraordinary events which took place so recently in our town, hitherto not remarkable for anything in particular. . . .”
This “our” acclimates the reader, making him practically a citizen of the town where the story will take place.
In an impersonal novel, sometimes a character will suddenly start to speak in the first person. You have the impression he must. And this doubtless adds a necessary touch of truth.
Memoirs and Confessions
Novels that claim to be close to autobiography, like those of Céline or Henry Miller, are often highly inventive. We have trouble believing Blaise Cendrars when he tells us, in The Astonished Man, about his love affair at the bottom of the Seine with the daughter of a deep sea diver. Marguerite Duras, to make a stronger impression on her readers, pretended that her Indochinese novel, The Lover, was about her life, whereas almost nothing in it is true.
Next to these false autobiographies are the true ones, which can be great and original literary creations. Michel Leiris’s Manhood, to name one.
The literary monuments that come to us as “memoirs” or “confessions” have a purpose far removed from a simple life story. They touch us almost despite the author, because of something extra he says when he lets loose. Saint Augustine’s goal was to edify. De Retz and Saint-Simon? Saint-Simon wanted to continue their political battles. Rousseau thought that in offering his own image, he advanced universal knowledge of humanity among his readers, even if the Confessions quickly turned into one last quarrel with his enemies. Likewise, in Monsieur Nicolas, Rétif de La Bretonne pretended to construct a work of science and unveil the human heart, whereas his delirious imagination led him to do just the opposite. In the case of these authors, private life can be found not only in the text but in the notes for scholarly editions, prepared by professors who’ve gone to the trouble to verify the most minute assertions, to identify the most insignificant characters, to learn the age of the writers’ lovers. . . . You discover that Chateaubriand fabulates more than Casanova.
Keys
When writers confess whatever they want about themselves, the choice is theirs. But when they write about others? Do they have the right to prey upon other peoples’ lives? We know the saying: “Any resemblance to persons . . . ,” a statement that proves nothing and has no legal value. “All the characters in this book are completely imagined, and Yonville-l’Abbaye itself does not exist”: Flaubert tells the lie without even blushing.
But today, a few kilometers down the road, signs invite tourists to visit Ry, “the land of Madame Bovary.” In Ry, they eliminated the cemetery around the church but kept two tombstones, that of Delphine Delamare, with its headstone in the form of a small pyramid, and that of her husband Eugène, a public health official. The day I went on my little pilgrimage, three or four adolescents were sitting on Eugène’s tomb. Since they were preventing me from reading the inscription, they got up, mumbling “you can’t even have a smoke in peace anymore. . . .”
Even if we possess the keys to Madame Bovary—Delphine Delamare, Louise Pradier, to name only a few—it doesn’t help us understand the novel. To concentrate on the sources is to misunderstand the very nature of literary creation. Unlike painters, novelists rarely aspire to create the exact portrait of this or that character. What they have in mind is a much more general subject: life. Of course they take their material where they find it. A thousand little details, borrowed from one person or another, are useful. It’s a little bit like inlaid furniture. No one can resist examining In Search of Lost Time and many other masterpieces under a microscope, looking for the slightest resemblance to people the author might have encountered. This teaches us nothing about the genius of the writer. Marcel Proust explains this very well in Time Regained: “The man of letters envies the painter, he would like to take notes and make sketches, but it is disastrous for him to do so. Yet when he writes, there is not a single gesture of his characters, not a tic of behavior, not a tone of voice which has not been supplied to his imagination by his memory; beneath the name of every character of his invention he can put the names of sixty characters that he has seen, one of whom has posed for the grimaces, another for the monocle, another for the fits of temper, another for the swaggering movement of the arm, etc.”
A gentleman, asked if he was the model for Albertine, replied modestly, deploying the rarefied historic past tense: “We were several.” [Nous fûmes plusieurs.]
In fact, Proust assures us, through all these infinite details the writer “recalls only what is general.” He wants to show a psychological truth, and he does it by putting one person’s neck onto another person’s shoulders. So what some call invasion of privacy is not committed out of malice or cruelty, but in order to find a larger truth about life beneath the particular detail.
Before Proust, George Sand claimed, “One has to have known a thousand persons in order to depict one.”
According to her, “In reality, people are so illogical, so filled with contrasts and incongruities, that the portrait of a real individual would be impossible and completely untenable in a work of art. . . . It is therefore nonsense to believe that an author wishes to provoke love or hate for this or that person by endowing fictional creations with traits taken from life; the least difference renders them conventional characters, and I maintain that, in literature, one cannot make a credible portrayal out of a real figure without plunging into enormous difficulties and going far beyond—toward either good or evil—the faults and attributes of the human being who served as the original.”
Despite everything, as Freud once said, “without a trace of unscrupulousness the job cannot be done.” Writers have to choose among literary conventions, the need for discretion, concerns about protecting their models—even the most minor ones—plus the esthetic standards that tell them their novel must be one way and not another.
If we writers didn’t give ourselves the right to mine our own lives and the lives of others, most of literature would not exist. Not the works of Rousseau nor Stendhal nor Flaubert nor Dostoyevsky nor Proust nor Faulkner nor Kafka. . . .
The annoying thing is that you never know how the models are going to react. Badly, most of the time.
“I have received five formal complaints, from persons about me, who say that I have unveiled their private lives,” writes Balzac. “I have very curious letters on the subject. It appears that there are as many Monsieurs de Mortsauf as there are angels at Clochegourde, and the angels are raining on me, but they are not white.”
Sometimes you expect the worst, and yet they’re happy. Or they don’t even recognize themselves and think you’ve caricatured someone else. Or they aren’t at all angry about what you feared, but about some other detail. Sometimes a reading turns into a drama. Take the sorrow of Robert de Montesquiou when he recognized himself in Charlus. Montesquiou was very different from Proust’s baron, if only in appearance. But he was the first to understand that Proust had gotten him just right. Even if Montesquiou had always avoided scandal and ruin, he realized that by condemning Charlus to sink into the depths of abjection, humiliation, and senility, Proust reached a truth that was truer than the facts. He knew that he would henceforth be Charlus for all eternity, and you might even say that this knowledge proved fatal. He confided in a friend, “I’ve taken to bed, sick over
the publication of the three volumes that have devastated me.”
The more people talked about In Search of Lost Time, the more upset he became. “Will I be reduced to calling myself Montesproust?” he asked Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre.
The town of Guéret recognizes itself in Chaminadour and an entire city is furious with Marcel Jouhandeau.
Proust writes Gaston Gallimard: “A woman I loved thirty years ago wrote me an enraged letter telling me she is Odette and I am a monster. Letters like these (and the responses!) kill all work. Not to mention pleasure, I’ve given up on that a long time ago.”
The greatest number of dramas are, as one might suspect, provoked by female characters. Why should their models rejoice when they recognize their image in a mirror deformed by passion and unhappy love?
That slightly indecent sport of hunting for sources has resulted in many misunderstandings. Sometimes with the result that instead of the novel copying life, life copies the novel. Naturally, no one believes it, and the novelists, not life, are accused of copying. Forgive me for citing two personal examples.
In my first novel, Les Monstres [The Monsters], I imagined that a reporter charged with investigating an alleged suicide epidemic among felines was forced to throw a cat out the window. Well after the novel appeared, that’s exactly what was done by the photographers at a well-known weekly.
The heroine of another novel, Le Palais d’hiver [The Winter Palace] was named Lydia; she owned a candy shop in Pau. It so happened that during the war there was actually a pastry shop in that town called Lydia’s, located on the Place Royale. Everyone thought her shop was my model, even though I was no longer living in Pau when she opened it and I knew nothing of her existence. Obviously I had a real model, not at all the Lydia of the Place Royale. It was what you might call a false key. I might add that the real model recognized herself immediately; let’s just say she was furious.
There are those who recognize themselves and get mad, and those, rarer still, who are happy. There are others who think that their life and their personality ought to inspire a novel. Only no one is inspired.
Reading
Reading, as much if not even more than writing, is an act that belongs to private life. Alone with a book. Perhaps we’ll recognize ourselves in the pages someone else has written. Our chaotic, poorly understood existence is suddenly comprehensible. Fiction can teach us more about ourselves than reality.
We forge a completely personal rapport with beloved writers of the past. We’ll never see them but we’ll cherish them, even if years, indeed centuries, separate us from them. They are closer to us than members of our family, or than people we think we love. They can become our sole consolation. Elio Vittorini says it best: “In literature’s greatest moments, there has always been a Chekhov, someone who abandons the novel and all other explicit representations or interpretations of his or her era, to touch the very depths of those isolated souls, those who are defeated by their times, isolated by the disarray and the storm.”
True Private Life
Certain people who readily talk about their private lives never speak about what they write. As if this were even more private than private life. The accounts we settle with ourselves on paper are the most personal of all. Real private life is in writing.
In a famous book, Virginia Woolf insists that every woman who wants to be a writer needs a room of her own. It is also true for men. Anyone who writes needs a room of their own, a place where they are alone with their writing. And, in their private life, this will be the most private place.
I’ve often watched authors behaving in contradictory fashion—either showing you what they’re in the process of writing, or holding it close to the vest. Yet another proof, if one were needed, that the most private thing in the private lives of writers is their relationship to writing. And even if they’re among those who write to “communicate,” they never completely share with their entourage, with their friends, any more than with their readers.
Writing about Love, Again . . .
We might add, on the subject of private life, a major paradox concerning love. Love belongs to the domain of the intimate, which doesn’t prevent it from being an eternal subject of literary inspiration.
Pierre Lazareff, the famous press mogul I used to work for, said there are only two things that interest the public: animals and love affairs, preferably thwarted. I think he was right. Even if you don’t agree with Denis de Rougemont’s theory that love is an invention of the troubadours in the West, it remains the sustinence of our literature. Without love, our literature would soon become anemic. And this goes all the way back to Homer, since Helen provoked the Trojan War, and Odysseus wandered from Calypso to Nausicaa while Penelope waited.
Chekhov worried when he was writing “The Steppe”: “A story without a woman is like an engine without steam. . . . To tell you the truth, I have a lot of women but they are neither married women nor women in love. And me without women. . . .” Once they’d gotten to the fortieth chapter of Twenty Years After, Alexandre Dumas and his collaborator Maquet were horrified when they realized that they hadn’t planned any love interest, whereas the success of The Three Musketeers had depended so much on the love story of Buckingham and Anne of Austria.
I can think of only one example of a contemporary novel without women—Camus’s The Plague. But this is because The Plague is partly a novel about separation. Camus wanted separation to be the main theme—separation being one of the characteristics of the war he was portraying allegorically. In his Notebooks, he remarked that the literature of the 1940s used and abused the myth of Eurydice. His explanation: “Never had so many lovers been separated.”
There are three solitary men in the novel, accompanied only by the ghosts of unattainable love objects: Rieux, the doctor whose wife is dying on a distant shore; the reporter Rambert, trapped in the city, far from the woman he loves; and the miserable Grand, long ago abandoned by his wife. But talking about separation is another way of expressing love.
So, with a few exceptions, the main subject of the novel is love. I won’t go back as far as the middle ages, to the courtly genre, which dates back to the Merovingians, with Fortunat. I’ll skip forward to the seventeenth century. By then, love has been solidly established in literature. The philosopher Huet defines the novel as follows: “We esteem nothing to be properly romance but fictions of love adventures, disposed into an elegant style in prose, for the delight and instruction of the reader.”
That’s a definition that suits neither Stendhal nor Flaubert nor Dostoyevsky nor Proust, Joyce, Kafka or Faulkner. Nor even Madame de La Fayette.
Madame de La Fayette is suspicious of love. Love, for the author of The Princess of Cleves, is a peril of which you have to beware. Yet she speaks of nothing else.
Then comes the eighteenth century. Suddenly, writers seem to disdain love. Their watchword is pleasure, and nothing but. So the novel conforms to the philosophy of the moment—the French materialism that draws from Locke’s empiricism. Condillac assigns no other goal to human life but “avoiding displeasure and seeking pleasure.” A pleasure that, according to the great Encyclopedia, “makes us happy at least as long as we taste it.” The prototype for these novels, generally brief and vivid, is Manon Lescaut. Manon will invariably sacrifice love and security for a moment of pleasure. And pleasure is the word that appears every time she does. During an argument about love and virtue, her lover Des Grieux concludes: “Being made as we are, it is indisputable that our felicity is found in pleasure, and I challenge anyone to define it in any other way.”
He points out that love is the sweetest pleasure of all.
There’s one notable exception, anticipating what the novel would become a hundred years later. That’s Julie, or the New Heloise, where the love story is characterized by lack and suffering. Jean-Jacques, who has so much trouble simply living, must sublimate a guilty love that he takes pains to reconcile with the didactic and moralistic aspect of his novel.
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br /> After a time out in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on pleasure, love returns to literature with a vengeance. It will accompany the novel in its evolution, its metamorphoses—even when the novel changes definition and objectives, as Balzac gives way to Flaubert or the naturalists give way to Proust and the novel loses its innocence, reflecting on its own nature and its techniques and adapting new rules of the game.
Throughout these metamorphoses the fundamental paradox of the novel remains. It is a fiction, a made-up story that allows us to seek and to find the truth about people and about the world. And love is one of the essential parts of that truth.
Love is sometimes demoted to a bit part. André Malraux points out that the The Brothers Karamazov is neither a detective novel nor a love story, although murder and love are at its heart. Dostoyevsky’s real interest is in evil. You could also say that Proust talks about Swann’s love for Odette and Marcel’s love for Albertine, but that the true subject of In Seach of Lost Time is the expression of a philosophical view of the world, an emotive experience of time and the adventure of a man in search of his vocation as a writer.
Only with the surrealists do we hear about the absolute supremacy of love. André Breton, in his peremtory way, proclaims, “Love will be. We are intent on reducing art to its simplest expression, which is love.”
Despite the novel’s evolution, Pierre Lazareff’s theory about love affairs, preferably thwarted ones, is still applicable, and may always be. What would there be to say about love if it weren’t thwarted?
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