Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  The energies that would have given us other novels to read, as we now read and reread Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, were absorbed by endless public readings in which Dickens performed to huge audiences his own characters and their stories. If only the art of the film had existed that early, we would have these unrivaled enactments, but since we cannot, and all their auditors are deceased, it has to be regarded as a waste and a loss.

  Dickens is almost always magnificent at openings and curiously weak when ending a novel. Our Mutual Friend begins on the Thames with grotesque power:

  In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

  The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.

  Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there was a business-like usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they were things of usage.

  The Thames itself is the protagonist of Our Mutual Friend. Lizzie Hexam, Mortimer Lightwood, Eugene Wrayburn, Jenny Wren, Mr. Riah, Bradley Headstone, Fascination Fledgeby, Rogue Riderhood, and the man with three names—John Harmon, John Rokesmith, Julius Handford—are nine vital figures in the book, but without the Thames they might not sustain our full interest. Lizzie Hexam’s father, Gaffer; Bradley Headstone; and Rogue Riderhood all suffer death by water. John Harmon supposedly does, but that is his rather peculiar subterfuge. Eugene Wrayburn, after a brutal attack from behind by Headstone, is rescued from the river by Lizzie, who helps nurse him slowly back to health. Rogue Riderhood, before being wrestled into drowning by the suicidal Headstone, himself undergoes a resurrection from near drowning earlier in the book. The abominable Fascination Fledgeby receives a much-deserved beating but unfortunately survives. Mortimer Lightwood, Jenny Wren, and the tiresomely good Jew, Mr. Riah, are the only major figures left unstained by the turgid water (to call it that) of what William Blake in an earlier draft of his poem “London” termed “the dirty Thames.”

  Riah was Dickens’s apology for the wonderful Fagin in Oliver Twist, an apology inevitably lame. After Shylock, Fagin is the most persuasive of all anti-Semitic caricatures.

  * * *

  —

  “He Do the Police in Different Voices” was T. S. Eliot’s original title for what became The Waste Land (1922). Ezra Pound brilliantly hacked away at Eliot’s manuscript, thus producing the poem we have all read. Eliot was precise when he invoked Our Mutual Friend, which is the London apocalypse that preluded The Waste Land.

  Who survives in Our Mutual Friend? Aside from John Harmon and Bella Wilfer, who achieve harmonious marriage but are pale figures, there are Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam, whose saving marriage charms the reader. Wrayburn matures into a resurrected consciousness, and the wonderful Lizzie, whom first we saw rowing her father on his scavenging expedition, becomes even more angelic and comforting. Then there is Mortmer Lightwood, once insouciant and ironic, who is exalted by the relationship between Eugene and Lizzie. With a finer edge of irony, he concludes the novel by returning to Society, and is rightly appalled by it. Best of all are Jenny Wren and Sloppy, who seems to fall in love with her, and Dickens perhaps intimates that they may yet make a match.

  Jenny Wren is one of the most underpraised figures in Dickens. A lame teenager, afflicted by her care of an alcoholic father, whom she calls her child and who finally yields to a drunken death, she has a strange wit of her own. At one moment when the abominable Fascination Fledgeby calls to her and Riah in their little roof garden, she cries out: “Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!”

  As a doll maker Jenny Wren is a consummate artist, and maintains herself by it. She calls Riah her fairy godfather and tells him and the rest of us that she awaits her prince to take her away. Sloppy, a foundling, is sweeter and kinder than any prince could be, and if indeed they wind up together, that would be another blessing Dickens confers upon us.

  There remains the riding Thames, and nothing mitigates Dickens’s vision of the dark waters. Memorable and unforgiving, the river destroys and rarely nourishes.

  CHAPTER 17

  Madame Bovary (1857)

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  I FIRST READ Madame Bovary in the wooden translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling, with some revisions supposedly by my late friend Paul de Man. Eleanor Marx was a daughter of Karl Marx and became a socialist activist. She committed suicide at the age of forty-three, when she discovered that her partner, Edward, was a bigamist.

  Fortunately, in 1987 I finally read it in French and began the long process of being haunted by it. I have just read the marvelous version by Lydia Davis, which seems to me a touchstone for literary translation. Her Madame Bovary is a kind of miracle, as is her Swann’s Way (2004). I am still absorbing her startling short fictions, as they are sui generis.

  In 1832, at the age of eleven, Flaubert read Don Quixote, which, together with Goethe and, to a smaller extent, Balzac, constituted his prime literary influences, though he read so widely and deeply that he rivals Montaigne in his ambience. Flaubert seems to have had a form of epilepsy, but the major hazards to his health came from his promiscuity with female and male prostitutes in his Middle Eastern tours. He contracted syphilis early in his life, and died at fifty-eight, but probably from a heart attack brought on by epilepsy.

  Flaubert did not marry and had no children. In a letter to his sometime mistress, the poet Louise Colet, he denounced childbearing, saying he did not wish to “transmit…the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”

  It seems wrong to call Flaubert a misogynist. For many years he had a deep love, scarcely sexual, for Elisa Schlesinger, who was married and a decade older. He famously identifies with Emma Bovary. The critic Albert Thibaudet in his Gustave Flaubert (1922) splendidly compares Flaubert’s stance toward Emma to Milton’s in regard to Eve: “Whenever Emma is seen in purely sensuous terms, he speaks of her with a delicate, almost religious feeling, the way Milton speaks of Eve.”

  Like so many readers, I feel that Milton desires Eve. Flaubert’s love for Emma necessarily is narcissistic. It is a useful truism to call Emma Bovary a female Quixote, since, like the Knight, she is murde
red by reality. Emma, who has no Sancho, discovers her enchanted Dulcinea in the absurd Rodolphe. Flaubert punishes her, himself, and us by fusing the poison of provincial social reality with the poison of Emma’s hallucinated fantasies of a sublime passion. I find this very cruel, but with Baudelaire one has to grant its unmatched aesthetic dignity. Flaubert so inverts Victor Hugo’s Romanticism as to persuade us that his own pure style can represent even ennui with a power that enhances life.

  Tomorrow I turn eighty-eight and am, more than ever, a sorrowful Romantic. These last few days, I have been reading and rereading Lydia Davis’s Madame Bovary. It exalts me yet also makes me very sad. I think John Keats would have loved Emma Bovary, because he was one of those questers who seek no wonder but the human face.

  Here is Flaubert at work murdering Emma Bovary:

  At six o’clock tonight, as I was writing the word “hysterics,” I was so swept away, was bellowing so loudly and feeling so deeply what my little Bovary was going through, that I was afraid of having hysterics myself. I got up from my table and opened the window to calm myself. My head was spinning. Now I have great pains in my knees, in my back, and in my head. I feel like a man who has been fucking too much (forgive me for the expression)—a kind of rapturous lassitude.

  —Flaubert to Louise Colet, letter, December 23, 1853

  Charles Baudelaire, reviewing Madame Bovary in 1857, regarded Flaubert as a fellow poet and indulged his own catastrophic vision of human life:

  I will not echo the Lycanthrope [Petrus Borel], remembered for a subversiveness which no longer prevails, when he said: “Confronted with all that is vulgar and inept in the present time, can we not take refuge in cigarettes and adultery?” But I assert that our world, even when it is weighed on precision scales, turns out to be exceedingly harsh considering it was engendered by Christ; it could hardly be entitled to throw the first stone at adultery. A few cuckolds more or less are not likely to increase the rotating speed of the spheres and to hasten by a second the final destruction of the universe.

  The societal scandal of Madame Bovary is as remote now as the asceticism of the spirit practiced by Flaubert and Baudelaire, who seem almost self-indulgent in the era of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon. Rereading Madame Bovary side by side with, say, Malone Dies, is a sadly instructive experience. Emma seems as boisterous as Hogarth or Rabelais in the company of Malone and Macmann. And yet she is their grandmother, even as the personages of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka are among her children. With her the novel enters the realm of inactivity, where the protagonists are bored, but the reader is not. Poor Emma, destroyed by usury rather than love, is so vital that her stupidities do not matter. She is a much more than averagely sensual woman, and her capacity for life and love is what moves us to admire her, and even to love her.

  Why is Emma so unlucky? If it can go wrong, it will go wrong for her. Freud, like some of the ancients, believed there were no accidents. Ethos is the daemon, your character is your fate, and everything that happens to you starts by being you. Rereading, we suffer the anguish of beholding the phases that lead to Emma’s self-destruction. That anguish multiplies despite Flaubert’s celebrated detachment, partly because of his uncanny skill at suggesting how many different consciousnesses invade and impinge upon any single consciousness, even one as commonplace as Emma’s. Emma’s I is an other, and so much the worse for the sensual apprehensiveness that finds it has become Emma.

  “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminscences” is a famous and eloquent formula that Freud outgrew. Like Flaubert before him, he came to see that the Emmas—meaning nearly all among us—were suffering from repressed drives. Still later, in his final phase, Freud arrived at a vision that achieves an ultimate clarity in the last section of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, which reads to me as a crucial commentary on Emma Bovary. It is not repressed desire that issues in anxiety, but a primal anxiety that issues in repression. As for the variety of neurosis involved, Freud speculated that hysteria results from fear of the loss of love. Emma kills herself in a hysteria brought on by a fairly trivial financial mess, but underlying the hysteria is the terrible fear that there will be no more lovers for her.

  That sounds right enough, yet rereading the novel does not make us desire a larger or brighter Emma. Until she yields to total hysteria, she incarnates the universal wish for sensual life, for a more sensual life. A remarkable Emma might have developed the hardness and resourcefulness that would have made her a French Becky Sharp, and fitted her for survival even in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. But James sublimely chose to miss the point, which Albert Thibaudet got permanently right:

  She is more ardent than passionate. She loves life, pleasure, love itself much more than she loves a man; she is made to have lovers rather than a lover. It is true that she loves Rodolphe with all the fervor of her body, and with him she experiences the moment of her complete, perfect and brief fulfillment; her illness, however, after Rodolphe’s desertion, is sufficient to cure her of this love. She does not die from love, but from weakness and a total inability to look ahead, a naivete which makes her an easy prey to deceit in love as well as in business. She lives in the present and is unable to resist the slightest impulse.

  Here is the dying moment of Emma Bovary:

  The priest rose to take up the crucifix; at that, she strained her neck forward like someone who is thirsty, and, pressing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she laid upon it with all her expiring strength the most passionate kiss of love she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions: first on the eyes, which had so coveted all earthly splendors; then on the nostrils, greedy for mild breezes and the smells of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to utter lies, which had moaned with pride and cried out in lust; then on the hands, which had delighted in the touch of smooth material; and lastly on the soles of the feet, once so quick when she hastened to satiate her desires and which now would never walk again.

  Lydia Davis has found precisely the accurate tone for this fastidious litany. I confess that it ravages me and renders me a touch ungrateful to Gustave Flaubert. This is an irony cutting so many ways that little is spared. The martyr of style is so persuaded of “the disgrace of existence” that he could be an ascetic of the second century of the Common Era, or, like Baudelaire, Nerval, and Rimbaud, a nineteenth-century version of the Valentinian Gnosis.

  I myself am sympathetic to Valentinus, since I also believe that the Creation and the Fall were the same event. Flaubert, except for Proust, is the true artist of the novel. Nothing is got for nothing, and there is a cost when existence seems a disgrace.

  CHAPTER 18

  Les Misérables (1862)

  VICTOR HUGO

  VICTOR HUGO is scarcely the only great poet to have indulged himself in the composition of novels. One thinks of Alessandro Manzoni, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. George Eliot, Willa Cather, James Joyce, and Ursula Le Guin, particularly the latter, wrote some admirable poems, but it is their novels that we reread.

  I am content with Paul Valéry’s judgment that Victor Hugo was the titan among all French poets. Though I am obsessed with Les Misérables, it is not of the company of Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert at their best. Is it actually a novel? A vast extravaganza that never knows where to stop, it sprawls over a mass of materials that are irrelevant to the story that supposedly it tells. I have read it straight through only once in the original, and was both exalted and baffled. There is an admirable translation by Norman Denny (1976), now available in Penguin Classics, which performs the necessary task of relegating to appendices Victor Hugo’s extraordinary excursions into the idea of the convent and into the Parisian argot of the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the criminal class. Denny chooses to print all of the detailed account of the Battle of Waterloo that constitutes the initial section of Pa
rt Two: Cosette. Only Chapter XIX is in any way crucial to the story, since it recounts the involuntary rescue of Colonel Pontmercy from the battlefield by the scavenger Thénardier. Colonel Pontmercy is the father of Marius, who is intended by Victor Hugo to be the hero of Les Misérables. Unfortunately, the two least persuasive characters in this vast book are Marius and his beloved Cosette, the child of the unfortunate Fantine, who has supported her by a miserable life as a prostitute and dies very early. Cosette is then rescued from the Thénardier family that starves her by the heroic protagonist Jean Valjean, who in most regards is the book.

  Having said that, I wonder if it can be true. When I think back to Les Misérables, what first comes to mind are the remarkable band of young revolutionaries gathered together in what they call the ABC Society. They all go down to needless deaths, since their barricade cannot withstand the cannons and overwhelming numbers of the troops sent against them. I list them in Victor Hugo’s own order: Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.

  The fascinating figure is Enjolras:

  We have named Enjolras first, and the reason for this will be seen later. He was the only son of wealthy parents, a charming young man who was capable of being a terror. He was angelically good-looking, an untamed Antinous. From the thoughtfulness of his gaze one might have supposed that in some previous existence he had lived through all the turmoil of the Revolution. He was familiar with every detail of that great event; he had it in his blood as though he had been there. His was a nature at once scholarly and warlike, and this is rare in an adolescent. He was both thinker and man of action, a soldier of democracy in the short term and at the same time a priest of the ideal rising above the contemporary movement. He had deep eyes, their lids slightly reddened, a thick lower lip which readily curled in disdain, and a high forehead—a large expanse of forehead in a face like a wide stretch of sky on the horizon. In common with certain young men of the beginning of this century and the end of the last who achieved distinction early in life, he had the glow of over-vibrant youth, with a skin like a girl’s but with moments of pallor. Grown to manhood, he still appeared a youth, his twenty-two years seeming no more than seventeen. He was austere, seeming not to be aware of the existence on earth of a creature called woman. His sole passion was for justice, his sole thought to overcome obstacles. On the Aventine hill he would have been Gracchus, in the Convention he would have been Saint-Just. He scarcely noticed a rose, was unconscious of the springtime and paid no heed to the singing of birds. The bared bosom of the nymph Evadne would have left him unmoved, and like Harmodius he had no use for flowers except to conceal a sword. He was austere in all his pleasures, chastely averting his eyes from everything that did not concern the republic, a marble lover of Liberty. His speech was harsh and intense, with a lyrical undertone, and given to unexpected flights of eloquence. It would have gone hard with any love-affair that sought to lead him astray. Had a grisette from the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that schoolboy face, the pageboy figure, the long, fair lashes over blue eyes, the hair ruffled in the breeze, the fresh lips and perfect teeth, been so taken with his beauty as to seek to thrust herself upon him, she would have encountered a cold, dismissive stare, like the opening of an abyss, which would have taught her not to confuse the Cherubini of Beaumarchais with the cherubim of Ezekiel.