Air Guitar

by Dave Hickey

  Eighty years after Flaubert finished writing “A Simple Heart” in provincial France, I finished reading it in provincial Texas, sitting in the wooden swing on the shady porch of my grandparents’ house in south Fort Worth, and, having finished it, Flaubert’s story, which had transported me out of the present, delivered me back into it with sharpened awareness. I can still remember the hard angle of the morning light and the smell of cottonseed in the lazy air as I sat there on the swing with my forearms on my knees and Trois Contes between my hands, amazed that writing could do what it had just done.

  Since I was reading not just as a reader, but as a reader who wanted to be a writer, I also felt a glimmer of insight into a question that had troubled me since I had read Madame Bovary and Salammbo in quick succession, as Flaubert wrote them. Why, I wondered, would the cold-eyed master of Madame Bovary, the scourge of provincial ennui (whose consequences I felt qualified to judge) have abandoned that worthy project to write a romance of Mediterranean antiquity? Why would he have barricaded himself with books and dreams in the study of his mother’s house, out there amidst the fields of mud and vegetables, to reimagine the oriental glamour of ancient Carthage?

  To what end? I wondered, and, now, in the tiny apotheosis at the end of “A Simple Heart,” I saw a door opening between the two books—between the banality of Madame Bovary and the splendor of Salammbo—and I understood, if only vaguely, something about writing and what it does in the world. Since then, I have come to regard “A Simple Heart” as Flaubert’s great allegory of his own vocation—and have always assumed that if Madame Bovary is none other than Flaubert as a fool in abjection, as he himself suggested, the servant Félicité is almost certainly Flaubert as a saint in glory, rising up, in the final moments of the story, out of the banality of his home country into the opening wings of this dazzling, improbable parrot.

  The tacit parallel between Flaubert’s endeavors and those of his character, I think, may be inferred from the peculiarities of tense and tone that complicate “A Simple Heart”—more certainly since, given Flaubert’s methods, we may presume that these peculiarities are far from inadvertent. In two passages describing the local landscape, for instance, Flaubert slips abruptly into the present tense. This jolts in French, but it has the effect of collapsing the distance between Flaubert and his narrative by substituting the voice of Gustave, the local citizen, for that of Flaubert, the all-seeing author. A similar collapse of authorial distance occurs in those moments when Flaubert’s cool narration of Félicité’s existence suddenly glitters with sophisticated contempt. In these passages, I suspect, the cosmopolitan Flaubert wants to remind us that, even though he can forgive Félicité’s provincial innocence, he cannot forgive his own lost innocence in her—for they are two in one.

  Considering Félicité as a character in a story, then, it helps to think of her as Flaubert’s Job, a character equally afflicted, yet bereft of Job’s anger at the injustice of his afflictions. Because, although Félicité suffers, she never feels that she is suffering injustice. Things are stolen from her that she never suspects are hers to claim. Her family abandons her, then exploits her. She doesn’t even notice. Her only beau humiliates her, then abandons her. She accepts the rejection and seeks no further. Her employer, a provincial widow, underpays her and treats her like a domestic animal. She is grateful for the shelter. She goes to church and prays for everyone.

  Beyond this, Flaubert would have us understand, the entire society of Félicité’s adult life consists of two relationships with children (who die in childhood) and a single comforting embrace from her employer (which is never repeated). First, Félicité becomes helplessly devoted to her employer’s daughter, Virginie. Then, when Virginie is sent off to school, she settles her devotion on her own nephew Victor, whose parents send him to visit Félicité with instructions to extort gifts from her—a packet of sugar, a loaf of bread. Young Victor, however, is soon sent off to sea, where he dies of yellow fever in the Americas, and, not long thereafter, Virginie dies of consumption while away at school. Both Félicité and her mistress are desolated, but their lives move on. The years pass quietly until, one summer afternoon, the two of them visit Virginie’s room, which has been left intact. They clean the shelves, reorder the toys, and refold the dead girl’s clothing. As Flaubert tells it:

  The sun shone brightly on these shabby things, showing up the stains and creases caused by the movement of her body. The sun was warm, the sky blue, a blackbird trilled, every living thing seemed to be full of sweetness and light. They found a little hat made of furry brown plush; but it was all moth-eaten. Félicité asked if she might have it. Their eyes met, filled with tears; finally the mistress opened her arms, the servant fell into them; and they embraced, appeasing their grief in a kiss which made them equal.

  It was the first time in their lives, for Madame Aubain was not naturally forthcoming. Félicité was as grateful to her as if she had received a gift, and from then on loved her with dog-like devotion and religious adoration.

  This, in Flaubert’s telling, is the single moment of companionable human solace in Félicité’s existence. In its aftermath, Félicité embarks upon a career of kindness. She stands in the doorway dispensing cider to passing soldiers. She looks after cholera victims and Polish refugees, assists derelicts and attends to the dying; and it is in this section of the narrative (as is obvious above) that the tone goes strange, as if Flaubert, appalled by the image of his own vanquished innocence, cannot withhold his anger at the neediness of Félicité’s generosity—at the spectacle of her giving so much back in return for so little—and, finally, at the fact that nothing remains of Félicité’s life, as silence, darkness, and old age close around her, but the dubious companionship of a third-hand pet, an obnoxious parrot named Loulou.

  Félicité, of course, is delighted with the parrot. She feeds it, pampers it, and teaches it to say “Hail Mary.” The parrot rebels, complains, tries to escape, and ultimately dies on the hearth, but this time Félicité has a response. She has the parrot stuffed, installs it in her room, and proceeds to worship it—to reconstruct it mentally as an embodiment of her loss and desire. At this point, the entire artifice of the narrative snaps into focus. It becomes clear that throughout the story Flaubert has been wholly devoted to explicating those attributes and significations that Félicité will ultimately invest in the parrot: The parrot’s gaudy wings are those of the Holy Spirit in stained glass; its truculent masculinity an attribute of her lost lover; its loveliness that of Virginie; and its American homeland an homage to her nephew Victor, who died there. The parrot embodies all of these attributes for Félicité, and thus, in the final scene of the story, she is reunited with all that she has lost, or never had—all those things she never knew she might deserve:

  A cloud of blue incense smoke rose up to Félicité’s room. She opened wide her nostrils as she breathed in deeply, in an act at once sensual and mystical. She closed her eyes. Her lips smiled. Her heartbeats grew steadily slower, fainter every time, softer, like a fountain running dry, like an echo fading; and as she breathed her last, she thought she saw, as the heavens opened, a gigantic parrot hovering over her head.

  This is splendid writing, of course, as plain and lovely here, in A.J. Krailsheimer’s English, as it is in Flaubert’s French. The dying fall of Félicité’s existence settles slowly toward inaudibility, then refuses to fade, and, in the last instant, blossoms forth in a crisp, unsentimental image of redemption. Most amazingly, however, through the evocation of this image, Flaubert manages the most elegant rhetorical maneuver available to writers on the page: He manages to do in the doing what he describes in the writing. In the act of describing Félicité’s secret construction of her loss and desire in the form of a parrot, Flaubert constructs his own parrot, publicly, in the form of a story that redeems Félicité’s isolation and his own—by narrating his own journey toward the business of making stories, embodying the attributes of his own loss and desire in Félicité’s story.r />
  We know now, for instance, that in the telling of Félicité’s story, Flaubert reconstitutes his own romantic disasters and hapless, needy generosity—that he sets the story in his mother’s hometown and describes that world as he saw it—that he redacts the loss of his sister Caroline in the death of Virginie and describes Félicité struck down by a coachman’s whip at the very spot on the very road where he was first struck down by the epileptic illness that plagued his existence. And all of this is good to know, of course, but only insofar as it reinforces what we already know, which is that Flaubert was concerned most critically with socializing his parrot, with offering it up to us in public, not as an act of vanity or seduction, but as an emblem of what works of art might do in the world—how they might redeem isolation like Félicité’s by creating about them a confluence of simple hearts, a community united not in what they are—not in any cult of class, race, region, or ideology—but in the collective mystery of what they are not and now find embodied before them, like Félicité and Madame Aubain in the presence of that brown, plush hat.

  Thus, when I finished reading “A Simple Heart” that morning in Texas, I did not retire to my couch to savor the experience. Nor did I pick up the copy of Bouvard and Pécuchet that lay on the corner of my desk with its pages still uncut. Nor did I start making notes for my own story in the manner of “A Simple Heart.” I started calling my friends. I wanted them to read the story immediately, so we could talk about it; and this rush to converse, it seems to me, is the one undeniable consequence of art that speaks to our desire. The language we produce before the emblem of what we are, what we know and understand, is always more considered. This language aims to teach, to celebrate our knowledge rather than our wonder. It also implies that we, and those like us, are at least as wonderful as the work we know so much about.

  The language that we share before the emblem of what we lack, however, as fractious and inconsequent as it often seems, creates a new society. It is nothing more or less than the kiss that makes us equal—and had George Sand lived to read the story her friend wrote for her, I think she would have understood this. Or, more precisely, she would have felt the thorn in the rose her friend offered up to her and recognized, in the very title of the story, Un couer simple, a repudiation of le couer sensible (the feeling heart) that stood as an emblem for the cult of sensibilité of which Sand was the natural inheritor. As you will remember, this cult (or culture) of sensibilité defined virtue in terms of one’s superior ability to empathize with those less fortunate than one’s self. What those “less fortunates” might themselves have been feeling was (as W.H. Auden shrewdly pointed out) simply beside the point. Because then, as now, the cult of sensibilité defined itself as an aristocracy of feeling, wholly dedicated to the connoisseurship of its own virtuous empathy.

  What Flaubert proposes in place of this refined aristocracy of virtuous identity—and what I continue to propose—is just democracy: a society of the imperfect and incomplete, whose citizens routinely discuss, disdain, hire, vote for and invest in a wide variety of parrots to represent their desires in various fields of discourse—who elect the representatives of their desire and occasionally re-elect them. Thus, unconcerned with class, culture, and identity, this society is perpetually created and re-created in non-exclusive, overlapping communities of desire that organize themselves around a multiplicity of gorgeous parrots. Unfortunately, this democracy of simple hearts is founded on the dangerous assumption that gorgeous parrots, hewn from what we lack (as Salammbo blossoms out to fill the arctic absences of Madame Bovary), will continue to make themselves visible and available to us. But this is not necessarily so. Flaubert is dead, and the disciplines of desire have lost their urgency in the grand salons of comfort and privilege we have created for the arts. The self-congratulatory rhetoric of sensibilité continues to perpetuate itself, and in place of gorgeous parrots, we now content ourselves with the ghostly successors of Marie Antoinette’s peasant village, tastefully installed within the walls of Versailles.

  SHINING HOURS / FORGIVING RHYME

  On a Saturday morning when I was eight or nine years old, my dad and I set out in our old Chevrolet to play some music at a friend’s house. Actually, my dad was going to play music, but he let me carry his horn cases, and both of us were decked out in jazz-dude apparel: penny loafers, khakis, and Hawaiian shirts with the tails out. First, though, we had to pick up our new neighbor, Magda, who had only moved to Texas about three months before. We had become friends with her because people left their windows open back then, and we heard each other playing Duke Ellington 78s. Now, Magda and my mother went shopping together and hung out, so I knew her as this nice, relaxed German lady who sat around in the kitchen with Mom, dicing things.

  When Dad beeped the horn in front of her house, however, a different Magda came out. She was all gussied up, with her hair in a bun, wearing this black voile dress, a rhinestone pin, and little, rimless spectacles that I associate to this day with “looking European.” She was also carrying an armload of sheet music, and as she approached the car I whispered to my dad that this must be Magda’s first jam session—because nobody looked at sheets at a jam session. Dad said to shut up, dammit, that Magda was a refugee, that she was a Jew who fled the Nazis, first to London and then, after the war, down here to Texas. So cool it! he whispered, and I cooled it. Problems with the Nazis were credentials enough for me. I hopped in the back seat, let her ride up front with Dad.

  Then we had to stop and pick up Diego, who worked at the Jiffy Dry Cleaners where we took our clothes. We beeped, and Diego came trotting out with his bongo drums in a paper sack—a really cool-looking guy, I thought, with his thin black mustache and his electric-blue, fitted shirt with bloused sleeves. Usually, Diego played percussion in Latino bands on the North Side, but he loved to sing jazz, so he was fairly bouncing with excitement as he ducked into the back seat beside me. Then all the way out to Ron’s, he flirted so outrageously with Magda that my dad and I kept cracking up.

  Magda blushed down into her dress, but she seemed not to mind Diego’s attention. At one point, she turned around and scolded him good-naturedly: “Herr Diego,” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You are a stinker!” And that cracked us up too, so we laughed all the way out to South Fort Worth where Ron lived in this redneck subdivision, in a ranch-style house with a post-oak in the lawn. As we pulled up in front, two black guys, Butch and Julius, were advancing warily across the lawn. They were dressed in white dress shirts and high-waisted zoot-suit slacks, carrying instrument cases, and glancing around them at the neighborhood.

  Butch and Julius were beboppers, but, like my dad and Ron, they played pick-up gigs with dance bands around town, so I saw them all the time. I waved, and Butch, who was carrying a guitar case, waved back. Julius was lugging his stand-up bass, so he just grinned, and Ron, who stood in the front door holding the screen, waved too. Ronno was my dad’s best friend, and as usual, he was barefoot, wearing a sleeveless Marine Corps T-shirt and camouflage fatigues. “Not many jazz fans in this neighborhood,” Butch remarked when we were all in the living room. Ron allowed there weren’t, but the VA had approved his loan so he took it. Julius just smiled and took his bass out of its case. Then he took a Prince Albert tin out of the string pocket inside it, flopped down in Ron’s easy chair and began rolling a joint.

  Magda’s eyes got big at this, but I could tell she wasn’t upset. She was tickled to death. You could almost hear her thinking, "Oh boy! I have made it all the way from Birkenstrasse to this! I am out in the Wild West—at an American Jazz session with Negroes smoking marijuana!" To cover her excitement, she marched over to Ron’s baby grand, set her music on it and began striking octaves and fifths, checking the tuning. Butch gave her an appraising sideways glance. Julius just grinned and lit up his reefer. After he had taken a couple of hits, Ron’s wife Mary stuck her head out of the kitchen, sniffing the air. “Guess y’all are gonna be wantin’ cookies,” she said. “I am!” I said, and
everybody laughed.

  Ron took a hit from Julius’s reefer and climbed behind his drum kit, clanging his ride cymbal as he did. Butch and Diego took up positions on the couch—Butch with his Gretsch guitar, Diego with his bongos between his thighs. My dad opened his horn cases on the floor. He fiddled with the saxophone, then took out his clarinet, wet the reed and leaned back against the piano with his ankles crossed, examining the instrument, blowing lint off the pads. They all tweaked and twanged for a minute, getting in tune, then Ron counted off Artie Shaw’s “At Sundown.” Magda was really shaky at first, pale with fear, but Diego just kept grinning at her and nodding, and she started to firm up.

  Then, Dad swung around, aimed his clarinet at her, and she seemed to wake up. In less than a bar, she found herself and started hitting the note, crisply; and the lady had some chops, you know. She could play jazz music, but it was strange to watch, because here in this smoky, shadowy room full of swaying, agitated beboppers was this nice German-Jewish lady in a black voile dress with her back rigid and her eyes glued to the sheet, her wrists lifted in perfect position, playing in such a way that, if you couldn’t hear the music, you would have guessed Schumann or something like that. But Magda was really rapping it out, and she had such great attack that Diego had to sit up straight to sing the choruses. Mary even came to the kitchen door to listen, which she rarely did.

  After that, Magda got into it, even bouncing her bottom on the bench once or twice (much to Butch’s whimsical delight). But she wouldn’t solo. They would give her the space, nod in her direction and say, “Take it, Maggie!” but she would shake her head and vamp through her sixteen bars. Then Butch or Dad would come in and solo. But I was really proud of them. They always gave her the space—in case she changed her mind. And I was proud of Magda too, for getting her confidence up, and letting it build, so the best thing they played all afternoon was the very last thing: “Satin Doll” by Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Johnny Mercer.