Getting Flaubert out of focus

Flaubert would have enjoyed this book. It brims over with those confident phrases, those premature conclusions, he collected lovingly in his Dictionary of Received Ideas. The terms of pseudo-scientific expertise have changed since Flaubert's day, but the craving for intellectual quick fixes is still amply supplied.

"It requires little ingenuity to suggest that Flaubert's richest satirical-aggressive impulses were rooted in the fascinations of anality," as Geoffrey Wall says, and "little ingenuity" is something Wall has plenty of. The Freudianisms - "all the awkward old Oedipal questions", "The unconscious meaning of his painful ' mistake' is all too evident" - come thick and fast. Freud himself might have demurred at claims such as "The imagined punishment jumps straight out of the unconscious", because, on Freud's own terms, if something "jumps straight out", it's not jumping from the unconscious, that nest of covert indirections.

Even those who believe in such "roots" might like to hear more about what flowered from them. Wall ascribes to Flaubert a " curiously obsessive passion for objects". He does not compare Flaubert with his contemporaries, and so offers no justification for "obsessive"; had he remembered Walter Benjamin's superb pages on the bourgeois interior under Louis-Philippe, he might have been less brisk in his diagnosis, might even have taken time to dwell on the meticulous poignancy with which Flaubert arranges "pauvres objets" ("wretched things") in his tales. Wall is at his mock-clinical worst when he drones on about Flaubert's " sadism"; cruelty is indeed one of this novelist's subjects and effects, but to confuse cruelty and sadism is a thoughtless vulgarism. Lack of interest in the precise meaning of words is not an advantage for a biographer of Flaubert, though it is a help to the reader of this book - when Wall refers to "an incontinently sadistic Russian mining millionaire", for instance, it's best not to wonder what, if anything, he means exactly. This biography is largely compiled from Flaubert's letters, which is all to the good as they are incomparably zestful, hilarious and sharp, but someone interested in learning more about Flaubert would do better to read his correspondence itself, or a selection of translations from it (there are good ones by Steegmuller and Wall himself), because this book draws on those torrentially opinionated screeds in a prim and desultory way. Given Wall's notion that "one of Flaubert's cherished secrets" is that comedy often springs from the details of our physical processes, it's odd he omits the lyrical evocation of frozen urine in the school toilets at Rouen; as he labours to show that Flaubert was fixated on his mother, why does he not mention the three pages which Flaubert expended in February 1851 on the varieties of breast?

He treats other sources less than carefully: du Camp's account of how Flaubert got the idea of writing Madame Bovary is garbled in Wall's version, for it was not suggested to Flaubert that he "do the story of Delphine Delamare" but that he write the story of "that poor devil Delaunay". The husband came first, and that may be why the book begins with Charles; we wait three chapters of Madame Bovary before we meet Emma. That novel is, in Wall's words, "a large fact of our cultural history" and, for that reason, we need small, accurate details to get it in focus.

A big difference between Flaubert's letters and his fictions is how much less the writer steps forward and speaks out in the stories. Wall sometimes fills in the gaps where he thinks Flaubert's opinion should have been, as when he calls the blind beggar whose saucy refrain coincides with Madame Bovary's death a "malign figure"; there is no basis for that "malign", he is just a "mis?rable". Conversely, Wall pays so little attention to the shape of Flaubert's texts that he misses obvious points.

He says that "Monsieur Aubain disappears in the third paragraph of Un Coeur Simple, which is simply untrue: his death is mentioned there but his memory lingers on. His widow and her servant live in a house with "the memory of 'Monsieur' soaring above it all". The word for "soaring" there ("planant") appears again, uniquely, at the very end of the tale when the servant dies in an ecstatic vision of her beloved stuffed parrot "soaring over her head". Flaubert's delicate inquiry into the relations between sexual and other kinds of love makes itself heard only through such quietly sustained attentiveness to particular words.

This biography won't help understanding of the way Flaubert wrote. A reader keen to know about such things had better turn to Stephen Heath's exemplary short book on Madame Bovary (Cambridge University Press). With Flaubert, as with all honest-to-goodness writers, why he wrote is unintelligible without reference to the way he wrote. Wall never describes the intricacies of writing to which Flaubert devoted his life, he merely ticks off "major themes", "profoundest themes", "one of his greatest and most original themes".

He quotes some of Flaubert's many moans about the suffering he went through for his work, but never shows the detail of the pains Flaubert took, why Flaubert always had in his mouth, as Emma does as she dies, "a dreadful task of ink". On Page 136, there is a single reference to a "distinctive, faltering cadence" in the prose. Not that we are told what the French is. There is nearly as much French in this review as there is in Flaubert : A Life. Such is the cost of "accessibility".