The Letters of Gus Flaubert

I'll confess right now: I'm writing this from the Jersey Shore (potential bad guys: don't even think of breaking into our house and stealing our stuff. We have a house sitter and fourteen attack chickens) and it's a lot easier to stare into the misty distance or eat clams than to try and come up with something vaguely literary to say. But in addition to a stack of true crime paperbacks, I brought my copy of the letters of Flaubert (Vol. 1 seems only available used, but Vol. 2 is still in print). I love the letters of Flannery O'Connor and those of Virginia Woolf, but there's something about Flaubert's that affirms my feelings about being a writer and reminds why I want to keep doing it, in spite of how rough (or in my case, non-existent) the progress is. So forgive me if I use this post to share some of my favorite excerpts (all from the first volume -- I left the second at home).

Here's a good bit, from a letter to his lover, a poet named Louise Colet:

"Since my humor is particularly bad today (and frankly my heart is heavy with it), I'll drain it to the last drop. You talk about your "days of pride," when "people seek you out, flatter you," etc. Come! Those are days of weakness, days you should blush for. I'll tell you which are your days of pride. When you're home at night in your oldest dressing gown, with {baby} Henriette getting on your nerves, the fire smoking and money worries and other troubles looming large, and you get ready for bed with heavy heart and weary mind; when you walk restlessly up and down your room, telling yourself there isn't a soul you can count on, that you have been abandoned by all; and then -- somewhere underneath your dejection as a woman you feel the stirring of the muse, deep within you something begins to sing, to sing something joyous and solemn, like a hymn, a challenge flung in the face of life, a surge of confidence in your own strength, the flaring-up of works to come. The days when that happens to you are your days of pride."

Flaubert would not appreciate our culture's melding of literature and marketing. When his friend suggested he would achieve greater success if he moved to Paris and took part in the literary scene there, he said,

"I am aiming at something better -- to please myself. Success seems to me a result, not the goal ... I have conceived a manner of writing and a nobility of language that I want to attain. When I think that I have harvested my fruit I shan't refuse to sell it, nor shall I forbid hand-clapping if it is good. In the meantime I do not wish to fleece the public. That's all there is to it."

Writing was difficult for him, and he took it absolutely seriously. But his prose is unlabored and full of humor. He said,

"I like clear, sharp sentences, sentences which stand erect, erect while running -- almost an impossibility. The ideal of prose has reached an unheard-of degree of difficulty: there must be no more archaisms, cliches; contemporary ideas must be expressed using the appropriate crude terms; everything must be as clear as Voltaire, as abrim with substance as Montaigne, as vigorous as La Bruyere, and always streaming with color."

Awfully inspiring in these days of compulsory cynicism.

Dead Letters

Part of our recent move was to clear out and pack up my old writing shed. I didn't build this shed--it was prefab, from a place on the road to Ithaca called Midway Sales--but I did lots of work in it, insulating and adding a woodstove and bookcases. When I got a job last year, I started doing most of my writing in my office at work, and the shed went unused for a while.

Long story short, I had forgotten that I left some birdseed out there, and mice got in. When I cleaned it all out last week, I discovered two dead mice, several nests, and mountains of mouse shit. A lot of stuff was ruined, including copies of my old books, some reference works, and, tragically, all my old correspondence. I'm talking about twenty years of letters--from family, friends, girlfriends, other writers*. There was no way to save them--the letters were packed tightly into a cardboard box, and the mice had mined the box for nesting material, and just pissed all over the place. It was thoroughly revolting. I briefly considered taking everything out that was remotely intact, photocopying it all, and keeping the copies--but we had to be out of the house in a few days, and I just did not see myself hauling the reeking bundle to work for the day. So out it went.

I can't say I regret this, but wow, I wish to hell I'd been more attentive and nipped this mouse thing in the bud. (I think I posted about it once before--I had noticed it earlier, but underestimated its severity.) Correspondence--it's a rare thing these days, you have to admit, and it's one of the few things I owned that was basically irreplacable. Someday I would have read those letters, but not anymore.

That said, I am pretty unsentimental, and don't even keep a journal, so the past, for me, is little more than what I can manage to remember. And there were a few letters in there I would probably have regretted rereading. At any rate they're all in the landfill by now, for better or worse, and I'm back to square one. Dang.

*One saving grace in all this is that I had all of Ed's letters and poems in a separate folder, which the mice didn't touch. Hope this doesn't disappoint you, Skoog--you are unpopular among rodents.