`Immense Ado About Nothing'

The pleasure I’ve taken in the fiction of Gustave Flaubert has always been qualified by the sorts of reservations I never experience with the greatest artists. My love of Chekhov and Proust is whole-hearted and forgiving. I read their flawed and minor works with love and a clear conscience, with the certainty that my time has not been wasted. So, too, with Henry James.

In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein reviews Henry James Goes to Paris, by Peters Brooks, and clarifies my reactions to both James and Flaubert. The review, on Page P11 in the print edition, is available online only to subscribers. Brooks’ thesis seems to be that James was deeply but subconsciously influenced by Flaubert’s example, though of course James quite consciously dismissed the author of Madame Bovary (the only work of Flaubert’s he even half-heartedly praised) as “a writer’s writer.” Epstein – rightly, I think – interprets this to mean “Flaubert doesn’t quite qualify for that more splendid thing, a great novelist.”

Brooks, a professor of comparative literature at Yale, is not a common reader but is, as Epstein notes, a “Freudian in the tendency of his thinking and who is a great devotee of the notion of repression.” It’s reassuring to know that some species of claptrap never die, but take up residence in English Departments. (Epstein also quotes Brooks as saying Flaubert is “a hero of our postmodernism” – don’t you love that “our”?) Epstein is also refreshing in his dismissal of Flaubert’s final work, Bouvard et Pecuchet, as “very nearly unreadable” – the inevitable conclusion of any honest reader. Here’s another sample of Epstein’s good sense:

“[Brooks] also holds the currently fashionable view that Henry James was a repressed homosexual – a view based by those who hold it on the flimsy evidence of some effusive letters James wrote to young men late in his life.”

James wrote at length about Flaubert three times – a review of the terrible La Tentation de Saint Antoine in 1874, a review of the correspondence in 1893, and an overview written as an introduction to a new translation of Madame Bovary in 1902. In the 1893 piece, James, whose own sense of humor goes unrecognized, comments on Flaubert’s earnestly grinding humorlessness:

“He polished ferociously, but there was a side of the matter that his process could never touch. Some other process might have been of use; some patience more organized, some formula more elastic, or simply perhaps some happier trick of good-humor; at the same time it must be admitted that in his deepening vision of the imbecility of the world any remedy would have deprived him of his prime, or rather his sole, amusement.”

As Epstein puts it, “For James, fiction begins in love.” Think of his love for Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Catherine Sloper Lambert Strether, Maisie, Maggie Verver, and many others – heartbreaking love. Flaubert served only as a cautionary example for James – a technically sophisticated, emotionally stunted example to avoid. James’ true precursors were Hawthrone, Turgenev and George Eliot. Epstein concludes his review this way:

“Henry James aspired to be, and in the end was, great, as man and artist both. How he achieved his greatness is a long and complex story, and it is difficult to believe, despite Peter Brooks’s elaborate suasions, that Gustave Flaubert had much to do with it.”

Let James have the last word, as he usually does:

“To the end of time there will be something flippant, something perhaps even `clever’ to be said of [Flaubert’s] immense ado about nothing.”