The New Lifetime Reading Plan

In addition to the three important prose works suggested, the reader might tick off, for minimum reading, the following poems: his masterpiece, "Song of Myself'; "I Sing the Body Electric^,,; "Song of the Open Road"; "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; "Song of the Answerer"; "Song of the Broad-Axe"; "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"; "As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life"; "When I Heard the Leairfd Astronomer"; "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame"; "As Toilsome I Wandered Virginias Woods"; "The Wound-Dresser"; "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"; "There Was a Child Went Forth"; "Proud Music of the Storm"; "Passage to нndia"; "Prayer of Columbus"; "A Noiseless Patient Spider"; and "Years of the Modern."

C.F.

86

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

1821-1880 Madame Bovary

Before commenting on this novel, I wish to recommend the one translation that does it justice—that by Francis Steegmuller. It will serve to convince the reader that good rea- sons exist for its authors high reputation.

When Madame Bovary was first published, in serial form, Flaubert had to defend himself before the public prosecutor against charges that it was offensive to morality and religion. He won the case. But the excitement over Madame Bovary, though transferred from the moral to the literary plane, has never since quite died down. The novel has continued to agi- tate many readers, including other novelists and critics. I must at once admit that, while I admire it as an unquestioned mas- terpiece, I nevertheless find it a bit chilly in its superb detach- ment.

Unlike Balzac [68], Flaubert was the classic type of the pure and dedicated artist. The son of a Rouen surgeon, he pur- sued law studies in Paris briefly and unhappily; in 1844 suf- fered a nervous attack; then withdrew to a life of study and writing varied by intervals of travei and erotic experience. He was not by nature a happy man. His native melancholy was fur- ther underlined by the loss of loved ones, by the misunder- standing with which the world greeted much of his work, and by the self-torture that followed from his literary perfection- ism.

"The Idea," he wrote, "exists only by virtue of its form.^,> Form to Flaubert meant more than a frame or a pattern. It was a complex affair. A few of its many elements were "the perfect word" (le mot juste), cunningly contrived and varied rhythms, assonance, reverberant or echoing sequences of symbols, and a genuine architectural structure. Over Madame Bovary he spent five laborious years. Before his time, no novйis in French had been so carefully written. Which is why I suggest Steegmullers translation: The emotional tone and weight of Madame Bovary are created by the use of a special language, requiring the most careful carry-over into English.

Flaubert believed that the artist hovered somewhere above the moral universe, that he should not judge, explain, or teach but merely understand and perfectly record. Insofar as this novel is devoid of sentimentality, as it is of pity, Flaubert suc- ceeded in his aim. Yet it conveys a message, if only a negative one; and that message we have already received in the pages of Gullivers Traveis [52]. Like Swift, Flaubert did not love the human race. Madame Bovary, for ali its seeming detachment, seems to me a beautifully organized expression of misanthropy.

Whether or not this is true, no one can deny its influence. Most of the later novйis that turn on the discrepancy between our ideal lives and the actual gray ones that we live owe much

to Flaubert. Madame Bovary is the first Walter Mitty. She has given a name, Bovarysme, to her disease, a morbid passion for believing oneself other and better than one is. It is even possi- ble that thousands of young men and women have rebelled against their environment, in daydream or in reality, not because they were spontaneous rebels, but because Madame Bovary infected them—just as young men committed suicide as a consequence of reading Goethe^ Sorrows of Young Werther [62].

There are other sides to Flaubert than those revealed in what is by most critics considered his masterpiece. I recom- mend particularly a reading of Three Tales, of which one, "A Simple Heart," discloses an almost Christian compassion not elsewhere to be found in this great, unhappy writer.

C.F.

87

FEODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY

1821-1881

Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoyevsky^ life and work are of a piece. Suffering, violence, emotional crises, and extravagance of conduct mark both. The terrible sincerity of his novйis flows in part from the anxieties that clouded the authors whole career. It is well for the reader to know this. To read Dostoyevsky is to descend into an inferno.