2018年5月14日 星期一

Flaubert: a Life by Frederick Brown. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1857-1880. Gustave Flaubert Books :


Gustave Flaubert died in 1880, a man who never basked in the limelight. Yet, his influence on literature is undeniable. He is remembered as a pioneer of realism, a relentless sculptor of words, and a man who dared to dissect the complexities of human nature with unflinching honesty. His life, a testament to the unwavering pursuit of a dream, even in the face of hardship and rejection, continues to inspire writers who strive to leave their mark on the world, one perfectly crafted sentence at a time.
Gustave Flaubert Books : https://amzn.to/3UrGoY7


Flaubert's Parrot? - Willa Cather Archive - University of Nebraska ...

https://cather.unl.edu/cs008_maguireskaggs.html
On 1 November 1932, Willa Cather answered an appreciative letter from a young Baltimore seminarian named John Kennedy,[1] who had written to admire ...

Amazon.com: Rites of Compassion: "Old Mrs. Harris" and "A Simple ...

https://www.amazon.com/Rites-Compassion-Harris-Simple-Heart/dp/1558615628
Personally selected by award-winning writer Mary Gordon, these two stories by Willa Cather and Gustave Flaubert render a flawless portrait of characters who ...

Flaubert A Biography Review Frederick Brown Christopher Benfey ...

https://newrepublic.com/.../flaubert-biography-review-frederick-brown-christopher-be...
May 8, 2014 - "You lament the monotony of ass," Flaubert wrote to his young disciple ..... Among American novelists, Willa Cather probably learned most from ...

The cracked kettle of Flaubert | The New Criterion

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2006/5/the-cracked-kettle-of-flaubert
A review of Flaubert: A Biography by Frederick Brown. ... In the summer of 1930, Willa Cather chanced to form a brief friendship with an elderly lady at the Grand ...

Not Under Forty, by Willa Cather : A CHANCE MEETING

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/cather/willa/not_under_forty/chapter1.html
Mar 27, 2016 - My uncle also was a man of letters, Gustave Flaubert, you may perhaps know. . .” She murmured the last phrase in a curious tone, as if she had ...





'Existence is a shoddy business'

Ruth Scurr reviews Flaubert: a Life by Frederick Brown.

Most writers lead boring lives - by choice, not necessity. "Ah! What vices I'd have if I didn't write," Gustave Flaubert once boasted to his future mistress, Louise Colet. She was one of many women who would have preferred him more vicious, or at least more liberal with his time.
From his first love (a young mother encountered on the beach at Trouville in 1836) until his sudden death in 1880, aged 58, Flaubert retreated from erotic relations so that he could work. "He would always feel most himself in the fastness of indefinitely unconsummated love, of longing, of bereavement," Frederick Brown, his new biographer, explains. This gets to the crux of the literary biographer's problem: when the most important and interesting things in a writer's life happen between the pen and the page, what more is there to know?
Brown faces the challenge of Flaubert's life with modesty and stamina. He does not attempt to compete fatuously with the incomparable stylist - instead, he quotes carefully, often at length, from the letters, stories and novels. The most immediate effect of Brown's book is an urgent desire to read absolutely everything Flaubert published, beginning with "Bibliomanie", the story of a monkish book dealer who lusts illiterately after books, and ending with the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, which helped kill him. In between there was L'Éducation sentimentale, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Madame Bovary, Salammbô, and "L'Histoire d'un coeur simple", to name only the most famous. Biographers are handmaids in the literary world, and since Brown's book will win Flaubert many new or returning readers, it is, for this reason alone, a resounding success.
To show Flaubert repeatedly turning his back on the world, all the better to write about it, Brown vividly evokes his context: familial, social, political and historical. Flaubert's father was a surgeon in provincial Rouen and "Gustave, born and bred in a city hospital, was exposed from the first to life's crueller dispensations." Images of the sick or insane haunted his childhood dreams. Flaubert grew up in the 1820s and early 1830s when France was struggling to recover from the upheaval of the Revolution in 1789, the trauma of the Terror, and the subsequent rise and fall of Napoleon. In Paris, allegedly, oxen still shied away from the Place de la Concorde, frightened by the lingering smell of the blood that had flowed there beneath the guillotine.
History was Flaubert's first passion at school; he was brilliantly taught by Adolphe Chéruel, himself a pupil of the great Jules Michelet. Later in life he would urge his melancholic friend Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie, "read to live… cultivate Goethe and Shakespeare. Read translations of the Greek and Roman authors: Homer, Petronius, Plautus, Apuleius… it's a question of working, do you understand?" He heeded his own advice, steeping himself in scholarship, when he wanted to escape imaginatively from the politics of contemporary France.

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Brown registers the full range of Flaubert's motives for putting art consistently before life. In 1848, in the grip of another revolution, Flaubert's friend and fellow writer Maxime Du Camp took to the barricades. Brown comments that there was no possibility of an epileptic like Flaubert doing likewise, and finds no mention of political strife in the meagre correspondence that survives from early 1848. Instead, he quotes a letter from Flaubert to Du Camp describing his troubles writing about Saint Anthony: "Out of sheer frustration I jerked off yesterday, feeling the same bleakness that drove me to masturbate at school when I sat in detention." Yet, in another letter from this year, we find words of piercing political acumen: "Existence is a shoddy business. I seriously doubt that the republic will invent a remedy for it."
When Flaubert first met Victor Hugo he wrote, "My eyes were glued to his right hand, which had written so many beautiful things." A few years later, Flaubert addressed Louise Colet from the new armchair he had acquired for his study: "What will I write in it? God only knows. Will it be good or bad, tender or erotic, sad or gay? A little of all that, probably, and nothing exclusively one or the other." Lonely and starved of her lover's company, poor Louise wrote back, jealous and petulant. "How can you possibly reproach even my innocent affection for an armchair?" came Flaubert's uncomprehending response. It is in such exchanges that Brown reveals his subject's obtuse self-absorption. How very ridiculous Flaubert was when he travelled to Egypt and flamboyantly abandoned his habitual sexual restraint. And yet, how very grand, kind, self-knowing and serious at other times.
Brown ends with a moving chance encounter in 1930 between Flaubert's niece Caroline and Willa Cather. Caroline, in her eighties, knowing nothing about Cather, introduced the subject of Flaubert tentatively: "You may perhaps know?" Cather wrote: "There was nothing to say. It was like being suddenly brought up against a mountain of memories. One could not see around it; one could only stupidly realise that in this mountain lay most of one's mental past." Awestruck, Cather simply kissed the hand of Flaubert's niece. Brown's biography - funny, racy, gossipy and erudite by turns - expresses the same gesture of profound respect.





The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1857-1880

https://books.google.com.tw/books?isbn=0674526406
Gustave Flaubert, ‎Francis Steegmuller - 1980 - ‎Biography & Autobiography
Gustave Flaubert Francis Steegmuller ... the subject of one of his weekly Causeries du Lundi, his "Monday chats" — reviews of new books or ... and they would soon be meeting at the "MagnyDinners," literary evenings at the Restaurant Magny ...

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