MAIN STREET IN FRANCE
“Eighteen years ago,” says Ogi, “a lanky, red-headed youth from
Minnesota ran away from Yale University and showed up at Helicon Hall to
stoke our furnace. We were never entirely sure about the furnace, but we
could always count upon lively arguments on the literary side of our
four-sided fireplace. Now this youth has grown up and added a new phrase
to the American language--”
“‘Main Street’ or ‘Babbitt’?” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Recall the story of ‘Main Street.’ A young girl marries a doctor and
lives with him in one of the desolate, cultureless villages of the
Northwest. The novel is a long one, and the method that of minute
detail; we learn everything about the little place and the people in it,
their empty, sordid lives, the utter absence of vision. The girl is
lonely and restless, she craves something beautiful and inspiring. She
has luxurious tastes, and chafes at having to economize. She meets a
handsome, attractive young man, and after many agonies of soul she takes
him as her lover. In the end he leaves her; and after being heart-broken
for a while she takes another lover. He also deserts her, and she is
ill, in debt, and finally takes poison, and her husband, the doctor,
dies of grief--”
“Hold on,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you must have been reading a sequel to ‘Main
Street.’ I don’t remember any of those things happening. Carol Kennicott
thought she loved the other man, but she didn’t deceive her husband, she
held herself back--”
“It is another of my poor jokes,” says Ogi. “This is not the story of
‘Main Street,’ but of a famous French classic, ‘Madame Bovary’ by
Gustave Flaubert. You see, the themes of the two novels are identical,
and so is the method; the difference lies in the temperaments of two
races. The young man from Sauk Centre and the young man from Rouen alike
call themselves “realists”; but one proceeds upon the assumption that it
is possible to restrain passion, and on the whole, better to try, while
the other proceeds upon the assumption that it is impossible to restrain
passion, and that if you pretend to do it, you are a Puritan, and what
is worse, a hypocrite. So at the end of Carol Kennicott’s story we find
her still trying to introduce a little light into Gopher Prairie, while
Emma Bovary is dead and the town of Yonville-l’Abbaye is exactly what it
was before.”
Flaubert is by many considered the greatest of all realists. He made his
religion out of a theory of style; and he was absolutely certain that
“Madame Bovary” was the final product of the “objective” method. He had
coldly observed reality, and no predisposition had been allowed to
interfere. My purpose in mixing him up with Main Street, Gopher Prairie,
Minn., is to bring out the contention that “Madame Bovary” is as
subjective as a lyric; from first to last an expression of its author’s
personal, or shall we say racial conviction, that the sexual impulse
dominates the lives of men and women. The great classic of realism is a
legal brief, in which every detail has been carefully selected and
arranged, and every sentence composed for the purpose of proving this
argument. We have once more the old Greek tragedy with its lurking
Nemesis; only this time the lurking-place is in the genital glands.
Flaubert was born in 1821, so that he was a youngster to the group of
writers we have been considering: Balzac, Hugo, Gautier, George Sand. He
was a tall, lanky, provincial fellow, with drooping mustaches, looking
like a dragoon. He was epileptic and hysterical, and suffered agonies of
melancholy, for the most part over problems of style. He would pace the
floor all night in torment seeking for a missing word; he records that
he spent eight unhappy days in avoiding one dissonance. The action of
all his life which he repented most was a phrase in “Madame Bovary.”
Translated literally, this phrase is “a crown of flowers of
orange-tree”; the unforgivable sin lying in the two “ofs.”
We are told that Flaubert originated a formula of art which Gautier
cherished all the rest of his life: “The form is the parent of the
idea.” In other words, you first think of a beautiful way to say
something, and then you think of something to say which can be said in
that way. It would be impossible for art perversity to go farther; and
you have only to consider “Madame Bovary” to realize how little Flaubert
followed his own theory. He did not first think of a prose work in two
parts, the first part having nine chapters and the second part fifteen;
what he thought of was the French formula, locating the seat of Nemesis
in the genital glands. The secret of his masterpiece is the fact that he
chose to illustrate this formula by means of characters which he knew
intimately and loved with all the power of his instinctive being. That
is the real basis of the greatness of “Madame Bovary”; the fact that
with all her faults and all her follies her creator loved her, and
believed in her, and made her real in every breath she drew and in every
word she uttered. The important idea which he put across is that we are
all of us, good or bad, wise or foolish, stupid or clever, passengers on
the same ship of life, tossed by the same storms, and bound for the same
unknown harbor.
That is the propaganda which makes the greatness of every work of
realism, if it has greatness. And so we can understand the failure of
this unhappy genius in his other writings. He went back to ancient
Carthage, and following his rigid art theories, he laboriously
accumulated knowledge of detail, and wrote what he meant to be another
masterpiece of realism, “Salammbô.” He creates for us a whole gallery of
Carthaginian characters; but he doesn’t know these characters, he
doesn’t love them, he doesn’t make us know them or love them--and his
would-be masterpiece is therefore as lifeless as any gallery of wax
works. We read it with curiosity because of the historical detail, the
pictures of a far-off and cruel civilization; but we seldom finish it,
and we forget everything but what a history-book might have given us.