Our Life is Composed of love

Embodied Literature and Social Cohesion in the George Sand—Gustave Flaubert Letters

Now that regular writers’ conferences, readings, and signings have been restored to the regular schedule, I expect to be taking part in many more conversations that aren’t about what they’re really about. The paradigmatic conversation of this type among writers, which is never about its ostensible topic, is the perennial, seemingly superficial “What writing materials do you prefer?” The virtues of the humble pencil will be sung. Fountain pens—brands, inks, local shops, repair options—will crop up early and often. Word processors will be ubiquitously complained about. The Remarkable tablet will have its partisans and its detractors (I’m a partisan). The glory of the Moleskine will receive its due. Legal pads and composition books will be defended with a fervor out of all proportion to the cause. 

Comical? Naturally. Foolish? I’m not so sure. Fiction writers know better than anyone that seemingly trivial habits express character at least as much, if not more than, core life data. Otherwise why put so much attention into describing a character’s winter hat, tailor-made suit, age and style of shoes, shape and color of fingernails, exercise habits, favorite type of pen? We know these quanta can express circumstance as much as choice. To the extent they are chosen, though, they speak of the inner life as much as the outer: What does this character find important, worth putting thought and effort into? Where is he willing to cut corners because other matters weigh heavier on his mind? How does his physical environment affect him (or register as indifferent to him)? To borrow a concept from critic James Wood in his magisterial How Fiction Works, such details have begun their “on-duty” shift in the work of opening up the mystery of personality. 

In the writer’s life, the choice of when, where, and how we write always involves on-duty detail. What we choose to do our communicating with bears at least some relation to what we want to communicate and how we want to communicate it. Choice of writing materials matters, of course, far less than the content, craft, and context of the result, just as choices of clothing, hair color, posture matter far less than a person’s behavior, affect, and speech toward others: still, both carry signal value, even if their relation to the thing signified might be skittish. Appearance may be surface-level, but rarely is it totally superficial, either. Appearance is unable to unravel a person’s whole story by itself, but appearance can be indicative, maybe: of origin, of inclination, of present trajectory. 

How philosophical are you ready to be? In my faith tradition it’s thought to be the case that what you do with your body, you do with your soul. You aren’t an illusion, we think; you aren’t a Cartesian ghost in a machine; you aren’t a prison house for a spirit. You aren’t even quite, in Walter J. Miller’s well-known formulation, a soul that has a body. You are somehow, mysteriously, body and soul both. The philosopher’s word for this is hylomorphism. I am glad of the loan from the Greek; I feel the need of some way to articulate this uncanniness, this sense of living with “one foot in each world,” of containing two magnets pushed together at their opposing poles until the resistance between them is palpable. 

Maybe this tension helps explain why people so like to imagine the physical act of writing, to picture literary artists at their craft—even if the evocative picture doesn’t clinch a complete story, so that movies based on this conceit are almost inevitably dull. But if Flaubert is right, and the product of art is all that matters, we arguably shouldn’t concern ourselves with the way the work gets itself made. Why, then, do we so demonstrably love such details? Why is it such glee to imagine a writer at work on a new manuscript: the glow of the screen illuminating the profile; fingers clicking quietly away at laptop keys, perhaps a blanket on the lap, a cat purring at the ankles, cold rain drumming its syncope on the skylight of the study? We create these idylls; for so many of us, such an idyll is all the ideal we need. 

Yet these imaginary writers’ lives can, perhaps, at times keep us from living the abundant diversity of writer’s lives that could be our own if we could only think our way into them, if we could only imagine the life we already have as a writer’s life. We tend to think we lack time to write: and many of us are indeed under immense, unavoidable pressure to spend our time otherwise. But what we typically lack even more than time is self-concept. The embodied details of writing can form a complicated metonymy for “what I need before I can start.” When I don’t feel I have what I need, I am unlikely to start at all. But this feeling may be more a function of how I have pictured the act of writing—or more insidiously, the writer’s identity—to myself, ahead of time, in my mind.

Lest this dynamic trigger despair, it’s worth considering that fine writers throughout history have struggled with it as well. Flaubert himself was no exception. In his letters to prolific fellow novelist George Sand (alias the French noblewoman Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant), he loves to depict himself to her as unavoidably reclusive, dependent on isolation for his professional focus:

I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being… My only company consists of a band of rats in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the water does not roar or the wind blow… Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting… All that results from our charming profession. That is what it means to torment the soul and the body.

This romantic insistence (not to say self-dramatization) is in one way difficult to criticize, since it did result in the brilliances of Madame Bovary, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” and “A Simple Heart.” Sand, however, was of different opinion. With an insistence on what today we might call balance and self-care, she constantly encouraged Flaubert to get out more: to see friends, to explore Paris, to attend to his own health. For Sand, artistic creation was less an affair of effortful origination, carved from the matter of the self, and more a music made not by but within the artist: a song picked out and performed by “the other”—the Muse? Another Spirit? Sand doesn’t say who she conceives of this other as being, but she solidifies her idea with the image of artist as harp string, vibrating in the wind. In another evocation of the natural world, she compares the growth of an artist to that of a great tree, telling Flaubert:

You take more trouble than you need, and … you ought to let the other do it oftener. That would go just as well and with less fatigue. … We are compressed in every way, and we thrust out our roots and branches how we can. Great artists are often weak also… Some too strong in desire are quickly exhausted. In general I think that we have too intense joys and sorrows, we who work with our brains… You say to develop one’s self in every direction? Come, not all at the same time, not without rest. … Be less cruel to yourself.

Committed to his picture of writer as hermetic solitary, Flaubert answers her that his handwringing and agonizing are inextricable from his process:

I don’t in the least know how to set to work to write, and I begin by expressing only the hundredth part of my ideas after infinite gropings… Thus for entire days I have polished and re-polished a paragraph without accomplishing anything. I feel like weeping at times. You ought to pity me!

Sand did pity him—and still, her pity took the form of continual, gentle provocation to live a more human and humane life; to let go of his wrenching, wresting attempts to force total control over his texts. Without necessarily taking her advice, Flaubert testified to her wisdom: As time went on, he admitted to Sand that the habits he found necessary to his productivity were also taking a toll, not only on his human body but on the unfolding body of his work. In letter no. 287 of their correspondence, he writes:

I have undertaken a senseless book… I do not expect anything further in life than a succession of sheets of paper to besmear with black. It seems to me that I am crossing an endless solitude to go I don’t know where. And it is I who am at the same time the desert, the traveller, and the camel.

Sand replies that if Flaubert is feeling depressed, he ought to write less and walk more, at least until the episode passes. What is better for the artist’s health, she asserts, is also better for the art itself: 

You fancy that the work of the spirit is only in the brain, you are very much mistaken, it is also in the legs.  (no. 288)

Sand believes, and tries to persuade her disciple, that we write with the whole self, with the embodied spirit. Like many writers Flaubert seems to have thought gnostically of the “self” as comprising merely that which participates in the act of writing: eyes, brain, hands. All else feels superfluous. However, over-reliance on any part of the body—even eyes, brain, and hands—can result, eventually, in damage to the finished product on the page which that same over-reliance was supposed to serve. The humbler, “less presentable” aspects of embodiment that underwrite the writing also deserve their due. So do the human ends of social, emotional, and psychological health, all of which take harm from unbroken loneliness. 

When we fill daily life with other modes of self-giving, literature can become just one among other gifts: not life’s center but rather its overflow, its effervescence. This, Sand suggests to Flaubert, may be a better way to go to work. She finds it so even while teaching her granddaughter, Aurore, elementary-level lessons during the day: 

[V]ery little time is left to me to write professionally, seeing that I cannot keep awake after midnight and that I want to spend all my evening with my family; but this lack of time stimulates me and makes me find a true pleasure in digging away [at her text]; it is like a forbidden fruit that I taste in secret.

Vice it may be in me, but I love to imagine Sand at her work table by candlelight, scooping aside the volumes and papers, the slate and chalk, she has been using all day to teach what was, essentially, homeschool. I imagine her pulling out, from an unobtrusive drawer, the folio of her manuscript; sitting down a in yellow glow that wavered and oscillated on her profile, bending over her “forbidden fruit” to watch the first words emerge: the wobble of the line, the scratch of the tip on the paper (did she use a quill? lead stylus? pen nib of bone or metal?). Perhaps she has a warm shawl; perhaps a cat nudges her dress hem; perhaps rain drums on the window….  

A romanticization, this, surely, but I prefer it to the picture of the artist-hero Flaubert, “writhing,” in the words of critic James Wood, “under the desk in search of le mot juste”—writhing, indeed, in a way Wood compares to another and far less decent form of self-stimulation. In Flaubert’s own mind, his radical daily isolation and struggle was a pure sacrifice to the Muse; in Sand’s scale of values, it was a well-intentioned but a needless and a wasteful sacrifice, made to a fickle goddess who might have been better and more fruitfully able to have her way with him if only he had also made himself more available to capital-L Life. 

It’s tempting, of course, to imagine the vast swaths of uninterrupted time to which Flaubert treated himself as not merely a luxury well worth having, but something we need before we can start. But after the experience of quarantine, many of us can confirm with Flaubert himself that such swaths of time will not necessarily deliver all that they promise. For as disciples of mindfulness are fond of reminding us, “wherever you go, there you are.” Self-enclosure does not equal self-escape, still less self-transcendence. Isn’t Flaubert’s prose, even at its finest, also at times infected with a sort of self-regarding preciousness, elevating style over substance? Could Sand have been right: Would we have had more and better work from the solitary genius of early modernism if he had been willing to work less, or work differently?

Sand’s own career—she wrote more than 100 stand-alone works of fiction and drama—could well be taken as evidence that her method also worked, though her works are generally acknowledged to be less polished than Flaubert’s—while she capably generated highly popular fictions, she certainly did not found her own school of craft, nor has any critic said of her as Wood does of Flaubert that we ought to be grateful to her “as poets are grateful to spring.” Recognizing his brilliance, Sand herself began their correspondence with respectful deference:

And you, my Benedictine, you are quite alone in your ravishing monastery, working and never going out? That is what it means to have already gone out too much. . . . I have had a great desire to question you, but a too great respect for you has prevented me; for I know how to make light only of my own calamities, while those which a great mind has had to undergo so as to be in a condition to produce, seem to me like sacred things which should not be touched roughly nor thoughtlessly.

For his part, Flaubert admired Sand’s fluent productivity and insisted on his own habits as on an unhappy, idiosyncratic necessity: 

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. Ideas come very easily with you, incessantly, like a stream. With me it is a tiny thread of water.

He would, he claimed, have gone out more if he had not felt his work would suffer; “I feel the need of seeing you,” Flaubert wrote Sand often; but when she sent concrete invitations, he rejected them nearly as often as he accepted. The text of their correspondence suggests that the tension about this may have grown between them over the years. In her public Réponse a un ami with regard to war and social upheaval in Paris in 1870-71, Sand took him to task for the broader effects of his reclusive habits, especially his resistance to direct involvement in the public affairs that so embroiled his feelings:

In vain you are prudent and withdraw, your refuge will be invaded in its turn, and in perishing with human civilization you will be no greater a philosopher for not having loved, than those who threw themselves into the flood to save some debris of humanity. … The people, you say! The people is yourself and myself. … Our life is composed of love, and not to love is to cease to live.

But then almost immediately the two discussed this letter in further letters, whose tone is friendlier, less polemic, and quickly reabsorbed by the cycle of immediate invitations and quotidian regrets: Sand asked Flaubert to come to her house at Nohant for Christmas 1871, but Flaubert refused, as he was then taken up with the casting and staging of a theatrical play that he hoped would help to solve his mounting financial difficulties (which, unfortunately, it didn’t). “You are too much alone,” Sand touchingly protests in early January of 1872, as she finishes describing the still-lively weeks of holiday revelry and warmth her family and friends have been enjoying together in the French countryside. “Come to us and let us love you.” Again, Flaubert—caught up in work, in debt, and in worries about his mother’s failing health—turns Sand down.

Most moving of all, in this light, is the letter Flaubert writes to Sand’s son, Maurice, after seeing him at the funeral of the “dear master” in 1876:

I dream of your poor, dear mamma in a sadness that does not disappear. Her death has left a great emptiness for me. . . . When your business is finished, why not come to Paris for some time? Solitude is bad under certain conditions.  

If ever a case could be made for the primacy of human concerns over questions of artistic technique, Flaubert implicitly makes it here. That Flaubert produced little work of note between A Sentimental Education in 1869 and Three Tales in 1877 makes the case still more appealing. Flaubert may be the acknowledged father of any number of literary realisms, but Sand is a too-little-acknowledged foremother of a still deeper realism: that of loving those who are given to us, doing the work that is given to us, and understanding that these endeavors need not be mutually exclusive—if only we can be good to one another while we still have time.