Over a festive season that stretched my resources, I turned to a German translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; translated by Elisabeth Edl (admired by me for her translations of Patrick Modiano) and much lauded at the time of publication in 2012. And, I must say it seems to have left a greater impression upon me than whatever English version I may have read in the past (but not the one by Lydia Davis, also from 2012) did; for I don’t remember previously having been as stimulated … or, as moved … as this reading has left me.
To be said on this particular edition: Beyond the literary work, the notes throughout are extensive, as is Edl’s translation essay; included also in the volume are the proceedings from the law case brought against Flaubert for … what? … obscenity, shall we say … by the French public prosecutors of the day. This latter inclusion was a first in the German language, and whether it has found its way into any of the English translations to date I don’t know. At least, it – the trial, the outcome (‘case dismissed’, so to speak), the repercussions (for society, for literature) – lives, still, in academia. This essay by Christine Haines published in French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp 1-27 and available on JSTOR is just one example.
Of an evening (that is, in bed!) my seriously serious book reading is intermittently interrupted by other forms of Lektüre, sometimes of a more frivolous nature and sometimes not. Definitely belonging to the latter; the latest (or the one before that) issue of the LRB. And, it was there, around about this Christmas time, that I was interested to read a review piece by Julian Barnes (Vol. 45 No. 24 · 14 December 2023) inspired by a new Monet biography by Jackie Wollschläger. With that, I won’t flex my (puny) Impressionist muscles; Julian Barnes may be able to get away with being an amateur art critic/historian/connoisseur, but, I not! It just reminded me that Barnes and Flaubert appear to have taken up firm residence in a similar crevice of my brain. Hardly surprising says she (to herself), recalling a stuffed parrot. But, amongst other things, I also remember his essay (also in the LRB) on the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and that it was far from complimentary. And, this I remember because I remember it having coincided with my reading of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in a then new translation and also from Davis, and I further remember having been momentarily concerned that I wasn’t getting the best of Proust. What, if anything, Barnes has had to say about her Swann’s Way, I don’t know. Or, just can’t remember!
This all said as a precursor; I now flee from the Francophile Julian Barnes to where I wanted to be -on the safer ground (for me) of the very English (irrespective of the subject matter) novelist Barnes; for I have also just read his latest novel Elizabeth Finch. A fairly spare book, not much more than a novella (is there a precise definition of a novella? this is under 200 pages anyway), I read it gladly and with interest but have this idea it could have been more, and at the same time less. That the ‘Elizabeth Finch’ character Barnes wrote, or at least the one that I read (as being described by the Ich narrative voice, better known as Neil), could be seriously so possessed with this Julian the Apostate – excavated from his Neo-platonic grave and offered up on the sacrificial altar of literary devices as an alternative path to a European Middle Ages without … what? … the perversions of Christianity? All very Gibbonish to my way of thinking and a too easy – or stridently secular? – (re)interpretation of the historical record. Which can be absolutely okay, and Barnes’ penchant for Exkurse into historical micro-narratives and discourse is familiar, but this one falls somewhat flat in my opinion. This Elizabeth and this Julian are just not good bedfellows. And this Neil was perhaps remembering an Elizabeth that was a figment of, if not his imagination, his infatuation. He knew her not at all.
Julian Barnes does talk about himself – sometimes – so we have evidence to his inspiration here. Elizabeth has obviously something to do with the celebrated art historian and novelist, Anita Brookner, with whom Barnes had a long and unusual friendship. How much precisely, only Barnes can say, but her physical characteristics, her manner and habits, her solitary life, have much in common with the fictional character, and Barnes and Brookner lunches (down to the 75 minutes) seemed to follow a very similar routine to that of Neil and Elizabeth. That Brookner was a greatly admired teacher there seems little doubt, nor that she was intellectually brilliant, enigmatic and almost ‘unknowable’. This tribute by Barnes in The Guardian at the time of Brookner’s death in 2016 is revealing. But, as always, in fiction, just as important in the well of inspiration as that which is true is that which is not, and Brookner was what Elizabeth Finch was not, a productive and lauded novelist; The Courtauld and a Slade Professorship at Cambridge something other than delivering an adult education course.
But not only Brookner is mined, there is also the fleeting ghostly presence of the great, now late, Hilary Mantel (also a friend) in an odd episode in Barnes’ novel in which, after delivering a lecture at the LRB that sort of wished Christianity had been cancelled in the Middle Ages, Elizabeth Finch finds herself cancelled in a very contemporary way by a rabid right-wing media. In this Guardian interview (recommended) from last year, Barnes says this to have been suggested by the brouhaha surrounding Mantel’s rather disparaging remarks on Catherine Middleton in a lecture sponsored by, yes, the LRB! in 2012 (and expounded upon later in print). Really, though, the comparison is a bit of a stretch – not that it is a false equivalence exactly, it just doesn’t make much sense. To begin with, you gotta be known to be shot down. This Elizabeth Finch was not. Mantel, on the other hand, was one of the most celebrated writers in the UK at the time, but even as such she qualified as fodder for the pack only through her choice of subject – minor in content, major in potential to offend – and a royal one into the bargain, and she was definitely not, anywhere near, cancelled in the aftermath. And, it should be said, the public appetite – and therefore tabloid lust – for all ‘bodies’ Royal is something other than the what if’s of monotheism vis-à-vis paganism in medieval Europe.
In the end, Elizabeth Finch remains a phantom to this reader, as she is in the novel bearing her name – her contours vague and unsatisfying (no Madame Bovary here!). And one is left to wonder at the point of the exercise …or, is that the point. And is it pointless to have wanted to know more about just how she spent her days; at her sexual predilections; her contrariness; at the mystery man … lover; or is he the narrative voice observing himself – his passion requited and in his possession? And what exactly was her intent in leaving her papers to this Neil, who says nothing is about him, but mostly it is? And where are the bounds of biography, and of fiction, and of biography within fiction? Or is it enough that Barnes leaves one with these questions, as Elizabeth did Neil?
And returning to where I began. Why do Julian Barnes’ novels seem to me to be more and more haunted by Flaubert and/or Modiano? The simple answer could be, that they are.