Volume 40, Number 11 · June 10, 1993
Unlikely Friendship
By Julian Barnes
Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence
translated by Francis Steegmuller, translated by Barbara Bray
Knopf, 428 pp., $35.00
This great correspondence is built upon equality and difference. Flaubert's exchanges with Turgenev are full of equality—not to say crusty backpatting—but largely empty of difference: 'We are a pair of old moles,' writes Turgenev, 'burrowing in the same direction.' Flaubert's exchanges with Louise Colet, vivid with difference, lack any useful equality: not just because most of her letters were destroyed, but because of his flamboyant and bullying assertiveness. He, the unpublished writer and debutant amorist, is always telling her, the well-known poet and skilled boudoir operator, just exactly what is what in both art and love: 'O enfant, enfant, que tu es jeune encore!' is a characteristic apostrophe to a woman eleven years his senior. Only with George Sand does Flaubert manage to attain both equality and difference.
Review, 6055 words
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