Any biographer of Flaubert is faced with a fundamental irony: he or she will be writing the personal life of the literary high priest of the doctrine of Impersonality. A writer, Flaubert maintained, should withdraw himself from his writings, self-annihilating, invisible. Like God in his creation, he may be felt everywhere, but should nowhere be seen. Perversely, of course, one has a stronger sense of Flaubert’s thoroughly individual, controlling, writerly presence in his fiction than of any other great novelist; and there is a correspondingly potent biographical mythology surrounding the personal agonies that went into producing this ‘impersonal’ landmark in European fiction.
In his lifetime, Flaubert was fiercely camera-shy (which may be a mark equally of diffidence or vanity), and almost never allowed himself to be photographed or caricatured (‘I reserve my face for myself’). One wonders what he would have made of Frederick Brown’s superb, full-length portrait. Even he, one suspects, could not have rejected it as a cliché — even in its other French sense of a mere snapshot.
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