Two unlikely bedfellows share a boat down the Nile in 1849: one, the very laddish Gustave Flaubert, setting out on what becomes a tour of Egyptian brothels; the other, Florence Nightingale, searching for a clue about where her future lies.  Within seven years, both will be famous.

*****

How delicious!  Not only was Flaubert sailing down the Nile in 1849 on his lad’s own adventure, Florence Nightingale was too, though in a rather less salacious version.  In fact, according to Geoffrey Wall, at one point they were even sharing the same boat.

Both were in their late twenties, “eloquently self-aware and profoundly unhappy” and each “hoping to find a new purpose to their lives.”  Yet,

within seven years of their journey along the Nile both will be famous, she as the saviour of the wounded soldiers of the Crimean War, he as the author of Madame Bovary.  His novel will be the classic description of the subjection of women.  Her mission to the Crimean will foreshadow their emancipation.  At this point in their lives, though, their primary creative energies are paralysed.  Egypt may transform them.

A “sensitive” in every sense of the word

Wall is writing about a new book called A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt by Anthony Sattin.  It’s long intrigued me why more has not been made of Flaubert’s journey and the letters and notes he wrote along the way.  Yes, Francis Steegmuller compiled them in a book titled, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, with the encouragement of Graham Greene who declared, naturally enough, on its publication in 1972,

Not only one of the most important books of the year, but one of the most amusing.

Greene is absolutely right, and it’s not just because Greene himself was a connoisseur of the type of erotica he could only buy in brown paper wrappers in the Tottenham Court Road.

The subtitle gives it away.  Flaubert was, in Steegmuller’s phrase,

one of the world’s great sensitives.

He was a sensitive in the mostly pejorative way we mean it today.  Before he’d even managed to leave France’s shores, he’d written his beloved mother eight letters, and when he arrives in Paris to meet up with his friend and travelling companion, Maxime du Camp, he spends the first few days crying because he has to leave his mother and his country.  In the end, it’s only his fear of being a coward – “I’d be so ridiculous that I’d never dare look at myself in the mirror again” – that has him set off at last.

But he’s also a sensitive in a wondrous way: he has faculties of observation and perception that are exceptional, far beyond the reach – in acuity and piquancy – of most of us mere mortals.

On the cudgel

Take his first observations on arriving at Alexandria.  What does he focus on?  The architecture?  The bazaars?  Not at all.  He focuses on the cudgel.

You would scarcely believe the important role played by the cudgel in this part of the world; buffets are distributed with a sublime prodigality, always accompanied by loud cries; it’s the most genuine kind of local color you can think of.

Or on the locus of modesty:

Except in the very lowest classes, all the women are veiled, and in their noses they wear ornaments that hang down and sway from side to side like the facedrops of a horse.  On the other hand, if you don’t see their faces, you see their entire bosoms.  As you change countries, you find that modesty changes its location, like a bored traveller who keeps shifting from the outside to the inside of the stage-coach.

His is a sensibility that, when confronted by the sights and sounds of Egypt, gulps it all down, as he says, “like a donkey filling himself with hay.”

“A great frequenter of prostitutes”

No, given the wonders of his observations and the thrill of sharing the mind of one of the world’s great writers, the fact that Flaubert’s travel notes and letters have been largely neglected is probably due to old-fashioned bourgeois morality, the kind on which Emma Bovary impaled herself.

For the notes and letters are also filthy.  And, thus, each person who wants to discuss them has a problem: the problem, Wall says, of

how to represent this succulently objectionable material.

All his life Flaubert was “a great frequenter of prostitutes” (1), and on arriving in Egypt, he discovers it’s “a great place to buy sex.” (2)  His letters, at least those not written to his mother, describe

a procession of enviably miscellaneous and memorably unhygienic ejaculations. (3)

That “enviably miscellaneous” is priceless.  So too the “unhygienic,” for the bracing air of unwholesomeness is everywhere in the book.  Here’s an expurgated version of his visit to chez la Triestine in Cairo, fresh off the boat:

Another dance: arms stretched out front, elbows a little bent, the torso motionless; the pelvis quivers.  Preliminary ablutions of ces dames.  A litter of kittens had to be removed from my bed … Effect: she in front of me, the rustle of her clothes, the sound made by the gold piastres of her snood – a clear, slow sound.  Moonlight.  She carried a torch.  On the matting: firm flesh, bronze arse … the whole thing gave the effect of a plague victim or a leperhouse.

As Wall says,

Flaubert’s letters-from-the-brothel manage to be both laddishly explicit and disarmingly self-aware.  They are the uncensored, unbuttoned stuff of all the masculine conversations that never made it into realist fiction of the time.

I think this is why I find them fascinating.  To be sure, it’s their earthiness and the sheer joy with which Flaubert meets life – “To life!  To erections!” he once exclaimed.  But it’s also the tantalising contrast between all that’s explicit and grotesque in the Egyptian debauch, and the immaculate discretion with which he channels Emma Bovary’s self-destruction.

If you too are interested in the antecedents of that great novel, or its great author – or you are interested in that other force of nature, Florence Nightingale – you might like to read Anthony Sattin’s book.  It’s published by Hutchinson and I’m off to look it up now.

*****

Notes

1. Steegmuller, page 9

2. Wall

3. Wall

To read Geoffrey Wall’s review of Sattin’s book, click here.

Images:  Flaubert when he was young and handsome, courtesy of Wikipedia (top);  Flaubert in his Nubian costume, photographed by Maxime du Camp (middle); Flaubert and Max had one of their bearers dress up as a slave, photographed by Maxime du Camp (bottom)