Critical Essays, on Everything
Julian Barnes
Flaubert’s Parrot, The Sense of an Ending and Through the Window by Julian Barnes
Critical essays are a tough business. Everyone’s a critic but very few people are good critics. Julian Barnes, if nothing else, knows what he likes and why he likes it. And when he says he approves of something, enjoyed it, admires it, thinks it worth consuming and thinking about and revisiting, that’s generally a recommendation to take seriously.
Orwell, of instance, might have been a liar, might have talked up his own experiences, as Barnes believes. But what Orwell writes about is still of interest; the talent cannot be denied. It’s not damning with faint praise at all. It’s praising with faint damnation.
Barnes’s essay on Arthur Hugh Clough, a now almost completely forgotten poet, begins by showing at some length how unromantic, how theoretically unpoetical, Clough could be. At a time of grand tourists traipsing around the continent and returning loaded with statues, paintings and VD, Clough refused to rhapsodise about Rome. Where some saw splendid desolation, and others were intoxicated almost beyond words, like Edward Gibbon, Clough thought the whole city a rather ‘rubbishy’ place. And who is to say, after all, that he was not wrong? Some romances are worth ditching; some romantic images likewise. You may yet like Parisian architecture and still notice all the refuse piled high and unattended in the streets, after all. It’s possible to keep one’s eyes open for two separate things. Or more.
The best essay in this collection by some distance is about the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. To start, we get what would, I suppose, now be considered an unfashionable — indeed undermining — thing for a younger male writer to begin his profile with: a series of details about how Fitzgerald presented herself in Barnes’s company — making herself seem absent-minded and careless, in Barnes’s view permitting herself to be misunderstood and underestimated. There is a minor disagreement about taking a taxi verses the Northern Line. She’s in second class and not in first on the train.
Knowingly, Barnes talks of his own encounter with Fitzgerald, her wrongfooting him consistently as though it was all planned, and writes parenthetically that she often lied to interviewers. (Although it’s possible, and anyone with an ordinary memory might tell you at times likely, that she could have been doing so not as a masterful gambit but instead because occasionally — for all of us — truth and falsehood can combine in our minds and come out in interesting ways.)
This essay is excellent because it’s so filled with enthusiasm and excitement. Because few people more than one or two decades younger than Barnes will have read Fitzgerald. Because he makes her seem subtle and witty and worth the time, in every instance.
The only short story of the collection is inspired by, and to an extent about, the writings of Hemingway. It’s beautifully done but one wonders, as one sometimes does with Barnes, what the point of the thing really is. What is the critic saying, really saying, here?
Flaubert’s Parrot is, although it is so amorphous a thing a single descriptor would not suffice, a kind of critical commentary on Flaubert and Flaubertism. It subjects to criticism not only the written work, not only the whole life of an author, but also his reputation, his implied fans, his world and worldview. Barnes even does a kind of prac-crit of Flaubert’s intimate correspondence. Not something many people would want to happen to them after their demise.
What do we discover about Flaubert? That he is a man worth being obsessed with — someone who was fallible and flawed and failing, who said crude and vulgar things in private, but who did, for all that, produce some work which was external to himself that functioneds perfectly and mattered and continues to matter. Works that people might tour like picturesque ruins, thinking about a vanished age, a society long gone.
In Through the Window, published many years later, Barnes returns to Flaubert, as he will presumably continue doing for as long as he is writing. Flaubert is a paradox because although it’s possible to think of him as personifying the France of his own day — he spent so much time writing plays (possibly the most topical and popular artform in those less literate, fast turnover, pack ‘em in, pack ‘em in, pack ‘em in times) and trying to have them put on — and yet the author himself spent so much time not in the France of his own day but in other, more liminal places.
The interior of someone’s head, for example. Or ancient Carthage. No wonder Flaubert is so widely translated, of course, but as Barnes notes, it’s worth thinking just a little about what might be missed in each and every rendering of a novelist as obsessed as Flaubert claimed to be with finding and putting down in type the right word.