Subject
Fw: ...on drinking terms with vn
From
Date
Body
----- Original Message -----
From: D. Barton Johnson
To: chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2003 8:06 PM
Subject: Fw: ...on drinking terms with vn
----- Original Message -----
From: D&R&N&S
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2003 12:29 AM
Subject: ...on drinking terms with vn
Julian Barnes pays tribute to the great Flaubert scholar Jean Bruneau, who died this month
Saturday June 28, 2003
The Guardian
It is now almost a commonplace that the best biography of Flaubert consists of his Correspondence. Biographers tell the facts; the letters reveal the man. Gide wrote that "for more than five years the Correspondence took the place of the Bible at my bedside. It was my reservoir of energy." Sartre, who fought Flaubert all his life, considered the letters a perfect example of free-association from the pre-Freudian couch. Even those who find the novels too perfect, too worked, often succumb to the directness, exuberance, wit, argumentativeness and unfettered intelligence of the letters.
It is now 30 years since the first volume of the Pleiade edition of
the Correspondence appeared. Three more followed at long and
unpredictable intervals. By the time the fifth and final one
appears, in a year or two's time, it will have taken a
century-and-a-quarter from the writer's death in 1880 to establish
as definitive a text of as many of the letters as has proved
possible. In charge of this work from the beginning was Jean
Bruneau, who died earlier this month with the end of his life's
work nearly in sight.
Bruneau was born in Nancy in 1922, the son of the grammarian
and lexicographer Charles Bruneau. At the age of 19 he joined
the Resistance, was arrested in the Jura in 1944 and deported
to Dachau. After the war he went to teach in America and began
dividing his time between chairs at Lyon University and Harvard.
In America he was on drinking terms with the pre-Lolita
Nabokov, and used to be summoned by Marguerite Yourcenar
whenever she felt the urge to have a conversation in Greek
(Bruneau's wife Lavinia would slip off into the Yourcenar garden,
which she grew to know well). In 1962 he published Les Debuts
litteraires de Gustave Flaubert, which led to his being invited, in
the mid-1960s, to edit the Pleiade Correspondence. The job was
frugally rewarded, and his academic life continued as before; but
from that point on the Bruneau dining table would have to be
cleared of Flaubert letters before the family could eat.
Flaubert's letters had first been given to the world by his niece
Caroline (who suppressed indecencies, corrected his
punctuation and tidied up his phrasing). Fuller editions followed,
but they were far from perfect; some had active misreadings
(Flaubert's handwriting is often hard to decipher); none had
adequate editorial backup. Bruneau established the text,
tracked down new letters, and provided a formidably detailed
critical apparatus: the appendices, notes and variants to Volume
Three, for instance, take up more pages than the text itself;
there are letters written in reply to Flaubert, excerpts from the
Goncourt Journal, third-party documents, historical background,
all of which bring amplification, corroboration, or, if necessary,
contradiction to the master's utterances. Flaubert only has to
mention in passing a book he might have dipped into for
Bruneau to give a succinct and pertinent summary of it. You
begin with words and you end up with a world. The editorial
knowledge and scholarship were unmatchable; but Bruneau also
had the perfect editorial temperament. He was modest yet
deeply tenacious; self-effacing yet filled with a drive for perfection
and completeness.
He had many successes - in 1974 he discovered Louise Colet's
then unpublished Mementoes in Avignon - and some inevitable
failures. Owners of letters could be reluctant to take the wider
view, suspecting (often rightly) that publication would reduce the
value of what they owned. Bruneau also came up against
narrow-mindedness and pig-headedness. For instance, Flaubert
wrote hundreds of letters to his publisher Michel Levy, many of
which appeared in the Conard edition (1926-33). Later, a further
102 turned up, published in 1965 in a tiny edition by Levy's
successor, Calmann-Levy. When Bruneau applied for
permission to reprint them, in his second volume (1980), he was
told he could cite the Conard letters in full, but use only the date
and first line of the 102 published 15 years previously. Such
situations require both tact and a holding of temper. Also a
continual optimism: believing that letters will turn up is often
necessary to making them turn up. To the end of his life,
Bruneau was convinced Flaubert's letters to the English
governess Juliet Herbert (and hers to him) would eventually
resurface.
The curmudgeonliness of proprietors contrasted sharply with the
generosity prevalent among Flaubert scholars. When Francis
Steegmuller was preparing his two-volume English edition of the
letters, Bruneau simply gave him free access to all that he knew
and held (so that some late letters appeared in English
translation before they did in French original). In 1981, Alphonse
Jacobs established the definitive text of the magnificent
exchange between Flaubert and George Sand; later, when
Bruneau got to that point in the Correspondence, Jacobs simply
allowed him to reproduce everything.
Much of this was down to Bruneau's personal as well as
professional qualities. The Flaubert website
(www.univ-rouen.fr/flaubert), announcing his death, described
him as "unassuming, straightforward and scrupulous", one who
never failed to acknowledge the tiniest article from the most
junior Flaubertiste. The only time I met him, he was already
aware that his mental powers were failing (a consequence, it is
thought, of his wartime treatment); he handled the situation with
exquisite courtesy and gentle regret. When it became clear that
he would be unable to finish the final volume, he handed over to
Yvan Leclerc, professor at Rouen University. By the time Leclerc
completes the final volume, he will have been at work for seven
or eight years; but in the true tradition of Flaubert editors, it is
Bruneau's name that he will place on the title-page.
The Flaubert website ended its announcement of Bruneau's
death with a quote from the first volume of the Correspondence.
The novelist, writing from Constantinople in 1850, on hearing of
the death of Balzac: "When a man we admire dies, we are
always sad." Many who never met Bruneau, but who learned
over decades to absorb his precise, humane and scholarly
presence through a trail of prefaces and square brackets and
notes and addenda and notes to addenda, will be saddened by
his death. When Alphonse Jacobs was dying in 1986, he wrote
to Bruneau: "Please do not pity me: I feel no pity for myself. I
think that my life has had a certain usefulness. I have done one
thing that I think will endure." Bruneau quoted these words when
he wrote Jacobs's obituary in Le Monde. Those who admired
Jean Bruneau will trust that he realised he had done one thing -
one very large thing - which will truly endure.