He was capable of hating and reviling his
unfortunate story, and of talking about it with a kind of exasperated
spite, as though it had somehow got possession of him unfairly and he
owed it a grudge for having crossed his mind. That is strange enough,
but that is quite a different affair; his personal resentment of the
intrusion of such a book upon him had nothing to do with the
difficulty he found in writing it. His classic agonies were caused by
no unruliness in the story he had to tell; his imagined book was
rooted in his thought, and never left its place by a hair's breadth.
Year after year he worked upon his subject without finding anything in
it, apparently, to disturb or distract him in his continuous effort to
treat it, to write it out to his satisfaction. This was the only
difficulty; there was no question of struggling with a subject that he
had not entirely mastered, one that broke out with unforeseen demands;
Bovary never needed to be held down with one hand while it was written
with the other. Many a novelist, making a further and fuller
acquaintance with his subject as he proceeds, discovering more in it
to reckon with than he had expected, has to meet the double strain, it
would seem. But Flaubert kept his book in a marvellous state of
quiescence during the writing of it; through all the torment which it
cost him there was no hour when it presented a new or uncertain look
to him.
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