Ouvriers de luxe

Writers approach​ the publication of their first books with a variety of tactics, depending on temperament. In 1896 the dandiacal Max Beerbohm, with a tip of his straw boater, called his first book The Works of Max Beerbohm. He was 24 at the time, and his ‘works’ consisted of reprinted articles and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful idea for a fellow not to publish anything until he was fifty, and then, one fine day, to bring out his Collected Works, and afterwards just leave it at that.’ As it happened, Flaubert didn’t publish his first novel for another ten years, while his largely unpublished juvenilia take up as many pages in the Pléiade edition as his entire corpus published in his lifetime.

Writers also, for better or worse, need publishers (and vice versa), and their relationships, involving taste, friendship and money, can be as long-lasting, as complicated and as asymmetrical as any marriage, not least because the writer quickly learns that the publisher doesn’t just publish him or her, but other writers as well. This can easily lead to rivalrousness and jealousy. The Irish novelist Brian Moore was for many years published by Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Maschler also published Philip Roth. Moore’s wife, Jean, used to joke that Maschler treated Moore like the wife, and Roth like the mistress. Not that those are the only available roles. Flaubert’s first three novels, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale, were all published by Michel Lévy, and there was none of that wife-mistress nonsense. The relationship, as established by Flaubert, was quite straightforward: he was an Artist, while his publisher was a Tradesman. Nor was there any question of which entrance to Flaubert’s house in Croisset the publisher should use, because Flaubert never invited him there.

Lévy was born on 20 December 1821, eight days after Flaubert. They reached maturity in the age of railways (which Flaubert loathed), publishing (which Flaubert tolerated) and democracy, of which Flaubert once wrote that ‘the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity of the bourgeois.’ It was also a time of a nationwide increase in literacy, ushered in by Guizot’s Law of 1833, which decreed that all communes of more than five hundred inhabitants must establish a primary school for boys (which would be free for the indigent). Cheap editions proliferated. In 1839, Stendhal had dedicated La Chartreuse de Parme ‘To the Happy Few’ – his elite readership. He died three years later; but by 1856 the novel was being included in the ‘Michel Lévy Collection’ alongside Le Rouge et le Noir, each available at a cost of one franc. Cheap books and railways also went together: in 1851, Louis Hachette came to London for the Great Exhibition and was much impressed by the W.H. Smith bookstalls at London stations. In March 1853 he inaugurated the first such kiosk in France at the Gare du Nord. Flaubert stood aloof from such matters. Two of the minor yet fascinating details in Gustave Flaubert et Michel Lévy: Un couple explosif are that in his entire life Flaubert never bought a newspaper from a kiosk and – almost incredibly – never went into a bookshop.

Today’s publishers must be relieved they do not have to deal with Flaubert, or some mutant facsimile of him; at worst, they have to put up with writers who are crazy, or criminal, or incorrigible hermits. But even the nuttiest need to be told that their publisher likes their books. Before Lévy took on Madame Bovary, Flaubert had been approached by a publisher called Jaccottet. As he reported to the Goncourt brothers in 1861, Jaccottet had said to him: ‘Your book is very good, it’s well-polished! Though of course you cannot aspire to the success of Amédée Achard [a prolific playwright and novelist, long forgotten]. I can’t promise to bring you out this year.’ Flaubert bellowed in commentary to the Goncourts: ‘It’s “well-polished”. I find that an insolence on the part of a publisher! A publisher can exploit you, but he hasn’t the right to appreciate you. I’ve always thought well of Lévy for never having said a word to me about my book.’ As Leclerc and Mollier put it, Flaubert viewed publication as ‘a compromise, or worse … a prostitution’.

Needless to say, Flaubert didn’t negotiate his contracts directly with Lévy, which was just as well: his niece Caroline said of him that he ‘had absolutely no head for figures’. He used his lawyer friend Ernest Duplan, and later his Lévy stablemate George Sand (who told him straightforwardly that he was naïf in business matters). He rejected the idea of an exclusivity contract, unlike Sand, Zola, Dumas père or Loti. He was unique in refusing any illustration of his books. Just as uniquely, he refused to allow his publisher to read the manuscript before buying it. (Lévy had ‘cheated’ by having seen a third or so of Madame Bovary when it was serialised in the Revue de Paris.) Lévy bought Madame Bovary for 800 francs – 400 per volume – which were standard terms for a first novel. After it sold well, Lévy gave Flaubert a ‘bonus’ of 500 francs, which Flaubert found patronising, but accepted. Five years later, with Salammbô, Lévy offered a contract worth 10,000 francs, while knowing nothing of the book beyond its single-word title, and the fact that it was set in Carthage. Rightly, he feared that it might prove to be ‘a work of erudition with historical and philosophical considerations’. Not wishing to be landed, next time around, with another ‘antique’ novel which he would have to buy unseen, he insisted on a proviso in the contract: he would buy Salammbô, on condition that Flaubert’s next book would be ‘contemporary’. If it was ‘antique’, Lévy could refuse it until Flaubert had delivered a roman moderne (which of course he wouldn’t be allowed to read before buying). This sounds reasonable enough, even if the definition of ‘contemporary’ seems bizarre to us: it meant ‘not set before 1750’. That’s to say, up to 110 years previously, when Louis XV was on the throne – which in our terms would be a historical if not ‘antique’ novel. L’Éducation sentimentale easily conformed to these conditions. And as it happened, Salammbô sold almost as well as Madame Bovary, though when Flaubert asked for the ‘bonus’ which he had previously found insulting, Lévy declined the request. The publisher could dig his heels in as well as his author: he refused outright to give Flaubert any sales figures for Madame Bovary.

Publishers such as Lévy established the templates for the business. (He himself told Sand that he wanted to create a need to read as powerful as the need to eat or to drink.) They printed editions for all pockets, from deluxe illustrated editions down to quarto-sized, two-column versions sold at ten centimes to ‘the less well-off’; they understood about publicity and marketing, and how to stir up the newspapers; they got their books not just into station bookstalls but also into the grands magasins that had sprung up on the grands boulevards. We may think the 20th century discovered the multi-book contract, but Lévy pioneered it. In 1860, Flaubert’s friend Ernest Feydeau had had great success with his naughty novels Fanny (1858) and Daniel (1859), whereupon Lévy offered him a contract worth 25,000 francs for everything he was to produce over the next ten years. He then went to the Union life-assurance company and insured Feydeau’s life at a cost of 823 francs. Does any publisher do this nowadays? It would certainly add to a writer’s normal self-doubts.

The custom was for a publisher to buy a book outright, gaining permission to exploit it for a set number of years, and then, if it was successful and the author agreed, would buy another term for a second down payment. If the book proved a sudden success, it was the publisher not the author who was enriched by this. Unsurprisingly, many writers felt they were wage-slaves – except that most didn’t get wages, only money up front (though Lévy paid George Sand a yearly income). Publishing had gone swiftly from a cottage industry to a capitalist one: in 1839, the journalist Élias Regnault, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, described publishers as ‘the new barons of industrial feudalism’. Flaubert thought of himself and his fellow writers as ouvriers de luxe.

He had the highest conception of Art and the lowest conception of Business. ‘I do not see the connection,’ he wrote, ‘between a five-franc piece and an idea.’ This dichotomy didn’t prevent – indeed, doubtless enhanced – that occasional (or persistent) paranoia which often accompanies the writing life. Many writers glaze over when faced with a royalty statement, or even a contract that might affect their income for years to come. If anything goes wrong, they are inclined to blame their publisher (or agent) rather than themselves. Some wonder why publishers often live in larger houses than they do, despite the reasons being obvious. Flaubert, who sprang from bourgeois stock, occupied the family house at Croisset, and had an apartment in Paris. Lévy, who came from humble beginnings in north-eastern France, built himself a swanky publishing house next to the Opéra and a luxurious bookshop in the boulevard des Italiens, and renovated a vast aristocratic mansion on the Champs-Élysées as his main residence. He also bought a château in Bordeaux. He had quickly become one of the eight hundred richest men in France.

How could this not seem offensive to the ouvrier de luxe? Baudelaire, who was also published by Lévy, wrote that the man’s nature was double: when he invited you to his home he affected to be ‘the perfect man of the world’, but when it came to business he was ‘as prickly as a savage’. What might explain this? Many reached for the lazy reason that Lévy was Jewish. Flaubert’s letters are spotted with casual – and very deliberate – antisemitic remarks, which increase in vehemence when there is any kind of disagreement with his publisher. This will dismay those who think that writers are – or should be – morally better people than non-writers, and less imbued with society’s prejudices. There is little general evidence for this. Antisemitism was widespread in France at this time, baked into all classes, and led vociferously, of course, by the Catholic Church. The Goncourt brothers displayed a snooty-euphemistic antisemitism, complaining that Lévy was a parvenu and ‘slippery’ – a ‘literary usurer’. Flaubert’s language was more visceral: Lévy was treated as juif, israélite, enfant d’Israël and vil circoncis. ‘Let’s hope the Israelite will shell out his piastres,’ he writes to Duplan in 1861. His abuse could also be literary, as when quoting Racine’s Athalie: ‘Dieu des Juifs, tu l’emportes.’ It feels more dismaying that George Sand, that optimistic, democratic bonne dame de Nohant, should share Flaubert’s prejudice. She was closer and more grateful to Lévy as a publisher: he issued her Oeuvres complètes in more than seventy volumes, and liked the fact that she read her contracts and discussed them with him. But when Flaubert complains about Lévy’s supposed dishonesty, she replies: ‘What do you expect? Once a Jew, always a Jew.’ She also embraced a more excessive antisemitism than Flaubert’s. ‘The Jews are doing their best to kill us off,’ she wrote to her secretary in 1856. And a year later she was voicing a version of the Great Replacement Theory: ‘In fifty years, France will have become Jewish. Some Jewish wise men are already predicting it. They will not be mistaken.’ Imaginative writers rarely make the best prognosticators.

When Flaubert’s inevitable falling-out with Lévy occurred, it had multiple causes. The death of Louis Bouilhet – Flaubert’s ‘literary conscience’ – in 1869 was a severe loss to him. In 1872, after the Franco-Prussian War was over, he launched a campaign of commemoration. He wanted a literal memorial, in the shape of a water fountain in Rouen, and two literary ones: a staging of Bouilhet’s play Mademoiselle Aïssé, and the publication of a final collection of Bouilhet’s poetry, Dernières Chansons, for which he insisted on the highest production values. Lévy, who had published Bouilhet for fifteen years, supported all these ventures in one way or another, though the publishing reality was that while Bouilhet’s plays had been more successful than Flaubert’s (which is not saying much), he was not the first-rate poet Flaubert insisted he was. Dernières Chansons was published in 1872 in an edition of 2000 copies, of which 602 remained unsold 36 years later. Both publisher and friend were left dissatisfied and irritated with one another, whereupon a rival publisher scooped up Flaubert’s next book, while also promising a luxury edition of Bouilhet’s Collected Works. Flaubert, as many writers have done, succumbed to the mixture of flattery and money, and declined to offer his next book to the ‘son of Jacob’. He always maintained that the final rupture was all about Lévy’s treatment of Bouilhet, but it was also about Flaubert’s own standing. L’Éducation sentimentale had been neither a critical nor a financial success (which didn’t prevent Flaubert asking, this time, not for a ‘bonus’, but rather for a ‘consolation’ – which Lévy refused). Nor was its author the magisterial figure posterity has raised him to. In (crude and cruel) publishing terms, when set beside Zola or Renan or Hugo or even Maupassant, Flaubert was a gagne-petit.

In his younger days, Flaubert had despised honours, and formulated various versions of the dictum ‘Honours dishonour, titles degrade, office-holding ossifies.’ When first offered the Légion d’honneur, he refused it delightedly; later, however, he accepted it. When Michel Lévy received the same honour in 1873, Flaubert reacted with ‘anger and indignation’ and a ‘hatred which nearly turned into a mania’, he told Sand. Two years later, Lévy died suddenly at the age of 54. Goncourt reported in his diary: ‘I inform Flaubert that Michel Lévy has died. At this news, I see his finger pass across his buttonhole, which no longer contains the decoration he had removed when Lévy was awarded the honour.’ Soon it would be on display again.