Geoffrey Wall
BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS
A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt
By Anthony Sattin (Hutchinson 402pp £20)
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The best biographies, like some of the best novels, are packed with subjunctives. They are alive with a persistent, muted sense of what might have been.
The lives of educated, imaginative, middle-class, mid-nineteenth century women were often tragically packed with subjunctives. Excluded from the public sphere, these women were further constrained by a scarcely figurative matrimonial corset, that patriarchal contraption so lovingly tightened of late. Subject to such chronic restriction, a young woman might take refuge in illness and romantic fiction or, more audaciously, adultery and suicide. Emma Bovary, that small-town extremist, exhausts both possibilities. For those more fortunate than her, there might be a carefully chaperoned excursion to somewhere far away - to Egypt, for example.
Anthony Sattin's A Winter on the Nile contains the story of one such exceptional nineteenth-century journey. The book is one part travel writing, one part cultural history, and one part biography. It's a delicious mix, skilfully blended. There are two travellers, an English woman and a French man, both in their late twenties. They are eloquently self-aware and profoundly unhappy. They are hoping to find a new purpose to their lives. They arrive in Egypt in November 1849, within days of each other. They stay in adjacent hotels. They travel along the same river, and they visit the same places at the same season of the year. They confide their secrets to their journals. They write vivid letters home. For two days they are to be found on the upper and the lower decks of the same steamship, plodding along the lower Nile from Alexandria to Cairo.
These two young travellers, so nicely oblivious of each other, are Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. 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 Crimea will foreshadow their emancipation. At this point in their lives, though, their primary creative energies are paralysed. Egypt may transform them.
That's the particular pleasure of this book. We know their future, but they don't. We watch them feel their way towards it. As we read, we enjoy a compassionate biographical irony, urging them both, like fond parents, towards the greatness that awaits them. This is the narrative drive proper to the partial biography, the 'year in the life'. The compacted form allows the biographer a freedom to experiment, to ignore many of the conventions of the full-dress, 400-page, conscientiously chronological contraption. You dispense with the ceremonious preliminaries. You are not required to linger until the day of the funeral. You can create a strong dramatic focus on a time of transformation. The back story can be sketched in. The sequel can be briskly selective.
To show how it's done, here is an example from the Florence Nightingale portion of the story. It is late in the journey, and the party that includes Florence is returning down the Nile, heading north. Florence visits the temple of Osiris on the island of Philae, near Aswan. Thanks to her liberal Unitarian childhood, she is wonderfully receptive to intimations of the sacred from beyond the authorised Christian experience. The upper chamber of this temple, where the resurrection of Osiris was once celebrated, is a place she adores, for reasons which are too private to share with her more orthodox English travelling companions.
This is Sattin's account of Florence Nightingale's farewell to Osiris:
Early that morning, she had visited the temple alone, walking through the outer courts, feeling her way up the worn stone steps and then going directly to the Osiris chamber where she knelt down, as she had done so often in other places on other Sundays. But instead of closing her eyes, she began to scratch at 'the sacred dust' to dig a hole. In it she buried the crucifix she had brought with her from home. As she did so, she imagined binding Jesus and Osiris in the ground as she had done in her thoughts. She then filled in the hole and, having thoroughly covered her traces, spent a while in prayer, savouring this unique moment of spiritual clarity.
The private, symbolic audacity of the gesture of burying the crucifix in 'the sacred dust', the passionate conjunction of Osiris and Jesus in the mind of that young English woman: this scene enriches and complicates my sense of what Victorians did, of what they could do, in private, with their rapidly disintegrating religious beliefs.
Florence Nightingale's Egypt is a place of spiritual self-fashioning. Gustave Flaubert's Egypt is somewhat different. It was a great place to buy sex. His letters to his schoolfriends describe in detail a procession of enviably miscellaneous and memorably unhygienic ejaculations, all nicely tinged with an intelligent morning-after melancholy. 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. Sattin creditably solves the problem of how to represent this succulently objectionable material by dwelling more on the melancholy than on the carnality.
When he quotes from Flaubert's letters, he foregrounds the inward action. Here is Flaubert in Esna, spending the night at the house of the courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem:
We lay on her palm-frond bed, a wick burning in a lamp, of ancient design, hanging from the wall. Her little dog slept on my silk jacket. She was tired after dancing, and she was cold. I covered her in my fur robe, and she fell asleep with her fingers passed through mine. But I didn't close my eyes: I spent the night in infinitely intense reverie - that was why I stayed - watching this beautiful creature sleep, snoring with her head on my arm. I thought of my nights in the brothel in Paris - of a whole series of other memories - and of her, of her dance, of her voice that sang songs that had neither meaning nor a distinguishable word to me. This went on all night. At three in the morning I got up and went to piss in the street, the stars shining.
That conjunction is perfect Flaubert, that double truth, the pissing in the street and the sky of shining stars.
Sattin has the imaginative range and energy to do justice to both of his travellers. Their differences make for a richly alternating narrative line. In quite a different key, there is a wonderful post-Egyptian episode in which Florence Nightingale's mother, Fanny, writes to her wayward daughter, accepting reluctantly her need to establish her independence. Here is Sattin's account of that anguished change of heart:
Letters passed regularly between them ... carrying words that none of them had been able to speak until now. And as the summer passed, so the tone of the letters became more conciliatory. Mr Nightingale was ... the catalyst for this change: he wrote to warn his wife not to oppose Florence ... perhaps fearing that she might refuse to return to them. This correspondence came to a head on 7 September 1851, when Fanny Nightingale wrote what must have been the hardest letter of her life, for in it she recognised her daughter's desire to leave them and her need for her mother's blessing upon her decision. 'Yes, my dear,' Fanny wrote, 'take time, take faith and love with you, even though it be to walk in a path which leads you strangely from us all ... I will do my best, I will indeed, to think you right, and let you follow the manner of man you are.' But she ended with a warning, or a plea, that Florence be merciful. 'You must not lay upon us more than we can bear.'
The forlorn generosity of the mother's words resonates long in the mind. With such material at his disposal, Sattin has written a brilliantly assured experiment in biography, a triumph of the historical imagination. Convincingly researched, informed by an unobtrusive first-hand knowledge of Egyptian places, compellingly skilful in the writing, the whole story is illuminated by Anthony Sattin's delicately perceptive sense of character in action.
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Geoffrey Wall's books include 'Flaubert: A Life', published in paperback by Faber in 2001.