Frederic Raphael is the author of more than twenty novels, including
The Glittering Prizes, f ive volumes of short stories, biographies of Byron and W. Somerset Maugham, and five volumes of his personal notebooks and
journals. His new books include
A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus.
For the
Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of collections of notable correspondence by eminent men, including:
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert
Trans. by Francis Steegmuller (1980-82)
When Jean-Paul Sartre titled his (unfinished) biography of Gustave Flaubert "The Idiot of the Family," it was the revenge of talent on genius. Sartre reproached Flaubert for lacking the kind of political commitment that led his biographer to endorse Stalin and Mao. Flaubert's crime, according to Sartre, was his failure to rally to the 1870 Commune in Paris or to denounce those who suppressed it. Flaubert's one persistent allegiance was to his art. He spent most of his life in his workroom in gloomy rural Normandy. While writing "Madame Bovary," he did occasionally go to Paris, to see his mistress, Louise Colet, but he preferred 
to keep her warm through a long, somewhat passionate correspondence. "Love me forever, do," he tells her and sends her "a kiss, a long one, two of them, good and long; a hundred. Next time we'll talk only about you. Meanwhile, work hard, as much as you can. The problem is not to look for happiness, it's to avoid being bored. It can be done, if you stick at it. A toi mon amour." You cannot entirely admire the man who kept poor Louise on the back burner until he had learned from her all that he needed to make Emma Bovary a believable (foolishly romantic) woman. Once the novel was done, so too was Louise. Often literally stuck in the provincial mud, Flaubert kept in touch with all manner of friends, including Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, George Sand and Guy de Maupassant. To the critic Sainte-Beuve, who had written scornfully of Flaubert's novel "Salammbô," he addressed a classic letter beginning "Cher Maître," in which he responds with deliciously mordant deference. We should all dare to be Flaubert's kind of idiot.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
Also see
Frederic Raphael's top 10 talkative novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
The famed literary editor and author Robert Gottlieb's latest book is the new biography, Great Expectations: the Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens.painful attempts at teaching and governessing; the disaster of the one boy, Branwell, brilliant and dissolute; the amazing success of Jane Eyre; the relentless loss of life to tuberculosis (although Charlotte died of complications connected to childbirth)—it’s so painful and moving a saga that no respectable biographer has failed it. The classic is the life of Charlotte by her close friend the brilliant novelist Elizabeth Gaskell; the most complete version is the series of individual volumes by the scholar Winifred Gérin. But don’t worry—you really can't go wrong.
