When Charles Bovary, recently widowed, asked her father if he could court her, she was excited.  How romantic!  Charles clearly adored her.  The reality was less exciting.  She was only a teenager and like another teenager who married another Charles, she found her husband stuffy and boring and her way of life dull.  She knew how attractive she was to men and felt she had wasted herself with Charles.  Still, she did her best, she tried to make her husband’s life as comfortable as possible, but inside she was becoming desperate.  The invitation to the Viscount’s Ball was a rare opportunity to blossom.  Her card was full; she danced every dance, but none with Charles.  But he was not a suspicious or devious man; he liked to see the admiring glances men gave to Emma.  He was pleased she was happy. 

But the ball just added to her frustration.  She found the Viscount’s embossed cigar case on the way home and treasured it.  She began to dream of exciting liaison’s with other men.  She began to flirt.  Soon she had attracted Leon, a handsome though impecunious clerk.  Emma would slip out for clandestine liaisons at the bottom of the garden after Charles had gone to sleep.  She would entice Leon to abscond from his work in the afternoon.  She was taking enormous risks but she didn’t care; there were in love and that the only thing worth living for.   When Leon took fright and left her to go to work in Rouen, Emma was devastated.  She hardly went out of her room and complained of her palpitations. 

Not long afterwards, she attracted the interest of Rodolphe, a wealthy landowner who had recently bought the chateau outside the village.  He was not a timid man and made his intentions known to Emma from the start.  Wasn’t this what she had always dreamed of?  Rodolphe was confident.  He knew how to romance a woman and soon they were lovers, seizing every opportunity during the day to meet.  Often Emma would hurry to the chateau to spend her afternoons with Rodolphe.  She couldn’t get enough of him.  But she was running up enormous bills at the haberdasher and store in the village to maintain an increasingly exotic life style.  She persuaded Rodolphe to run away with her.  She would leave Charles, their daughter Berthe, and escape to Paris and from there to Italy.  They would be so happy.  It was sad, but for Rodolphe, Emma was becoming an embarrassing liability.  She was wonderful and entrancing, but he had to get away.  So he chose the coward’s route and left her a note as he sped through the village in his coach. 

Emma collapsed when she read the note and was ill for months.  She became pale, lost weight, had frequent attacks of the vapours.  She had little interest in the house, her appearance or even Berthe, but then she met Leon again and their relationship flared into a dangerous passion that threatened his new occupation in Rouen.  Besides, she was getting into serious financial difficulties and was being sued for debt.  Eventually, she could hide their precarious situation from Charles any longer; a notice was posted in the village square to the effect that their furniture was to be seized and sold off. 

Emma implored Leon to help; she even tried to encourage him to steal the money she needed from his firm.  She then went to Rodolphe, but he rejected her too.  So she persuaded the pharmacist’s assistant to open the store  where she discovered the arsenic and took a generous amount.  Charles spared nothing on the funeral; he doted on little Berthe, who had her mothers looks and charms.  But a year after Emma’s death, he opened Emma’s bureau and found all of the love letters.   Poor Berthe found him that evening dead in his chair.  He had had a heart attack. 

So how are we to understand Emma?  She was certainly an incurable romantic and she had the looks and the style to go with it.  She was the kind of person, who could illuminate a room.  She had a dangerous sexual energy, that would respond to any romantic impulse, she did not stop to see the consequences of her actions,  she wanted something or someone and she had to have them, no matter the cost or the risk.  But if any spurned her, she would cast them off without a second thought.  Those she loved to distraction, she would hate to destruction.  In the end there was only one way out for her; the romantic death.

Flaubert’s is a classic description of the hysterical personality.  All the features are there, the impulsive behaviour, the splitting, the fantasy life, the failure to consider consequences, the decline to an inevitable conclusion.  He would have been well aware of contemporary psychiatric descriptions of hysteria.  Nevertheless his novel shocked bourgeois society.  So is Madame Bovary a novel of its time?  Not at all!  Although Hysteria has been replaced in psychiatric nomenclature by borderline or narcissistic personality disorder, it has not disappeared.  People like Emma are still around – in fact the our current celebrity and media culture encourage it.  And hysteria remains the best term for it and Flaubert’s the best description.

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So writes one time Harvard Professor of Psychology, Gordon Allport in his preface to Viktor Frankl’s abiding monument,  ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’.   He claims it as the central theme of existentialism.  We might, however question whether it is always necessary to suffer in order to grow.  There is something Calvinist in that notion.  But what Frankl shows us through his narrative is how it is possible to withstand the most dreadful pain, torture and privation by finding and retaining an essential meaning in life. 

Viktor Frankl was a jewish psychiatrist, living in Vienna in 1939.  He could have escaped to America; he had a visa, but he could not bring himself to abandon his parents to their fate.   He was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz, but he survived.  He wasn’t a Capo, a privileged collaborator; he found the meaning in his suffering to survive.    

‘Man’s Search for Meaning’  focuses on everyday indignities and privations, the cruelty, the lack of food, sleep and adequate clothing, the lice, dysentery, work, and endurance.      

After the initial shock of becoming a number instead of a human being, a prisoner enters into phase of apathy and indifference.  He tries not to be noticed, merges in with the crowd, gives an impression of smartness and fitness for work; does  anything that would stop him being singled out and sent to the gas chambers.  Many gave up, refused to work and accepted their fate, but those who survived discovered and nurtured an essential purpose in life that was worth clinging on to. 

 Frankl describes how the memory and love for his wife kept him alive.  In the midst of the most dreadful degradation, he focussed on thoughts that uplifted the soul;  an image of mountains, the coming of spring, music, snatches of poetry, the book he wanted to write.      

There is nobility in suffering,  Frankl claims, opportunities to find a moral compass and retain human dignity.  Suffering can bring out the best in a person if he sees meaning in it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky said that the only thing he dreaded was not to be worthy of his sufferings.    Those who let their inner hold on their own dignity and meaning, eventually fell victim to the camp’s degrading influence.   They gave way to introspection and retrospection, lost purpose and hope, and just lay on their bed of stinking straw and were taken away to die.    

Frankl described a strange timelessness in the camp.  Hours or days of degradation and pain, passed slowly, but months and years passed quickly, punctuated by suffering.  Survivors saw it as a provisional existence, something to be endured for as long as it took; they retained the hope  they would be free. 

Prisoners were supported by  the companionship of mutual privation.  They tried to help each other.  They kept each other warm at night, they remove the lice from their hair, they shared their food, they told grim jokes. They were a kind of community; they trusted each other.  Religion was a potent bonding force; prisoners often gained solace by praying together every night.

Unfortunately, their suffering did not always end when the guards left and the camp gates were opened .   Release was all too often associated with bitterness and disillusion.  Life had moved on.  Their family had died.  There was no work and they had lost the companionship of shared suffering.  Others could not understand   

For Frankl, his experience in Auschwitz became the mainspring of his life.  From it he developed a philosophy of hope and a psychotherapy for those in despair, based on the discovery of the meaning  of their suffering.   It was Niezsche who said, ‘He who has a why (a purpose) to live can bear almost any how.’   Frankl explains that the ‘why’ of existence is was not so much what we expect from life, more what life expected from us in terms of work and family.   Life ultimately means taking responsibility.   Sometimes action is needed, sometimes contemplation, sometimes it’s just necessary to accept fate.  When a man realises that suffering is his destiny, he will accept it as a challenge.  Such thoughts can keep a prisoner from despair.   Again, Nietzsche,  ‘That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.’

Few of us in the west have ever been tested in the way Frankl was.   But meaning can be threatened in other ways,  such as the  death of a spouse, the devastation of divorce, the collapse of love, the loss of purpose in retirement or unemployment, the estrangement from one’s children, the disillusion with a cause or faith.   When people lose meaning and purpose, then they succumb to an inner emptiness, an existential vacuum,  the boredom and loneliness, which lies at the base of much of the unhappiness of modern life. 

Empty people try to fill their lives with thrills and diversions;  the sexual libido becomes rampant in existential vacuum, so does the pursuit of power, the addiction to shopping, alcohol, drugs, the accumulation of money.  It is pure escapism into immediate gratification, a frantic search for meaning in sensation.  ‘We had such a wicked time, I got smashed, the sex was fantastic!’ 

Such diversions rarely lead to meaning.  Quite the reverse;  often the will, the hope, the purpose and the self respect dies a little more.  Frankl states that people can transcend the thrill-seeking self and discover a meaning in their lives by creating a work or a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone (such as falling in love), and most of all, by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering. 

He claims that we can be ennobled by taking on the suffering another would have to bear, like giving up a relationship that would devastate them, an ambition that would cause them pain. This might give suffering a meaning, but it is avoidable.  And is martyrdom and self sacrifice ever a valid route to redemption and happiness?   Only if the sacrifice has a deeper meaning to the integrity of the ‘soul’,  outside of the act itself.  

 Survival of identity and meaning  (what I tend to regard as the soul) is more important than mere corporeal integrity.   The anorexic starves their body so that their basic identity and meaning can thrive.  And for many other sick people,  illness endures the meaning of what has happened, until a person can bear to bring it to mind.   If the meaning and purpose are devastated by life’s vicissitudes, then the body will easily become vulnerable to disease.  Mind, body and soul (meaning) are a continuum, which contains health and happiness.   

‘Man’s search for meaning’ was first published in 1946 in German under the title of ‘Ein psycholog erlebt das konzentrationslager’.  Frankl developed the existential concept of logotherapy from his experience.  Unlike psychoanalysis, logotherapy  does not dwell on the past, but focuses on the  development of a meaning in a person’s suffering that can break the cycle of loneliness and unhappiness.   

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Eric Remarque writes in the first person and present tense.  We are there with him,  crouching in shell holes,  deafened by explosions,  but still acutely aware of the pop of mortar shells, the hoot of gas shells  or the little whirring ones that release enough shrapnel to cut a man to pieces.   We smell and see death everywhere,  the sickly sweet scent of corruption, bits of body hanging on splintered trees.  We hear the screams.  We see boys broken down, weeping for their mothers .  We are there clearing an enemy trench with grenades, running, lunging, stabbing, not thinking, limbs working like a robot. The enemy is a machine to be put out of action, a dangerous animal; kill it or be killed.  Don’t think!   We spend the night lost in a shell hole in no man’s land, crouching up to our necks in mud and water  as bullets whistle overhead.  We suffocate in our masks as the greenish gas settles in our craters.  We see those who have torn them off coughing up the pink froth of their lungs.  There is only so much gore and death that a person can take!  We become immune to the horror of it all.  It is the inevitable backdrop of war.  Just keep your head down, run like the devil and if one comes for you, throw yourself in a hole.  Stay alive!  Don’t think! 

 As a common foot-soldier, you can’t see the bigger picture, you are not fighting for your country, you are fighting for yourself and your mates; you just have to get through it, to last out until it ends.  Remarque is German, but that is irrelevant.  There are no sides in this war; the only enemies are pain, fear  and death.  Glory, bravery, honour, have no part of this.  Pleasures are much more mundane;  a full belly, a night’s sleep,  an regular bowel, getting a good billet, going on leave, the memory of the touch of a woman, and comradeship; the companionship of communal latrines, crude jokes, a shared cigarette, a snaffled meal, revenge on a sadistic NCO.  In war, it’s your mates that get you through.

If the function of historical literature is to bring events alive,  All Quiet on the Western Front  succeeds like no other novel in conveying the essence of war for those who fight in it.  It’s up there on a par with Wilfred Owen’s poem.    

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Erich Maria Remarque was born Eric Paul Remark in Osnabruck and was just 16 when war was declared.  He went to the front in 1917, was wounded at Passchendaele and evacuated to hospital.  He never returned to the front.  His novel was condemned by the Nazis as unpatriotic but he escaped to America on the last sailing of the Queen Mary with the help of his friend, Marlene Dietrich.  He lived in Hollywood, got to know Greta Garbo and was part of the émigré celebrity circuit. His sister,Elfreda, remained in Germany and was executed by the Nazis for defeatist sentiments. Remarque, himself, was inaccessible. Somehow, I wish I didn’t know all that, but it doesn’t detract from the reality that he and the few like him achieved more hope  in a few lines than a whole dead generation of young man. .      

 My grandfather, William Scriven, chief clerk at the Bristol and West Building Society, went to war with millions of others, even though he had a rheumatic heart.  He was killed in the last battle in 1918.  We might say, my mother, only 2 at the time, never got over it.

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Vincent was the eldest of a large close knit family.  His father was a preacher and for a time Vincent tried to find an outlet for his zeal in religion, as a minister in a poor coal mining region of Belgium, but his attempts to get close to his parishioners by living like them shocked his elders and they refused to support him.  He worked in his uncle’s firm of art dealers, but his intensity put people off.   He was a rebel.  He had strong inflexible views about religion and argued constantly with his father.  His passionate nature, his need for love, could lead him to form intense attachments, like the one to his widowed cousin, but he was all too often rebuffed.  

After his father died, his sister, Wilhelmina, told Vincent to leave home because his eccentric behaviour was causing comment in the village and upsetting his mother.   Vincent would have felt this rejection keenly, but the fact of the matter was he was too much, too much for other people and too much for himself.   

His brother Theo persuaded Vincent to go to Paris to meet other artists and learn from them and continued to support him both emotionally and financially.  His work in Holland had been poetic, dark and melancholic.  His move to Paris led to a thawing of his palette.  He visited all the greats; Pissarro, Gauguin, Manet, Seurat and absorbed everything they had to teach him while developing his own unique style using a combination of vibrant brushwork, delicate draughtsmanship, an emotionally charged palette and everyday motifs.  He worked tirelessly at his craft, single minded, focussed and remarkably lucid, constantly improving refining in his quest to capture the essence, the source of meaning.  

What Vincent was struggling with was the dilemma of the creative artist.  While he needed to have the creative space to develop his own unique expression,  that expression, his identity, could only be validated  through his art.  It was a paradox; he had to be alone to belong, his obsessional  intensity fended people off though he desperately needed their love.   He wanted more than anything else to be accepted and he never stopped working.  His entire oeuvre was accomplished in a brief 10 year period between 1880 and 1890.  He was entirely self taught,  using a frame he had read about in a book to master perspective.  He learn to master expression, character.  It was as if he needed to get beneath their skin, to really connect.   His most fervent wish was to mean something to the people around him, to make a useful contribution.  ‘Man is only here to accomplish things’, but his work was little appreciated during his lifetime . 

Work had always been a lifesaver  for Vincent, his reason for living, his entire meaning in life.  Nothing else mattered.  So what went wrong?   Why did he cut off his own ear?  Why did he shoot himself?   As ever, it was a combination of events.  Theo’s plans to get married may have prompted him to move down south and get his own place.  Arles was different, strange, and had an intensity of light a vividness of colour that seemed to resonate with something inside Vincent.  Things were more extreme there, more dangerous, and he was lonely.   And then there was Gauguin’s visit.  Vincent had loaded so much meaning on this visit.  They would be brother artists, paint together, start a colony of artists in the south.   But Paul Gauguin was more self sufficient that Vincent, more of a loner.  He was sociable enough but he distrusted intimacy and would have found Vincent’s needs intrusive.  He became irritated.  Vincent was too whinging.  They argued.   Vincent lost his temper and threw a glass at him.  Gauguin decided to leave.  In desperation, Vincent cut off his ear.   If that was intended as a gesture to make him stay, it backfired.  He was left alone and desperate, and admitted himself to an asylum.  He recovered for a while.  His paints allowed him to focus his thoughts on something outside his own morbid preoccupations, but eventually it all got too much for him.  He began painting images of death.  His work was not selling.  Nobody cared.  It was hopeless.  And one sunny morning in the corn field, he shot himself. 

Vincent Van Gogh wasn’t born an artistic genius, he made himself one though the most intense focus and dedication.  What created the brand Van Gogh;  self belief, courage, imagination, perseverance, and faith could so easily be transformed into the single minded obsession, the  fanaticism, the lack of compromise and the escape from reality that could slip into a darker palette without human comfort or hope.  He needed the unflinching of Theo, faith is the meaning of his own art and the approval of artists he admired.   His genius need to be held, to be contained.   Like specialist plants and animals, he was all too sensitive and vulnerable to changes in his social environment.  Without Theo, he could not survive.  A year later, Theo died too.    

The real Van Gogh; the artist and his letters, is currently exhibited at the Royal Academy until April 18th.  Don’t miss it! 

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If thou hast a heart

famed for tenderness and pity,

contemplate this spot.

In which are deposited

the remains of a young lady,

whose artless beauty, innocence

of mind and gentle manner

obtained her the esteem

of all who knew her.

But when nerves were

too delicately spun

to bear the rude shakes

and jostlings, which we meet

in this transitory world,

nature gave way.  She sank and died

a martyr to excessive sensibility.

Mrs Sarah Fletcher,

wife of Captain Fletcher,

who departed this life

at the village of Clifton

on the 7^th June, 1799

in the 29^th year of her age.

May her soul meet that peace

which this earth denied her.

Sarah committed suicide.  Her ghost was said to haunt the house where she lived. Her tomb is in Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire.

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 between regret and despair,

when fate replaces hope

and is companioned by fear,

the mind fixes on  

the moment of being,  

belonging,     

not to compete

but to repair,

less an excursion  

as a better way home.    

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