these, turns out, are the particulars of the nobility i aspire to.

-- from james wood's how fiction works --

flaubert loved to read aloud. it took him thirty-two hours to read his overblown lyrical fantasia, the tempatation of saint anthony, to two friends. and when he dined in paris at the goncourts’, he loved to read out examples of bad writing. turgenev said that he knew of “no other writer who scrupled in quite that way.” even henry james, the master stylist, was somewhat appalled by the religious devotion with which flaubert assassinated repetition, unwanted clichés, clumsy sonorities. the scene of his writing has become notorious: the study at croisset, the slow river outside the window, while inside the bearish norman, wrapped in his dressing gown and wreathed in pipe smoke, groaned and complained about how slow his progress was, each sentence laid as slowly and agonizingly as a fuse.*

*though one wonders if a great deal of time was not spent just sleeping and masturbating (flaubert likened sentences to ejaculate). often, the excruciation of the stylist seems to be a front for writer’s block. this was the case with the marvelous american writer jf powers, for instance, of whom sean o’faolain joked, in wildean fashion, that he “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon wondering whether or not he should replace it with a semicolon.” more usual, i think, is the kind of literary routine ascribed to the minor english writer ac benson—that he did nothing all morning and then spent the afternoon writing up what he’d done in the morning.