FLAUBERT IN EGYPT: A SENSIBILITY ON TOUR. A NARRATIVE DRAWN FROM GUSTAVE FLAUBERT'S TRAVEL NOTES & LETTERS

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH & EDITED BY FRANCIS STEEGMULLER '27.Boston: Little, Brown and Company,1973. 232 pp. 10 Illustrations. $8.50.

Flaubert's experiences in Egypt force a modern reader to blink himself into wakefulness dispelling a Near-East dream world kaleidoscopically beautiful, ugly, and exotic. Camels lurch like turkeys and sway their necks like swans. Their cries rattle out with tremulous garglings as accompaniment. Before fascinated onlookers, a sheik rides his horse, led by two grooms, over the bodies of 200 men lying on the ground. The desert is strewn with carcasses: a dead camel three-quarters eaten by jackals, guts exposed, rotting in the sun; mummified buffaloes; horses' heads. In Cairo you brush against all the costumes of the Orient and elbow all its peoples: the Greek papa, long bearded, riding his mule; the Albanian soldier in embroidered jacket; the Copt in black turban; the Persian in his pelisse; the desert Bedouin, with coffee-colored face, walking gravely along, enveloped in white robes.

Alexandrian uproar is deafening: cudgelings right and left and victims emitting ear-splitting gutteral cries. Cudgelings play a great role. Everyone who wears clean clothes beats everyone who wears dirty ones, or none at all. Women veil their faces but expose their naked breasts and hook into their noses ornaments hanging down and swaying from side to side.

A snakecharmer wraps his snake about Flaubert's waist and encourages it to bite his ear. The snake-charmer's finger wipes off the blood and spreads it on the ground. Then he blows his breath twice into Flaubert's mouth, makes him breathe twice on the large black snake twined around his neck, and twice rubs the bloody ear with his hand wet with spit. Now forever immune from poisonous snake bites, Flaubert is solicited for a big tip.

A Frenchman delighting in Paris brothels, he is curious about Arab sexual phenomena. To amuse a crowd, a jester takes a woman in a Cairo bazaar, sets her on the counter of a shop, and couples with her publicly while the storekeeper calmly smokes his pipe. A young fellow has himself publicly buggered by a large monkey to create a good opinion of himself and to make onlookers laugh. Public baths offer a variety of stimuli, with final massages given by. "quite nice young boys." At dinner tables everyone admits his pleasure in sodomy. Startling pages describe Flaubert's nights with Egypt's most celebrated dancer and courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem, tall, lighter in color than an Arab, unruly black hair, heavy shoulders, full apple-shaped breasts. He notes carefully her costumes, dancing ("brutal"), jewelry, drinking of raki, buckets of burning charcoal, her little dog, and especially her, and his own, sensual ardors. After copulation as she sleeps and snores, he turns his face to the wall and amuses himself killing the bedbugs on it.

The insides of Nile temples interest Flaubert less than outsides, "buried in sand, partially visible, like old dug-up skeletons. Gods with heads of ibises and crocodiles are painted on walls white with the droppings of birds of prey nesting between the stones." The glittering lights in towns along the Nile dazzle him "like the butterfly colors of an immense costume ball; the white, yellow, or blue clothes stand out in the transparent air - blatant tones that would make any painter faint away."

At the time of the Near-East adventures, Flaubert was 27, and he and his friend, Maxime du Camp, literary and rich, spent two years in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Athens, and Rome. Egypt consumed some seven months in 1849 and 1850 with some four months cruising the Nile aboard a cross-sailed cange. Flaubert's notes made in Egypt are important for readers interested in the Carthaginian novel Salambô, the Palestinian tale Hèrodias, and the final version of Temptation of Saint Anthony.

Critics give lavish praise to Francis Steegmuller as translator and editor. His shrewd insights concerning French temperament and tastes, shown in his other books about Flaubert, Maupassant, Apollinaire, and Cocteau, appear again in his comments about the two diarists and notetakers: Flaubert, tall, muscular, a blond but sedentary Viking; du Camp, slight, dark, brisk, and ambitious. Graham Greene praises Flaubert in Egypt as one of the most important and amusing books of 1973. It is also one of the most racy, with language and episodes to startle, and perhaps shock, even tolerant and emancipated sophisticates.