A Literary Surgeon Comes of Age : EARLY WRITINGS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, <i> Translated by Robert Berry Griffin (University of Nebraska Press: $30; 275 pp.)</i>

Gustave Flaubert grew up in a public hospital where his father was chief surgeon. The dissecting room served as his playground; he would climb up barred windows to peer at the corpses stretched out on tables. In this atmosphere of decay and death, Flaubert began his literary career in 1830, at the tender age of 9.

Now, in the dissecting room of our minds, we can climb barred windows to peer, not at corpses but at the birth of a literary corpus. Flaubert is one of the few important writers to have left behind such a large and varied collection of adolescent experiments in writing. These 11 short stories and portraits that Flaubert wrote from ages 13 through 17 are interesting not so much as stories in themselves but as documents offering insight into the creative development of a great writer.

Flaubert’s childhood idol was Romanticism. The young Flaubert carried a dagger in his pocket and one could imagine him swigging wine from a skull. This is the melodramatic voice that speaks through his early stories. Almost all of his characters are misshapen and marginalized, unable or unwilling to adapt to the petty existence of bourgeois society. Haunted by impossible metaphysical longings for the infinite, they totter on the brink of madness.

“Dream of Hell” is the macabre story of an alchemist who fears he has no soul. Satan tries to prove to him that he does by making him fall in love with a peasant girl. It is the girl who becomes enamored of the alchemist, and she eventually jumps off a cliff because the alchemist remains indifferent to her. Satan was wrong. He has no soul.

Unfortunately, neither do these stories. Or rather they are stories in search of a soul. The voice is that of a melodramatic, adolescent Flaubert trying too hard to sound deep and important.

Nonetheless there are many dazzling flashes of brilliance, especially in Flaubert’s studies. “There are people who dissect a human heart the way they do a cadaver,” wrote Flaubert. And Flaubert was one. Even in his earliest stories he wielded his psychological scalpel with exceptional skill. At 15, Flaubert described the adulterous Mazza in “Passion and Virtue”:

“When she left her lover’s arms, it seemed to her that something was rumpled within her, just as her clothes had been . . . she saw that love was only a kiss, a moment of ecstasy where lover and mistress punctuate their caresses with groans, locked in their embrace. And when she realized that it all ends with him getting up, with her leaving, that their convulsive passion needs a bit of flesh for its heady satisfaction, her soul was overcome with a deep weariness, like those starving people whom nothing can nourish.”

There is something quite remarkable about the ability of a 15-year-old boy to enter into the consciousness of a woman, and to write so convincingly of love’s emptiness at a time in his life when he can’t even expect to have known its fullness.

This psychological sketch reminds us clearly of Emma in “Madame Bovary,” one of the great disillusioned romantic adulteresses of our literary culture. This story from Flaubert’s childhood, like others in the collection, is fascinating because it presents embryonic psychological sketches of characters to appear in his most famous novels, “Sentimental Education” and “Madame Bovary.” But they are just that--sketches--and as such, they lack real character or plot development. It is thus not surprising that Flaubert never published them in his lifetime.