In Ezra Pound’s bitter poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” published in 1920, the poet lashed out at a culture that had disappointed his hopes for a 20th-century Renaissance. Pound saw himself as a martyr, defending true artistic values in an age of mediocrity: “For three years, out of key with his time, / He strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’ / In the old sense. Wrong from the start.” But Pound clung to one symbol of intellectual conscience, one writer who had always stayed faithful, like Odysseus’s wife, to the values and demands of art: “His true Penelope was Flaubert.”

For readers today, as for Pound, Gustave Flaubert is something more than a man, more even than the great novelist who produced “Madame Bovary” and “Sentimental Education.” He is the ideal artist, indifferent to money, marriage, even fame, in his obsessive quest for literary perfection. To think of Flaubert is to see him in his study at Croisset, the country house near Rouen where he spent his working life, bent over a single page for days at a time, stalking the “mot juste,” the correct word. He was the first novelist to believe that style could be the soul of a novel, that the baggy, appetitive genre of Balzac and Dickens could become the complex, shapely one of Henry James and Marcel Proust. “What strikes me as beautiful,” he wrote to his friend and lover Louise Colet, “what I would like to create is a book about nothing, a book without external attachments held aloft by the internal force of its style.”

But if Flaubert was a monk of art, he was not, like Kafka (another fervent disciple), a monkish personality, tormented and secretive. If anything, he was more like a medieval friar – worldly, stout, scabrously funny. He had a gift for intimate, joyful friendships, and his wonderful letters have brought many of his friends with him down to posterity: Maxime du Camp, Alfred Le Poittevin, Louis Bouilhet. Whenever he finished a novel, Flaubert couldn’t wait to read it to his best friends in marathon, night-long sessions, as though a book’s real fulfillment was not to be published but to be shared.

To fully understand what makes Flaubert so winning a figure, one needs to see both sides of his personality – the admirable artist and the lovable man, with all their corresponding frailties. Frederick Brown’s “Flaubert: A Biography” (Little, Brown, 628 pages, $35) triumphantly achieves this double vision, while adding a third dimension, too – a deeply informed cultural and historical perspective, that roots the novelist’s life in his times.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Mr. Brown, in this age of biographers as prosecutors or psychoanalysts, is his dignified sympathy with his subject. Knowing that a slavish disciple usually becomes a bitter enemy, Mr. Brown wants neither to canonize Flaubert nor to indict him; he wants only to understand this complex figure, and to help the reader understand him. As a result, Mr. Brown, whose life of Emile Zola is a classic, has produced in “Flaubert” another indispensable, terrifically enjoyable work.

Flaubert’s life, sedentary though it mainly was, has inspired a huge amount of biographical detective work over the years, and Mr. Brown synthesizes it masterfully. Born in 1821, the second son of a prominent Rouen doctor, Flaubert was raised in a home that oddly combined bourgeois propriety with medical brutality. As chief of the local hospital, Flaubert’s father was entitled to an apartment on the grounds, which meant that the young Gustave grew up surrounded by corpses, plague victims, and madmen. During one cholera epidemic, he later recalled, “a simple partition, which had a door in it, separated our dining room from a sick ward where people were dropping like flies.” It is impossible not to connect Flaubert’s early exposure to sickness and death with the adult writer’s extreme cynicism about all euphemisms and middle-class proprieties. The writer who would meticulously describe Emma Bovary’s decomposing corpse learned early on to be unsparing about bodily facts.

Gustave’s older brother followed in their father’s footsteps as a doctor, and as a young man he too was destined for a respectable profession. Only after two miserable years at law school was Flaubert rescued, in another life-shaping irony, by suddenly falling sick with epilepsy. His seizures, which continued at intervals throughout his life, gave Flaubert the justification he needed to drop out of the bourgeois career track. His youth ended with a last great adventure, a two-year tour of Egypt and the Middle East, including a five-month cruise down the Nile.

When Flaubert came home in 1851, he was ready to settle down to the slow, sedentary work that would define the rest of his life. With elephantine persistence, he produced his series of masterpieces, from the scandalous “Madame Bovary” in 1856 to the satirical “Bouvard and Pecuchet,” still on his desk when he died in 1880. Love affairs, political upheavals, even the occupation of his house by German soldiers couldn’t keep him away from his work for long.

Mr. Brown tells Flaubert’s story in prose of exceptional literary distinction: Few biographies reveal such a civilized intelligence at work. Two elements of Flaubert’s life, in particular, show Mr. Brown at his best. The first is the novelist’s cultural and political milieu, the panorama of French history from the Orleanist monarchy to the Third Republic. In addition to providing lucid, full accounts of events like the 1848 Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Mr. Brown shows how other, less official kinds of history influenced Flaubert. Thus, he traces the novelist’s ideal of the mot juste to his classical lycee education, which made the cultivation of Latin style a kind of ethical discipline. At the same time, he shows how the popular stage, with its gallery of glamorous rogues and insouciant criminals, shaped Flaubert’s defiant attitude toward middle-class convention.

This leads to the second of Brown’s key insights: the complex role played in Flaubert’s life by the bourgeoisie, as both an economic institution and an ideological target. No writer is better known for his hatred of the bourgeoisie than Flaubert; it permeates his novels and provides some of the most impassioned moments in his letters. (“What a sad opinion one forms of men, what bitterness grips one’s heart when one sees such delirious asininity on display,” he wrote after attending a political rally in 1847.) His idea of the artist’s vocation was formed in large part as a reaction against middle-class complacency and materialism.

Yet Brown’s revealing treatment of Flaubert’s finances shows that his artistic life was only made possible by his family’s arch-bourgeois lifestyle. The Flauberts were rentiers whose real-estate income paid for Croisset, Parisian flats, luxurious travel, and everything else that cushioned the novelist’s life. Indeed, when “Madame Bovary” was prosecuted for obscenity, Flaubert’s lawyer began his defense by claiming the writer as a loyal son of his arch-bourgeois father: “He who left [his children] a considerable fortune and an illustrious name endowed them with the need to be men of heart and intelligence, useful men.”

This was not just a forensic trick. Flaubert’s working habits as a writer were,ironically, the perfection of the bourgeois virtues: steadiness, thoroughness, patient accumulation. The novelist was intimately shaped by the family, the class, and the nation he anatomized so unsparingly in his fiction. Frederick Brown makes sense of this paradox, and of the many other complications of Flaubert’s life, with all the insight his subject demands and deserves.

akirsch@nysun.com