The Literary Life
A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal.
by Robert Alter
with the collaboration of Carol Cosman. Basic Books. 285 pp. $13.95.
Stendhal is an acquired taste but one not easy to sate; it’s the special happiness of the French that so many of their students of the novelist have not only appreciated his rare qualities, but possessed a few of those qualities themselves. Jean Prévost, Alain, Paul Arbelet, François Michel, Henri Martineau, and Vittorio del Litto—to name only a few of the leading Beylistes—have brought to the investigation of their favorite author’s life and sentiments such a mingling of factual precision with sympathetic delicacy as expands the happy reader’s horizons almost indefinitely. When he has exhausted the 79 volumes of the Divan edition, he may wander on through volume after volume of commentary without losing the flavor of that wise and witty friend, the mature Stendhal. The full biography is rarely attempted under two volumes; the friends and mistresses and separate periods of Beyle’s life all have historians of their own; the study of his marginal notes is a science in itself, and early 19th-century Parma is the subject of investigation because he wrote a book partly about it. Men are still to be found who will play the game of quotations from Le rouge et le noir—as if that novel, modeled stylistically on the Code Napoléon were a sacred text which it would be shameful not to know by heart.
English readers have, naturally, been more restricted. Most of the novels have by now been converted into Saxon, along with the autobiography, a selection of the letters, and a selection of the journals. We have had numbers of introductory studies and appreciations, but the one biography in English has been that of Matthew Josephson, a remarkably heavy-minded and clumsily written performance when it appeared in 1946, and not at all improved by the thirty-odd years of its aging. The new book of Robert Alter (written with the collaboration of Carol Cosman) aims to supplant Josephson and to add some of the critical perspectives which have come to the fore in recent years; it too is introductory in character, presuming very little in the way of previous acquaintance with the literature, and perforce treading over many well-trodden paths. Yet, though it does not rival or even represent the depth and complexity of the work available in France, the new book far outstrips that of Josephson. No literary biography should be allowed in the hands of a reader who has not already read the main books of the author whose life is being recounted. But for anyone who knows the Rouge and the Chartreuse, Alter’s book will provide a handy vade mecum to future reading and a useful survey of a pretty overwhelming quantity of complex circumstance.
Coverage is the first and greatest problem of any biographer of Beyle/Stendhal; to achieve coverage, which is indispensable, the biographer is always in danger of sacrificing complexities, which are merely crucial. The novelist’s fifty-nine years were thickly layered with incidents and fantasies, scratchings after a living, abortive and successful literary ventures, a vigorous love life, a various sex life (sometimes congruent these two, more often not), political ambiguities combined with extreme sensitivity to the changing political weather—incessant movement from place to place, and a devotion to revaluation and reconsideration which ultimately bestows on the smallest gesture as many facets and interpretations as a well-cut diamond. Many of those 79 volumes are devoted to self-dissection and self-analysis (which does not preclude self-contradiction). Indeed, Stendhal lays out so much of his inner life in his various memoirs, autobiographies, fictions, and recollections that biographers are occasionally reduced to transcribing what Beyle himself has told them, or to correcting his interpretations of his own data—an ungraceful posture, indeed. (What makes them think their own motivation isn’t far more suspect than Beyle’s?) A special problem with Stendhal is that fragments of experience from the earlier part of his life, after resting inert within his mind for twenty years or so, will sometimes turn up, disguised, transformed, and endowed with a wonderful new energy, in the later fictions. He was a complex and busy character, whose apparent loose ends can often be knotted up in remarkable ways; the best work on him combines, I think, respect for facts, contempt for systems, and patience in sorting out patterns. Loving petits faits vrais himself, he left to posterity a generous supply, with the cheerful intimation that the happy few would know what to make of them. They have been busy ever since.
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The latest big burst of Stendhal studies came just after the war, when existentialism (whatever happened to existentialism anyway?) was much in the air; to readers of those dark ages, it was the loneliness, the self-centeredness, and the deliberate hypocrisy of heroes like Julien Sorel, Fabrizio del Dongo, and Lucien Leuwen that was most appealing. A parallel was evidently felt between peace-of-Vienna Europe, where a simple glint of intelligence in a person’s eye could be interpreted as dangerous liberalism, and life in totalitarian society, of which France had just had a bitter dose. A hypocritical hero, as opposed to a mere hypocritical protagonist like Tartuffe or his English scion Sir Willoughby Patterne, offers particularly intriguing potentialities to an analytical novelist and a reader susceptible to challenge. How deeply must we probe, not just in the characters, but in ourselves, to find gleams of sympathetic understanding? Julien in the seminary at Besançon, grimly practicing the art of eating a boiled egg in a devout manner, is like Fabrizio confessing his sins to God in a heartfelt outburst after the killing of Giletti, but never pausing a moment to think of simony, the sin in which he is most deeply immersed, and which has just led him to commit a murder. Both heroes are problems for the reader because he has been given all the materials for a judgment which is flagrantly wrong—and in that predicament, by a heartless author, he is simply abandoned. The character does not implore our sympathy. The author makes no apologies, nor does he seem to turn his hero about to show off his “points.” Where he can, he analyzes and explains; he is very good at this, and his explanations are not put forward to be dismissed or seen through—yet they always fall short. If the reader is to follow the fiction with a full heart, he must do it on his own.
Méfiance, or defiant mistrust on the part of Stendhal’s heroes, has its counterpart in the instinctive, much analyzed, and still mysterious pudeur of his heroines. These paranoiac personages are all on their guard; yet it can’t be said that any of them display profound spiritual insights or even unusual sensitivities, while of ideas in the form of reasoned convictions they are almost ostentatiously innocent. Happiness is for most of them something childish and very natural, discovered incidentally or accidentally, most often when two or three are gathered together in the name of—what? a communion too evanescent and unstable even to be stamped with a name. Fabrizio in his solitary midnight grove by Lake Como clarifying the turbid waters of his passion for the Duchessa Sanseverina, Julien chasing butterflies with Mme. de Renal and her children at Vergy, are emulating, if anyone, the happiness of Rousseau on his lake isle of Bienne. The famous fifth revery of the solitary stroller describes the mind released from the pressures of society and circumstance and intention, cradled in the flux and reflux of the universe and the no less rhythmic and soothing motion of its own constitution. Such in its general character is the supreme happiness of the Stendhal protagonist—a happiness not of performance or of ideas, but precisely of release from both, a moment of airy introspection and delight, in which height and depth are paradoxically one. The pursuit of such happiness is not simply a footrace but a hunt which includes much vigilant waiting for the rare appearance of a creature not very susceptible of domestication. Once glimpsed, it can only be put away, out of reach of the rational mind and the dusty world, to undergo the mysterious process of crystallization, leading perhaps to the greatest and least calculable mystery of all, resurrection.
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How thoroughly Stendhal’s mind was saturated with the religion in which he professed to disbelieve! His most exalted heroes are of wonderfully muddled parentage, children obviously of the spirit more than the flesh; like Dionysus before being raised, they are imprisoned beneath walls of triple brass: (l) literally, in dungeons; (2) politically, by reactionary rulers rendered irresistible by the fact that liberals, true liberals, and even true-blue liberals are all as rascally as the ultras and trimmers; (3) professionally, in cassock and gown, when essentially they are soldiers; (4) socially and temporally, in the costumes and customs of the 19th century, when spiritually they are of the 16th; (5) intellectually, within the cocoon of an ideology which, even when they respect it, freezes their veins; and (6) temperamentally, behind the mask of their own practiced méfiance, and what is more deadly, that of their author.
Yet they rise from these many sepulchers and are transfigured, as we are allowed to see through the eyes of that cenacle of faithful women who are the traditional last ministrants and witnesses of the dying resurrected god. Such is Stendhal’s art of insinuation and suggestion which in this and many other particulars teases us with the possibility of a parallel, yet puts all the weight of it on the reader. The better the reader, the greater the weight, which isn’t at all to say the heavier the parallel. Other potential weights in the narrative Stendhal controls by making, with unparalleled boldness, a series of transverse cuts in the narrative line and in the structuring of attitudes. The author doesn’t puff to swell the impetus of his tale, but cuts into it with crisp, dry observations coming from a distance. They sometimes have the effect of a retro-narrative: as, for instance, when Julien Sorel, about to enter the seminary, stops in a café and is served by Amanda Binet. Leaning over the counter, she reveals a “taille superbe.” “Julien observed this,” says the author crisply; “all his ideas changed.” Toutes ses idées changèrent: if we are conscientious readers, we will have to go back over the first twenty-three chapters to accommodate our first impressions of Julien with this snapshot of a man who, at the mere glimpse of an agreeable bosom, can change all his ideas in six brief syllables. This sort of thing demands special agility of a reader; indeed, the novels span an extraordinarily wide range of moods. The same hero who is a prophetic destroyer and redeemer of society as a whole may take part in a caricature campaign like that of Julien against the Maréchale de Fervaques—scenes which remind us, in their capering skeletonized grotesquerie, of one of Voltaire’s contes. Such, or something like this, are a few of the complexities of Stendhal’s major fiction; the books are tests for equilibrists, and after many readings remain unstable and iridescent in the mind.
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Not to belabor a cliché, the fictions avowed and unavowed are the radiant heart of Stendhal’s fifty-nine years on earth. No doubt we can never know too much of the man who was capable of forming them. But between the biographical raw materials of the great novels and the vision itself, there is a distance hardly to be measured in units smaller than light-years. The stories of Beyle’s turbulent pursuit and capture of Gina Pietragrua, his first Milanese playmate, and of his less fortunate campaign to take the heart of Mathilde Dembowski, can hardly be told except in terms of amused derision. How the former was metamorphosed into the mobile, glittering Duchessa Sanseverina, while the latter became that arrogant little necrophiliac Mathilde de la Mole, no biographer can hope fully to explain. By its very nature, biography tends to put in the foreground Beyle, the chubby government bureaucrat with his succession of unimportant assignments and even longer list of fleeting mistresses and casual acquaintances. Mr. Alter in his new book works the fiction in with the events of the life, making use predominantly of Freudian tie-ins. Neither the criticism nor the biography will startle anyone familiar with the previous literature. The author is particularly good, it seemed to me, on the Chartreuse, where he manipulates the parallels with musical composition discreetly yet appreciatively. But in all he assigns to each of the two major novels fewer than fifteen pages, in which to describe their origins, the process of their composition, their structure and thematics, as well as their critical reception. Naturally, the commentary appears thin. Mere quantity might not matter so much, were the author himself a more deft and polished stylist. Alas, and once more, alas. Too often simple ideas have to be dug out of a thick impasto of academic jargon, blue-jeans American informality, and mixed metaphors:
Instead of living in clover, then, as a French diplomat in Italy, Beyle found himself a lame duck paddling through cold waters.
By the fall of 1821, Beyle himself contrived a much more efficacious remedy for his depression than the erotic measures his well-meaning friends had proposed.
This durance vile of early childhood undoubtedly helped make Henri Beyle painfully shy and uncertain in his social relations for many years afterward, but it also provided him with an unforgettable model of the essential bourgeois vice of snobbery, which was the key to the social psychology of an upwardly mobile France after the Restoration of 1815.
Verbally, the book is too often inexact or uncouth; one can’t help being struck by slips like “roles” for “rolls” (85), “importunacy” for “importunity” (148), the repeated use of “boudoir” as elegant for “bedroom”; we hear of “the finely distilled residue” of an experience (96) and “the unique tenor that [the Chartreuse] has among novels of the age” (26). On page 187 we encounter a “marginalium.”
It’s a shame that more effort wasn’t put into polishing the prose, for Mr. Alter’s book is good enough to supersede Josephson without difficulty, and could easily have been better yet. But without a jarring sense of incongruity, it won’t stand on the same shelf with Arbelet or Martineau or Pietro Paolo Trompeo; and, though useful as a work of ready reference, it’s unlikely to be read as members of the Stendhal Club like to read books about their favorite author, for the sheer, vibrant pleasure of it.
