The Other Side of a Frontier, page 45
An Early Outsider
Stendhal was one of those gamblers for whom the wheel of Fortune turned too late. Ignored by almost everyone except Mérimée and Balzac who considered that La Chartreuse de Parme was the most important French novel of their time, he declared, without a trace of self-pity, indeed confident in his blistering vanity, that the wheel would turn 100 years after his death. In fact in forty years the great egotist was justified by Zola. For Zola he was: ‘a man composed of soul alone … One always feels him there, coldly attentive to the working of his machine. Each of his characters is a psychologist’s experiment which he ventures to try on any man.’ By the beginning of this century Henri Beyle – the figure hidden secretively behind more than 200 pseudonyms who had passed his life as a doubtfully combatant Napoleonic soldier in Italy and Russia, as a travelling and loitering journalist and plagiarizing high-class hack, as a dilettante, petty Consul, ugly and coarse in drawing-rooms, as a misfiring, theorizing lover and a novelist poor in invention who left his great novels abruptly unfinished – had become a cosmopolitan cult.
One important reason for this is that he knew the lasting force of that clear, plain, dry and caustic prose style: and knew that something curt and preposterous in one’s style as a person will have its hour. At certain periods of crises in history and manners an intelligent man is forced to see that a change of style is being born. As a youth growing up in the French Revolution and with youth’s need of a persona, he found himself divided between the eighteenth-century idea of ‘the man of the world’ and the first intimations of Romantic energy. One had to construct a new self. As an aspiring writer he was drawn to the art of his time: stage comedy – but he soon saw that this had become impossible. Stage comedy depended on a stable class system, fixed social values: these had gone with the Revolution and the post-Napoleonic world. He also saw that the novel was the new form to which the audience would respond but that it would impose a crude, impersonal omniscience and would be about ‘other people’ grouped in their acceptable categories: the novelist is drowned and effaced in other people, whereas he, Stendhal, secretive, addicted to masks and self-defence, was obsessed by his own intelligent private life, his need to begin constructing a Machiavellian and impervious self from the ground upwards. The egotist lay awake at night, tortured by the question: ‘Who am I?’ Even more important: ‘What shall I make myself? What is my role? What are the correct tactics?’ It is easy to understand why he is the precursor of Romanticism in La Chartreuse de Parme and why in Le Rouge et le Noir Julien Sorel foreshadows the large population of outsiders and the disaffected formed by the revolutions, wars, social crises, prisons and police states that have revived something of the climate and complacencies of the Napoleonic period. In a recent biography Joanna Richardson says that he was ‘a provincial born outside of the Establishment, enjoying none of the privileges of birth, wealth or education. His sense of inequality and grievance led him bitterly to make amends. He despised authority, he professed to scorn the nobility and yet – like Julien Sorel – he wanted to conquer the nobility. He ridiculed the dignitaries of the Tuileries, and yet, with monotonous persistence, he tried to ensure himself a barony … all his life he was conscious of status.’ Yet, of course, the desire to be either Sorel or Fabrice was a deeply imaginative conspiracy that sailed far beyond social or political considerations. The egotist’s pursuit of personal happiness – la chasse du bonheur – led him to the Romantic idealization of solitude and reverie, the brief sublime moment.
The biographer of Stendhal is in competition with a perpetual autobiography – Stendhal has no other subject, in his novels, his letters, his exhaustive Journal, in the Souvenirs d’Egotisme and La Vie de Henri Brulard. He saw himself as a conspiracy. He was given to minute research into the moral history of his attitudes, so the biographer is left chiefly with the problem of deciding where, if ever, the candour ceased to be fantasy or petulance, where calculation in love was coxcombry, and where they were signs of a fatally split nature. There is no doubt that his celebrated hatred of his father and his sensual passion for his mother, who died when he was seven, reiterated the old Oedipus story, but it was political as well. Stendhal despised his father for being a bourgeois lawyer and a supporter of the Bourbons; very early the boy convinced himself that he was a putative aristocrat and yet at the same time a child of the French Revolution. He also despised his father for being a shrewd Dauphinois and a speculator in property, despised him even more for being unsuccessful in this, and resented the loss of a good deal of his inheritance. Stendhal was even jealous of his widowed father’s grief, and went on to imagine, that on the mother’s side, the family were of Italian origin and that they combined passionate Italian traits with the pride he oddly loved to call espagnolisme. Here, rather than in social snobbery, was the root of his aristocratic idea: he felt he belonged to the élite of another age and another country. Yet his truculence covered deep timidity. His temperament was lazy, but he read and worked like a diligent bourgeois. Only those who work, he said, were equipped for the true end of living – the study of the arts and pursuit of pleasure.
For one who thought himself born into the wrong class, Stendhal was lucky in ‘the bastard’, ‘the Jesuit’ (his father) who gave him a decent allowance and sent him to Paris to study. He was lucky also in family friends – the Darus, who took the conceited youth into their house. He refused to go to the Ecole Polytechnique, and they got him a job in the Ministry of War. Stendhal thrived on influence. In a few months, at the age of seventeen, he was commissioned an officer in Napoleon’s reserve army in Italy. Italy transfigured him. Italy was freedom; hearing opera for the first time – ‘the Scala transformed me’. A lifelong dislike of France – indeed, the pretence that he was not really French – began. He fell in love with Angela Pietragrua, a married woman – older than himself – whom he was too timid to approach; she fulfilled his need for the remote goddess. There were untouched remote goddesses to follow; there was also syphilis, caught in the brothels of Milan, which affected his health for the rest of his life. The only woman he was really devoted to for many years was one of his sisters, and in his letters to her a tutorial figure appears and one begins to see that he is constructing his own system of self-education and behaviour. The outsider is studying and acting out a role, creating a self from scratch; it is defiant, touching and a good deal absurd. In his love affairs – he was determined on seduction – the tactics, the search for a style, the analysis of his amorous campaigns have the fidgetiness of artificial comedy; he spent half of his youth putting obstacles in his own way, as Miss Richardson says. In the pursuit of these passions, he believed in the coup de foudre: when it occurred, he was paralysed and in tears; if he was encouraged, he fell into long storms of melancholy; if he was victorious, boredom arrived sooner or later, generally sooner. The perpetual cry of this adolescent, whether he is with Napoleon’s army in Germany or Russia, whether he is back in Italy, is that he is bored to death. He is one of those who exhaust an experience before the experience occurs – the Romantic malady that becomes a pose and second nature. But if he did not succeed in creating an impenetrable new self and in becoming the superior man of sensibility, he had fitted himself to become a master of comedy in which scornful epigram and abrupt observation go off like rifle shots and leave the dry smell of gunpowder. Each sentence of his plain prose is a separate shock.
The later Romantics were too young for the Napoleonic glory, but in his harsh, sardonic way Stendhal had known it on the battlefield, though not as a fighting officer. From Smolensk he wrote in 1812, when he was twenty-nine:
How man changes! My former thirst for seeing things is completely quenched, after seeing Milan and Italy, everything repels me by its coarseness … In this ocean of barbarity, there isn’t a single sound that replies to my soul.
He was thinking of the music of Cimarosa and his love for Angela Pietragrua. When he watched Moscow burning, he had a toothache and read a few lines of Virginie, which revived him morally. He had taken the manuscript of his unfinished Histoire de la Peinture en Italie with him, read Mme du Deffand, pillaged a volume of Voltaire, whom he detested, and tried to think of the ‘score of comedies’ he would write ‘between the ages of thirty-four and fifty-four’ if only his father would die and leave him some money. He shows off to his correspondents, and rescues an early mistress who had married a Russian (she is very ‘chilly’), but when the great fire starts he seems to keep his head and to display sang-froid – or so people reported. He was unconsciously collecting the material for the superb Waterloo chapter in La Chartreuse de Parme, and one catches its accent. (He was not at Waterloo.) Of the beginning of the retreat he wrote in his diary, as one seeing the scene staged for his benefit:
We broke through the lines, arguing with some of the King of Naples’ carters. I later noticed that we were following the Tverskoï, or Tver Street. We left the city, illuminated by the finest fire in the world, which formed an immense pyramid which, like the prayers of the faithful, had its base on earth and its apex in heaven. [Very much like Stendhal’s own nature.] The moon appeared above this atmosphere of flame and smoke. It was an imposing sight, but it would have been necessary to be alone or else surrounded by intelligent people in order to enjoy it. What has spoiled the Russian campaign for me is to have taken part in it with people who would have belittled the Colosseum or the Bay of Naples.
An aesthete’s comment? Not entirely. It is an introspection we shall see transmuted when we find him examining the illusion of Napoleonic glory. Even before the grand scene the Stendhalian hero is a psychologist. History dished this outsider. He was the victim, he said, of the mediocrity that characterizes an age of transition.
There have been two revivals of interest in Stendhal in this century. In the twenties it was led by Francophiles who used it as a modish attack on the nineteenth century for its denigration of the eighteenth. Stendhal was useful, too, as a distant founder of the parricides’ club which thrived after the 1914 war.
The hardness of his ego and his impudence were our admirations; and the ‘enclosing reverie’ no more than a charming Romantic nostalgia. Stendhal’s curt, disabused and iconoclastic manner made the reader of Gide and Proust feel at home. But this movement fizzled out, though it persisted among Beylistes who had a delightful time taping Stendhal’s mystifications, footnotes, vanishing tricks, love affairs and changes of address. In the thirties left-wingers and Catholics were frosty about Stendhal’s politics and withering about his atheism: he gleamed like an arid Sahara. When the wheel is turned, in a second revival, we could feel ourselves to be in something like a Stendhalian situation. Existentialists found the self-inventing man sympathetic; practitioners of le nouveau roman looked to the novel without a centre.
In his Stendhal: Notes on a Novelist, Mr Robert Adams says:
Perhaps the most enchanting yet terrifying thing about the heroes of Stendhal is the sense that they define their own beings only provisionally and temporarily, in conflicts of thought and action, in negations; without enemies, they are almost without natures and wither away, like Fabrice, when deprived of danger. I think it is this vision of human nature which allies the novels of Stendhal with the great hollow, reverberant structures of Joyce, and the legerdemain card-houses of Gide; the fact that all systems of thought and feeling are tangential to the nature of their heroes is linked to the circumstances that their central natures are themselves a dark and hollow mystery. From this aspect there is no core or centre to the Stendhal fiction, as there is none to the fiction of Joyce: the more little anagrams and puzzles of correspondence one solves, the less one finds actually being asserted. What the novel means is its shape, its surface, its structure; the arcana of society, like those of thought, are simply emptiness which returns to the surface of light and the solitude of the cynical individual.
Another critic, Victor Brombert, writes in Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom, that the self-inventing man is a lifelong pursuer of freedom:
Neither is it by coincidence that the greatest ecstasies of life take place behind austere and quasi-monastic walls. Ultimately it is freedom from all worldly ambitions, an almost spiritual elation, that Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Donga achieve … Freedom remains a prisoner’s dream, and man’s vocation is solitude.
This conclusion certainly fits with Stendhal’s view that our greatest happiness is in reverie. But it is important here to recall what he wrote about the purpose of Lucien Leuwen: it was to be ‘exact chemistry: I describe with exactitude what others indicate with a vague and eloquent phrase’. The poetry is to be in the chemistry. Love is a consciously produced effervescence; it produces its transcendant, chemical moment of ‘bonheur’; then the beautiful experiment vanishes. One returns to contemplation until the next ‘moment’. And it strikes one, especially when he abruptly creates his unbelievable and preposterous scenes – in this novel the affair of a faked childbirth before witnesses – that his model for the novel was opera, the failure to invent the plausible, or perhaps a success in rising above it.
Yet a political novel like Lucien Leuwen is saturated in the social material it offers. It is rich in people who have been ‘placed’ as astutely as any in Balzac, but with more militancy. The unpopular garrison at Nancy is superbly done, for the minor characters have their own malicious concern for style and role also. They distress the hero. There are portraits of people who are drying up in futile class hatred. Stendhal is as cool – perhaps in his coolness lies the contemporary appeal – about the crude new middle class: he is exact but without the heavy hatred that is sometimes too black and white in Balzac. The following portrait of Mlle Sylvanie, the shopkeeper’s daughter, is full yet compressed, poetic yet also ironically of this world. Here the chemistry is indeed exact:
A statue of June, copied from the antique by a modern artist; both subtlety and simplicity are lacking; the lines are massive, but it is a Germanic freshness. Big hands, big feet, very regular features and plenty of coyness, all of which conceals a too obvious pride. And these people are put off by the pride of ladies in good Society! Lucien was particularly struck by her backward tosses of the head, which were full of vulgar nobility, and were evidently meant to recall the dowry of a hundred thousand crowns.
His young women have tenderness and verve: their capacity for growing into their passions is extraordinary. He is always beginning again with his characters for they too are ‘making themselves’. And abruptly too. This abruptness is excellent in his portraits of young men; here no novelist in any literature or period has surpassed him, not even Tolstoy. No one has so defined and botanized the fervour, uncertainty, conceit, timidity and single-mindedness of young men, their dash, their shames, their calculation for tactics and gesture. They shed self after self and a date is put to their manners. Stendhal’s sense of human beings living now yet transfixed, for an affecting moment, by their future, gives the doctrine of self-invention an ironical perspective which is not often noticeable in its practitioners today.
Poor Relations
The small house on the cliff of Passy hanging like a cage between an upper and lower street, so that by a trick of relativity, the top floor of the Rue Berton is the ground floor of the Rue Raynouard, has often been taken as a symbol of the life of Balzac. The custodian of the house – now a Balzac museum with the novelist’s eternal coffee-pot, his dictionary of universal knowledge and with his appalling proof sheets framed on the wall – shows one the trap-door by which Balzac escaped to the lower floor in the Rue Berton. Down it the fat breathless novelist of forty-one went stumbling and blurting, like his own prose, to the Seine. Two houses in one, a life with two front doors, dream and reality; the novelist, naïve and yet shrewd, not troubling to distinguish between one and the other. Symbol of Balzac’s life, the house is a symbol of the frontier life, the trap-door life of the great artists, who have always lived between two worlds. There Balzac wrote his letters to Madame Hanska in Poland, the almost too comprehensive, explanatory and eloquent letters of a famous and experienced writer who has the art, indeed the habit of self-projection at his finger-tips; there, when the letters were posted, he went to bed with the docile housekeeper who was finally to turn round and blackmail him, and so provide him with the horrifying last chapters of Le Cousin Pons. At this house in the worst year of his life, the least blessed with that calm which is – quite erroneously – supposed to be essential to the novelist, Balzac wrote this book and La Cousine Bette, respectively the best constructed and the most fluent and subtle of his novels.
A new life of Balzac was published in Paris in 1944. It is called simply Vie de Balzac and is by André Billy. This biography contains nothing new, but it gathers all the immense biographical material in a couple of volumes. Its detail is as lively and exhaustive as a Balzac novel; the manner is warm but sceptical, thorough but not dry. Very rightly, M Billy looks twice and three times at everything Balzac said about his life, for he is dealing with the hallucinations of the most extraordinary egotist in the history of literature. One can imagine a less diffuse biography; one in which the picture of his time played a greater part and where every detail of a chaotic Bohemian career was not played up to the same pitch. But given the gluttony of Balzac’s egotism and the fertility of his comedy, one is not inclined to complain.
Like the tones of bronze and antiques – Balzac estimated the weight and value of himself with the care of an auctioneer’s valuer – with which he darkened the house he finally took for Madame Hanska when he had got his hands on some of her fortune, the novels of Balzac weigh upon the memory. The reader is exhausted as the novelist by the sheer weight of collection. One is tempted to see him as the stolid bulldozer of documentation, the quarrying and expatiating realist, sharpening his tools on some hard view of his own time. He seems to be stuck in his task. Yet this impression is a false one, as we find whenever we open a novel of his again. Balzac is certainly the novelist who most completely exemplifies the ‘our time’ novelist, but not by his judgements on society. He simply is his time. He is identified with it, by all the greedy innocence of genius. The society of rich peasants brought to power by revolution and dictatorship, pushing into business and speculation, buying up houses and antiques, founding families, grabbing at money and pleasure, haunted by their tradition of parsimony and hard work, and with the peasant’s black and white ideas about everything, and above all their weakness for fixed ideas, is Balzac himself. He shares their illusions. Like them he was humble when he was poor, arrogant when he was rich. As with them, his extravagance was one side of the coin; on the other was the face of the peasant miser. The cynic lived in a world of romantic optimism. We see the dramatic phase of a century’s illusions, before they have been assimilated and trodden down into the familiar hypocrisies. To us Balzac’s preoccupation with money appears first to be the searching, scientific and prosaic interest of the documentary artist. On the contrary, for him money was romantic; it was hope and ideal. It was despair and evil. It was not the dreary background, but the animating and theatrical spirit.
