Stendhal's Self-Portrait:
CANTARELLA, HELENE
Stendhal's Self-Portrait The Private Diaries of Stendhal. Ed. and trans, by Robert Sage. Doubleday. 570 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Helene Cantarella THERE IS something so artless and engaging...
...Through this analysis of his own "intimate consciousness," he hoped also to gather the data on the human heart which he felt he needed to become a comic bard and "successor to Moliere"—an ambition he was never to realize...
...Young Beyle wrote his journal for himself alone: "It is an anatomical work solely for my enlightenment...
...I was born violent: in order to mend my ways, I have been counseled to know myself...
...An excellent introduction and thirteen connective passages between the major portions of the various notebooks provide continuity...
...The impact of Italy on the naive Henri, fresh from the constricted provincial life of his native Grenoble where he had long chafed under the regime of "that bastard" his father, was permanent...
...It is all there, down to the last, most intimate detail...
...It is an impressive job, done con amore, and it cannot fail to delight both the specialist and the general reader...
...The admirable translation, in swift, contemporary idiom, preserves the flavor of Beyle's dry, pithy prose...
...Wherever he traveled—and he served in various official capacities in many of the major cities of Europe—he observed intently the people about him...
...Through the welter of facts, impressions, analyses and quips, one gets a clearly defined and cohesive panoramic view of life during the most fateful years of the Napoleonic era...
...What is not so clear, despite flashing insights into Beyle's evolving character, is the alchemy by which the erratic fop, so consumed by trivial passions, ennui and dyspepsia, was transformed into the dedicated creator of Julien Sorel...
...To be sure, fifteen years of furious activity were to pass before he devoted himself exclusively to the novel, the genre in which he was to excel...
...The self-portrait which emerges is certainly not a flattering one, but here is the man as he was and saw himself: thick-set, impeccably dressed, living on credit, intelligent, analytical, but also impetuous, selfish, conceited, insecure, grasping, frivolous, and often downright silly...
...Reviewed by Helene Cantarella THERE IS something so artless and engaging about Stendhal's diaries that one reads them almost without drawing a breath...
...We are greatly indebted to Robert Sage for making these diaries available in English...
...Peripheral though his activity may have been, he nevertheless stored up a mass of material which was to serve him later in his major works...
...By then, Beyle —or de Beyle, as he liked to call himself—would become Stendhal...
...read voraciously and widely, discussed endlessly, spent almost every evening in some theater or opera house, courted, seduced and lost innumerable women, and evolved '"beylism...
...drew portraits in acid of those who disliked him...
...Everything of value in the 2,000 pages of the original five volumes seems to have been kept, while the gaps have been filled by inserting Beyle's letters to his sister Pauline and to his friends...
...Italy gave him what he had always sought: new sensations in love and art, a new awareness of music...
...Never above pulling strings to gain advancement, Beyle used his friends and relatives to obtain cozy little sinecures in the Napoleonic administration...
...For fourteen years, these notebooks traveled with him everywhere, and he poured into them his impressions of everything he did, his comments on the countries he visited, his designs on the women he desired or loved, his criticisms of the books he read, the plays he saw, adding every now and again perspicacious critical evaluations of his own successes and blunders...
...But the fact remains that the transformation did take place...
...his personal system of philosophy, based on the "pursuit of happiness through love, work and energetic action...
...He managed just to miss taking part in all the famous battles, save for the tragic retreat from Moscow, in which he played a role more conspicuous for squeamishness than for bravery...
...Begun in 1801, when Marie-Henri Beyle was only 18 (and long before he had completed the metamorphosis which was to bring forth the novelist Stendhal), they are an odyssey of self-discovery by a youth who grasped at life with eager hands...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 14
