Adult Mind at Play

...Alter is right to examine in considerable detail Beyle's variegated love affairs: It is from their heroines, and from Beyle's alternatingly rapturous exaggerations of unfulfillable hopes and ecstatic satisfactions sinking into splenetic satiety that the fiction gains its curious doubleness, its Wertherian and Don Juanesque superimpositions...

...Often highly secretive jottings in bastard English or employing elaborate pseudonyms (to disguise the names of women, sexual performance, etc...

...More exotic, surely, but not more German...

...De I'Amour, his first true work of art, stands at the confluence of his two earlier kinds of writing...

...Stendhal, whose real name was Marie-Henri Beyle, was born in Grenoble in 1783...

...We find, for example, plural "protagonists" and a redundant "most especially" on one page...

...The publication of A Lion for Love, by Robert Alter with the collaboration of his wife, Carol Cosman, supplies at last a fine, perceptive, concise critical biography of Stendhal, written with a clarity and good sense worthy of its subject...

...Three years after Stendhal's death, the 25-year-old Flaubert wrote to a friend: "Last night in bed I read the first volume of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir...

...as Alter reminds us, both Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo find supreme happiness in the isolation of a prison cell or a Carthusian monastery...

...Another resulted from intensive early training in mathematics and rationalist philosophy, which was to counteract forever a strong sensuality and enthusiasm for such romantic literature as Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise...

...Saddled with a stocky physique and rather coarse visage, he depended chiefly on charming wit and dandified elegance for his amatory conquests...

...Still, the sojourn in Germany gave him the particular pen name—among more than 200 he indulged himself in—that he ended up favoring...

...Writing, for Stendhal, was to be a way to create the life life denied him...

...The Italian epitaph he composed for himself identifies him as "Arrigo Beyle, Milanese," but his grave is in Paris, his other spiritual home...

...This was to be one of the dualities he carried with him all his life...

...After all, Beyle used it first on one of his travel books, Rome, Naples and Florence, published in 1817 as by "M...

...Grudging admiration—as was, ultimately, the greatest tribute Stendhal got in his lifetime: Balzac's warm private and public reception of La Chartreuse...

...We learn how "from the need of a wounded Beyle to avoid detection and of a defeated Beyle to escape his own aching sense of inadequacy, some of the most nuanced complexities of the 19th-century novel [were...

...As a true member of the romantic avant-garde, he worshiped Shakespeare and dedicated his polemical pamphlet Racine et Shakespeare to him...

...We get brief but excellent summaries of all the books, major and minor, as well as deft critical assessments of their virtues, innovations and shortcomings...

...As Alter rightly remarks, Beyle gravitated between contradictory models for lovers: the saintly St.-Preux of Rousseau and the wickedly profligate Valmont of Les Liaisons dangereuses...

...Yet how many false starts there were, too...

...his most important government job was no more than that of provisional deputy to the Commissariat of Wars in Brunswick...

...now in an Italy that scarcely resembled the idealized Lombardy of his youth, he felt himself withering inwardly because he was cut off from the wit, the rich verbal culture, the intellectual intensity of the Parisian salons...

...So in the two great novels "the suppleness of the management of narrative point of view" is shown to be "a consequence of the writer's experienced subtlety of perception about people...

...A distinguished mind, it seems to me—a mind of great delicacy...

...Yet this selfless-ly classic writer could also state later on that "the only thing worth the trouble in this life is oneself...

...But is it style, true style, as it used to be, unknown today...

...The sentence on page 247 beginning "It is by no means clear" is by no means clear—indeed, it is a perfect mess...

...Alas, the grammar and syntax of the book leave something to be desired...

...A few, like Lamiel, had the makings of greatness if only Stendhal had not boxed himself into a plot contradiction that he could not resolve...

...This may be true for all serious writers, but for him perhaps even truer...

...But what really launched Stendhal's career, albeit only privately, was the plethora of notebooks and journals, even the marginalia he wrote into the books he was reading...

...Italy was to him, as Alter paraphrases Beyle, "the ballroom of a high culture that knew how to translate desire into a perfectly choreographed pattern of repeated fulfillment...

...Thus the self-delusion with which he insisted that Alexandrine Daru, his cousin's chastely bourgeois wife, secretly loved him, enabled him later to describe "the intricate emotional rhythms of the experience of self-deception...

...If this name had stuck in his memory instead, one of France's greatest novelists would have become the namesake of one of its worst...

...the romantic Countess Clementine Curial who, for three days, "kept him hidden in a cellar to which the only access was by a ladder that had to be set up and withdrawn each time...

...Even posthumously, Stendhal was slow to catch on...

...All his life Stendhal would abandon literary enterprises—some no sooner than begun, others brought painfully near conclusion...

...Not only was it almost totally plagiarized from three or four sources, it was also full of garblings of the stolen material that were just about its only original contribution...

...Already as a young man, Alter points out, Beyle deplored the effusiveness and discursive explicitness of Mme...

...yet they wear their erudition with becoming lightness...

...A good thing, too...

...the fall of the Empire and the concomitant loss of prospects and disorientation pushed him into this literary hack work of which other specimens were to follow...

...The "h," Alter tells us, was added "to the eternal consternation of copy editors, undergraduates writing class essays on The Novel, and other wrestlers with orthography, to make the name more exotically German...

...Alter and Cosman have clearly read just about every word by and about their subject, and digested it all...

...He is referring to Beyle's first published book, Haydn, Mozart, et Metastasio...

...they nevertheless permitted him to speak his mind and develop his style...

...Flaubert, the jeweler in words, the almost too exquisite stylist...

...That Napoleonic code was not your standard model for writers...

...the pure and noble Matilde Dembowski, who limited his pla-tonic visits to one a fortnight...

...Despite his accompanying Napoleon to Italy and, afterward, on the awesome Russian campaign and retreat (showing prowess and endurance, even if he never found himself in the thick of battle), Beyle proved not to be soldierly material...

...either for his Bonapartism or because his unrequited love for the splendid and libertarian Matilde Viscontini Dembowski brought him into close contact with the Carbonari (Italy's freedom fighters), he ended up on Metternich's blacklist, hounded out of the city that was the hotbed of rebellion...

...the public (historic or instructional) mode mingling with the private (amatory or anecdotal) manner...

...the platonic, even masochistic, Werther and the ruthless Don Juan...

...More typical was the reaction of George Sand, summed up by Alter as "decidedly qualified praise...

...His mother died when he was seven, and he hated with roughly equal passion his strict and possibly stingy lawyer father, the pious aunt who moved into the house as surrogate mother, and the entire stodgy bourgeoisie of Grenoble...

...born...

...Beyle had struggled with other works before—notably a play, and a history of Italian painting—but had not been able to finish them...

...Scrupulous a supervisor of imperial revenues as he was, he must have proved too independent-minded and outspoken to do well in a bureaucracy...

...Although he tried, with the help of his influential cousins, Martial and Count Pierre Daru, to make it in Napoleon's Army and, subsequently, in the civil service, he was not to prosper greatly in those endeavors...

...Out of hate for the former two, whom he perceived as tyrants, he became a republican...

...A good, hard-working consul when he had to face the boredom of Civitavecchia (he escaped for long periods on any pretext), Beyle was in addition an indefatigable writer whenever he overcame periods of idleness...

...as Alter puts it, "If Stendhal was his equal, he wanted it implicitly clear that he, Balzac, was first among equals...

...less than 7,500 inhabitants" and "a wracking fever" on another...

...the young Flaubert, a recalcitrant law student, wrote his sister that it scarcely resembled French: "The gentlemen who compiled it didn't offer much of a sacrifice to the Graces...

...Romantic self-indulgence in the content, code civil classicism in the style —a duality Beyle productively exploited...

...A great and beautiful book," the younger but far more established novelist called it, while adding a good many reservations (e.g., a brusque, careless style...

...It all goes back to that basic ambivalence of Beyle's between classicist rationalism and fervent but finicky, selective romanticism...

...Everything is set forth most readably, with exemplary lack of pretentiousness or convolution...

...Characteristic is George Saintsbury's evaluation for the famed 11th edition of the Britannica: "Never master of a perfect style, he has exercised ever increasing authority as master of pessimist analysis...

...Italy could also get on his nerves, especially after Metternich's secret police made Milan, his favorite city, deny him its freedom...

...Dialogue and narration are governed by an "overriding sense that intelligence should dominate both," a procedure that compels the reader "to make inferential judgments, re-examine assumptions, identify significant elements in surprising directions...

...seven years after that, he was appointed intendent at Sagan in Silesia...

...Leaving in 1799 that "dung heap" Grenoble for Paris, he threw himself into the pursuit of his two great ambitions: success with women and a political career...

...the dandified elegance required money that throughout Beyle's life was to be more or less scarce...

...Women in Beyle's life were of paramount importance...

...de Stael's style and observed that "there is a way of moving which is by showing the facts, the things, without stating the effect...

...But his charm had a hard time overcoming a natural timidity and an eccentric insistence on wooing unattainable women...

...Not far from Brunswick was a town whose name he would later recall: Stendal...

...We may prefer one or another member of this indissoluble trinity, but we need them all...

...out of contempt for the imaginative poverty of the latter, he became a spiritual aristocrat...

...but had he not been a conservative classicist, his musical tastes might have run to Weber and Berlioz...

...and, in between, Stendhal, the uncannily canny psychologist whose utterance was as crystalline as his vision was lucid...

...But such lapses are not enough to prevent this book from being the nicest incentive to Beylisme, the cult of Stendhal that, for the best reasons, keeps proliferating...

...Stendhal, Alter writes, "brings one closer to the self-contradictory movements of a convincing individual psychology" than did any previous novelist, and this, to a large extent, by the rapid, improvisatory way he wrote or, more often, dictated his fictions...

...The supreme masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Parma, was dashed off in a mere 52 days of dictation...

...the operations of extravagant imaginations on persons, events, and relations that are in themselves banal, trivial, indifferent...

...An important difference, however, for English readers, has been the fact that, though good critical biographies of Balzac and Flaubert have been available, Stendhal, until now, had received only his purely critical due...

...All fiction can be triangulated by means of these three geniuses, and nothing would be more idle than trying to rate them...

...As a result, Paris had a way of looking good to him—especially after he assumed his last job as French consul to the godforsaken Papal-States harbor of Civitavecchia—for Paris was the place where conversation about the arts and the art of conversation throve...

...On March 22, 1842, he dictated some pages of a tale he was working on...

...Even for the finished masterworks, though, success—indeed, recognition—was equivocal...

...It is hard to think of another writer of genius," Alter observes, "who launched his career in so dubious a vessel, and in such a morally questionable fashion...

...And A Lion for Love in its entirety is a thoroughly perceptive summary of, or short introduction to, Stendhal's life and work...

...Both The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse gained some approbation, but neither was hailed as the triumph it was...

...A milk coach...

...The other great creative influence was Italy, a country he spent a large part of his life in and often found preferable to France—but again Beyle was to be torn between two loves...

...Reviewed by John Simon Nineteenth-century France, early and middle, produced in rapid succession the three archetypal novelists: Balzac, the natural storyteller and word-painter, a veritable artesian well of fiction...

...Then others: the impure and wily Angela Pietragrua, who invented her husband's jealousy to keep Stendhal at (partial) bay...

...As Stendhal evolved into a great writer, he continued to rely on historical anecdotes or tales from chroniques scanda-leuses that he transmuted to fit his psychic needs and infused with his trenchant but amused psychological skepticism...

...His first stroke, in 1841, left him with impairments of speech and lapses of memory agonizing for a writer, but neither they nor a very real fear of death could deter him...

...Rather, we must assume that the "h" was a letter associated by the French of that time with aristocratic origins, even as the "y" for "i" (say, Denys for Denis) has been in more recent times...

...that evening he suffered another stroke in a Paris street, and he died the following morning...

...unlike his cousin Pierre Daru, who was a lion for work, Henri was a lion for love...

...The style is French...

...In his concluding sentence, Alter aptly summarizes Stendhal's art as "an abiding expression of plangent feeling, poised wit, the harmonious play of an adult mind...

...Alter fails to note a parallel with one of Beyle's mistresses, Alberthe de Rubempre, a cousin of the painter Delacroix, who added an "h" to Alberte for purposes of quite un-Teutonic self-aggrandizement...

...de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie...

...As an uneasy, frequently wavering, but at last convinced admirer of Napoleon, Beyle never forgave his country for the way it dealt with Bonaparte...

...Best known of his remarks is this from a letter to Balzac: "In composing Chartreuse, in order to hit the right tone, every morning I read two or three pages of the civil code...

...Alter notes, "Shuttling between two cultural realms, [Beyle] had imperceptibly made himself a permanent exile: in France, he had longed for the passion, the energy, and the music of Italy...

...Neither those Italian locales nor the de suggests a German...

...Moreover, Alter does not always notice connections: Surely there is some relationship between the facts that Beyle's favorite whore in London was a Miss Appleby, and that the money-saving diet she promised to stick to if taken along to France was apples...

...Significantly, Stendhal first revealed himself as an original writer in his analysis of the psychology of love, De I'Amour (1822), a work that even today, after innumerable such tomes, retains a freshness...

...There is something fishy, too, about Alter's assertion that the coach ride from Civitavecchia to Rome?5 miles —took eight hours...

...But Stendhal had no great expectations: He realized that he was writing for "the happy few," that his recognition would come in the 20th century, that his stripped-down style would disgruntle many...

...They were mainly of two kinds: available women whom he loved transiently and left unless they left him first, and more or less unavailable ones for whom he fought and pined and suffered, virtually unable to let go...

...This romantic notion is, of course, reflected in the fiction...

...Not, to be sure, in the beginning...

...Dichotomy to the last...

...They made it as dry, as hard, as stinking, as flatly bourgeois as the benches of the Law School, where we go to harden our buttocks while hearing it explained...

...He eventually did better with women, yet here, too, he was often denied fulfillment...

...Typical is Beyle's oft-quoted self-description from Souvenirs d'egotisme: "In my life I have passionately loved only Cimarosa, Mozart, and Shakespeare...

...These and several more receive their individual dues as well as evaluations in terms of their contributions to Stendhal's fiction...