Henri Beyle, better known to us by his pseudonym, Stendhal, was called by the French un homme singulier, or what we might call, with an inevitable loss of nuance, a character. And he was, indeed, the most singular of all the great nineteenth-century French novelists, and also perhaps the most contradictory. Unlike Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, his peers in the pantheon of fiction, he had an amateur’s approach to literature, and except for some youthful dreams, never strove to be a professional writer. His detractors would say that it showed. Not a few of his readers would become fed up with his desultory style, lack of narrative drive, overindulgence in asides, and his affectation of unsentimental detachment from the fate of his characters. A pretty fair judge of the art, Henry James pronounced Le Rouge et le noir to be unreadable, yet he was enthralled by La Chartreuse de Parme, showing the strange mix of emotions that can be evoked even within the same reader by this great figure of French letters.
It marks some of his distinction that Stendhal should elicit wildly varying and even troubled reactions, as did Beyle in person, at the salons, as he expatiated on every subject under the sun, blithely ignoring his own ignorance. None of which is to say that his work was without craft, or to deny that he was, in fact, extraordinarily learned. But it is noteworthy that his singular spirit and idiosyncrasy animated both man and work so completely that it is almost inconceivable to think of one without thinking of the other.
It is certainly in the hope of showing the rich veins of this idiosyncrasy and the pleasures of being reacquainted with such a lively character that Jonathan Keates, a British man of letters, has undertaken this brilliant biography. This is the first life of Stendhal in English in a quarter-century (the most comprehensive treatments are French, the most recent being published in 1990), and it is hard to imagine one being written to eclipse the sensitivity and acuteness of Keates’s work, or one that would give greater pleasure to the reader, with its combination of lovely magisterial prose and piquant, earthy wit—not unlike that of Beyle himself. The greatest tribute, I think, is to note that in Keates’s portrait Beyle lives and breathes as a credible person posed against a richly textured historical background that also comes to life.
Like all of the other truly great writers of that century, Beyle was the product of bourgeois ambition deflected from its original aim.
Like all of the other truly great writers of that century, Beyle was the product of bourgeois ambition deflected from its original aim. He was born Marie-Henri Beyle in 1783 in the provincial city of Grenoble, a place he came to detest and mock as the very type of philistine commercialism and mean-spirited provinciality (surely touches of this feeling make their way into Le Rouge et le noir’s ugly portrayal of Julien Sorel’s birthplace). To put it simply, as simply and candidly as he himself would later put it, he loved his mother and hated his father. His mother died in childbirth when Henri was merely seven, and he would never forgive his father, aside from his other demerits, for failing to provide any substitute for his beloved, comforting maman. His father was a lawyer with ambitions in municipal politics and an outlook fixed on commercial advantage. Unfortunately, his rigidity and charmlessness, apparently cultivated in part to mold himself into a great striver, left only a chill of isolation on his sensitive son, while his monetary ambitions, owing possibly to acute incompetence, never panned out.