Preface

For a long time I was afraid to revisit the writings of those who had been my favorite writers when I was in my teens (a very long time ago!). I have been relieved to find that the writers I admired then hold up well. I was disappointed by later works (which I read when they first appeared) by Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, but in rereading what they wrote that I loved and/or admired when I was young, I find their fiction still at least admirable and like some of it. I like John Cheever's Falconer even more than his Wapshot novels that I enjoyed reading when I was young. Philip Roth has continued to produce at least interesting books (at a grueling pace, that has left me behind).

Although I was unable to get through The Magic Mountain again, I still adore many of Thomas Mann's shorter fictions (and his last novel, which I did not read during my adolescence, Felix Krull. And Melville's shorter fiction (I haven't tried Moby Dick again... yet anyway)., and the novels of E. M. Forster. And Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a novella that made me want to write, and which I was afraid to reread, but was relieved to find still inspiring.

I came to the writings of Stendahl -- the pen-name of Marie-Henri Beyle,(1783-1842 --, during my 20s, and would have told anyone who asked that he was one of my favorite writers of any time. I read Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) first. Later I was even more enamored by the 1838 The Charterhoue of Parma (André Gide's choice on his 1912 list of eight great French novels and Henry James's choice of the greatest dozen novels published before the twentieth century) than by The Red and the Black (which I reread as I was floundering trying to make a career in my late 20s). I made it through both volumes of Lucien Leuwen, but bogged down in The Life of Henri Brulard, On Love, and Stendahl's biography of Rossini. I didn't dislike these books, but didn't finish any of them. (I did read three novellas (Italiann tales) in the translation of M. Scott Moncrief, the translator who opened Proust to me.)

When Richard Howard's new translation of Le Chartereuse de Parma appeared a few years ago, I read it and was somewhat disappointed that it did not live up to my memory of it (though I could appreciate Gina even more than I could when I read the book when I was in my 20s and Count Mosca much more than I had before). Despite this chilling precedent, I reread The Red and the Black coming back from Europe recently (a lot of it in a sweltering Dulles International Airport).

The Review

The Red and the Black is a long novel, first published in 1830. It is nearly 500 pages in length. It has some plot, but mostly it is character-driven. Stendahl portrays his young protagonist, Julien Sorel, as being close to pretty. His overriding trait is ambitiousness, followed by prickliness. Once he gets away from his domineering paysan father and the lumber mill in which his father employs his sons, including Julien, Julien is treated very well by his social superiors, and has multiple patrons. Nonetheless, he is constantly on full alert about being mocked. His hero is Napoleon, but Julien makes his way among royalists and clerics and has to keep his admiration for the bold conqueror secret.

Julien is also determined not to show the high-born ladies who fall in love with him that he wants their love. He wants conquests and is intent on seduction, but these serve his ego, and he is too on guard to feel pleasure... or love. Or to believe that he is loved.

Julien cuts a dashing figure in red (army uniform) and black (as a tutor and seminary student) and has formidable ability to memorize (he has memorized the entire Bible in Latin and given the start of any verse, can finish it). Nevertheless, he is a blockhead, far too paranoid about being dissed to enjoy his rapidly rising status, the love of the beautiful women he wins, or anything else (except brief flashes of conceit). The tragedy of the novel is inevitable given Julien's character flaws.

Stendahl had not heard the Anglophone demand to show rather than tell... and his ironic telling of Julien Sorel's rise (and, more briefly, his fall) appeals to me. Stendahl gets into the heads of his characters, not just Julien. Most of the comedy of the novel comes from seeing how Julien understands what is happening in one way, the women he loves (and others) understand what is happening in quite different ways, and neither Julien nor the aristocrats who patronize him discover how out of synch their expectations and interpretations are from his. The social climber Julien Sorel is satirized as much as the pompous rich and/or noble and/or pious. And Stendahl maintains a bemused distance above all the characters with aphorisms such as "Man was gifted with speech to help him conceal his thoughts" (and to fail to recognize his feelings or those of others) and "In a seminary even the way one eats a boiled egg can be made to indicate spiritual progress," and--my favorite--"All real passion thinks only of itself. That's why passion seems ridiculous in Paris where one's neighbor always seems to think that you are keeping him in mind." (Provincials do not have a monopoly on egotism!)

As in The Charterhoue of Parma, the women who love are more appealing than the ardent (but in many ways caddish) young man who is loved. Julien is in love with love, that is, in love with the idea of winning the hearts of women from social ranks superior to him, first the mother of the children he is tutoring, Mme de Rênal, then to his highborn fiancé e, Mathilde de la Mole, then to Mme de Rênal whom he seduces again, and then... Neither the married nor the unmarried woman had ever been in love before, and there is also a maid who is in love with Julien (and his reading has not included the warning to beware of spurned women...)

Well, like Fabrizio del Dongo (who participates in a battle at Waterloo and also puts in time among monks and in prison) in Charterhouse, Julien needs a nurturing older woman even more than he needs the love of an agemate (however rich and noble). Julien casts aside a life of pretending and speaks some personal truth to power (a suicidal course on trial for a capital crime!) about class and hypocrisy. Still, this seems as much another form of egotism than of social protest.

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© 2007, Stephen O. Murray

This is a belated contribution to MsMorvay's (5th) resurrecting the oldies writeoff.




Recommended: Yes