Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  As it happens, we’re now almost exactly as far from Giraudoux’s novel as Giraudoux’s characters were from the publication of Stendhal’s; a good time, perhaps, to consider the question raised by that strange scene in Bella. More important, the superior new translation of Charterhouse by the distinguished American poet and translator Richard Howard makes it possible not only to breathe once again that incomparable air but, as good translations always do, to grasp fully its peculiar qualities, to understand why the experience of reading this work is so famously “rapturous,” and why the novel itself continues to be so fresh and sustaining.

  “Fresh” is the key word here. On November 4, 1838, Stendhal (the most famous of more than two hundred pseudonyms used by Marie-Henri Beyle, a Grenoble-born career diplomat and lover of all things Italian) sat down at his desk at 8, rue Caumartin in Paris, gave orders that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, and began dictating a novel. The manuscript of Charterhouse was finished seven weeks later, on the day after Christmas—an impressive feat, when you think that a typical French edition runs to five hundred pages. The swiftness of its composition is reflected in the narrative briskness for which it is so well known—the “gusto, brio, elan, verve, panache” of which Howard is rightly conscious in his translation—and, as even die-hard partisans of the novel would have to admit, in passages where compositional speed clearly took a toll in narrative coherence. (“We have forgotten to mention in its proper place the fact that the duchess had taken a house at Belgirate.”)

  The idea for the book had actually been rattling around in Stendhal’s head for some time. His Roman diaries of the late 1820s are crammed with lengthy references to the convoluted histories of the Italian Renaissance nobility, a favorite subject and the basis for a series of short tales he published in the mid-1830s as Chroniques italiennes. The lineaments of Charterhouse owe a great deal to a seventeenth-century chronicle of the life of Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul III, that Stendhal came across during the course of his Italian travels. (Farnese, who became pope in 1534, had a beautiful aunt, Vandozza Farnese, the mistress of the cunning Rodrigo Borgia; murdered a young woman’s servant; was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo; escaped by means of a very long rope; and maintained as his mistress a well-born woman called Cleria.) So while the extraordinary speed of the novel’s composition can be attributed to an almost supernatural flash of inspiration, it can also be seen as the more natural outcome of a long and deliberate process that had finally achieved fruition.

  Like the circumstances of its creation, the finished novel seems at once spontaneous and premeditated. The quick pace of the narrative and the vividness of the characters are balanced throughout by a coolly sardonic assessment of human nature and, in particular, of politics. Stendhal, a lifelong liberal who as an idealistic young man had followed Napoleon into Italy, Austria, and Russia, found himself living at a time of almost unprecedented political cynicism in post-Restoration France. Disgust with the bourgeois complacency of his countrymen played no little part in his admiration for the Italians, whom he considered to be more authentic—“more profound and more susceptible to violent emotions,” as he wrote in his diary. To Howard’s credit, both the Italian passion and the French worldliness are evident here; but it is the novel’s distinctive impetuousness and forward momentum, the qualities that so famously make it such a good read, that are fully captured here, perhaps for the first time, in English. (Howard himself finished the translation in twenty-eight weeks—one week per chapter—a feat only slightly less miraculous than Stendhal’s.)

  But the appeal of Charterhouse is more than just a matter of its urgent, even impatient style (“Here we shall ask permission to pass, without saying a single word about them, over an interval of three years”). It lies, too, in the vibrant characters, who are prey to unruly emotions that will be familiar to contemporary readers. There is, to begin with, the novel’s ostensible hero, the impetuous young Fabrice, who as a teenager, when the action begins, disobeys his right-wing father and sneaks off to fight for Napoleon. What is most resonant for contemporary readers isn’t Fabrice’s starry-eyed idealism—which is, after all, endemic among protagonists of Romantic novels, and which, in any case, is constantly belied by the hard and occasionally farcical realities of lived life (an exhausted and slightly hungover Fabrice sleeps through much of Waterloo)—but the decidedly more modern, and even postmodern, way in which a sense of authenticity keeps eluding him.

  This more than anything, you suspect, is what keeps Charterhouse alive for each generation. Like so many of us, Fabrice is always measuring his life against the poems and novels he has read. (At Waterloo, he thinks of the “fine dreams of sublime and knightly comradeship” he learned from studying Tasso.) With a self-consciousness more typical of the late twentieth than the early nineteenth century, he keeps checking up on himself, as if trying to conform to some hidden master plan for being, or for loving—a plan that, as the novel tragically demonstrates, he is never quite able to follow. No wonder he so often expresses himself in the interrogative: “Had what he’d seen been a battle?… Had this battle been Waterloo?” “Am I such a hypocrite?” “What about a minor affair here in Parma?” One ironic measure of Fabrice’s inability to master the art of living as a free man is that he finds true happiness only in the womblike security of his prison cell in the Farnese Tower (as many critics have noted, he’s jailed for exactly nine months), from which he is loath to escape after he falls in love with Clelia—an affair, appropriately enough for a character obsessed with astrological signs and prophecies and hidden symbols, that is conducted at first exclusively through hand signals.

  Fabrice is hardly the only vivid and oddly contemporary character here; you could easily argue—many have—that the real heroes are his aunt and her lover. Master political and social puppeteers, they are far more complicated and interesting than the young man they spend so much time trying, in vain, to establish in an adult life—even as, with Laclos-like sangfroid, they try to stage-manage some contentment of their own. (Mosca to Gina: “We might find a new and not unaccommodating husband. But first of all, he would have to be extremely advanced in years, for why should you deny me the hope of eventually replacing him?”) This is one reason why Charterhouse tends to appeal to our maturity, whereas Stendhal’s 1830 masterpiece, The Red and the Black, with its endlessly striving, morally casual young antihero, appeals to our youth.

  Gina, in particular, is one of the great creations of the nineteenth-century novelistic imagination: brilliant, flirtatious, cunning, vulnerable, passionate, extraordinarily self-aware, and yet helplessly the prey of a forbidden passion for her beautiful nephew. We first meet her at the age of thirteen, trying to stifle a giggle at the ragged appearance of a Napoleonic officer who’s been billeted in her brother’s opulent palace (the Frenchman, Stendhal hints, is Fabrice’s natural father), and from that moment we’re never quite able to take our eyes off this woman who, despite her exalted social position and the Racinian dilemma she finds herself in, is never less than fully, sometimes comically, human. (“Will you for once behave like a man with a brain?” she writes to an admirer.) Mosca, too, who in the perfect, inevitable geometry of unrequited love hopelessly adores Gina in a way he knows will never be reciprocated, is an intricate creation, complex and conflicted in his public as well as his private life (we’re told that this leader of the ultraconservative party started out, like his creator, as a Bonapartist) and the victim of erotic passions that grip him, in Stendhal’s vivid locution, “like a cramp.”

  The novel’s headlong narrative momentum, and the refreshingly real emotions of its acutely self-conscious characters, are clearly the work of a man who, like his young hero, rebelled in his youth against his stultifyingly conventional family, a man who wanted to be known as an artist and lover of women. (Stendhal’s epitaph, in Italian, which he composed while still in his thirties, reads: “He lived. He wrote. He loved.”) But Charterhouse is just as much the work of a season
ed diplomat only too familiar with the compromises that adult life imposes. The author’s older voice comes through in the fate he chooses for his characters: by the end of the book Fabrice, solitary in the religious retreat to which the book’s title refers, has died, still very young, having inadvertently caused the deaths of both Clelia (by now married off to another man) and their illegitimate child, the victims of a harebrained kidnapping plot gone horribly wrong; Gina follows him to the grave not long after. Only Mosca, the sole character who governs his passions successfully, survives.

  So, like its creator, the novel is part Fabrice and part Mosca. Or, to put it another way, it contains the best qualities of its contemporary French rivals: it has the headlong plottiness of Balzac, complete with assassinations, forged papers, disguises, and politically motivated self-prostitutions, and also the elaborate, almost glacial self-consciousness of Flaubert. In other words, it’s got something for everyone.

  None of the English versions of Charterhouse currently available is inadequate—least of all that of C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, the great translator of Proust, whose 1925 version was the Modern Library’s predecessor to the new edition and is still remarkably readable. But because language itself changes, even the best renderings of any work stop sounding modern after a while; and precisely because of its narrative momentum and the contemporary-seeming predicaments of its characters, Charterhouse needs to sound modern. This, Howard’s translation does. First and most important, it moves with admirable rapidity, fully conveying what James called the “restlessness” of Stendhal’s “superior mind” by means of a number of subtle but quite concrete choices on Howard’s part, not least of which is his rendering of French verbs more crisply and colloquially than has been done before. (In the great Waterloo scene, for instance, Stendhal’s sabrer becomes “cut down,” which is better and faster than Margaret Mauldon’s long-winded “killed by a saber-cut” in the 1997 Oxford Classics version and yet more natural than Scott-Moncrieff’s “sabred.”)

  Accuracy, however, is never sacrificed; this Charterhouse is filled with small and ingenious grace notes that are just right, and that you suspect Howard had a lot of fun working out. When Marshal Ney reprimands a subordinate at Waterloo, he “chews him out”—a rendering that, for once, gives the sense of the French verb gourmander, which can mean, as it does here, “to reprimand,” while wittily capitalizing, with just the right masticatory note, on its resemblance to “gourmand.” (In other renderings this is either under- or overtranslated, from the blah “telling off” in Mauldon to the nonsensically literal “chewing up” in Scott-Moncrieff to the rather overbearingly Julia Childesque “making mincemeat out of” in Margaret Shaw’s 1958 Penguin Classics version.) My one reservation concerns Howard’s decision to give the Italian versions of the names instead of the French—Fabrizio instead of the text’s Fabrice, for instance—which obscures the important narrative conceit that this whole tale is one we’re hearing from a Frenchman who has, in turn, heard it from Italians who knew the principals. It is a book about Italians, but one seen through French eyes.

  Howard’s briskness and wit serve just as well in conveying the other side of Charterhouse: the very French manner that Proust referred to as Stendhal’s “Voltairean,” “eighteenth-century style of irony.” At the novel’s opening, Stendhal makes a passing but pointed reference to the fate of a group of 150 liberals illegally imprisoned by the conservative faction to which Fabrice’s father belongs: “Soon they were deported to the bocche di Cattaro, where, flung into underground caves, humidity and especially lack of bread rendered a summary justice.” Earlier translations show how easy it is to flub the small but pointed wit here. Mary Loyd’s 1901 version—“where damp and, especially, starvation wreaked prompt and thorough justice”—misses the joke altogether, steamrolling Stendhal’s deliciously dry and oblique “lack of bread” and indignantly overtranslating the word that Howard more properly and dryly gives as “rendered.”

  Howard understands that Stendhal’s style is inextricable from his substance—the speed from the passion, the irony from the worldliness—and so he gives you Stendhal’s style whole, with no touching up. Reread Howard’s translation of the line about the murdered liberals; at first glance you’d think it was the humidity and lack of bread that were flung into the bocche di Cattaro. Rightly, Howard reproduces the feel of Stendhal’s French, even at the price of the occasional syntactical clunker. Balzac, hardly the most polished of stylists, complained about Stendhal’s sloppy grammar, a fault about which the latter was deliciously unapologetic, preferring as he did a conversational naturalness and ease to the geometric perfections of le siècle classique. In the very first entry in his journals, dated April 18, 1801, when the author was eighteen, he makes a mistake, but displays a nonchalance on the subject of grammar that will provide retroactive vindication to anyone who struggled through the pluperfect subjunctive in eleventh grade: “There will be a lot more, because I’m making it a rule not to stand on ceremony and never to erase.”

  Public ceremonies alternating with private mistakes; battles with banquets; stateliness with speed, epic scope with journalistic detail; loves unrequited and passions disastrously indulged; idealism and cynicism; the giddy heedlessness of self-satisfied youth and the sad wisdoms of old age; the minutes you remember in detail and the three-year chunks you completely forget. The grandeur and the messiness, the magnificence and the mistakes. No wonder Giraudoux’s young infantryman felt he had to know Charterhouse. What else would the dead want but what you find so much of in this novel—and in this new translation more than ever before—which is, in a word, life?

  —The New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1999

  HEROINE ADDICT

  WHATEVER OTHERS MAY have thought of the novels of Theodor Fontane—and the long-standing consensus is that they are, as one scholar of German literature has noted, “the most completely achieved of any written between Goethe and Thomas Mann”—Fontane himself clearly thought that they were pretty unexciting. To his mind, L’Adultera (1882), one of the studies of tormented heroines on which his present-day reputation rests, was primarily about “the circumstantial and the scenery.” He characterized The Poggenpuhls (1896), the story of an aristocratic family frantically maneuvering to extract itself from genteel poverty, as a book that “is not a novel and has no subject-matter.” In May 1898, a few months before he died, at the age of seventy-eight, he wrote a letter rather wearily describing The Stechlin, the unusually “pudgy” tome (most of his fiction is bracingly short) that was the last work he lived to see published:

  An old man dies and two young people get married,—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages. Of complications and solutions, of conflicts of the heart and conflicts in general, of excitement and surprises there is virtually nothing.… Naturally I don’t claim that this is the best way of writing a contemporary novel but it is the one that is called for.

  Even Fontane’s characters are plagued by a certain anxiety about having nothing very exciting to talk about. In Cécile (1887), a novel about a good woman trying in vain to bury a bad past, a group of tourists in the Harz Mountains are taken around a medieval castle; unnerved by a visitor’s embarrassment that there’s not much to look at, the tour guide “rapidly resumed his lecture in the hope of compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible items of interest.”

  Compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible interest is an excellent way to sum up both the strangeness and the beauty of Fontane’s fiction. The topography of his plots is, for the most part, as flat and monotonous as the notoriously bland landscape of his Prussian homeland, Brandenburg (about which he lovingly wrote in a multivolume work). Most of Cécile is devoted to the excursions and the chitchat of those hapless tourists. There’s some gossiping, a halfhearted flirtation, and then everyone goes home to Berlin; the revelation of Cécile’s sexually compromised early life arrives agonizingly late in the novel, and the denouement, as often in Fontane, is swift, effi
cient, and a little surprising. In Jenny Treibel (1892), a wry social comedy with darker political overtones, a young woman makes a play for the son of the self-absorbed title character, one of the nouveaux riches bourgeois—a class much loathed by Fontane—who dominated German society after Bismarck unified the nation; after the girl has done a good deal of scheming, her plan simply fizzles out. (Fontane loves to create plots in which the characters’ own plots never quite work; for all the Poggenpuhls’ agonized machinations, what saves them in the end is a fortuitous event.)

  And in Effi Briest (1895), considered by many to be Fontane’s masterpiece, the suffocating dreariness of the young heroine’s provincial existence is brilliantly conveyed precisely because the author isn’t afraid to be dreary himself; by the time you’ve got through a few dozen pages in the Baltic town of Kessin, accompanied by Effi’s excruciatingly correct, “frosty as a snowman” husband, you’ll feel like breaking down in tears, too. Fontane’s taste for withholding action, or at least delaying it improbably, is evident in the novel’s most famous feature, a structural gambit of daring subtlety: the frustrated Effi’s brief affair with a womanizing officer is never actually described—and is only discovered many years later, when she and her husband have settled comfortably into their marriage. (His pursuit of revenge is thus rendered all the more appalling—an effective vehicle for condemning ludicrous codes of masculine “honor.”)

  When “excitement and surprises” do occur in a Fontane novel, it’s usually when the book is nearly over. The death, or suicide, or marriage, or resignation in the face of overwhelming social or familial pressure is a culminating little bump in the otherwise long, smooth, and highly scenic road. (Fontane features more suicides than any other German writer of his century; even these are characteristically quiet.)