by Anne Fadiman
At college, though we read a few chapters of Le rouge et le noir in French, I decided to defer the pleasure of finishing it on my own. Also, by this time I had picked up a snobbish prejudice that the very popularity of The Red and the Black made it a little common, whereas The Charterhouse of Parma seemed to exude the aroma of a delicacy: literary caviar. So I began my education in Stendhal with his last great novel, Charterhouse. It was assigned for colloquium class, too, come to think of it; I had no choice in the matter.
Colloquium was a big deal at Columbia: you had to be interviewed to get in, and supposedly only the most brilliant students—highest grades, best academic minds—made the cut. In practice this meant I was thrown in with a bunch of dull premedical students seeking to become well-rounded and only a few humanities soul mates. To this disappointment was added my unspoken shame, because most of the other seniors were entering their second year in the seminar, whereas I had been rejected the year before for junior colloquium. It didn’t help that in that first interview I’d dismissed Jean Giraudoux as a lightweight, only to discover while idly going through the Butler Library card catalog that one of my interviewers had done his doctoral dissertation on Giraudoux! In those days I was forever provoking Columbia with my working-class defensiveness, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. An intentional provocation, surely, occurred in the first semester of senior colloquium, when, instead of doing an analytical paper on Rameau’s Nephew, I wrote a scampish Diderotian dialogue about the colloquium itself, sending up everyone in class, including the two professors, F. W. Dupee, a lion of the English department, and Richard Kuhns, a younger, tweedier man from Philosophy, who co-taught the class. They were not amused and demanded a substitute paper, which I never handed in. (Dupee forgave me, apparently. He was a dear man, a peach, sympathetic to rebellion, and a fine critic with a subtle prose style: how I could have twitted him so cruelly I’ll never know.) My next paper would be on The Charterhouse of Parma, and this time I resolved to play by the rules.
The Charterhouse of Parma has been characterized by Richard Howard as “a miracle of gusto, brio, élan, verve, panache.” I took to the book immediately and avidly, and it remains a rarefied pleasure. Why this rather recherché novel should have so delighted me at age twenty needs some background. I’d already been submitting the shape of my future sensibility to a gang of writers who specialized in analysis and paradox. I was powerfully drawn to Nietzsche (who loved Stendhal, saying: “The man was a human question-mark … . Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health”), Gide (who declared The Charterhouse of Parma his favorite French novel), and Dostoyevsky (my idol)—they had prepared me, with their psychological lineage. Also, I loved the comic novel: Fielding’s cheeky addresses, Sterne’s digressions, Diderot’s sabotage of normal plot flow, Svevo’s rationalizing narrator, Machado de Assis’s sardonic, pithy style. What tickled me most, I think, was voice—the sound of outrageous candor cutting to the point, combined with a touch of irony insinuating that it could never be that simple.
In Stendhal, I found the exemplar of a spasmodic, abrupt voice whose very impatience signaled vitality. Where another writer might take paragraphs to prepare an insight, Stendhal would polish the business off with a terse epigram (“Courtiers, who have nothing to examine in their souls, notice everything”). His mind was so generously stocked that he could throw away ideas the way Bob Hope did one-liners. His paragraphs lacked topic sentences; or rather, they were all topic sentence, one atop the other. He dispensed with transitional sentences whenever it suited him and, by doing so, “predicted” in prose the Godardian jump cut I loved. “Let us skip ten years of progress and happiness” was his typically brazen shortcut. To leave out plodding intermediate steps, you need sophistication about the deep structure of narrative, supreme confidence in yourself, and an unimaginable faith in the audience’s intelligence.
Stendhal wrote like a free man. Unconstrained by popular opinion, he wrote “to the happy few” (the oft-quoted final words of Charterhouse) and for an audience a hundred years hence who would appreciate him. I was that audience, I liked to think.
I was especially smitten with the early battle episodes, wherein Fabrizio, our Italian hero, voluntarily enlists in the French army. Barely seventeen years old, he runs away from home with a head full of romantic notions and an allegiance to his idol, Napoleon. As he scoots from one place to another, following dubious escorts, dodging bullets, having his horse stolen, trying to discover whether he has actually taken part in a battle, and encountering a pusillanimous army in full retreat (this is Waterloo, remember), Stendhal observes with comic regularity that Fabrizio does not understand in the least what is happening. Ah, to understand what is happening to you—the pattern underneath ephemeral events!
If I had to summarize in one word what I cherished about The Charterhouse of Parma and Stendhal, that word would be “worldliness.” There was a mystique about worldliness that attracted me at twenty. Not for me the adolescent pulings of The Catcher in the Rye: if the price of entering adulthood was loss of innocence and the residues of childlike wonderment, I could not pay up quickly enough. Disenchantment was my goal. So when the worldly diplomat Count Mosca advises his adored Gina to marry an elderly man who can give her wealth in return for her title, we may be shocked at this nobleman pimping his beloved, but then we appreciate his grasp of circumstances. In the same practical manner, Mosca advises Fabrizio to enter the priesthood with an eye to making bishop: a strange choice for a libidinous young man, requiring years of patient execution, but one that makes sense in the rouge et noir context of nineteenth-century ambition. He also advises Fabrizio to take a mistress from a conservative family and to read in public only the stupidest right-wing newspapers. We are none of us romantic isolates; we are social animals, being watched by potential allies and enemies. Mosca is a realist: it does not bother him that he has been cuckolded by his wife, but it does bother him that she has embarrassed him by doing it with a political enemy.
To be worldly means to know that men and women are not angels, that they have vanities and vices that they seek to justify. Choderlos de Laclos, author of Les liaisons dangereuses, one of my favorite novels at the time (and still), certainly went further, depicting depravity as the common rule. The strategies that Valmont and Mme de Merteuil suggest for each other in Les liaisons dangereuses invoke sex as a game of chess to ward off boredom. Stendhal was more interested in demonstrating the realpolitik of court life; but in both cases it was reason, aligned with the recognition of appetite, that intrigued me. I found the same combination in the Marquis de Sade. Youth, being largely powerless, is often fascinated with evil forces. But the gothic never appealed to me, because, as much as wanting evidence of evil, I was listening for, craving, reasoned analysis—the sound of calm French logic—even when it took a hypertrophied form, as in Sade.
The Charterhouse of Parma and Les liaisons dangereuses swept through our family. They were read and discussed by me; my older brother, Lenny; and my sister Betty Ann, who was a year younger than I (our youngest sister, Joan, was still playing with dolls). Betty Ann in particular—dark, attractive, moody—was drawn to portraits of strong, independent-minded, active women: in adolescence, she modeled herself on the Duchess Sanseverina, Mme de Merteuil, and Billie Holiday. For Lenny and me, the duchess (Gina) was a fantasy ideal, an older woman of worldliness, beauty, and intelligence who we dreamed would take us under her wing. I found myself identifying (as did, I suspect, Stendhal) with Count Mosca, whose impressive overview of life cannot win him first place in the heart of his beloved Gina. She is much more taken with her nephew, that gilded youth, that heedless naïf, Fabrizio. Wherever he goes, women fall over themselves to please him. And even older men, like the bishop, are fond of him. Placing himself forever in danger, he is continually being rescued by the interventions of guardian angels, most notably his adoring aunt.
I did not begrudge Fabrizio his triumphs; but, though we were the same age,
twenty, in no way did I identify with him. I was already seeing myself as the witty secondary, the one who would not get the girl, just as a few months later, when I read Sentimental Education for colloquium, I immediately identified not with the dreamy, aristocratic Frédéric but with his resentful, lower-middle-class pal, Deslauriers. (Possibly, I think, so did Flaubert. I wonder if this is a professional deformation: the writer, stuck at his desk, avenges himself on his dreamboat protagonist by condescending to or otherwise undercutting him.)
At Columbia, I had watched with fascination two of my classmates, Mitch and Jon, who seemed to me golden boys. I had befriended both. You might even say, in retrospect, that I’d had crushes on them, though I would have denied it. It seemed they were always plunging into complicated situations—being torn between several girls vying for their attention, between several spiritual or aesthetic paths—and then coming to me for advice. I simultaneously envied their success with women and felt superior, from my perch of ironic detachment. But why should I have been certain so early that I could not be a ladies’ man? Cowardice, probably. I don’t think being a ladies’ man is ever a matter entirely of looks but, rather, of a certain receptivity to adventure and, with it, an incompleteness of self. A man with those qualities is often more enticing to women than a man who projects himself as a “finished portrait” (as I was already attempting to do). Gina cannot love Count Mosca with all her heart, because he is too cautious and aware of every consequence, while Fabrizio has the reckless, impetuous disregard of a sleepwalker, which she identifies with capacity for passion (rightly, it turns out, though his passion will be for Clélia, not for her).
I could never re-create my precise responses to Fabrizio or the novel after all these years were it not for the fact that I happened to keep my colloquium paper. Here it sits before me, typewritten on onionskin, with Professor Dupee’s penciled comments—a shipwrecked sailor rescued from the ark of time. “Fabrizio, the Unconscious Hero.” At the risk of being laughed at for exposing my undergraduate prose, I will quote:
The unconscious hero was a favorite character of novelists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century … . The unconscious hero’s ejection from the secure surroundings of his childhood into the larger world, his naïve attitudes confronted with obvious examples of evil, his near-passive participation in a string of marvelous incidents which thrust him into the path of danger and grotesque characters, and finally, his arrival at a stable position—was a formula employed in works as diverse as Candide, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Gulliver’s Travels, Justine, and The Charterhouse of Parma.
The lack of great consciousness in a novel’s protagonist seems to increase his susceptibility to coincidence. The rational, active, tragic hero in literature constructs his own destiny, and if he is defeated by fate the implication remains that he himself laid the groundwork for his failure. The unconscious hero, however, becomes much more controlled by the laws of chance.
He is incredibly handsome, so much so that most people are immediately won over to him by his physical appearance; he is graceful, strong, courageous, and sufficiently proud of his honor to fight against personal attacks; he is naïve, gallant and susceptible to romantic notions; he is frequently passive. A character with these attributes is quite useful to the writer of an epic adventure novel, because the writer must be able to create a perpetual stream of incidents and plot twists. If the hero is handsome, then at any moment a woman may fall passionately in love with him, arouse her lover’s jealousy and incite a duel.
In retrospect, it seems to me I was taking mocking revenge upon my popular, handsome friends. Though Mitch and Jon were both highly intelligent, my consolation was the prejudice that they were unconscious Fabrizios and I was the ever-alert Count Mosca. My dream was to become Stendhal, never his romantic hero.
The rest of the paper analyzed the many ways Stendhal explained Fabrizio’s unconsciousness. For instance, the anticlerical author blamed Catholicism, “the instruction given him by the Jesuits of Milan. That religion deprives one of the courage to think of unfamiliar things, and especially forbids personal examination, as the most enormous of sins; it is a step towards Protestantism.” Or youth: “He was too young still; in his moments of leisure, his mind devoted itself with rapture to enjoying the sensations produced by the romantic circumstances with which his imagination was always ready to supply him. He was far from employing his time in studying with patience the actual details of things in order to discover their causes.”
I cited Fabrizio’s unconscious cruelty toward his aunt, after she has rescued him from prison, and went on to indict him: “His passion for Clélia ultimately leads to the death of his lover, their child, the Duchess and Fabrizio himself. Yet none of this tragedy would have occurred had Clélia and Fabrizio taken a rational course of action.” (This is definitely a twenty-year-old talking!)
In the end, however, I gave Fabrizio his due by saying: “But if Fabrizio is led into situations of danger and eventual tragedy by his instincts, he is also elevated above the common run of men. It is Fabrizio’s reckless heroism which wins him the adoration of Gina; yet this heroism, as with everything else about him, is of a peculiarly unconscious nature.” And to prove it, I ended by quoting Gina: “I love in him his courage, so simple and so perfect that, one might say, he is not aware of it himself.”
In the next twenty years, I stockpiled Stendhal’s books. Often, going on vacation, when I wanted something I knew would amuse me, I would pluck a title of his from the shelf. The Red and the Black proved to be one of those special novels, like Vanity Fair, whose vivacity and charm far exceed what you might expect from a classic. I think it’s Stendhal’s best. I read his lesser novels, such as the refined Armance, the slight Lamiel, and the interminable Lucien Leuwen, which is interesting on every page but never comes to any point (it was left unfinished, perhaps because Stendhal realized he was spinning his wheels). I also read his Italian tales, such as “Vanina Vanini,” which have the economy of Kleist, if not the same payoff. The tales did not stay with me; but the storyteller remained good company throughout.
In the meantime, Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution had made a great stir: it was daring, youthful, formally inventive, yet attached to the traditions of an older culture, including Stendhal. The aura around The Charterhouse of Parma only deepened with Bertolucci’s film, which plays off that novel in subtle ways, being set in Parma and featuring a beautiful aunt who is romantically obsessed with her nephew.
Finally, I turned to Stendhal’s “creative nonfiction” and was enchanted again. On Love, his book-length meditation, seemed an astonishing font of philosophy, reverie, and paradox: it made me want to write essays. For the moment, it excited me enough that I imitated the master with a chapter called “Journal of Decrystallization” in my first novel, Confessions of Summer. Later, when I had gravitated definitively to the personal essay, I gobbled up his two autobiographical texts, The Life of Henry Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist. The “I” in these books is one of his greatest characters: mischievous, Oedipal, pedantic, irascible, enthusiastic. I also read his Roman Journal. By this time, Stendhal had become for me one of those writers, like Montaigne or Borges, whose sentences are incurably interesting, regardless of whether the piece they are embedded in comes together.
Then I returned to where I started, and reread, several weeks ago, The Charterhouse of Parma.
I am fifty-seven years old; in a few years I will be sixty! This fact, which shakes me to the core, cannot help inspiring indifference in you, the reader. I completely understand your refusal to be moved by my aging. I even applaud it. And in part I feel it myself: Who cares? But I ask myself, What has all this aging accomplished? It has lost me the ability to appreciate a literary masterpiece.
I can no longer read Kerouac for pleasure; Dostoyevsky repels me. The Stendhal of the ruminations on love, travel, and himself continues to act as a replenishment, but I find Charterhouse tiresome. Not all of it, of course. I still love the battl
e scenes, and the great interior monologues of Count Mosca and Fabrizio in chapter 7, and Gina flinging herself into her nephew’s arms. I still love much of the analytical psychology. But as a whole, it feels a little too willed, precious, artificial. That so much of the narrative exists in summary—which I once regarded as audacious—now seems vitiating. Stendhal dashed off The Charterhouse of Parma in fifty-two days, at the end of 1838, and the circumstances of its composition (or should I say performance?) show: in its penchant for summary, in its likeness to a single whoosh of sustained exhalation, in its tour-de-force bravura quality, but also in its repetitions and hasty summings-up.
Stendhal’s recurrent potshots, such as using the warm-heartedness of his Italian characters to reproach French calculation, wear on my nerves. Count Mosca’s long Machiavellian disquisitions on the inner workings of the court are no longer as fascinating this time around. It could be that worldliness itself, the initial attraction of Charterhouse, no longer possesses the same allure, the same meaning for me. I have it—or as much as I am going to have.
The book also feels like an uneasy commingling of two traditions: the French psychological novel and the Italian tale, with farcical elements of opera libretto and commedia dell’arte. In my youth I had accepted the mixture of genres as an enrichment; this time I balked, partly because I was less able or willing to submit to the story as a waking dream. Over the years I seem to have lost some of my youthful capacity to enter the mimetic/oneiric space of a novel; and this coincides with my becoming more drawn to essays, history, memoir. Call it mental hardening of the arteries.
I also now mistrust Stendhal’s brief for romantic love. His skepticism is more credible to me than his romanticism. The Charterhouse of Parma plays as a conflict between reason and passion. Stendhal admired passion but, I think, didn’t really believe in it. He needed it, though, to advance the plot, so that he wouldn’t get bogged down again, as happened with Lucien Leuwen, in observation, without an engine (passion) to drive it. The same Stendhal who wrote the Life of Rossini turned to operatic passion as a convention. In Charterhouse, this inflatedly noble tale, he sought to reproach a commercial age. But he was on firmer ground with the scheming middle-class upstart Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black than with the aristocratic hunk Fabrizio.
