Memoirs of Egotism

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FOREWORD

TO THE WORLD, STENDHAL IS THE NAME OF ONE OF THE world’s most eminent novelists, the author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Yet Stendhal is only one of many pen-names assumed by Marie-Henri Beyle, just as his two great novels are only a small portion of a sizable and varied literary output. While all serious readers admire the fiction of Stendhal, more than just a Stendhalian happy few also love the short, fat, and passionate Beyle, half sentimentalist, half cynical homme du monde.

Stendhal—as it’s simplest to call him—reveals his truest and most vulnerable self in his correspondence, journals, and such varied works as the treatise On Love, the polemical pamphlet (attacking the stultified French drama) Racine and Shakespeare, a chatty biography of Rossini (in which the digressions matter more than the narrative), several chronicles of the Parisian art scene, and a travel book called Walks in Rome. These, moreover, are just some of his writings published between 1821 and 1830, the time period covered by Memoirs of Egotism. This decade also includes Stendhal’s first novel Armance (about the daring subject of sexual impotence) and closes with his account of the rise and fall of a gifted young man from the provinces, The Red and the Black.

Despite all this literary activity, little of it earns a mention in Memoirs of Egotism. Stendhal is, in fact, the least self-aggrandizing author one can imagine. He doesn’t push his books; he doesn’t drop names—indeed, he disguises the identities of many of the people he writes about. During these Paris years, for example, Stendhal spent time with the visiting English essayist William Hazlitt (from whom he may have borrowed the word egotism), socialized with the Russian novelist Turgenev, and traveled back to Italy where he stopped off to see his friend the great poet Leopardi. The influential French critic Sainte-Beuve tells us that he attended a dinner party on January 25–26, 1830, where he sat between Victor Hugo and Stendhal. You would think that such luminaries and gatherings might receive a paragraph or two in the Memoirs of Egotism, but you would be wrong. At least Stendhal does talk, all too briefly, about his close friend, the short-story writer Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen and The Venus of Ille.

So what does interest Stendhal? The short answer is his own psychology, the tricks and tics of the memory and the unconscious, his own contradictory nature, equally fascinated with role-playing and sincerity. Scribbled down in 1832, in just under two weeks, these recollections—never completed, like so many of Stendhal’s projects—are his first real attempt at autobiography (and would be succeeded by his masterpiece in the genre, The Life of Henry Brulard, which treats his childhood and youth). Having lived through the tumultuous Napoleonic era, spent years as a man about town in Milan and Rome, and attempted to make a living as an author during the Bourbon Restoration, the now middle-aged Stendhal suddenly finds himself the French consul in the small Italian town of Civita Vecchia. Bored, he decides to while away my leisure hours by recalling his Paris sojourn of the previous decade. He insists that he will scribble as fast as possible—turning out roughly thirty pages per session—and not revise anything, aiming at the kind of authenticity and absolute truth denied more artful and polished pieces of writing.

In fact, the conversational roughness, the constant authorial questioning of motives, the interjection of second thoughts, the sudden shifts and swerves in the narrative, and all the other revelations of a mind actively brooding over its past are what give Stendhal’s Memoirs of Egotism its magical immediacy. Here is a heart laid bare. The reader, moreover, soon grows as interested in the actual process of revery as in what is being remembered: Where was I? Stendhal writes at one point, before adding, Heavens, how badly written this is! Elsewhere he notes that like a respectable woman turned harlot, I must constantly try to overcome the reserve that makes a gentleman reluctant to talk about himself. As always, Stendhal’s prose throughout is transparent and unadorned, and every sentence actually says something. For anyone who has had a taste of the absorbing occupation of writing, there is only a secondary pleasure to be extracted from reading. Often, while at work, I have thought it was only two o’clock when a glance at the clock showed that it was half-past six. This is my only excuse for having blackened so much paper with ink.

At one point Stendhal compares the Memoirs to an examination of conscience, but more accurately it might be called a psychological case-history: This, says Beyle, is how I gradually recovered from my almost suicidal passion for Metilda (an Italian beauty who never even granted him her favors). He does this largely by plunging into a social whirl, made up of now-forgotten cronies, evenings at various salons, and the eventual consolations of new love affairs. To the Parisian society of his time, Stendhal was chiefly known as a witty cynic, with a taste for fashionable clothes. In his own view, he needed his intelligence and wit and splendid dress to compensate for his shortness (he was under five feet, five inches) baldness, obesity, and general lack of good looks. Plus he was now in his late forties, a crisis age for those who, like Stendhal, find that nothing in life matters so much as the promise of happiness in the arms of women. Only the music of Mozart and Cimarosa, the plays of Shakespeare, and the paintings of Tintoretto, he tells us elsewhere, have ever provided him with anything close to the pleasure of falling in love. And as he says here, it bores me to write of anything but the analysis of the human heart.

So love—lost, sought, or purchased—is a dominant theme throughout the Memoirs. Among the book’s highlights are Stendhal’s chapter about his total fiasco when attempting to enjoy the beautiful courtesan Alexandrine, his portrait of the elderly General Lafayette (who likes to pinch the bottoms of pretty young girls), an idyllic account of love in a cottage during a journey to England, and numerous brief anecdotes about the sexual histories and proclivities of the socially prominent:

"Mme. Lavanelle was as dry as a stick, and besides she had no wit, and was incapable of real passion; the only thing that could excite her was a glimpse of the handsome thighs of a company of grenadiers in white cashmere breeches as they marched through the Tuileries Gardens."

One day the eight or ten nieces of Mme. de Montcertin asked her: ‘What is love?’ To which she replied: ‘It is a low, vile thing, of which chambermaids are sometimes accused, and when they are guilty, we send them packing.’

Besides erotic intrigue, Stendhal is also fascinated, and sometimes repulsed, by the political machinations of the toadies and trimmers of the post-Napoleonic world. Yet the creator of the astute Count Mosca in The Charterhouse of Parma is certainly not without his own Machiavellian shrewdness. He tells us that whenever I arrive in a city, I always try to find out: 1) who are the twelve prettiest women; 2) who are the twelve richest men; 3) what man there has the power to have me hanged.

Halfway through these meandering reminiscences—and they are very like a rambling conversation with an imaginary future reader—Stendhal admits: One can understand everything except oneself... No matter. He also confesses that scribbling away at these pages simply makes him happy—and readers of the Memoirs of Egotism will find that its pages will make them happy too.

MICHAEL DIRDA

July 2008

INTRODUCTION

Stendhal as Autobiographer

ALL OF STENDHAL’S LIFE WOULD SEEM TO HAVE BEEN a preparation for the writing of his autobiography. Surely no man brought to such a task more aptitude, more interest, or more passion. His novels themselves, it has often been remarked (like many other great novels) were but concealed autobiographies, or, at any rate, variations upon the theme of his own life. No Jean-Jacques Rousseau, indeed no Marcel Proust ever ransacked his memories more vigorously in search of times past, or interrogated his ego more earnestly, more constantly than he.

Once at a salon in Paris a man, made curious by reports of M. Henri Beyle’s somewhat mystifying private character, asked him directly what his business was. The self-styled Baron de Stendhal fixed his sharp eye upon his interlocutor and said: Sir, I am an observer of the human heart. The man, thinking he was a spy of some sort, was frightened and retreated abruptly. But the observation, the analysis of the human heart and its passions had truly been his business in life. And where could one better study this subject than in oneself? Since his boyhood Stendhal had reveled in introspection; he had the faculty of surrendering himself to some emotional experience, then recording it afterward with complete self-consciousness. A great forerunner of modern psychology, he tried to examine himself, and others, with the experimental and dispassionate attitude typified by the new scientists of the time, much as his friend Cuvier, the biologist, dissected animals in his laboratory. Such a method, eschewing all bombast, or sentiment, or self-apology, he believed, had not yet been tried in the medium of literature; certainly not by Rousseau, whose Confessions were written in self-defense, nor by Chateaubriand, who had sought to glorify his own character.

Stendhal had a profound sense of history: did he not declare that he had once (toward 1821) postponed committing suicide out of political curiosity about what was going to happen next? Born in Grenoble in 1783, in the time of Louis XVI, he was a child of the eighteenth century and also a product of the great French Revolution whose doctrines he ardently embraced. During the span of history that was his lifetime by fifty, surely approaching the most turbulent eras of ancient Rome, he had seen a half dozen dynasties come and go. He had been an officer of Napoleon’s army, present at his court and at many of the climactic scenes of the First Empire, including the retreat from Moscow. He had lived through an ocean of sensations. Indeed he had lived many lives, in different lands, under many different guises: as a soldier, an administrator, a diplomat, a traveler, a gallant, a man of society, and an author. But wherever or whatever he had been, he had never accepted the appearances of things without examination; his had been a detached spirit, ever skeptical, even rebellious at ideas that were à la mode.

He had no religion, no home, no wife. All other obligations had been rejected by him in favor of the perpetual research for personal freedom and self-knowledge. And for those morally conservative times that came after Waterloo, during the Bourbon Restoration in France, this was tantamount to being a monster of immorality. M. Beyle’s books, it was pointed out, were full of scandalous matter and published under a nom de plume. This godless philosopher lived with actresses, and perhaps even took money from them, it was whispered. The fat Mephistopheles, he was sometimes called.

What few knew was that he was a man of infinite sensibility, for he was noticeably reserved, or in society wore various masks, including that of a wit. His wit concealed a heart that had suffered sorely, a nature that had known great ecstasy and prayer—after its own fashion—not only for women, but for painting, music and literature. In the privacy of his memoirs he would have much to tell us about the real Henri Beyle who had concealed himself from the world.

Like a youth, or rather like a man who continued in the illusion of eternal youth, he was obsessed by the notion that he was misunderstood by his age. (He insisted also that his times were out of touch with realities.) Others, after the restoration of the legitimate monarchy, might turn Royalist in politics, orthodox in religion, or they might sell out by merely pretending to be both. He would continue an unbeliever, a liberal, a Jacobin, devoted to the idea of democracy that was now out of favor in Europe. When the Romantic movement in literature (which he had helped to launch) began to embody excesses of style and an intellectual fuzziness that he could not abide, he stood forth as an anti-Romantic, addicted to dryness and factual precision. This was enough to earn him anew the opprobrium of critics who were in fashion. In any case they had long had the habit of slating his books, especially The Red and the Black, for alleged bad taste and subversive ideas. His books were little read by the public, and he was being forgotten in his own time—as he was to be forgotten for fifty years after his death. But what of the future?

The future generations, Stendhal guessed shrewdly, would be different. The reader of tomorrow would be republican and equalitarian in his outlook, more concerned with scientific truth than with religious authority. Hence he decided to do what few writers have ever done: to address himself to posterity. Though he was ignored in the 1830s, he predicted: I shall be read in 1900.

He said to himself cheeringly:

I can see clearly that many writers who enjoy a great reputation today [1832] are detestable. What would be a blasphemy to say of M. de Chateaubriand now, however, will be a truism in 1880.

This was an apt prophecy, as were so many of his others. The glamorous author of René and Le Génie du Christianisme was read mainly by schoolboys in the heyday of Zola. Stendhal, on the other hand, was revived, or rather resuscitated, like Shakespeare, Blake and Herman Melville. He would appear astonishingly modern not only in 1890, but in 1950, so that the veriest scraps of his notebooks and letters would be held precious by his devotees of later times.¹

As an author he had had, in his own time, few friends