Auerbach on Voltaire, Goethe, Balzac - we've reached the modern novel - They will then seem most real.

I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them.  They will then seem most real.  (The Good Soldier, 1915, Ford Madox Ford, Part 4.1)

16. “The Interrupted Supper,” Abbé Prévost, Voltaire, the Duc de Saint-Simon.

The French 18th century, with all that drags in.  “In the literature of the eighteenth century tears begin to assume an importance which they had not previously possessed as an independent motif” (397).  Thank goodness for the “light, agile, and as it were appetizing” Voltaire.  It is Rousseau who poisoned everything.

… [Voltaire] is free from the cloudy, contour-blurring, overemotional rhetoric, equally destructive of clear thinking and pure feeling, which came to the fore in the authors of the Enlightenment during the second half of the century and in the authors of the Revolution, which had a still more luxuriant growth in the nineteenth century through the influence of romanticism, and which has continued to produce its loathsome flowers down to our day.  (407)

For Auerbach, romanticism is long regression, a slide away from reality.

The section on the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon introduces, a new theme, historicism, which moves us to:

17. “Miller the Musician,” Schiller and Goethe.

More German literature more generally, really.  This is a complex, subtle chapter that will, for readers of Wuthering Expectations, contain few surprises.  German imaginative literature, in the 19th century, was off in its own world, wrestling with the Ideal while other literary traditions made big moves toward the Real, ironically influenced in many cases by 18th century German historicism (Auerbach calls it “Historism”), meaning that a good novel, for example, is not just set in a specific time and place but is in some important way engages with the setting.  Comments on it, critiques it, whatever.  We take this almost for granted now.  Every Trollope novel I have read does this.  Adalbert Stifter novellas do not.  Roughly speaking.

Auerbach blames Goethe, obviously, such a giant that he is responsible for everything that happens in German literature for a hundred years, but more specifically his response to the French Revolution, “his aversion to everything violent and explosive” (447).  Goethe responds directly to the Revolution, but he does so by shifting towards Classicism, towards some kind of Idealism.  I guess I never wrote about this before, but Nicholas Boyle writes about it in detail in Goethe: The Poet and the Age Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803 (2000).

This is an unusual chapter of Mimesis.

18. “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert.

Many readers should probably skip from Chapter 1 to here, since Auerbach writes about modern novels for the last three chapters.  I know, many of you only care about novels.  That is fine.  You are a creature of the age.  You cannot help it.

Here is Auerbach saying what I just said up above:

[Balzac] not only, like Stendhal, places the human beings whose destiny he is seriously relating, in their precisely defined historical and social setting, but also conceives this connection as a necessary one: to him every milieu becomes a moral and physical atmosphere which impregnates the landscape, the dwelling, furniture, implements, clothing, physique, character, surroundings, ideas, activities, and fates of men, and at the same time the general historical situation reappears as a total atmosphere which envelops all its several milieu. (473)

Auerbach has – obviously! – chosen a chunk of the opening of Père Goriot, the long description of the boarding house, as his representative Balzac passage, a landmark in prose fiction.  I have expressed, all over Wuthering Expectations, a lot of skepticism about the value and even the existence of Realism or even so-called “realism,” so it might seem that I do not have much sympathy with Auerbach’s project.  Yet I spend a lot of time quoting writers describing furniture.  But Auerbach is really writing about, as in his subtitle, the “representation of reality.”  It is the representation that is changing so much over the centuries.  It is the representation that matters.

These last chapters could have been their own little book, and one that more people would have read.

The Hugo Objects at the Maison de Victor Hugo

My suspicion of the concept of the value of the writer’s house museum does not stop me from visiting them whenever I can.  The grounds for suspicion are obvious, I assume* – the attempt to squeeze meaning out of seeing the pen with which the author wrote his masterpiece, the chair on which he sat, the fainting couch on which he reclined, the chamber pot which he hurled at a yowling cat that had interrupted his concentration, and so on.  In a painter’s house, we do what the artist did, we look carefully at interesting objects; in the writer’s house we look carefully at the contents of someone’s attic.

So I dunno.  The literary boosters of Grenoble are currently renovating and assembling a Maison Stendhal in the house of the author’s grandfather.  They have one great advantage – the local university curates the Stendhal archives, including his manuscripts – that may or may not overcome the endless obstacles to an interesting museum visit:  Stendhal hated Grenoble, left it as soon as he could, and so on.  He went to school over there; this plaza is featured in The Life of Henry Brulard; the vines on this trellis could be the ones planted  by his grandfather, but most likely are not.  All of this should be ready in – well, several years from now.

I am imagining, here, that the visitor is genuinely interested in the writer and has read some sample of his works.  Picture, instead, the poor sap who is dragged into one of these museums with no knowledge or interest.  Luckily for him, writer museums are typically small.

The Maison de Victor Hugo, on the charming Place des Vosges in Paris, has the enormous advantage of featuring the enormous Victor Hugo, not just a writer but a celebrity.  A floor of the house is currently devoted to an extraordinary display of Hugo objects, the Hugobjets, a bewildering selection of Hugo kitsch:  the Hugo fan could drink Hugo beer and gamble with Hugo playing cards; the aspiring sage could write with Hugo pens and Hugo ink.  Trademark laws being what they were, none of this was generated by Hugo himself – there was no Hugo, Inc. – but by anyone who hoped that Hugo’s aura would help move his merchandise.  A visit to Google Images should give an idea of the variety of stuff.

The ordinary objects with Hugo’s face pasted on them were most amusing to me, but the volume of commemorative plates, fans, cards, and busts, pictured above, were perhaps more instructive.  Everyone wanted a relic of Saint Victor of Notre Dame.  The Hugobjets date, mostly, from 1870 or later, near the end of Hugo’s life, when his popularity and stature somehow metastasized into a Hugo craze that continued for a decade or two after his death.  He was no longer just the greatest French writer, peer of Shakespeare and Goethe, but something much larger, and sillier.

The Hugobjets exhibit was enormously instructive.  It became obvious why writers like Verlaine and Corbière and Gide had to ignore or mock or reject Hugo, whether or not he was the greatest poet in the language, even if they had to jettison the poetry along with the plates and busts and playing cards.  What a burden; what a monster.

* See, please, April Bernard on the topic.

Stendhal - I ask for my food

The NYRB edition of The Life of Henry Brulard - the old Penguin edition as well - ends with a separate 1840 document called "The Privileges". It begins "May GOD grant me the following letters patent:", and continues with a list of what we would now call super-powers. Some samples:

"ARTICLE 4:... The privilege-holder having a ring on his finger and squeezing that ring when looking at a woman, she will become passionately in love with him as we believe Héloïse was with Abelard.

ARTICLE 5: Good hair, excellent teeth, good skin never grazed. Faint, pleasing smell.

ARTICLE 10: When out shooting, eight times a year, a small flag will indicate to the privilege-holder, at a distance on one league, the game that exists and its exact position.

ARTICLE 16: The privilege-holder, wherever he may be, having said: 'I ask for my food,' will find: two pounds of bread, a beefsteak well done, a leg of lamb idem, a bottle of Saint-Julien, a carafe of water, one item of fruit, an ice-cream and a demi-tasse of coffee. This request will be answered twice in twenty-four hours."

Etc. Small sums of money, minimal physical pain, prowess in combat, the ability to turn into an animal. This is a strange piece of writing. I should point out that Stendhal wrote this when he was fifty-seven years old.

Nota Bene, in a comment, reasonably suggested that one could use Stendhal's memoirs to illuminate some of the more (some of the many!) perplexing aspects of his fictional characters. There are no shortage of parallels between young Henri Beyle and the fictional Julien Sorel and Fabrizio. But I'm having enough trouble understanding Stendhal himself (or "Stendhal"). Henry Brulard is a slippery book. I'll have to refer Nigel to Erich Auerbach's chapter on Stendhal in Mimesis and puzzle on the subject some more.

Stendhal – for in reality, as we know, everything is always quite different

Here’s Stendhal writing about crossing the Alps behind Napoleon, and seeing Italy for the first time:

“It was the hospice! There we were given, as the whole army was, half a glass of wine which seemed to me ice-cold like a red decoction. I have a memory only of the wine, but no doubt they added a piece of bread and cheese. I fancy we went in, or else the accounts of the interior of the hospice I was given produced a mental picture, which for the past thirty-six years has taken the place of the reality.

Which is where the risk of falsehood lies that I’ve been noticing in the three months I’ve had my mind on this veracious journal.

For example, I can picture the descent to myself very clearly. But I don’t wish to conceal the fact that five or six years later, I saw an engraving that I thought a very good likeness, and my memory is now nothing more than the engraving.” (p. 468)

Can you see why modern writers have become interested in The Life of Henry Brulard? The whole point of the book, the obsessive drawing and redrawing, the reworked timelines, are all designed to pin down the reality of Stendhal’s past. But here at the end of the book, at one of his life’s turning points, he finds that what he thinks are memories of events are actually memories of a description, or an engraving. Despite all the detail, all the dates, the entire project is fundamentally unstable.*

W. G. Sebald refers to this passage in his novel Vertigo. In fact he almost directly quotes it. The first, short, chapter of this unconventional** novel, which in general is about writers’ (Casanova, Kafka, Sebald) journeys to Italy, recounts Stendhal’s life from his entry to Italy to his death forty-two years later. Here is Sebald on Stendhal at the Marengo battlefield, fifteen months after the battle:

“The decisive turn in the battle, brought about by Kellermann’s ferocious cavalry charge, which tore open the flank of the main Austrian force at a time when the sun was setting and all already seemed lost, was familiar to him from many and various tellings, and he had himself pictured it in numerous forms and hues. Now, however, he gazed upon the plain, noted the few stark trees, and saw, scattered over a vast area, the bones of perhaps 16,000 men and 4,000 horses that had lost their lives there, already bleached and shining with dew. The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion such as he had never previously experienced.” (Vertigo, p. 17)

Sebald interlarded all sorts of pictures into his novels - photographs, documents, drawings. There are 13 in the 28 pages of the chapter on Stendhal, seven drawn by Stendhal, one of him (just his eyes, actually), and five others more or less related to the story. Sebald’s use of illustrations is complicated, the pictures sometimes only tenuously connected to the text. When reading The Life of Henry Brulard, Stendhal must have seemed like a kindred spirit.

The quote I put in the header is a diversion. That’s Sebald (Vertigo, p. 7) writing about Henry Brulard, not Stendhal.

* Even aside from Stendhal’s fabrications and jokes. Am I supposed to take this seriously? “Around this time, I became friendly, I don’t know how, with François Bigillion (who later killed himself, I believe, out of boredom with his wife)” (p. 277). “I believe” is a comic touch of the highest caliber.

** And brilliant, essential, etc.

Stendhal - What patience you will require, oh my reader!

Today, the strange features of the memoir of the childhood of Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal. From one of the numerous title pages:

“Life of Henry Brulard, written by himself. Novel of details, imitated from The Vicar of Wakefield. To Messieurs of the police. Nothing political in this novel. The scheme is a hothead of every kind who grows weary and slowly sees the light and ends by devoting himself to the cult of luxurious town-houses.” (p. xl)

Stendhal traveled a lot and worked in a French consular office in the Papal States, so the misdirection aimed at the police may have been in part utilitarian. Possibly. Mostly, it’s a gag. Not a true word in it. The cult of luxurious town-houses!

The drawings, Stendhal’s maps and diagrams and scrawls, are the memoir’s unique feature. The one above is typical, a luxurious town-house, the floorplan of one story of his grandfather’s house. Here’s part of the scribbling:

“Winding staircase – Large, cheerless courtyard – Magnificent inlaid chest-of-drawers surmounted by a clock: Mars offering France his arm; France wore a cloak decorated with fleur-des-lis, which later on caused great anxiety – Solitary window with panes of magnificent Bohemian glass. One of them, top left, was cracked and stayed that way for ten years.” (p. 113)

There's a drawing on, more or less, every third page. A lot of them are floorplans, sometimes repeated over and over with minor variations, often including a dot labeled "Moi". Sometimes Stendhal draws maps of Grenoble or the countryside, or gives us side views of a piece of terrain. There must be a dozen different versions of the city square in front of his grandfather's house, each with slightly different labels. There are almost no people, although the drawing of himself at the blackboard, a source of enormous trauma, from yesterday's post, is included four times. Once, Stendhal draws a tiny rat.

What are the drawings for? Stendahl insists that his memory is faulty, that he is remembering details of his past only as he writes them. He often admits that he is unsure of when an event took place, even his age at the time. He says he will look things up in the Genoble archives, like when he went to school(!). The drawings are stimulants to his memory, a way of trying to pin down the truth. This is why obsessively redraws parts of his grandfather's house - he wants not just the basic layout, which anyway he might have gotten wrong last time, but also where the furniture was, where people were sitting. Every scene is a little different.

The scene on the left is a unique one, a picnic with his relatives, an escape from his oppressive home. Here's what the handwriting says:

“From B to C slope of eight or ten feet on which all the ladies were sitting. They were laughing, drinking ratafia from Teisseire (Grenoble), there were no glasses, out of the lids of tortoiseshell snuff-boxes.” (p. 148)

And here's the narrative. Stendhal is "seven or eight":

“After my jealousy-inspired rebellion, I threw stones at these ladies from point A. The big Corbeau (an officer on six months’ leave) took me and set me in an apple or mulberry tree at M, at point O, between two branches from which I didn’t dare climb down. I jumped, I hurt myself, I ran off toward Z.” pp. 148-9

The detail about drinking out of snuff-box lids is worthy of Flaubert.

One more drawing, a famous one. The list of letters to the left are the initials of all Stendhal's lovers, in order. I think he slept with the numbered ones. "I pondered deeply on these names, and on the astonishing follies and stupidities they made me do (I say astonishing for me, not for the reader, and anyway, I don't repent of them)". The list is on p. 19 of the NYRB edition, but I've cheated here and reproduced p. 27 of W. G. Sebald's first novel, Vertigo. More on that later.

The quote in the title is from p. 23. Stendhal is right, his book requires patience. The Life of Henry Brulard has a number of tedious passages, and others that are barely comprehensible. Then some parts use a single detail or incident in a psychologically penetrating way, a little burst of insight. Much like his novels.

Stendhal – it’s cold, the pens are malfunctioning

On the back cover of the NYRB edition of The Life of Henry Brulard (written 1835-6, published 1883), which is, oddly, an autobiographical work by someone not named Henry Brulard, there is a small portrait of a young Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal. The portrait can be seen at the Musée Stendhal in Grenoble, Stendhal’s childhood home. If I ever find myself in Grenoble, I will be sure to go. Let’s see what Stendhal himself has to say about his hometown:

“Truth to tell, when I think hard about it, I haven’t been cured of my unreasonable revulsion for Grenoble: in the true sense of the word I have forgotten it. My magnificent memories of Italy, or Milan, have erased everything... If I may be permitted an image as distasteful as the sensation, it is like the smell of oysters to a man who has had a terrible indigestion from oysters.” (pp. 106-7)

Stendhal/ Beyle lost his mother when he was six years old. His family was devastated. Both his father and his grandfather essentially withdrew from society. Over and over, Stendhal laments that he never he spent his childhood without knowing children his own age. He was instead tutored at home for years, tyrannized by his cruel Séraphie and capricious father, his beloved grandfather supportive but passive. Beyle finally escaped, first to a different set of tyrants at school (but at least alongside other boys) and then to Paris, which, being the soul of perversity, he despised. The memoir climaxes with a 17 year old Beyle crossing the Alps to Italy with Napoleon’s army, Napoleon about to achieve his first great triumph at Marengo, Beyle about to fall in love with Italian mountains, Italian music, and Italian women.


Straightforward enough – a great writer’s childhood memoir, his miseries and escape into another life. But who, then, is Henry Brulard? And what is this, a marginal note on p. 247: “Rapidity. Bad handwriting (reason for). 1 Jan 1836. It’s only two o’clock, I have already written sixteen pages; it’s cold, the pens are malfunctioning. Instead of getting into a temper, I keep gong ahead, writing as best I can”? And what on earth is that thing to the right – one of the hundreds of drawings that are an integral part of the book?

The rest of the week, I’ll see if I can explain. No guarantees.

Stendahl at Waterloo - Ah, now we're being attacked!

Beginning any sort of discussion of Stendhal, as I did yesterday, with a question of style is probably a good way to confuse people. For this, I blame Stendhal. He's a really strange writer. A strange person.

The Charterhouse of Parma is probably most famous for its scenes set at Waterloo. They served as an important example for later battlefield novelists, especially Tolstoy.

What a surprise then, that Waterloo takes place in Chapters 3 and 4, at the very beginning of the novel, and that Fabrizio, the protagonist, is not even a soldier, but a 17-year old Italian with a purchased hussar uniform. This was a brilliant move by Stendhal. Because Fabrizio knows nothing, and barely speaks French, the battle can be depicted in a fresh and unusual way. We never leave Fabrizio's point of view, confused as it is. He's even drunk part of the time, after buying a bottle of brandy because he wants the other soldiers to like him.

We're back to style. Scott gets close to this sort of "objective" style in some of his battle scenes, but he is never this pure. He also wants us to know the terrain, the positions of the armies, all of the usual stuff. Stendhal throws all of that away. We just get drunk Fabrizio, who doesn't know how to load a rifle, hoping for a glimpse of Napoleon.

Any readers of War and Peace will find these two chapters interesting.

Any current readers of W&P who are reading this are thinking: Oh sure. I'll get right on that. Anything else I should read? Buddenbrooks? The Oxford English Dictionary? Thanks for the helpful suggestion.

Stendhal and his jokes

"This Minister, despite his frivolous manner and his brilliant remarks, did not possess a soul à la française; he was not able to forget his griefs and grievances. When his pillow revealed a thorn, he was compelled to snap it off, and blunt its point against his own throbbing limbs. (I apologize for this paragraph, translated from the Italian)."

The Charterhouse of Parma, Modern Library, p. 96.

This is an entire paragraph. The first sentence is the sort of French character versus Italian character stuff Stendhal likes. The second sentence is bizarre and barely comprehensible. The third sentence is a classic Stendhalian joke.

A classic Stendhalian joke is one no one else gets. His entire book On Love is in this genre.