Unfinished Symphony

LAMIEL (256 pp.) -- Stendhal -- New Directions ($2).

Stendhal carried in his mind's eye an exact portrait of Lamiel, the heroine of his last novel. "She is a little too tall and too thin," he noted. "I have seen her between the Bastille and the Porte St. Denis, and in the steamboat from Honfleur to Havre; her head is the perfection of Norman beauty; a superb high forehead, blond cendre [ash-blond] hair, an admirable and faultless little nose, blue eyes not quite big enough, chin narrow but a little too long; her face is a perfect oval and one can only take exception to her mouth, which has somewhat the shape and the turned-down corners of a pike's."

Rags to Bitchery. Lamiel was to begin her life in an orphanage, become a Parisian courtesan, marry a duke, and die the mistress of a robber-chief. From autumn 1839 to spring 1842 Stendhal sketched the outline of her progress from rags to riches. He described her adoption by a childless couple, her entry as a servant-companion into the household of a duchess, her initiation into the facts of upper-class life, i.e., mingled boredom, bitchery, fear and arrogance. He did portraits of varying completeness of the men in her life, ranging from a Machiavellian, hunchbacked doctor to a simple Norman peasant whom Lamiel pays 15 francs to teach her the nature of love ("Isn't there anything else?" she cries disappointedly when he has earned his fee).

As he hurried on with his rough draft, Stendhal omitted many a detail, skipped from point to point with the eagerness of a writer who knows that most of the machinery of his story, to say nothing of the polish, can be worked in later. He introduced many minor characters by name only, breathing a mere suggestion of life into them. Lamiel was beginning to look more & more like the plan of one of Balzac's great social histories when Stendhal suddenly took sick and died.

How Novels Grow. It was 1889 before anyone bothered to unearth the MS. from the library of Grenoble (Stendhal's birthplace) and transcribe the muddled pages of handwriting. The result, now translated into English for the first time, has been praised by some critics as the masterpiece of Stendhal's career. "Nowhere as in Lamiel," says Poet Louis Aragon, "is the real world to be found in Stendhal . . ."

The real world is there, but is Lamiel a real novel? It has all the marks of Stendhal's particular brand of greatness, such as his sharp, plain, declarative manner of speaking and his genius for showing the depths of one character by pointing up the shallowness of another. But Lamiel is not a masterpiece, for the same reason that a human skeleton is not a human being. It is a book that Stendhal fans and students of novel writing might well read over & over to find out how a novel grows. But Stendhal said of it: "The great and actual object is laughter"; and the true measure of Lamiel's incompleteness is that much of it reads like a fumbled joke.

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