The Genius As a Young Man

THE PRIVATE DIARIES OF STENDHAL (570 pp.)--Edited and Translated by Robert Sage--Doubleday ($7.50).

Poor Henri Beyle! He had no looks, no money, no social status, not even a good job. All he had was genius. But at 18, Henri Beyle was the only one who knew it, and not even he could be sure. He had just left his native Grenoble on what was to become a lifelong journey devoted to la chasse au bonheur--the pursuit of happiness--and the first stop was Milan, where young Beyle served as a sublieutenant in Napoleon's army of occupation. Ambitious, hot-blooded Henri knew exactly what he wanted to be: "the successor of Moliere" and "a seducer of women."

Unfortunately, he had no knack for rhymed comedy and little gift for seduction, but that did not stop him from trying. To drive himself on, he noted tactical maneuvers with military precision, e.g., the sneak attack camouflaged by an embrace verging on strangulation, accompanied by the lover's deceptively shy whimpering (noted Henri: "If you go about the business calmly, you can't fail"). He also jotted down guiding principles: "Heroes have intervals of fear, poltroons moments of bravery, and virtuous women moments of weakness." But the weak moments came when Henri was not about and his amorous success consisted in courting the daughter of a household and being bedded by the mother, in falling into the arms of women he didn't love while dreaming of those he did. As a lover, he embraced compromises, but not as a writer: he would contemplate nothing less than the accolade of eternity and rejected two "fine subjects" for plays "as incapable of enduring more than 200 years."

Nonetheless, the youth who later adopted the pen name Stendhal and became one of the world's great novelists once deigned to write something not for the ages, but for himself. The result is something for the ages. It is the famous Journal, finally translated into English a century and a half after it was written.

Analyst v. Butterfly. This extraordinary diary is Henri Beyle's completely candid dialogue with himself between 1801 and 1814, from the age of 18 to 31. Diarist Beyle permitted himself no second thoughts, following his own basic rule "not to stand on ceremony and never to erase." He put it down simply, quickly, directly, without ornamentation, racing on the wing of the event, often dashing off notations in telegraphic French and dotting it with unlikely Italian and improbable English ("She did can well perform and not be applaused"). Diarist Beyle's spontaneous self-communion is raw, inchoate, crackling with vitality, sometimes overdetailed, often brilliantly illuminating.

It was a complex, contradictory personality he undertook to commit to paper and one that would later appear in various guises in his masterpieces The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma and Lucien Leuwen. The cold analyst ("Outside geometry, there's but a single manner of reasoning, that of facts") was balanced by the man of passionate emotions ("I had possibly the most violent burst of passion I've ever experienced . . . The passion . . . was ambition ... I felt myself capable of the greatest crimes and infamies"). The would-be cynic ("I've got to attack every woman I meet [to] form my character") was softened by the timid lover ("With a little more assurance or a little less love, I would perhaps have been sublime and would have had her"). The fluttering social butterfly ("I was brilliant ... I was wearing a waistcoat, silk breeches and black stockings, with a cinnamon-bronze coat, a very well arranged cravat, a superb frill . . . My whole soul appeared") was brought to earth by the lucid critic ("I realize that the works I've written stink").

Love + Work. Between 1801 and 1814, Beyle ranged from Naples to Moscow (where he witnessed the city's famous burning and Napoleon's great defeat), but wherever he lived, his personal equation remained: love + work = happiness. He ran off to Marseille to live with an actress and be a banker, wound up a grocer and quickly broke with the "stupid" girl he had imagined was his ideal. He fell in love with the wife of one of Napoleon's leading officials, imagined that that old black magic was enchanting his inamorata, that "she looked at me as though I were a powder barrel." But the fuse fizzled. One violent passion for a majestic Italian beauty spanned a decade during which he never saw the "sublime wench." After eleven years he finally noted: "On September 21, at half-past eleven, I won the victory I had so long desired." It took him a few more years to realize that there was nothing sublime about the wench.

Through all of Beyle's illusions, disillusions and perceptions in the diary, he is constant in applying a method of coldly objective analysis to matters of the human heart. This method is what he called Beylism. It is the psychological method he applied in his novels, the fruit of his self-analysis and his very special pursuit of happiness. In all of this he demanded candor and sincerity, but he knew where to draw the line. "It is not impossible," he wrote, "to be bored when with a mistress, but that boredom should not be shown; it would lose her."

For Beyle-Stendhal, that kind of playacting was how men of character faced the facts of life. It is a key to his,thought. He hated hypocrisy, and so did his principal literary heroes, Julien Sorel. the ambitious provincial, Lucien Leuwen, the morose bourgeois, Fabrizio del Dongo, the romantic idealist. But to all of them and to all the young men who set out to conquer the world, Stendhal's message was plain: be insincere. It is one of the piquant paradoxes of the diary that Beyle offers the advice in all sincerity.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.