Napoleon and the Shopkeeper

By Martha Duffy

BALZAC by V.S. PRITCHETT 272 pages. Knopf. $15.

This is a kind of literary marriage that is becoming increasingly popular: a longish essay on a suitably cultural subject wedded to lavish and largely relevant illustration. In the case of Balzac, the union is not exactly bliss. One might wish to trade some of the Paris street scenes for more text, but the subject would probably overwhelm any possible approach.

Balzac wrote the way some men talk: compulsively, brilliantly, endlessly. In a career of only 21 years he managed to get down on paper all of France in the first half of the 19th century. He understood every nuance of provincial ambition, every deadly trap a great city lays impersonally for the young adventurer and the sick old man alike. Some of his characters' names have become inter changeable with vices-- old man Grandet with avarice, Cousin Bette with envy.

Balzac's masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine, contains 91 interwoven novels, and more than 2,000 characters. Its theme is the power of money.

Money was something Honore de Balzac knew about intimately because his mirror manias were spending and collecting. A small man with comically short legs, he spent fortunes on clothes, bought gloves by the dozen and fancied bejeweled canes. Another passion was furniture, rugs and bric-a-brac. All his tastes were expensive and execrable.

Imperial red, gold, white and black, Aubusson and Araby clamored in the many salons he decorated. The mistresses they were meant to impress were humiliated to be found in them.

Balzac was born in 1799 in Touraine, the province of France that is perhaps least regional and most national in feeling. His family had sizable social ambitions, most of them never satisfied. They tried to force their son to be a lawyer, but from the moment Balzac encountered the library of his boring, squalid boarding school, he was totally committed to the life of the imagination.

His idol was Napoleon. He kept a little statue of the Emperor on his writing desk for inspiration. Balzac's opinion of his own worth was certainly Napoleonic: "I have the most extraordinary character. I am astonished by nothing more than myself." His goal was to do with his pen what Bonaparte had done with the sword. He succeeded. As V.S. Pritchett says, "His fecundity throbs, his power of documentation, his ubiquity as a novelist are extraordinary. There is the spry, pungent and pervasive sense that, in any scene, he was there and in the flesh."

Getting this gargantuan figure there on the page is Pritchett's task as a biographer, and in many ways he succeeds. He has a shrewd sense of the whole Balzac family, particularly the author's adoring mother and sister who alternately lent him money foolishly, connived with him against creditors and betrayed him to competing women.

Pritchett's knowledge of Balzac's body of writing is so well assimilated that he can call on it at will. There are no noisome transitions between "life" and "work." Fictional characters and stories are woven into the book as they reflect on Balzac's life or illustrate the boiling contradictions of his nature.

In one way, though, Pritchett disappoints. Too often the narrative is only a recital of debts, contracts, mistresses, houses and more debts without a sense of the relish with which this complicated and violent genius conducted his messy life. It may be that as a biographer Pritchett is too much of a smart, admiring English shopkeeper to do justice to this Napoleon of the pen. A little awe might have helped. sb Martha Duffy

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