The New Lifetime Reading Plan

One hundred years ago Stendhal (one of his more than 150 pseudonyms, his real name being Marie-Henri Beyle) would not have been listed among the major novelists of Europe. Fifty years later the situation would have changed: He would have been named among the first half-dozen novelists of France. Today the shift is even greater: Many rank him among the foremost novelists of any time and place. Stendhal lived partially in the future, and so he would have foreseen ali this. Indeed he did foresee it. "I have drawn a lottery ticket," he wrote, "whose winning number is: to be read in 1935."

So, though most of StendhaPs stories are laid in Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe, we would expect his feeling for life and his way of expressing it to be modern. And that is roughly what we do find. Some qualifications should be made, however. His plots seem to us to smack of opera. His dialogue is more formal than that to which our phonographic realists have accustomed us. And, in the case of his masterpiece The Red and the Black, the title refers to forces no longer opera- tive—the Red standing for the uniform of Napoleon's soldiers, the Black for the cassock of the clergy. The hero, Julien Sorel, wears the black because in his day a poor youth with his special talents could advance himself only through the church, whereas Julien's heart and imagination belong to the Napoleonic era he thinks of as more glorious than his own. However, the deeper tensions in Julien are not peculiar to the France of his generation. They are part of our modern con- sciousness.

StendhaPs genius lay partly in prevision. His novйis, partic­ularly this one, anticipate many of the motifs and devices we are used to in contemporary fiction. That is one reason why he can be called the novelista novelist. The Red and the Black, for example, is the first classic expression of the young-man-from- the-provinces theme—a theme on which ali the books of Thomas Wolfe and dozens of other novйis merely ring changes. Also it heads a long line of narratives whose subject is the dissatisfaction of the heroine with an empty society—see Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and of course Emma Bovary [86]. Though George Eliot [84] dared to portray an intellectual, it is in The Red and the Black that we first get the type fully and closely studied. And so we can keep on iden- tifying in Stendhal other anticipations of twentieth-century fic­tion: his systematic rather than intuitive use of psychology; his understanding of what is now called ambivalence; his extraor- dinary detachment from his characters; and especially his major preoccupation, which is with the outsider, the "being apart," who cannot become reconciled with an inferior or materialistic or merely boring society.

The reader will perceive ali this only after reading The Red and the Black. While reading it you will be caught up in a fasci­nating love story, which somehow seems far more adult than

any encountered in the Victorian novelists. Furthermore you will experience the sensation only the finest psychological nov­elists can give—that of actually, for a dozen hours or so, living inside the passionately intense, complex minds of a few invented persons who become realer to you than your own neighbors.

Final note: Many good judges rank The Charterhouse of Parma as equal to The Red and the Black. Try it.

C.F.

68

HONORЙ DE BALZAC

1799-1850

Pиre Goriot, Eugйnie Grandet, Cousin Bette

Unlike Stendhal [67], of whom he was one of the few to show any early appreciation, Balzac today is not as widely read as he should be. Everyone admits his achievement, but no one is quite sure what it is. Does he rank among the greatest of nov­elists? The answer is not clear. Faults stand out that were not so apparent during his century: faults of taste especially; a weakness for melodrama, almost for detective-story melo­drama; an incapacity to portray character as changing and developing; and, most important, certain defects of intelli­gence. Another trouble is that he never wrote a masterpiece. I recommend three titles, among his best known, but they do not represent him properly. Nor would any other three titles. To be overcome by Balzac you should read fifty or sixty of his novйis; and life is too short. But for sheer energy as well as for the variety of his social portraiture, Balzac is perhaps unsur- passed.