STENDHAL. By Jonathan Keates
Sinclair-Stevenson, #20 (pp 478)
MODERN biographers go for guilty verdicts: their subjects are
posthumously put on trial and judged on guilty secrets. Recently, for
example, Dame Daphne du Maurier was labelled a lesbian by Margaret
Forster though her facts sounded suspiciously like fiction. Now
Stendhal's secret is out -- of fiction.
Octave, in Stendhal's first novel Armance, loves Armance and liberty
and, making a choice between two ideals, follows his desire to fight in
the Greek War of Independence. Jonathan Keates accuses Octave, a figment
of Stendhal's imagination, of failing to acknowledge ''the awful secret
of his sexual incapacity'' and supposes Stendhal created Octave because
he secretly desired dashing young men -- a circular argument proving
nothing.
Keates also examines a passage in Stenhal's journals. Once, watching a
play in Paris, Stendhal noticed a Russian soldier sitting next to him
and afterwards wrote: ''However much I desired him, I dared not look at
him. If I was his wife, I'd have followed him to the end of the world.''
For Stendhal fans this passage reinforces what is evident in the
fictions: Stendhal was able to inhabit many characters. For Keates it
''constitutes a frank acknowledgement of homosexual impulse.'' Keates is
welcome to his conviction in this case but many will find it difficult
to read anti-royalist Stendhal as a closet queen.
Does it matter if Stendhal was homosexual? It does to Keates who
reckons the novelist impressed his sexual passion on his heroes. By this
reckoning Julien in Le Rouge et le Noir and Fabrice in La Chartreuse de
Parme are impressive ''precisely because, it is implied, men as well as
women respond to their allure.'' Allure is not le mot juste.
Does it matter of Stendhal's sister Pauline was a lesbian? It does to
Keates who feels Pauline's marriage was a mistake and knows she like
dressing as a man. Keates comes to a strange conclusion: ''The notion of
Pauline as her brother's alter ego may in part have been based on
apprehensions of a shared sexual complexity.'' Strange because Stendhal
regarded Pauline as his sister-confessor and his letters to her show him
as a heterosexual man of affairs.
According to Keates, these affairs were fanciful rather than physical.
In 1797, still a schoolboy, Stendhal fancied Virginie Kubly but was too
timid to tell her. In 1802, then a soldier in the service of Napoleon,
Stendhal fancied he had fallen in love with Vicotine Mounier but she
kept her distance. At the beginning of 1805 he got close enough to
Melanie Guilbert to kiss her (''I stole 20 kisses from her'') but by the
end of the year the affair had fizzled out and he fell for Alexandrine
Daru but since she, the wife of Napoleon's Minister for War, was spoken
for, Stendhal was safe.
In 1811 Stendhal arrived in Milan and went after another married
woman, Gina Pietragrua. He obtained a formula for maintaining a
permanent erection (by rubbing the big toe of his right foot with a
paste made from olive oil and the ashes of a tarantula) but Gina kept
him dangling and frustrated until, in 1815, he concealed himself in a
closet and watched her making love. Confronted by Stendhal, she
confessed she had several lovers. Far from being furious, Stendhal
admitted, ''I gained a certain physical pleasure from imagining her in
all the situations she described.''
After the Revolution of July, 1830, Stendhal was appointed French
consul at Trieste and in this capacity attempted to marry Giulia Rinieri
de' Rocchi but her guardian suspected he was after her money and
rejected him. In Rome in 1839 Stendhal had another stab at romance but
Giulia Cini was a countess beyond the reach of a consul. At the end of
his life, Stendhal was working on a new novel, Lamiel, in which the
eponymous heroine finds the act of love farcical. Stendhal's personal
tragedy, Keates implies, was his farcical love-life. It does not occur
to Keates that Stendhal might have been diplomatically silent about
heterosexual success stories.
One March morning in Paris in 1842 Stendhal died at the age of 59
after collapsing in a street from an attack of apoplexy. He had
anticipated as much: ''I find that there's nothing ridiculous about
dropping dead in the streets, as long as one doesn't do it
deliberately.'' This faintly ridiculous man was, French obituarists
agreed, ''un homme de talent''. It took some time to dawn on the French
that they had lost a novelist of genius.
Going over the books, Keates does justice to Stendhal's genius but his
account of the man lacks balance. While Keates describes his biography
as ''a straight forward birth-to-death narrative . . . based on no
initial psychological premises'' the Freudian influence is obvious.
Stendhal detested his father, adored his mother, and saw women as
surrogate mothers -- if we believe this biography. I believe Stendhal
was too complicated a creation to be treated as a character in a
Freudian fiction.
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