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.