STENDHAL (506 pp.)—Matthew Josephson—Doubleday ($4).
THE SHORTER NOVELS OF STENDHAL (552 pp.)—LIverighf ($2.49).
Rotund, romantic Lieut. Henri-Marie Beyle—who had never ridden a horse or seen a battle—hoisted his huge rump into the saddle and galloped off to war. His armor included two pistols, a large saber and the works of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Racine and Moliere.
"You will be spitted like a hog," muttered one of Napoleon's unimaginative professionals. But Henri Beyle, in whom genius and absurdity were uniquely compounded, somehow survived—and under the pen name of "Stendhal" immortalized his adventures in soldiery in two great works of fiction: The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.
Like most "definitive" biographies, Matthew Josephson's Stendhal is heavily ballasted with tinkling trifles. It lacks, for all its efforts, the dazzling high spiritedness that poured like a flood out of Stendhal himself. Nonetheless, like Josephson's Victor Hugo (TIME, Oct. 19, 1942), it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized.
Insatiable Appetite. When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them "a manifestation of psychological genius." Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself.
With his usual devastating honesty, Stendhal recorded in his autobiography (The Life of Henri Brulard) that he had loved his mother "with a mad passion"—"as criminal as possible" and indistinguishable from the love he felt for his mistresses in later years. His hatred of his chief rival was so violent that even in middle age he generally referred to his unfortunate father as "the bastard."
When his mother died, her place in the gloomy Beyle home at Grenoble was filled by insipid maiden aunts and didactic priests and governesses. Young Henri's life was soon charged with the ideas and feelings that persisted until the day he died—a horror of the established order in family, church and state, and an insatiable appetite for romantic passion.
Henri welcomed the French Revolution, and loved the period that followed—when the ladies promenaded "in flowing 'Roman' garments that exposed their arms and shoulders and nearly all of their bosoms," and the dandies courted them "gotten up like peacocks, in embroidered coats, with ruffles . . . immense green cravats, and rare knotted walking sticks."
By the time he returned with Napoleon's army from the invasion of Italy, Henri was, and remained, says Author Josephson, "the eternal strategist in the game of life and sex, always armed with . . . systems, prescriptions, stratagems, and nearly always, comically enough, fated to lose his weapons, and his plans, midway in the contest." He needed stratagems. By his own admission, he was as fat and homely as an "Italian butcher boy"; and despite his talkative, romantic arrogance and fashionable dress, he was terrified of ridicule and feminine rebuffs.