Volume 13, Number 8 · November 6, 1969
The Self-Inventing Man
By V.S. Pritchett
Stendhal
by Wallace Fowlie
Macmillan, 256 pp., $4.95
Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom
by Victor Brombert
Random House, 224 pp., $5.95
Stendhal: Notes on a Novelist
by Robert M. Adams
Funk & Wagnalls, 250 pp., $5.95
The Novel of Worldliness
by Peter Brooks
Princeton, 304 pp., $9.50
Stendhal is one of those gambler writers who, making their throw at an unlucky time, scornfully stake on the future. What real reason has this great but uninventive last-minute novelist, who had passed his life as a doubtfully combatant soldier, traveling and loitering journalist, dilettante, plagiarist, petty consul, drawing-room sarcastic, and misfiring lover, for announcing that he would not be understood until one hundred years after his death? Only Balzac, among contemporaries, eulogized him. That was formidable support but it came too late, in fact just before Stendhal died. In his favor as self-prophet, there are his egotism and the vast pride of the timid. There is the force of obsession with a subject that scarcely alters: himself multiplied by disguise. To have left his important books unfinished might have been the result of a half-conscious cunning. And then he is a perpetual archivist of anecdote and ephemera. If one treats life as scandal—see Aubrey—one can be sure of being read forever. These things are a help to the prophetic self-esteem; and, anyway, the wheel of Fortune turns.
Review, 2027 words
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