2/19/24
Stendhal does not jump confidently into his work. His book comes with three attempts at a preface, and there’s an increasing sense of desperation as these introductions roll on. In the first preface, he says that “no more than four will understand this book.” He warns that it is not entertaining. He feels obliged to explain why he uses the first person singular so often. And he goes to great lengths to proclaim that there is nothing lovable about his book, he views love as a disease of the soul.
Not only that, Stendhal even admits that there are parts of the book that no longer make sense to him. He justifies this in a fairly hilarious fashion: “Since what goes by the name of success was out of the question, the author pleases himself and has published his thoughts exactly as they occurred to him.” This thought pleases me greatly — why should I put any concern into how my treatment of this work will be judged when Stendhal jumped into this project with so much carelessness?
Then, after going to such great works to denigrate his work, he goes after his readers.
Though I have made every effort to be clear and lucid I cannot work miracles; I cannot give hearing to the deaf, nor sight to the blind. So people with money and coarse pursuits, who have made a hundred thousand francs in the year before they open this book, had better close it again quickly, particularly if they are bankers, manufacturers, or respectable industrialists; in a word, men with highly positive ideas.
Stendhal believed that only someone comfortable with daydreaming for hours at a time could truly appreciate this book. You would think that a book about romantic love would find its most natural audience among women, but Stendhal has unkind words for them as well, especially of a certain type:
I am bound to displease the women who, in those same drawing-rooms, force attention by their perpetual affectedness. I have occasionally caught some of them in an unguarded moment of sincerity, and they were so surprised that they did not know whether a recent sentiment they had expressed was natural or affected.
In Stendhal’s novels, such insights are delivered with subtle brilliance, but stated bluntly in the context of people who don’t have what it takes to understand his book, this just sounds mean. He goes on to list the “antecedents I require in my readers,” which basic boil down to being just as sentimental, easily embarrassed and socially awkward as him.
Now after bringing together this motley brood of sensitives, Stendhal informs them that he will use geometry and philosophy to make his points. At this point I’m starting to think he was being generous giving himself four true readers. He ends the first preface by writing “Many people will think themselves offended; I hope they will read no further.”
This brings us to preface two, where he broadens his pool of potential readers to 100. He gets a little more specific here about his target audience:
I would ask anyone who wants to read this book: ‘Have six months of your life ever been made miserable by love?’
To this, I wonder if any six months of my life have not been made miserable by love, but I digress. But then Stendhal writers something that confirms that, yes, I am the target audience of this work:
I shall continue my indiscreet questioning and ask you whether within the last twelvemonth you have read one of those outspoken books which force the reader to think: J.-J. Rousseau’s Emile, for example, or the six volumes of Montaigne? Because if you have never suffered from that weakness of the strong and are not in the unnatural habit of thinking while you read, this book will rouse your anger against its author.
Stendhal could have stopped here and moved on to the text, but he has one more preface for us, which is a fairly hilarious account of how this whole project came together. He basically just scribbled a bunch of notes during his time in Venice and plopped them onto the lap of a pure publisher, who kindly tried to make something of it (although Stendhal complains that he printed it on poor paper, with a ridiculous layout.) When Stendhal asks how the book is selling, he gets this brilliant response: “You might call it sacred, for nobody will touch it!”
This preface was written later in Stendhal’s career and he has a beautiful perspective on it all. He notes that for the first 11 years, the book sold only 17 copies! No doubt his later fame for “The Red and the Black” and ”The Charterhouse of Parma” increased sales, but even after that surge, Stendhal says “I doubt if it has been understood by more than a hundred or so curious-minded folk.”
But at least by the end of this preface, Stendhal has found peace with his potential readers and ends with this:
I need not press my investigation further; the reader will, on reflection, be well able to reach his own conclusions …