2/28/24
Chapter 9 is a perfect illustration of why I consider myself a dedicated imperfectionist. Someone obsessed with always acting, doing, saying or writing the right thing at all times would cringe at what Stendhal has to say in this incredibly short chapter. Here it is in its entirety:
I am trying extremely hard to be dry. My heart thinks it has so much to say, but 1 try to keep it quiet. I am continually beset by the fear that I may have expressed only a sigh when I thought I was stating a truth.
Look at Stendhal showing weakness. He knows this project isn’t going so well, that he’s being impersonal and the result is coming up short. He knows that to make his readers understand him, he can’t express himself this way. You can’t want to communicate about your emotions and end up writing something that‘s like a cookbook.
But he can’t bring himself to do it, the emotions are too raw. He can’t risk using real names — he’s not even using his own real name. He has lots of ideas, but no way to make them meaningful to anyone.
This is why someone turns to writing fiction. Stendhal wasn’t a born writer. He was a soldier in Napoleon’s army and then a French bureaucrat. He never had literary aspirations of any kind until he felt it was a necessity.
The only way he could take the things he was feeling and make them real to others was by fictionalizing it all. Then, this notebook of emotional fragments suddenly had a direction and meaning. These random thoughts became the interior detail of characters and at that point it no longer mattered whether it was true, it belonged to his characters and it lent depth to the storytelling.
I believe that writers feel compelled to their craft because they desire more than anything to find their perfect reader. When Stendhal in the introduction addressed how few had bought his book and even fewer will understand it, I think he meant to take it one step further: that he didn’t even write this book for them. He wrote it for one person who he wanted to read it, understand it, and then see him differently.
Whether that was one specific person he had in mind all along or an abstracted ideal — someone akin to a literary anima — I do not know. But I feel quite certainly that is what compelled Stendhal to write this and his beautiful novels that followed.
There’s a wonderful subplot in “The Red and the Black” that a more stringent editor might have asked him to excise, but I found it delightful. After losing his love Mathilde, the daughter of his employer, for the third or fourth time, Julian recounts his tale of woe to a Russian diplomat, who helps him contrive a way to win her back. He’s going to seduce a politically connected widow to make her jealous, but to do this, he’s going to take a pack of 50 letters this diplomat has used in another successful seduction effort and copy them in his own hand, sending them day by day to his insincere beloved.
Over time, the plan is succeeding, but Julian finds the letters incredibly tedious and, at times, insipid. One day he sends a letter, and the widow is again impressed, but she asks him “why did you make so many references to London?” He then realizes that he was so bored while copying the letter that he forgot to change the internal details, including changing the city from London to Paris.
Woody Allen would later steal this joke in his film “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” when his alter ego sends a series of love letters to a woman who has rejected him. She returns the letters, but tells him they were beautiful. He then says “I plagiarized them from James Joyce. That accounts for all the references to Dublin.”
The secret truth of all writers is that they have this linguistic seductive power in them and wish more than anything to exploit it. But that perfect literary seduction needs to include the perfect seduceable reader to work. We don’t all have that crafty Russian diplomat or the just-right personal letters of James Joyce at our disposal. so we try and fail, adapt and fail some more. We keep on trying and grow as writers because of this failure.
Such is life and art.