12
PAR1'ISAN REVIEW
Stendhal must be classed with an important type of modern writer
in whom the life and the work are so mutually indispensable that
the latter does not yield up its real interest or significance when
taken alone. Together they constitute what may be called a
phenomenon-not only within literature but within their culture
as a whole. Certainly Poe, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and even Melville
are more interesting when considered in this way rather than in
relation solely to their incomplete and variously confused produc·
tions. Less obviously apocalyptical in style than any of these per·
haps, Stendhal's writing has the same quality of being the casual
outpouring of someone who is essentially more the prophet than
the artist.
In a preface to the perplexing and inconclusive
Armance,
Andre Gide, who has an excellent nose in such matters, advances
the theory that the only possible meaning to be extracted from the
book is that the hero is impotent. Gide proceeds to suggest that it
is a study in the superiority of spiritual love over physical-im·
potence having a merely symbolical value. Even if this is true for
this particular work we cannot help being tempted to apply the
clue to the other Stendhal novels. In going over the roll-call we
have seen that at least two of his heroes, Octave and Lucien, appear
to have gone to their graves in a virginal state. Fabrizio admits
equivocally to not having been born to know "the taste of love,"
and we have noted the rather suspect quality of Julien's passion
for the two women in his life. (In fact, he finally says of Mathilde,
" She is my wife,- but she is not my mistress.") Moreover, the
notion that Octave's "lack of conscience" was a euphemism for
another kind of lack cannot but direct us to certain avowals of the
author of
Armance
himself. In that same scene in his autobiog–
raphy in which he writes the initials in the dust, he adds, "The
fact is that I have possessed only six of the women whom I have
loved." And later, "With all of these, and with several others, I
have always been a child." Recalling his early years in Milan, he
complains, " Nobody took pity on me or aided me with some char–
itable advice. I therefore spent the two or three years in which my
temperament was most active
womanless."
(The italics are his
own.) Moreover, from an obscene remark in a letter to Merimee
there is evidence to be drawn that his much recollected life in Mar–
seilles with the little actress Melanie Louasan was of the more
